In a couple of weeks it will be 27 years ago that my dad died. He’s been dead for more years of my life than he was alive.
Dad was the sort of person who kept everything inside. Also for his generation ‘talking’ about things didn’t have the status it has now, especially for men. He never spoke about the pain and guilt of being the only member of is immediate family to be alive, or if he did speak of it, it wasn’t to us kids. The pain leaked out of him anyway, as repressed emotions tend to do, expressed mostly as rage though his violent, erratic temper.
That’s not to say he was a bad person, on the contrary. He was extremely honest, very charitable, a hard worker, an excellent provider for us, had a sense of humor and was highly intelligent.
His emotional intelligence was where he needed education. He could fly off into a rage over the simplest most innocent things for no logical reason. I don’t really like to talk about the abuse, people get all weird and stupid about it usually. Unless someone’s been through a similar situation growing up, they can’t understand, and that’s probably a good thing, but either way judgment needs to be left behind.
As a child I was constantly terrified, afraid of making him angry (there were other reasons to be terrified — mother was extremely cruel but she had almost no redeeming qualities, but that’s not what this post is about). He had a way of pounding up the stairs that was most unnerving.
At the age of 16 he crossed a boundary I could not accept, he ran after me into my room and proceeded to beat me. But my room was the only safe place in the house, the only place, that until that moment, I’d never been beaten. It freaked me out, enraged me. I started hitting back, and that freaked him out. The look on his face was, well, complete shock. That day saved me, it saved my soul in many ways. He stopped, he left my room, he went down the stairs to the living room and I heard him say to her, “do you know what that kid did, she hit me!” and “I’m too old for this.” And that was it, he never hit me again. If I’d have known, I’d have done it a lot sooner.
Over the years I grew to understand him, at least partially. Most of my understanding came from watching him die of lung cancer, changed me that did.
Once a week we would take him from one hospital to another for his radiation treatment. I’m still not sure why that task befell us, I would think that he either should have been in the hospital that was capable of providing the treatments, or the hospitals should have arranged the transport between them. He was so weak at that point and it was strange pushing him in a wheelchair, the man who terrified me all my life. Yet there he was, helpless and dependent upon me (and her). He trusted me, despite all that he’d done before, he trusted me to take care of him when he was sick, and of course I did. My only complaint about it was why. *Why* were we taking him to this place at all for treatment, because it seemed to be more of a form of unnecessary torture for him, he would get soooo sick afterwards, and so much weaker. They knew, the doctors knew, that there was no hope for him to get better, so why they made him go through that, I’ve no idea.
The anatomy of families is so strange and hindsight lends some clarity…
Dad was really great when I felt sad, I mean nobody else in my family would even have noticed my sadness, but he did and in his own way took great steps to try and cheer me up whenever it happened. In the dichotomy of our relationship, I was also ‘daddy’s little girl’ being the youngest of 3. I cling to the happy memories, the times that he showed how much love he had for me. Those are the things that allowed me to see him as a person, troubled, but still human, humane.
My dad was always great at reading stories to us kids, and not just reading but enacting them — different characters had different voices, different inflections in his voice. He was grand at that, and there were some stories (and I know all kids do this) but there were some stories I made him read over and over and over again, just because I loved the sounds, the way he read them. I can still hear his voice when I think of it.