Friday, 17 July 2009
When Relief Trumps Grief
By Mark Sherman
I don't think I have ever really mourned my father. He died more than 30 years ago and his death certainly did shake me up; no one this close to me had died and my father's death was sudden. But for one week there were no tears. I guess I had to "be there" for my mother.
She had been with my father when he died. As she told the story, they had gone to shop and he had gotten into a dispute over a parking space with a young woman. I can imagine his rage, a rage of which I had always been the most common victim.
He lost the argument and he and my mother drove off. Moments later he pulled over clutching his chest and he died before the EMTs got there. He was 68 and I was 35.
It was a Sunday. My wife and I, along with our four-year-old son, had just driven the 160 miles back home from a visit to her parents and, having done all the driving, I was tired. We walked into the house, and the phone rang. It was my mother, who lived some 80 miles away.
"Daddy died," she said.
My first reaction was complete shock. My dad had not been sick; sure, he had had a minor stroke the year before, but had recovered fully. He had never had heart problems and was still active at his work as a physician. And now, just like that, he was dead? No, this couldn't be.
My next feeling, the most memorable one, the uncensored feeling one gets upon hearing of a sudden death, was a release from fear. It was overwhelming. I didn't have to be afraid any more. All I could think of were fairy tales where the dragon is finally slain and the townspeople can, at long last, breathe free. Yes, I was afraid of my father. I was 35 years old, he had not hit me in more than 20 years, and yet the terror was still there.
But he was my father, and as the week wore on I kept asking myself, Why wasn't I crying? Maybe it was numbness, I said to myself. And having to do things. Having to drive the 80 miles down to Queens, to go with my brother to identify my father's body at the morgue, to go with my uncle and brother to pick out a casket, to make coffee for the people who came back to the house after the funeral and during the week of sitting shiva. And most of all, having do my best to comfort my mother.
But even at the funeral and burial, I didn't cry.
"What's wrong with me?" I kept asking myself.
I returned home on Sunday, a week later, and went into my college office on Monday. The chairperson of my department approached me in the hall, and I was ready to embrace her; I am sure I would have cried then. But at that moment, a male colleague came out of his office and shook my hand as he expressed his condolences. So still the tears wouldn't come.
The next morning I took my son to nursery school and as I hugged and kissed him, he said, "Bye, Daddy, see ya later." That did it. Somehow I made it back to my house, a few minutes drive away, before I lost it and sobbed.
But that was about it. In between, in these 30 years, I have hardly cried at all for my father.
Rationally, I can understand that he was a man with his own problems, a man whose own father committed suicide when my father was 21. I know that rage is a way that many people typically deal with fear or sadness. But when you are a child, you have no way of comprehending this and because parents are gods - or dragons - there is no way, even as an adult, truly to see them as simply human.
I certainly couldn't do this with my dad. I tried it once. I was 10 years old and I was in the car with my younger brother. My dad had just dropped his mother off at a restaurant and was walking back toward the car. I decided, quite consciously, to look at my father as if he were just a man, a man I didn't know - and I did it; I really accomplished it. Suddenly, he was just a middle-aged guy walking along a Brooklyn street.
I was terrified. I had stepped out of the child's universe and had learned an unspeakable truth: that our parents are just ordinary human beings. I immediately let go of this and never tried it again. Fear of my father's rageful verbal abuse and of the hard spankings he would give me didn't come close to the terror of seeing him as ordinary.
Perhaps if he had grown old gracefully or if he had ever become physically frail, I could have let go of the fears I had and could have seen him, if not as ordinary, at least not as a dragon. There was a sad, struggling man in there, but my childhood experiment that might have allowed me to see that was a disaster. I needed a god, even if he was a fearsome one.
Will I ever be old and brave enough to try again to see him as just a man?
[EDITORIAL NOTE: All elders, 50 and older, are welcome to submit stories for this blog. They can be fiction, non-fiction, poetry, memoir, etc. Instructions for submitting are here.]
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Comments
A "touching" story!
Posted by: Heinrich on Jul 17, 2009 8:23:33 AM
Mark - Beautifully told story of your relationship with your father and dealing with his death. I especially liked the image created by your son's words, "Bye, Daddy. See ya later." - Sandy
Posted by: Sandy on Jul 17, 2009 11:07:17 AM
Incredible story! I have heard it said that if you want to see a man cry, get him in a safe space and have him talk about his father.
To this day when I take off my belt and hear the sound it makes, I get a fear reaction. Yes, my father used it on me, but I still knew somehow that he loved me.
Posted by: James J Henry Jr on Jul 17, 2009 1:53:03 PM
Mark,
Your story was so well written.
Thanks for taking us into your confidence and trusting us to understand your inability to mourn your father.
We get it. We really do.
Posted by: Nancy on Jul 17, 2009 6:09:17 PM
A wonderfully honest, relatable and poignant, well-written story.
Posted by: marvin on Jul 18, 2009 12:36:48 PM
Your essay, so well written, is, to play with your own title, honesty trumping pretense. When I was a small child I had a friend named Morton whose father used to beat him with a strap and once made me watch. I was three, he was four. It was very disturbing. I've wondered over the years how he had come to terms with his feelings about the man who was his father.
Posted by: Brenda Verbeck on Jul 19, 2009 8:14:26 AM
a well-done memoir
Posted by: Nikki Stern on Jul 20, 2009 5:47:14 PM
I am 60 years old and my mother, 84 still terrifies me. My friends see her as this sweet little old lady but the thought of doing or saying something she doesn't like turns me back into a small child. Very few people understand what it's like to try to love someone who instilled fear and shame in me from childhood. Granted she can no longer hurt me unless I allow it but the body still remembers. Thank you for your story.
Posted by: Jan Hinton on Jul 21, 2009 9:10:22 AM
Mark that was a lovely story. Thanks for sharing it.
Posted by: Sheila Halet on Jul 30, 2009 12:59:21 PM
