Nothing To Miss
My neighbor dismissed my grief over the loss of a father, claiming there was nothing to miss
My neighbor’s husband had just passed away, and her twelve-year-old son was grieving the loss of his father. The grieving widow’s words echoed long after she spoke them: “You were lucky. You never endured the pain of burying your father. You cannot imagine my son’s suffering.”
She claimed you cannot miss what you never had. I forgave her. How could she know that vacuums are painful too? I was the widow’s daughter. A bastard, maybe? Perhaps my father was a lie? Nobody I knew ever knew him… save my mother, who refused to ever speak of him. But no. My mother was too moral… too pure.
The loss of him left her bitter and angry at the world. Angry at me. Lonely, in a way that only a widow can understand. I lived every day with her ire. I lived with her hatred of a world that had cheated her of what other women had… cheated her of a mate’s love, companionship, and caring. Cheated her of sharing life with one of only two men she ever truly loved.
But she had known the love of a father. I live every day with a deep aching hole in my heart and a million questions burning in my brain. I live with the awful guilt of envy of all who loved and lost… of all who knew a father’s touch and how his voice sounded and what made him smile. I live with a ripping need to know what parts of me are gifts from him.
“Family history?” my doctor asks. How can I know? Countless times I have given the same reply, and the pain never eases. I met my father’s brother, at last, when I was 55. He was 80 by then, and weary. I begged him for knowledge, but he could tell me only that, as a boy, my father sang like an angel, cursed his ‘curly girly’ hair, and held a dangerous fascination with ships and dreams of adventure. He was barely a man when he signed on in the Navy and left to fight a war on the other side of the world, and he never came home. He died in in Australia, aged just 26. His English parents grieved from afar and could not even bury their son.
I was six weeks old when my father passed away. The only father I knew was a slab of cement in the local cemetery and a row of war medals that my mother pinned on me once a year when, with other war orphans, I marched in honor of his service.
My uncle spoke of my grandmother’s awful suffering at the loss of a son, and the rather hollow joy of gaining a daughter-in-law and granddaughter she would never know. Her only grandchild. A little girl who might have helped to fill the hole left in her heart by the loss of her only daughter, who left them at just eight years of age.
My neighbor’s words echoed, long after she spoke them. “You were lucky. You never endured the pain of burying your father. You cannot imagine my son’s suffering.”
True. I could not. And she could never imagine mine. Her son had something ever so precious… something that I craved deeply but could never possess: A memory.
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