I recently passed the 10 year anniversary of my father’s death.  I was going to write on the day he passed, but I just didn’t.  I didn’t have anything to say.  I don’t know why now, almost 2 months after the anniversary of his death, why now I have something to say I just do.

I never got to know my dad.  I lived with him up until I was almost 3 but those years were tumultuous.  My dad was a very brilliant man, at one point he made six figure incomes (a lot back in the 1970s) as an investment banker but alcoholism got the best of him.  I suppose in so many ways this story of his, and subsequently mine, is told in various fashions with various different families across the globe.

My mom took me late one night in my 3rd year and never looked back.  We left everything behind as she was thinking he would get his act together.  He did not.  The house we lived in was foreclosed on and the bank took everything.  We moved in with my grandmother whom I call my Me Ma.  Mom was gone a lot with her job as a flight attendant so I spent most of my time with my Me Ma.  My Me Ma was a proud, strong, country woman who held down a house and a large farm of cattle and some crops.  She had several gardens.  I spent a lot of time outdoors with her on the farm, in the gardens, listening to classic country music and shelling peas in her living room while we watch the Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw on TV.  She helped to fill the void from the abrupt departure from my dad and the frequent absence of my mother.  She was the one consistency in my life.  Children need consistency.

I saw my dad a few times off and on in my childhood, but only when he made child support payments.  I was a barter for those payments.  He would come to pick me up at my Me Ma’s, or sometimes we would do the exchange at a Burger King parking lot or similar.  He almost always had a beer in the vehicle.  Open container laws were new at the time and he still drank while he drove.  Beer for the car and liquor for the house.  The last time I saw him in my childhood was when I was around 7 years old.  Two years later my grandparents, his parents, would conduct a massive intervention on dad with dozens of close friends and family.  It worked.  Dad became sober in 1989 and would never go back to drinking.  But I did not get to spend time with him during this time.  He was still jobless and unable to make child support payments so my mother refused to let me see him.  I agreed, as I was conditioned to hate him and resent him.  I did that part splendidly. 

My dad’s dad, my grandfather, died a few years later.  He was a man that was bigger than life, a huge supporter of the local community and church.  Hundreds of people came to his funeral in Dallas before they shipped his body by train to West Texas for a 2nd funeral.  I saw my dad briefly at the funeral but do not remember speaking much with him.  He was stricken with grief over his dad’s death and was crying a lot.  I was a teenager then, 15 years old.

When I turned 18 years old I was a legal adult.  My cousin on my dad’s side had a wedding and I attended.  This was the 1st time free and clear that I got to see dad unencumbered.  It was an awkward gathering.  Dad had gained a lot of weight, he was taking dozens of prescription pills to control dozens of issues one of them being heart problems.  All of his issues stemmed from years of smoking and drinking.  At the time I had a serious boyfriend who was in Marine Corps boot camp.  Dad had been a Marine.  He made fun of the fact that I was dating a jarhead.  This just made me mad.  The day ended awkwardly with dad standing in the street of my uncle’s house getting ready to leave.  I don’t remember what the exact last words were that we exchanged in person.  I think it was something about my mom and him asking how she was doing.  I would never see him again.

Less than a year later I was 19 years old and standing in the back office of a plant farm that sold cacti and other desert foliage out in the middle of nowhere in Joshua Tree, CA .  The man that ran the business was a retired chaplain (Lt Col) in the Air Force.  Standing next to me was my boyfriend who was a PFC in the Marine Corps.  We were eloping.  We hadn’t told anybody what we were doing.  I had to hurry back to Texas to finish up my freshman semester of college and he had to hurry back to the base as his command didn’t know he was getting married either. 

If I were to say that my rocky connection with my father had no bearing on my life or on this decision to elope I would absolutely be lying.  It had everything to do with this decision, and as hindsight would reveal to me years later, many other decisions I made were built upon this simple foundation of just needing male love and attention that was always just out of grasp.  This romantic bond in the form of an elopement had been my quest for male love.  I thought that marriage was the pinnacle (we as females are conditioned to this mentality thanks to Disney, et all—fuckers!) and that finally the quest would be satisfied.  But as author Bell Hooks points out, such a quest for male love is rarely satisfied.  As she so perfectly explains in The Will To Change: “Usually rage, grief, and unrelenting disappointment lead women (and men) to close off the part of themselves that was hoping to be touched and healed by male love.  They learn then to settle for whatever positive attention men are able to give.  They learn to overvalue it.  They learn to pretend that it is love.  They learn how not to speak the truth about men and love.  They learn to live the lie.”  This is what would happen to me in subsequent years as my husband became controlling and verbally abusive, threatening to kill me and do other harm.  Once he chased me with a hammer into the bathroom while I cowered in tears, my hands over my head, sobbing behind the toilet.  He just stood there with the hammer positioned overhead and just laughed.  Once he went into a rage over something so silly that he started pulling my books off the bookshelf and ripping the pages out in front of me as he knew how much I loved them and he knew how much that would provoke tears and heartache in me.  But I continued to stay with him.  Because I thought I could help him.  Because I thought that I loved him.  Because I overvalued my need for him and the attention such gave.

A few years later (in 2002) during the same time that my husband was getting out of the Marines I graduated from college (UC—Riverside) with an English degree.  When we got back home to Texas I called my grandmother on my dad’s side to give her the news of my graduation.  Dad answered the phone.  He had started living with her.  Like our previous conversation it would be awkward and superficial.  I told him I had graduated from college.  He asked what school, what major and what was my GPA?  I told him.  He said that was good.  He passed the phone to my grandmother.  That was the last time I would ever speak to him.

A few months later, in October 2002, I was ironically at my Me Ma’s house in East Texas when the phone rang.  It was my cousin calling.  They were trying to locate me to tell me that dad died.  He had a sudden heart attack in his sleep.  I was 22 years old.

This is one of those moments that books authors, poets and film makers speak about when they tell you that life can change suddenly and forever in an instant.  For me my life changed as such because right up until that moment I had hated my father because that what I was raised to do.  But secretly, unbeknownst to my conscious mind, I always felt that this riff would be resolved.  I always felt like we would have that one moment where we would make-up for all the pain and indiscretions and the walls would come falling down and we could finally get to know each other not on an awkward, superficial level but on a level that was really real, and most importantly, just ours.  In reality this was never going to happen.  The silent curtain of death made certain of that.

I was dad’s only child and therefore responsible for taking care of his things.  Dad’s illustrious life filled with one time successes and achievements had been reduced to a bedroom in my grandmother’s house that he was living in along with a small storage unit.  It was my job to clean up his stuff and take what I wanted.  I had to make the drive from my house on the other side of DFW that took 45 minutes each way.  Faith Hill had a new single called “Cry” that I played on repeat over and over and over again, the entire drive to where dad’s stuff was and the entire drive back.  I would bawl along with the song while I drove.  It really struck a nerve with me on how I felt about dad.

The strange part about going through dad’s stuff was that it was a sort of expedition into the man that I didn’t know.  What kinds of stuff does a man manage to keep after all these years?  In his bedroom there were his clothes and a couple of pieces of jewelry.  There was his collection of poetry and writings.  Dad was a musician but I didn’t find any musical instruments, just writings.  The most heartbreaking part was dad’s book collection.  Dad was a big reader just like I am.  His few shelves and boxes were filled with books on fiction, poetry, spirituality (M. Scott Peck and C.S. Lewis were big ones) and history.  As I sorted through this collection I came to the bittersweet realization that half the books dad had I had too.  I ended up with tons of duplicate copies of the same titles, some even obscure.  We had been reading the same books.

When I opened the storage building I found my old Cabbage Patch doll I hadn’t seen since 1985.  It was fully intact and grubby from having been moved over the years, the only thing missing was a shoe.  Along with it I found pictures of me from my childhood in an era that was frozen in time.  There were no pictures past age 7.  Nothing from when I was a teenager.  Nothing from when I was an adult.  There were tons of boxes of old papers and the photo album from dad’s 1st marriage to his 1st wife.  She had been there for dad’s intervention in 1989.  The photo album from when my parents married was missing.  It probably disappeared in the foreclosure.

The funeral was a few days after dad’s death.  I found out that in the last years of his life dad had been heavily involved with Alcoholics Anonymous (AA).  Everybody that came to the funeral was from his AA group, (save for one last investment banker friend of dad’s from the “high roller” era of the 70s).  Dad as always had been the real life of the party.  Every person that came up to me was very warm, hearts-on-their-sleeve types, and every single one of them told me how dad talked about me everyday.  They gave me big hugs.  They said they were so glad to finally get to meet me.  They all told me how much dad loved me.  It was very strange and bittersweet.

Grandma for God-knows-what-reason decided to have an open casket even though dad’s exit wasn’t the prettiest.  Dad had died in her La-Z-Boy recliner, fists clinched tightly to his chest, with his face in a grimace, eyes squeezed shut. At the time I felt like dad looked in death probably very similar as to what he did in the womb, fists clinched and eyes tightly shut.  Only with less pain around the eyes.  The world had not gotten to him yet.  This would be my final image of my father in his casket in the funeral home. 

Dad’s one lone financial trader buddy who heard about dad’s passing in the paper came to funeral.  My grandmother asked if I wanted to get up and say something.  I told her I wasn’t able to do that but that I felt like dad would have loved to have a poem recited.  I picked out John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud”.  Dad’s buddy got up on the podium and recited it for me after exchanging a few stories about the good ole’ days.

Grandma had been wondering where we should have dad buried.  She was thinking of just finding a public cemetery in DFW.  I knew dad was really big into the family heritage where he was born, which was West Texas (dad was born in West Texas but would only spend his summers in his youth out there as shortly after his birth my grandparents moved to San Francisco where dad was raised).  I suggested that we put dad on a train back to the area he was born in, and grandma found out that there happened to be one more plot left in the family gravesite.  That’s where dad is buried today, out in the rural West Texas dirt surrounded by the family he loved dearly.  I have never been out there, but plan to someday.

If dad were alive today he would be 71 years old.  It has been a journey for me, this path of uncertainty born out of uncertain beginnings (amongst other things).  The biggest lesson I learned in his passing almost immediately was what a waste of time it is to hate somebody, especially somebody who is 50% of who you are.  I have come to realize that this hate belief wasn’t mine but something I chose to carry from a young age.  I don’t carry it anymore.  And I don’t conduct my life in the same fashion as I did in my insecure 20s, when I was still making decisions from an unaware place of inadequacy.  Truthfully, these scars from my dad won’t fully go away but I’m okay with that because they are not supposed to vanish completely.  I will probably never be 100% comfortable and trusting in a male environment though I have no doubt this can be vastly improved with the right person. 

The biggest lesson I have come out with is a deep compassion for the human journey as it relates to the masculine and to the father, as I have come to see this pain expressed in countless other forms with other people.  This planet needs men and we need fathers.  We need them present and open and grounded. There is too much emphasis on the single mom in today’s world and though I appreciate the championship of the spirit of such I also hate the loss of value for the father that it does in its exchange. So many people grow up without their fathers whether it be because they are not physically there (check) or whether it be because they are not emotionally there which can be just as damaging (never mind adding abuses to the mix).  Our planet’s women can better engage with their own light if they don’t have to be distracted with chasing after this masculine approval we are conditioned to desire thanks to the media and which in many cases we don’t have to begin with at all making the void much worse.  I believe father love and support is part of a crucial foundation to the healing of the planet. Not only would this love help the women and the children growing up but just as importantly it would be most beneficial for the men too, who are just as suffering.

Thank you daddy for taking part in my life journey so that I can see truths that otherwise I would have been blind towards.  These truths are only going to help further my life and soul’s growth as I continue to move forward in my own personal adventure.  I will always love you and hold you dear to my heart.  You will not be forgotten.

June 1941-October 2002