We Buried My Father

We buried my father when I was in the sixth grade, when my mom discovered he had been having several affairs. This wasn’t the first revelation, but after a period of trying to reforge their marriage and catching him in yet more lies, she had had enough.

She yelled for us to come down from our rooms and said something like, “Your father is leaving.” Her voice was taut, but her face was pained. Like a young officer ordering his first firing squad. They were getting a divorce.

She made myself and my two sisters watch him pack his bags. I remember the sounds of his luggage being loud. His breathing was loud. The crickets were loud. The moths danced with the porch lights. We watched him leave, his image move from the foyer in front of us, to our porch, into his car, and off into the night. Barriers.

We buried him that day, a man who could be so jovial, meticulous, excitable and lazy. A man who liked pranks. A man who hated his job.

A few weeks after, a hazy man who called himself my father took my sisters and I out to dinner. He looked like my dad, but he seemed to slump more. The girth that used to be fun to bounce on as a child now looked unsightly. I didn’t know it at the time, but I would never touch him the same. He wanted our mom back and needed our support. He wanted us to help change her mind.

One sister, who is my age, was against it. She held him responsible for his failings. She would go on to hold a grudge for many years for his infidelity. The other sister was a toddler and didn’t talk much. What little she did understand was probably uncomfortable. I was still afraid of my dad at this age, so I didn’t talk much either — a theme that would recur in our relationship. I looked down most of the time and poked at my food. And my father cried. I think he realized then that he would be alone.

Intimacy with him died at that dinner. Guilt grew from its compost and would rot what frail relationship we maintained. I wish I hadn’t seen him cry.

—

I remember leaving Barnes and Noble with him months, if not years later. Contact with him was sparse until we found a routine. I withdrew into video games, he tried to settle into a job. We saw him every few weeks at the longest.

We sat in the car and he asked if I harbored any anger towards him. I did, but I lied. I’m not sure I even understood how I felt, but I was also afraid of him and that was as good a silencing mechanism as any.

These sorts of conversations had happened before. Dad would explain why he felt how he did, why he sought attention from other women. Mom was not affectionate enough, he had a big sex drive, he hated his job. Always his job. I’m not sure if he thought he was helping address the estrangement or if he truly had no one else to talk to, but I listened.

But he never told me until that day in the Barnes and Noble parking lot of the time when he sat in his car, in his parent’s garage, with a hose running from the car’s exhaust pipe into the driver’s side window.

Any notion I may have had of confronting my dad about anything was extinguished then. Afraid an angry word, a condemnation come due, or a wrong question would drive my father to suicide, I robbed myself of the healthiest and most direct way to deal with issues: talking.

And so I never talked about it. I listened to this hazy man explain and excuse. I loved him, and I felt sorry for him. And I certainly did not want him to kill himself, if only for my family’s well-being and mine, but what resulted was a silent judgment, a sneer hidden behind the face of his son.

I would not forgive him, because I could not voice my feelings. Instead, every fault and misstep since was weighed in the shadow of his infidelity and estrangement. I painted him as a monster, held him to standards I held for no one else. Every fault became inexcusable. I no longer saw him as a man who was flawed by nature; I saw him as a man fallen, who continuously fell short. Every angry outburst, spanking, scolding ever done became fodder against him. He was subject to the cruelest expectations.

Back home I was a pacifist who begged for reconciliation, lest I carry the guilt that he killed himself. I was his stalwart defender to three angry women, snarling wolves, my dad a lame moose. But in my mind I was more vicious than anyone, judging his entire character for the smallest things. Tearing down his tower for a few cracked stones.

This image of this lonely and hazy man trying to repair his relationship with his children, trying to please us, almost groveling to dig himself out of his past and failing, being met only with embarrassed condescension, it pulls at my soul.

Years passed this way. Our relationship held together by pity and fear.

For a long time my dad lived alone, still working in a job field he despised, one we all blamed in part for why he changed so much. His life was not exciting. After work he would watch television, he would eat, he liked driving in the mountains. Our conversations were not personal. Women came and went. We still saw him every few weeks.

—

About a decade after the post-separation dinner, my father called us to say he was getting married. The woman was nice. We didn’t know her well, but she texted us a lot, which was annoying. That Father’s Day we had gotten him a shirt. I called him to tell him not to expect much. We did a good job calling him every Father’s Day — I imagined being alone, estranged and stuck in a job you hated to be unbearable if his phone went silent on Father’s Day.

His fiancee expressed his gratitude at the shirt.

“Thanks for calling him, brought a nice smile to his face,” she texted.

It was such a small gift, half-assed even. A gift I feared would be so insignificant as to break him, as though it were an infinitesimal harvest after a season of grueling work.

But I picture my father beaming, in his simple solitude, after a day where he talked to all three of his children, who told him they love him. I picture him excited just to receive a gift at all. Given the circumstances, is there anything else to ask for?

After years of muted conversation, maybe it’s not important that so much of our relationship was pity, fear and guilt. The feelings I struggled with long ago maybe don’t need to be addressed now. Maybe this family should raise my father from the grave. And maybe we should wipe the dirt off him and see him for the human he is.