What is left?,

I asked myself after receiving a call from my older brother that our father had passed away. I wasn’t surprised at the news, in fact I anticipated it even though I didn’t know his current health nor did I know his exact age as I haven’t communicated with him in over twenty years. What confounded me was that I didn’t really know how to act when receiving the news. This man who sired three sons, impressed upon them in varying degrees his own frequently violent emotional deficiencies. I can’t speak to what specific impact to my other siblings this has had but for me, I have carried the ghost of my childhood for all of my life.

In each man there is a little child, for some there exists a remnant of a bygone age where we played and sought to be mischievous. For others there is a hurt child that is a survivor but who remains hurt and distrustful, he sometimes wears the mask of a phantom and will strike out when feeling vulnerable. 

The example of how to relate to other people which was taught to me by this man who was himself a victim of his own childhood, has stained my life and my relationships which has resulted in one failed marriage, another noted failed relationship, and to some extent impacted my own two sons. My second wife has often struggled to understand how to accommodate the lurking phantom who’s spectral presence voids any normal interaction when it appears. In hindsight, I often used that phantom to push people away in order to protect the hurt little child, and in some respect, to protect those same people in the long run.

During the time that he was alive I waited for his demise, not with fervor but with a stoic anticipation of release that the harbinger of the phantom implanted in me would finally be slain by the only thing that truly ends all things, which is time.

Below is an edited poem, How Do We Forgive Our Fathers? by Dick Lourie that was featured in the film, ‘Smoke Signals’ that begs an important question.

How do we forgive our Fathers?

How do we forgive our Fathers?
Maybe in a dream
Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever
when we were little?

Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage
or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all.

Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers?
For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers?

And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness?
Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning
for shutting doors
for speaking through walls
or never speaking
or never being silent?

Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs
or their deaths
saying it to them or not saying it?

If we forgive our Fathers
what is left?

For me, I now feel a sense of relief, a quieting of a weary soul. The threat of the monster is no longer there. It is time to take that hurt little child by the hand, tell him that everything is okay now, that he can come out from hiding and take off the mask. That he can start picking up the pieces of the broken dream of his childhood and see what fits, what to throw away, and what he can start anew.

That is,
What is left.