I was afraid to call my father this past Father's Day. Not for any dark, family-secrets reason, or because I was upset with him or he with me. My fear was that the man on the other end of the line would only partly be my father, and would also be someone else, a stranger.
But, though he answered with a quaver in his voice, it was wholly my dad, who offered one of his standard phone jokes, "Oh, Tom, it's you. Let me tune you in. Yes, you're looking very good!" That's my father, moving into a conversation with a joke, his patterned way of putting everyone at ease, making everything seem normal. After we exchanged a few more bantering pleasantries about the weather and how he felt, he turned me over to my mother, also a long-held pattern for our phone conversations, which like our face-to-face conversations, have always danced on the surface of things.
Normal on that surface — but now, below that surface, far from it.
My father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's more than three years ago, though his memory had been in tangible decline for a couple of years before that. At the time, his being in his mid-80s made it easy to dismiss his forgetfulness, easy to think that his not being able to remember the past day's events — or sometimes the past hour's events — was just the natural deterioration of age.
But my mother, over 80 herself, was more frequently telling the family that my father was completely forgetting old friends, not recognizing faces in photographs, not recognizing familiar places, and asking the same questions over and over. For my mother, the Alzheimer's diagnosis, grim burden that it was, was a strange relief of sorts: it confirmed what she suspected — it gave the culprit a name. But for me, that diagnosis brought home the knowledge that my father was slowly being erased, and pricked me with the knowledge that I never really got to know him in the first place.
I know where he was born, know the circumstances of his first meetings with my mother, know that friends called him "Sarge" because of his service in World War II and the Korean War, know that he worked at Ford Motor Co. for 40 years, know that he once liked to bowl — I know many things about my father.
But I don't know his dreams. I don't know if he became the man he wanted to be, don't even know if he was comfortable with his place in this world, or even if he thought much about his place in this world. I don't know when his moments of greatest happiness were, or when he felt most defeated and alone. I don't know his essence, and I never will.
Moment in time
| I was there visiting because my mother needed a break from caring for him. My mother, who has always been a very patient, reasonable person, is wearing down from my father's constant questions, from her gradually having to take over every responsibility in the house that required judgment and reflection. While she was off on a brief vacation, I spent a few days with my dad, seeing how the disease was working on his mind. He was losing words, substituting "that thing, or "that stuff" when he referred to a towel or requested some salad dressing. The world was getting much smaller for him. |
I know that it's self-indulgent and irrelevant to helping my father with his condition to feel guilt at this point for not having been close to my dad, but with his disease pulling him away, I want to hold on to what I have of him, and to take stock of why I never had more.
I'm not discounting how much I do have from my parents, just by virtue of them being my parents, people who loved and cared for all the kids, directed our educations, got us out of troubles, people who were always there. I am like him in many ways, much more ready to turn worldly matters into a joke, a nifty — and now natural — way of sidestepping the serious side, of skirting intimacy.
I mentioned that my father worked 40 years at Ford. A prodigious thing, inconceivable to me. I think I am a natural slacker at heart, a dreamer, something people of my parents' generation have little acquaintance with. I barely remember my father ever being sick or missing work through all my years of being conscious of the steady, solid clocking of his days, the checks for the mortgage, the Christmas presents for the kids. As I moved into adolescence, I noticed that my father, always a social drinker, began to drink more, enough to put him out of the picture on frequent evenings, a man sleeping in his living room chair.
I don't know what moved him into alcoholism. Was it thwarted dreams? Did he really want to be a test pilot, or a magician or an avocado grower, but instead had to care for his family? Was it the middle-class sameness of the years wearing on him, did he want to blot out the noise of the time's ticking clock?
I don't know, and I didn't ask. And there was more direct estrangement between my father and me, and my father and my older brother, because we were moving with the rhythm of the late '60s in our teen years, so our hair was long, our music loud and our politics impolite.
Those things seemed to bewilder my father, and angered him too, though he was never hateful about them. Though there were many arguments about our hair, they often were made into mocking jokes, like when he hung dresses in our closets and bought us hair spray, calling us, if I remember right, Gladys and Gertrude. Some sons bond more deeply with their father when they move toward manhood, but I moved a little further away.
Expressions of love
At least in the last few years, I've been able to tell him that I loved him — on the phone, once in a while when parting in person. And now we give each other awkward hugs when I leave their house after a visit. Men, clumsy with their maleness, trying to bridge gaps. It's always been different with my mother, who I've always found easier to talk to, to understand. She has always been both perceptive and receptive, a person of great warmth and resource. Maybe sons always relax around their mothers, not fearful of judgment or having to measure up to something.
For years my father carried around in his wallet a yellowed clipping of a news article about himself, the quarterback of his high school football team, having been carried off the field with a broken knee in an important game. I know he was proud of that, his own image of himself as the hero. I think I would have liked him, as a boy of that age, a lefty like me, a nice guy with a quick smile. Maybe I would have been his friend.
People, even your parents, are mysteries, their acts sometimes ambiguous, their gestures sometimes unclear. For me, there was always an inwardness in my father that's more apparent to me now, and I sense my own parallel privacies, something held back from the world, a reserve that's so natural I can't think of being otherwise. I wonder if he's ever felt the weight of depression, because I wouldn't know it from his behavior. But from my own dark moods, I know there are many ways of concealing the weight pressing on you from outside.
Fathers can be such oaks, especially to their young children. I can remember being very small, with my father holding me in the surf at the beach. The waves scared me, but I felt secure in my dad's arms. One of many pleasant memories I have of my dad is that on the day we'd leave to go on family vacations, we'd get up before dawn, eat a quick breakfast and go out to our station wagon. We kids would crawl in the back and go back to sleep pretty quickly, but I remember a warm sense of anticipation that we were going on an adventure, and we could hear my mother and father's voices as we moved into our journey. Their low voices, the purr of the engine, and my father at the wheel — I always had a sense of confidence and trust that we'd get there and get back.
I have no children to give that sense of steadiness to, no one to instruct in the correct dish-selection sequence when washing dishes, the proper means of taking a jump shot, how to dry a car windshield with newspapers after it's washed. No kids will look in my closet and see a jar labeled "Colorado air," because only my father would declare it, his home-state's air, to be the cleanest on earth, and bring a jar back from every visit.
Saying goodbye
My father is leaving, and I never really knew him very well. But I know the important things: he is a good man, and many people love the goodness in him, as I do. I don't truly know what is in my father's heart, but I know his heart is good. If I wasn't able to share his passions, or even to know what they were, I sense that I share some of his feelings, that I know some of his pain.
But now our tenuous connection is thinner yet. He only remembers his direct family members now, sometimes hesitantly, and behind his warm eyes is less of the life force, the signature of self.
I returned from this past Christmas with my parents, and his deep mental and physical limitations are all the more telling. He is still my father, but more and more a man in retreat. I feel a lot of guilt in never crossing the bridge that divides us, now that its supports are toppling. It pains me that so much was just skimming of the surface between us, and that that quality — often warm, rarely intimate — could mark all my relationships.
I'm pretty much an old guy myself now: I'm soft, I tear up at movies, at tributes to aging baseball players, sometimes even at political bluster in speeches, even though I know better. Seeing my father struggle with simple words, I'm worried that I don't have what it takes to keep on, to face age and its humblings. Truth is humbling.
I want only to tell the truth of what I know about my father and me, but it's sometimes so difficult to know what the truth is, with memory hazy and emotions high. I do know that my father has begun his last journey, and that it's one that always ends with the traveler alone. I just hope I can somehow help with the heaviest bags.
Contact Tom Bentley at svreeken@santacruzsentinel.com.
