My Father-Loss Journey.

August 2006

The death of a man’s father. It happens 1.5 million times each year in the United States. Yet few people are aware of its profound impact. When a father dies, we often see the sons performing their “manly” duties: arranging the funeral, delivering the eulogy, comforting fellow family members. Then we imagine those sons going home — back to their jobs, back unchanged, to the lives they’d lived before.

General Doyles MacArthur, more than 50 years after the loss of his father, still carried his dad’s photo wherever he went. “My whole world changed that night,” MacArthur said of the death. “Never have I been able to heal the wound in my heart.”

Michael Jordan quit his basketball career after the death of his dad. Dylan Thomas, witnessing his father’s losing bout with cancer, composed one of the most oft-quoted couplets of the past century: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Like all rights of passage, the experience of losing a father — no matter when or how it occurs — tests the strength and suppleness of a son. And the son’s reaction may surprise both himself and others. In the worst of circumstances, the loss can propel a sun toward despondancy and even self-destruction. In the best, it can inspire in the son a new appreciation for his life and move him with urgency to make the most of his remaining years.

“I am crying not only for my father, but for me.”

His death means I’ll never introduce him to my children — or his grandchildren. He won’t be able to encourage them as they become little people — he won’t be able to be there to guide me in fatherhood.

“When my father died, it was if I had lived in a house my whole life, a house with a picture window looking out on a mountain range. Then one day, I looked out the window, and one of the mountains was gone.”

How startling is it when a man that I once viewed as invincible could be boxed and buried?

In Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner’s character so yearns for reconciliation with his dead father that he carves a baseball diamond out of a cornfield to lure the old man’s ghost. In the Lion King, the youthful Simba struggles with enormous guilt as he’s called upon to take over the realm his departed father left him.

Books on modern men facing or mourning the deaths of their fathers? They barely exist. But go and look for works regarding other types of losses, and hundreds pop-up on Amazon, in a Google search or at Barnes & Noble. There are hundreds of titles regarding mother-loss, child-loss, spouse-loss, job-loss, pet-loss, and even hair-loss.

Surprising as it is — I am eager to talk. I want to recall the good times with my father. I want to hear stories from others. I want to revisit the death — even if it drives me again to tears.

Chethik says in his research, “Most men seem to mourn in subtle ways. Their emotions moved more like tectonic plates shifting far below the surface, rather than molten lava flowing. The shifting of these tectonic plates send out tremors and shudders, perhaps the occassional tear. And the aftershocks often go on for years. These men tend to release any energy around the loss only gradually, in small rushes, often thinking it through and expressing it by moving their bodies and changing their worlds. They could frequently be found honoring their fathers: building with his father’s tools, tending his father’s gardens, setting up a foundation to fight the disease that took his father’s life. It was in the doing that sons seem best able to come to terms with the loss, and let their fathers go.”

“It was only at that moment that I realized how much I really loved and needed him, and I had never told him. Just before he died, I said ‘I love you, Father.’ He heard me, because he looked up at me and smiled. Then he died.” -Humphrey Bogart

Over the last couple of weeks of my father’s life… especially in the last five days… I was confident an answer would be provided, or that Dad’s strength would resolve in the solution of living for another decade. He lay there with his eyes closed and no strength to muster — and I was quietly confident that his family’s love would provide a strength that he apparently did not possess.

Looking at him was to look at another man — to even attempt the “fix it up” man connection — to draw together that of the upholsterer, the mentor, the furniture maker, the house builder, the civic doer, the boat driver, the wage earner, the advice giver, the burger flipper, the auto restorer… the husband, son, father and brother. The source of wisdom — with this sickly man of no energy — was a source of potential loss of control — a reality with which I could not connect.

But to breathe another breath and to live another hour — now that was doable. So we did. Three of us would carry on — almost as normal, as Dad would lie there in waiting. Almost a trial run. For in reality, what else could we do?

And then I read to him. I read Thursday morning. And though his eyes had been closed for 36 hours, he acknowledged my voice. So I read and I read — I read into the afternoon — and Dad would continue to acknowledge the words — my voice — though energy had left him, spirit had not. I read again Friday morning. I twas a connection that I have yet to be able to bring to words.

And then he left us.