Kissing the Patriarch Goodbye

It’s been over six years now, since I last spoke to my father: mid-summer, July 15th, 2014. I was in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he was lying on a gurney at a funeral home — dead as a doornail. To hide the incisions of his autopsy, the back of his head and throat were carefully wrapped over with portions of the white sheet that bundled the rest of his body. He was propped up at an angle, his face available for viewing. The sheet that covered his body was slightly raised over his arm to expose the solid, stubborn fingers on his right hand.

On the flight from San Francisco that morning, the thought beckoned me to call the funeral home. I understood the value of an open wake for those who needed to witness the actuality of a death, but it wasn’t evidence I needed. I had been grieving the loss of my father for years. In fact, as I sat on the plane with my laptop opened on the tray in front of me, I wondered if I could even find the words for a eulogy. As the flight made its way across the plains, I sputtered on the keyboard, sentences, written, deleted and written again, but while wrestling to find a way to memorialize this man and our complicated relationship, the idea that I need to see him once more steadily rose to a certainty. I couldn’t explain why; I just needed this opportunity to say goodbye.

There are as many types of fathers and daughters as there are fathers and daughters. Each daughter, though, only has one father to claim, one story to tell about the father she got. It’s each daughter’s prerogative whether she needs that story to develop over the course of her life, whether she wants to make sense of the way her father filled his role, who this man was, and who he was to her. In my case, by the time I was in my mid-20s, I realized if I didn’t begin writing my own story about my father, he might write my story for me. For this daughter, then, authorship — making sense of my father and finding that story myself– came to feel like a matter of survival.

***

What helps this makes sense, perhaps, is knowing that through my eyes as a child, my father was, well…mythic. This condition — his being “mythic” — was also conditional to our relationship. That’s how it works with the narcissistically afflicted; adulation is the condition for engagement. By way of this arrangement, it follows that my father was an exceptional man, a professor, a world-renowned scientist, an inventor, a researcher, and probably close-to, if not certifiably, a genius. He was handsome, charismatic, British-ly witty, and revered by all who knew and surrounded him. If I didn’t know this from the comfortable distance, I became accustomed to living from him; I knew it from his colleagues and students who’d whisper so in my ear at university gatherings. “You’re so lucky to have such an intelligent, interesting father,” they would tell me.

Of course, this conditional relationship was aided by instincts. Daughters come into the world pre-wired to adore their fathers, (for better or worse), and I adored mine. I learned well, and early, how to recount the story of his rise to success and international acclaim from a childhood of virtual poverty in post-war London and, later, rural England.

Over time, his story became familiar enough to me, and foundational enough to our relationship, that it started to feel like my story. Who was I? I was the daughter of this remarkable man. “Let me tell you all about him!”

And this is how that story went:

My father, Peter Roland Swann, singlehandedly, (always a suspect claim), rose from poverty in post-WWII England, through class ranks in a country where class has parallels to the debilitating racial barriers known to people of color in the US. In spite of humble origins, he gained scholarships to one exceptional school after another, receiving his degree from Cambridge University and later becoming a respected researcher and teacher at the Royal School of Mines in London, England. In 1977, he moved to the United States, where he started a small garage operation with his brother selling components for electron microscopes. The business, which grew into a multi-million-dollar success, designed and manufactured components that would later be used to develop life-saving medical equipment and the iPhone. Dubbed the “Steve Jobs” of electron microscopy by his admiring colleagues, my father’s was a modern Horatio Alger’s story. What could one possibly do but admire such an accomplished and brilliant man?

What we know about myths, of course, is that they are larger than life, but also that they are just that …myths. This, after all, was the ‘above the waterline’ story, the one that bound me to my father in this first chapter of being his daughter. But it was a story that cast a shadow, and as the years passed with my growing up in that shadow, I began to see the contours of a different father and a different story.

That father was rarely, if ever, home. He lived through, and in, his professional reputation, adopting a younger, female research assistant (maybe two?), to tend to his manly needs. He was a father who left the care of his children exclusively to his wife and mother. He commanded attention whenever he was around while vexingly unable to offer his own. When asked for anything more than what already he didn’t give, he left the house, slamming the front door behind him with righteous indignation — no words.

***

After the plane landed in Pittsburgh, my husband, Jon, and I took a taxi to my father’s apartment, where he lived with his wife, my step-mother. The apartment was perched in a high-rise above Pittsburgh on Mt. Washington. With tall, wrap-around windows, it looked out over the famed three rivers and the city’s post-industrial skyline. It was one of those apartments where the elevator opens up right into the living quarters, plush and spacious, with cream-colored carpet and furnishings that left you searching in vain for a chair that might foster a relaxing exhale.

It had only been a week since I’d last walked off that very elevator into that same apartment. I’d flown to Pittsburgh with my husband and children after hearing enough details about my father’s condition to know this might be the last time I could see him alive. It was a short visit, only three days, coast-to-coast, and back again. So short, in fact, that I’d barely had time to digest the visit before returning.

Still available to my body was the memory of how my father had greeted me when I stepped off the elevator that week before. I walked over to give him a customary hug and found myself held, solid and tight, wrapped by fatherly with an immediacy that felt wholly unfamiliar. With a different father, something might have been said after that embrace. Maybe a few tears would have been shed or questions asked in the transition to conversation. But the space of closeness at that moment was so unusual I don’t believe either of us knew what to do with it. Touched, yet wisened to protocol, I stepped back in silence. The unusualness of the moment suggested we both knew what this visit portended.

The rest of that short trip more closely resembled what I’d come to know in my father over the years. Out of the spotlight, he was often grumpy, distracted, obsessive, and self-absorbed. He didn’t listen when I talked and didn’t respond when I asked questions. He was anxious about his health and his finances, mumbling about how hard he’d worked his whole life to make money only to find himself so anxiously preoccupied in the end with how to keep it. On this visit, though, he seemed especially irritable and elusive and bent over, frail and short of breath, to anyone paying attention he was clearly in poor health.

“Shouldn’t you be calling the cardiologist to get rechecked, dad?” I asked. His response was a mutter, inaudible, but something in his tone, the precise edge of disdain, the degree of withdrawal, all of that and more was data I processed in a painfully familiar equation. It amounted to the formula I knew too well for when to stay quiet. Another word and I risked admonishment — both sharp and derisive — “Karin, don’t tell me what to do!”

That evening, after the children were tucked in their sleeping bags, I walked across the hall by the elevators and into the living room where the news headlines played across the television screen. Leaning against the door jamb, I watched my father and stepmother on the couch, pausing to reflect before I approached. I knew this was my last visit, and steadied myself before entering. This would be my last moment, I decided, the one I would want to look back on and remember.

I had tried to love my father for so much of my life, tried to please him, to help fill him up with my interest in his work, learning, through well-honed intuition, 10,001 ways to prop up his mythic status. Always, I held out hope for that one day he might notice; he might see how hard I’d been working to paper over the cracks for him, to validate his greatness, shower him with the adoring care of his daughter. Beneath that, of course, was the longing for him to see that I existed in my own right, separate from him, a girl, then a young woman, someone for a father to discover, encourage, enjoy, cherish and admire. But over the years, I’d been forced to accept that a thousand daughters couldn’t have filled him up or taught him to see beyond his need to see himself.

So, sitting there, now, beside the two of them on the couch, my father fiddling with the remote, my step-mother, also fragile and in ill-health, sitting, vacuously, beside him, I allowed my body to sink into the couch next to theirs, feeling the space of my own separateness that my father had so long missed.

The exchange that followed was wordless. I opened my heart to both of them, opening that same heart in that same moment to the recognition that my father was on something I could only describe as a suicide mission. There was nothing I could do to help. Instead of engaging, I sat quietly and witnessed the two of them, the hollow, sinking air of pointlessness in the space around them. It was a sour truth, yet one I experienced in an equally and strangely sweet moment. It was a moment of surrender that I had taken my life, up until then, to find. I’d tried to love this man, to charm him, to please him, to change him into someone who might notice me, but here, in a wordless recognition, I realized I had no power to create change in a man who saw no need for it — and certainly not the power to create in him the will to live.

***

As I stepped out of the elevator a short five days after that visit, the scene in the apartment was measurably different. People, some I knew, some I didn’t, floated across the cream-colored carpet, awkwardly arranged, drifting in and out of the open floor plan. It was a strained gathering that included friends of my step-mother’s, siblings, step-siblings, and their spouses. Those family members notably absent, added to the tension. The feeling in my body, tight and constricted, betrayed the open architecture, plus, my stepmother’s fragility took the form of several dozen egg-shells invisibly strewn throughout the apartment. Everyone seemed to be trying to avoid stepping on them.

People talked, but the conversation was thin. Silences were broken, anxiously with “how can I help?” On top of this, the fact that my brother and I were staying at a hotel downtown while step-siblings slept in my father’s apartment added to the strain, foreshadowing what was later revealed in the contents of his will. The space between more than a few relationships could have easily been cut with a knife. Among other things, then, it was that kind of tension.

Families that don’t tell their own stories have this kind of awkwardness, of course, and ours was one of them. British and afflicted by narcissism, the shortage of communication was a harbinger for a shortage of the kind of storytelling that makes it easier to talk to one another. After all, for a family to tell stories, there needs to be love, attention paid to one another, a fondness for each other’s quirks, there must be plotlines with conflict and resolution, humor, humility, and, essentially, time together, in one another’s company. The story of this family, my family, might be that it suffered from the affliction of rarely telling stories about itself.

By extension, in that apartment on that day, there were so many un-acknowledged conflicts, un-metabolized, un-shared stories, a constipation of togetherness. The affair my stepmother and father had, my mother discovering them at the airport, the shadow cast over my stepmother by my mythic father, evident in her appearing some twenty years beyond her age. There was also the tangible awkwardness between the step-siblings, themselves, people who had entered my life in high-school, who seemed to have issues with each other, but I barely knew them and knew not what they were. Then, there was the money my father had given and taken from his own children over the years in such different amounts and such random ways, barking at requests for an explanation. No doubt, this was the cause of the cold, measured distance between my siblings and me.

All these conversations were lined up in queue, the discussions, the arguments, the come-to-Jesuses that should have happened years ago were pushed back into the overhead compartment and snapped shut, creating a field of tense cordiality barely concealing a measured, magnetic repulsion. It was a family absent the feel of family. The anti-family, anti-story family.

***

Had I not largely exiled myself from all these relationships about ten years earlier, I might have lost myself entirely in the compulsive effort to create something normal out of all this awkwardness. I might have tried. But the time away and the years of therapy accompanying them had afforded me an inner compass. So, amidst all the superficiality and anxious chatter, the needle turned back to the decision I’d made on the plane.

“Really, she said?” My stepmother was mystified, her thin arms propped on the kitchen’s white, Corian countertop. “You want to see him?” I had asked her, first, how she was doing, and she’d responded, clearly disoriented and in shock, recounting the moment she’d found him lying on the floor by the TV in the living room. It was early in the morning, and she hadn’t expected him there. CNN’s headlines quietly droned in the background when she saw him collapsed on the floor, lying in a puddle of his own defecation.

“It was disgusting,” she said, looking at me searchingly, her eyes half devastated, half repulsed. It was her trauma to recount, I told myself, however she needed to do so, but I couldn’t help but wonder about the disgust. People do that when they die, yet she seemed to be looking at me with the hope that I could clean that part up for her as if the gap between how she saw this idealized man in life and who he was on the floor in his own feces in death was too hard to reconcile.

It was also likely this orientation that led her to wonder why I would think to visit a father who’d been carved up and stored in a freezer for two days in a funeral home. But when she clearly saw I wasn’t going to give up on the idea, she gave me the number, asking me again, “Really?”

I found the powder room by the entrance elevator and dialed the number on my phone. The man answered with a Pittsburgh accent, his tone polite, measured and respectful, appropriate to someone in the business of dying. He hesitated after I submitted my request. “You understand he’s had an autopsy?”

“I do,” I said. “Is there any way to wrap him so I can see him?”

There was a pause on the phone. I wasn’t sure what to make of it. Perhaps they didn’t want the extra work, perhaps there would be a fee, and his hesitation signaled some doubt about how to address that. Perhaps there was a question about whether preparing him for a visit would even be possible.

My intent was clear, however, and while I was, myself, anxious in the pause, whatever remaining sense of entitlement I had around this relationship, it was going to be exercised in the service of this request. After putting me on hold for a few minutes, the man returned to the line: “Yes,” he said in cordial-funeral-home-Pittsburgh-ese. “You can come in. He’ll be ready for your visit by 2 pm.”

***

By the age of 25, I had a storage container full of thwarted efforts to draw my father down from Mt. Olympus into the every-day life of being a father. Years of waiting for him to look up and say hello when he was buried behind his computer, years of wanting a question from him about my life, some curiosity about what I liked in school, what I did with friends on my birthday, anything. The years of neglect and oversight took their toll; when your father is a God who doesn’t notice you, you start wondering if you’re worthy of your own existence.

I began to know the grey, sodden flavor of depression that sets in after too many years passing with your self-esteem feeding on self-doubt. I learned to be small, to see others as the perennial authority, greater, strong, more successful. I learned to default to the belief that something must just be wrong and broken in me.

But the neglect, itself, the accumulated moments of un-met need for things only a father can give weren’t the worst of it. There were the darker memories that few, if anyone, knew about. Moments I later came to understand as abuse, something which you just don’t see that way at first because it’s your parent, after all. They are the water you swim in.

The ax came down at the most unlikely moments. The only predictable thing, it seemed, was that no one would be around. His (my father’s) select words packed more than a punch. Appearing non-violent, they were measured and “reasonable,” but they landed like bullets and bites, skewers, and sledgehammers.

That’s why it was confusing for decades to see it as abuse. There were no visible scars or bruises, no alcohol or drugs involved, no sexual violation—quite the opposite. My father was such a successful, cultured, mild-mannered, and accomplished man! However, the insidiousness of the narcissist’s hand, I’ve learned, is that it doesn’t always land on the skin, it lands in the victim’s heart where, invisibly, it can teach you to devour your own soul. How I wished he had done something child protective services or any rule of law would have recognized as a crime.

There are many stories that could chronicle the details. My reluctance to tell them belies the family affliction, stories that don’t want to make it to the page because they hurt too much. But I will say that the worst times were usually when I approached him with some need for support, when my underbelly, my insecurity must have triggered a fear in him about his own, un-thinkable, vulnerability. Perhaps it was times when he was feeling deflated when the slightest crack in the mythic contours of his ego became evident to him, and he felt the sudden (though unconscious) urgency to put the crack somewhere else, anywhere else. Anywhere he wouldn’t have to feel it.

It was those moments with my father when he told me I was a “human tragedy,” an “embarrassment,” a “worthless little shit,” and if I dared cry, I was a “sniveling female.” I “should wear tighter fitting clothes.”

I dressed “like a box.” My interests were “worthless,” and despite the series of graduate degrees I accumulated, there was “nothing” he could possibly imagine I could teach him about anything.

When I was selected to give the valedictory speech at my university graduation, he arrived late, bemoaned my speech, saying, “isn’t anyone here a Republican?” Then he pulled me aside to remind me, “not to let it go to my head.”

These blows were far worse than the slow, groaning sadness that grows from neglect. They threw me off balance and when I stumbled to find the words to say something back, my father would calmly admonish me. “Why are you being so defensive, Karin? I’m just trying to help you. Don’t you want my help?”

“You bastard,” I thought under my breath when any semblance of clarity returned. But hovering, quietly and cautiously inside me, those words, and others like them, found no place to land. They sunk down to my heart and found a hole at the bottom where everything drained out. Trickling into no more than a puddle on the floor, it’s a wonder I walked away at all.

I rarely spoke to others about these incidents, or the overall air of contempt my father projected when I was around, or how I internalized him until he was there, all the time, in my own mind scouring for my insufficiencies. I was ashamed of it, afraid it might make others uncomfortable if they didn’t understand. On the few occasions when I told my mother, she responded with the solution she probably resorted to at the receiving end of her own imperious, Austrian father’s attacks. “Walk tall,” she said, “don’t let him get to you, rise above it.”

And that’s how I did it, drawing myself up each time from the puddle. “I’ll do it on my own then!” Head cocked, arms and chest pulled in firm, buttocks cranked up for the walking “tall.” Never, NEVER again ask for help. And that’s also how “you bastard” found its way back up, into my muscles, my spine, stretching my short, 5ft frame surely up an inch, or so. Rising above the rabble,(isn’t that how the men do it?), above the crowds of weaker ones who didn’t know, like I knew, now, how to withstand the blows.

Years later, I learned about the term projective identification, the defense of choice for malignant narcissists. These days, we more popularly understand it as gaslighting. It happens when the narcissist projects some part of themselves they can’t tolerate or acknowledge, (their vulnerability, immorality, or select emotions), onto someone else, anyone. They vilify that quality in their victim and, confused and devastated; the victim takes the attack in, believed, leaving them turned inside out, self-immolating. The narcissist with their successfully resurrected elevated self-image then moves on in his or her merry way.

This is how, by the age of 25, my father lived in me with such a monstrous presence that with any new person I met, I found myself wanting to shake their hand and say: “Hi. I’m Karin. My father’s an ass-hole.”

It’s absurd, really, to have felt that the biggest, most important thing I could say about myself was that my father was an ass-hole. But that’s how I eventually began to realize that if I didn’t start authoring a different story, my father would write me out of my own life.

***

To author another story, one which would give meaning rather than erase it, the proverbial curtain would need to be pulled back. The beneath the water line story explored more thoroughly, the roots exposed. Because of the family affliction, however, there isn’t much I know about my father’s childhood, not much about what it was really like.

I do know in his early childhood that his father was overseas, stationed as a cook during the second world war. His mother primarily raised him in a small village in Somerset, England. One of several children of a local pig-farmer, his mother, my grandmother, was a tough, proud and bawdy woman, proud of the pennies she’d saved, the rations she’d managed to provide for her sons during the war years. Her father had returned from the Great War, a victim of shell-shock and mustard gas. He spent most of the years after his return lying in an upstairs bedroom, traumatized and incapacitated. The morning he died, my father and my uncle learned the news as they witnessed family members carrying the old, war-broken man, heavy, rigid, and awkward, down the stairs. No adult spoke of it to them then, nor after that day. Not a word.

A fastidious house cleaner, my grandmother, was the definition of godly-ness next to cleanliness. She apparently once sent my father and uncle outside to cut the grass on their small front lawn with two pairs of scissors, one of them, nail scissors (they clearly owned no lawnmower). The boys obeyed.

When my grandfather returned to the family after the second world war, it was, then, long after my father had learned to live with his absence and after his mother had donned him the man of the house.

In spite of the war, my grandfather had managed to maintain his charm as an affable, romantic fellow who, in between short stints of work, lived largely “on the dole.” He started his ruddy-cheeked day with a shot of whiskey in his tea, (poured behind his wife’s back), and, after billiards at the pub in the evening, he returned home prone to outbreaks of drunken violence. His older son, my father, was the select recipient of this kind of attention. If he was caught out with the girls or didn’t finish his school work — impeccably — he would feel it in a less than forgiving assault on the all-too-human flesh of his body.

And the rest we know. Perhaps with greater understanding now. The scholarships to exceptional schools, the prized child of a proud mother, the poor boy, gifted in math, who found security in all the “right answers” of material science, the impressive career teaching, researching, and designing in the meticulous field of electron microscopy. With these few touchstones as contours to the story, it all starts to make a little more sense.

***

My husband, Jon, and I arrived at the funeral home shortly after 2 o’clock. We were mostly silent during the drive there through the winding roads enveloped by the tall, lush green trees that gave Pennsylvania her name. The car bumped in and out of potholes on the road, a tribute to Pittsburgh’s icy cold winters, unknown to us in California. My eyes followed the details of the landscape familiar from my childhood, particular plants, and trees I hadn’t seen in years stirring memories forged decades before.

Jon, who had lost his mother to cancer after more than a decade long fight, was no stranger to death. Nor, as my husband, was he a stranger to the impact my father had had on my ability to trust men. I was fortunate, however, to have found in him, a man willing to turn towards his, and my history of loss and mistrust, a man willing to ride the waves we need to ride to learn how to love again. How can I measure the value of that? Of having him beside me, behind the wheel, as we took to the twists and turns of those roads, consulting the GPS together, navigating our way to a conversation with death?

We arrived at the funeral parlor and pulled into the parking lot, entering by the side of the building. My chest was jittery under the shirt I was wearing, and I reached over for my husband’s hand. We found the front desk, and Jon kindly asked for the person we needed to talk to in order to see my father.

I don’t remember many details about the funeral home itself. I remember feeling the stir of uprightness and entitlement that helped me make it past my stepmother’s discouragements and the hesitancy of the man on the phone. I remember the shaking in my rig cage, in and around my knees — a nervousness that was coupled, nevertheless, with confidence — a clarity of purpose.

The man whom I’d spoken to earlier on the phone met us with the same somber, politeness confirming my father was ready for viewing. I couldn’t help but feel a strange intimacy with him as he walked us down the hall towards the room; he had granted me something I’d never been given before in my own family — the opportunity I now had to state my case. Together, the three of us stood outside the room. There, at the double, French doors covered with a ruffled, white, nylon curtain, I hesitated.

“Can I go in on my own?” I asked. “I’m afraid not, ma’am,” the funeral man answered awkwardly, “I’ll need to be in there with you.” Disappointed, and suddenly struck, myself, by the awkwardness of having him in there, I nonetheless entered the room.

***

I haven’t been in the company of many dead bodies, but with all those that I have, the first encounter has been strikingly other than what our death-fearing culture would predict. As I approached my father, I felt the sense of an arresting peacefulness and settling. The room was still, the air somehow cleared and purified by the presence of death.

There was a couch to the left of the gurney against the wall at a right angle; I searched for a chair so I could sit up close beside my father. Jon, seeing my need, kindly brought one over. With encouragement, he left to find a seat on the couch behind me.

It took a moment to find my seat, to feel my feet resting on the ground while the eyes in my heart found focus on the details of my father’s skin, the surprising ruddiness on his cheeks. Unlike the translucent, pale skin I had seen in other dead bodies, I marveled at how alive he looked. I traced the salt and pepper stubble of his morning beard, the mussy, ruffle of hair curling up over his forehead, his handsome, well-proportioned nose that transitioned down to the thin, soft lips of his mouth, slightly opened.

I leaned in a bit closer to look at the expression on his face. Under the dark, small mounds of his eyebrows, I thought I could see the shape of a certain fear in one of his closed eyes and a restful, resignation in the other. I drank in the details that seemed so familiar but somehow more available to me at that moment than they had ever been before when my father was alive.

The distinctiveness of the details announced this as the body of one man and no other. I saw the scar on his hand where it had been punctured when, as a young boy, he had jumped to rescue a ball on top of a spiked metal fence. A disturbing image, to be sure, but one that lived now, innocently, in the raised, white line on the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. Back towards his face, my eyes registered the bump on his forehead, an innocuous small lump of fatty tissue that could be seen at a certain angle and which my father used to joke was an outgrowth of his great intelligence. Beneath the white sheet that covered him, were the other parts of his body, unseen to me and others, which, when living had carried the tension and knowing throughout his life of other painful memories, those bound to his father’s drunken un-doings.

These details had such a particularity, so painfully and preciously belonging to this lifetime, this man, and to the only father, I ever knew. Awash in tenderness, I took him in, the man who, at birth, I was destined to adore.

And that is how I felt in those first few minutes being with him that evening. The utter immediacy of his body lent an air of unspeakable vulnerability in him and in me. Tears, which warmed my eyelids, slowly filled and crossed the thresh-hold, rolling down my cheeks, cooling as they reached my chin.

I knew this as the same body that hugged me that morning as I stepped off the elevator. Itself innocent, as innocent as the day he was born, undefended. Undefended, in those precious moments, he was powerless to reject my love or my tears. All the feminine vulnerability that had threatened him so in life was on tender display beside him.

I realized then that it wasn’t just my anger that had been silenced over the years, but also my love. That love had been too real, too immediate, too tender to take in for a man who somehow, in the deeper contours of himself, must himself have doubted he was worthy of it. And so it was, from this foundation of openness, that my conversation with my father began. Not with anger and hatred, but with love.

“Dad,” I said, “I want to tell you how…” I stopped. My voice cracked into the silence. The words seemed unsure of themselves. How awkward was this, after all? I suddenly became aware of the man standing at the door behind me and the strangeness of talking to a dead man who’d had the back of his skull taken off and put back on again. Gathering my attention back towards the inner compass that had brought me there, I rallied forward. No matter how awkward, I needed to get where I needed to go.

“Dad,” I started again, “I hated you for most of my life. You were an ass hole.”

No eloquence, no poetics, just raw declaration.

“I’ve come here to tell you how much you hurt me, to tell you how wrong you were. You treated my brothers and me like shit.”

The words were finding their channel now, realizing it was a channel that could finally flow now, here, in these unusual circumstances.

“I didn’t know how to protect myself from you. And you were the one who was supposed to protect me in the world. But no one protected me. Not you or anyone else. And I couldn’t protect my brothers either, or my mother. We were all too scared. You were too powerful, too established in our minds as ‘the authority’ to question. “

The “walk tall’ I had known for so many years inside me, the way it lived in my muscles, tightening my frame in self-reliance, started yielding with these words into the original “you bastard,” the anger taking active shape again, filling up and spilling over.

“And you weren’t there for-fuck’s-sake… It felt like you were never there, and on the few occasions when you were, you acted like you owned us, like we had no purpose other than to treat you like a god and for you to treat us like shit so you could prop yourself up as perfect.”

I could feel the words embodied and the effect of speaking them on my body, the layers slowly peeling away, making room for something in me to begin to soften and expand.

“I loved you,” I continued, “You have no idea how much I loved and adored you. But you turned those who were closest to you, those who loved and depended on you, into the dark and broken sickness you couldn’t accept in yourself.”

It was down to the basics now, to say what needed to be said and just as importantly, hearing myself say it.

“I hated you for all you did and for all you didn’t do. That’s it, I hated you. I fucking hated you.”

With each word spoken that left my lips, it was like my nervous system watched on in awe. This father’s rocket launch defensiveness was ineluctably missing. Unable to lift a finger and arrested by his own death from speaking one measured or bitter word, he lay astoundingly there, his body more still and available in my presence than it had ever been.

He couldn’t tell me I was defensive, and he couldn’t walk out of the room or slam the door, he couldn’t give me a look of indignation, or threaten me, or ignore me. He had no choice but to ‘listen.’

I will say, it was nothing short of heaven on earth to finally speak those words, words that had been unspoken and lying in wait for decades. Heaven to be exactly who I was in that moment, no judgment, no cost. As more words came forward, I spoke out, pausing in between to take in my father’s body, my love, my own body, my hatred. The tears flowed as I spoke, as did the current of resolve and strength I had brought to the encounter, the grief and the fortitude, side by side.

In the softness and strength of my body, a sense of power was growing, fueled against reason, by love. Love for me, for him, for the humanity that had been reduced to shreds in both of us. “It’s just you and me,” I said at one point, stating the obvious so I could hear myself say it, “and this time, you can’t fight back. You can’t fight back.”

It was the first time I’d ever been myself in his presence, but this time, for the first time, it happened with my words. It was my story.

I wasn’t sure if I was done or what else might need to be said, but at one point, struck with momentary self-consciousness, I remembered the man from the funeral home was standing behind me by the door. I must have surprised him there when I turned around to look, registering, in that brief moment, that tears that had gathered in his eyes as he witnessed the lifetime of hurt and reconciliation unfurl before him. Turning back towards my father, I saw my husband, who’s abiding support spoke to the possibility of a different kind of man, a man who could grow, change, love, and see me.

Feeling Jon’s encouragement, I turned again to my father, registering the value of these moments of honesty. I reached out to touch his hand, wary at first of that touch on a cold body. Unmistakably lacking the feeling of life, his plump hand was nonetheless his. My fingers savored the touch, welcoming the opportunity now to love the man I had finally been able to defy. That shell of constraint that contained me for much of my life, words restrained, that had kept me “walking tall,” was slowly, one muscle, one memory, one tear at a time, beginning its release.

In the space it created, I could feel the fullness in me take shape, the red, fleshy, human parts, the soft feminine forms that had been hardened into self-reliance. A tenderness took over, one I could feel towards myself, towards my father, towards the man at the door at the funeral home, and my husband, and the whole sorry mess in the apartment on Mt. Washington.

It was in the space of that field of presence, then, that I began to feel the flavor of forgiveness. My head bent down towards his hand, compelled by the softness, my lips landed on the cool, rounded flesh. I kissed him, holding my cheek against the cold, sensing it there, taking in the preciousness of knowing an edge where his skin ended, and mine began.

It wasn’t a collapse into forgiveness in the way I had so often collapsed in my father’s presence, not a collapse into “everything’s all right now; I can forgive you.” It was a collapse into my own expansion into that warm, soft truth of everything I had to say, a collapse into the full size of me without negating the full size of him.

After all, this wasn’t just the last time I talked to my father; it was the most intimate conversation I’d ever had with him. Only in sharing the anger and hatred with him that had been bottled up for a lifetime, had I found my love for him, and for myself.

On that midsummer evening in Pittsburgh, beside the gurney, this father’s body lay on, a daughter surrendered — surrendered to the woman I was now able to become.

Post Script

The iCal function for birthday notifications just pinged up on my screen, reminding me it’s my father’s birthday. He would have been 84 years old. Here, in Berkeley, California, six years after his death, I’ve recording these final words, but did this story find its way to be written now?

Perhaps it took this long to find my footing, given all that happened after my father’s death. It was never really clear from the autopsy what he died from. It had to do with his heart, and maybe that’s all that matters.

As the weeks passed, a complex and painful drama unfolded, revealing decisions he had made with his estate. Promises to his children were broken, step-siblings became millionaires and disappeared without a trace; my siblings and I were broken even further apart as my father’s legacy lived on in randomly distributed dollars and nonsense. But that money was nothing compared to what we had needed from a father.

I tried to build a bridge to my brothers — with laboriously written letters, edited and re-edited, reviewed, painstakingly with a therapist. But the language for resolving conflict just wasn’t there. My father’s weapon of choice was words, and there was little confidence, it seemed, that more words could lead to anything but more hurt and pain. So, in all these years, the memory of my last conversation with my father has lived in the background, the story untold, until now.

Then, at the expense of sounding, well, obvious- something happened in this country. Donald Trump was elected. This was bad news for many Americans, but given the father I had, the morning after his election, I sat in the chilling familiarity I had with the narcissism in this President and with a foreboding sense of what was to come.

In the past two years, the chorus of voices from women speaking up in #MeToo, in women’s marches and on the front lines of political campaigns have highlighted, as nothing else has, how my story is no anomaly. Other versions of it have been experienced in different ways by women around the world and throughout history. It’s the story of learning from a man that you are worthless, unworthy of protection, unworthy of time and respect, a target for aggression. It’s the story of the learning so many of us take in that we are better served by our own self-doubt than by a voice claimed with an anger that has metabolized into strength, spoken in the service of our value.

On the plane flying across the country to visit my father after his death, I knew something unfinished needed to happen. It’s something that’s happening now with urgency, clarity, and fortitude across our country. And as I finish the words of this story, I can now see that it isn’t the story I may once have thought it would be.

It isn’t a story about narcissism, or about overcoming the influence of an abusive parent; it isn’t a story about families without stories, or about how you find the words to free yourself from them. It includes all these elements, but it’s a story about what happens to our humanity when we systematically avoid the harder truths about ourselves and fail to hold others accountable for theirs.

In making sense of both my father’s inhumanity and humanity, I’ve learned that beyond the threshold of shame, the vulnerable, innocent parts of us as girls and boys, as women and men, too often dismissed as ‘feminine,’ are waiting to be reclaimed. Our bodies, our closest allies, which carry us through life, bear the burden of the loss, and only in returning to these all-too-human bodies are we able to truly return to ourselves.

Stepping closer into those truths, I discovered the emptiness that tragically hides in the hearts of so many of our “successful” men, men like Donald Trump, and the many men who voted for him who were raised to compete and succeed in a country where so many have been fated to fail.

Today, in this America, my father’s need to call me a “human tragedy” was really his need to put a crack in me that lived, well guarded against shame, deep inside himself. His life, his childhood, the expectations on his boyhood, all robbed him of the possibility of being more completely, ordinarily, and imperfectly human, as himself.

Joining other women today in this golden era of our uprising, my own courage has grown. From this foundation, I can now see so many men around me who live with self-doubt that, inexplicable to themselves, leave them several short steps short of ever really knowing who they are. They are men who do no understand the value of relationship because they were taught their value lives in an un-naturally stoic, self-reliance. Here, the masculine parallel of Betty Friedan’s “problem without a name” finds its form: The “man-shaped hole,” unmistakably evident in today’s America.

It has taken me many years and a confrontation with my father, afforded only by his death, to find the words to write my own story. But where, now, does the real story begin… for men?

Photo Credit: torbakhopper Flickr via Compfight cc