A while ago, when I said I was feeling stronger, I promised I would write about my Dad.
Well, its been 6 months and I am feeling stronger. Grief is a funny thing. It strips you back.
You walk around without skin for a while.
Air hurts.
You want to walk around in baggy clothes.
Not get your hair blow dried.
Hide.
You think no one wants to talk to you because you actually don’t want to talk to anyone.
But after that initial shock of loss, what is left?
Luckily for me, very luckily, I have two sons that have a lot of him in them. Also, if I am brutally honest with myself, I have a lot of him in me too. In fact every single thing that I loved about him and hated about him, is in me too.
And I have spent hours recently writing down all of it. All the things I hated about him. Resented over the years. Loved about him, held the other men in my life up to his irresistible charm and magnetism. His romanticism.
His gift for telling a story. His photographic memory. His drive. His ambition. His impatience with stupid trivial stuff. His love of a good drink after a hard days’ graft. His ability to cut through the crap and get down to it.
His ability to be blunt. To be quiet. To protect me from myself at times and him from me. He was not an easy man. I am not an easy woman.
How hard it is to be a parent. To be a good child.
What have I realised in losing him? That everything he taught me has made me the woman I am today. Yes, I chose my path, but God bless him, as I got older, he stopped questioning my decisions because either he trusted me or he realised his work was done.
Both I hope.
I have always been a handful. Still am. But he put up with all of it.
As parents we do. I am afraid you have no choice.
Your children are of your body and it brings a love that is other worldly.
I struggle with its complicated beauty everyday. I cannot imagine how Dad put up with all of my crap.
My ungratefulness.
We were each other’s toughest critics. Him on me. Me on him. While I was busy feeling like I should/had to be the perfect daughter, I turned it back on him and expected him to be the perfect father. How unfair our love was to one another for a lot of years.
What changed that? Losing the biggest thing we had in common.
My mother. His wife.
Losing her was the best thing that ever happened to us.
To survive that loss we had to get over ourselves.
Over our fear of loving one another.
Learning how to live with how love can paralyze and free takes time.
We paralyzed each other for years.
I was so afraid of him not loving me I held my love back from him. I wasn’t brave until the loss of my mother forced me to find him. Cling to the love like a raft in the sea. To find myself, find this life. To realise that life is short. That you don’t lose by loving that you only loose by not loving.
The night before he died, Dad didn’t want to go to sleep. He wasn’t in pain and didn’t need much morphine to stay comfortable.
I knew once he was home he would go quickly. It was his style. This was a man that quit a four pack a day habit cold turkey. Never touched another cigarette after that (48 years). He had breathtaking will power, strength.
The night before he died, he couldn’t talk too much. And I knew it was my last chance to tell him how much the years since Mom’s death meant to me.
How she forced us to give in. Stop beating each other up and just love each other. I told him how lucky I felt to have had a father like him.
He took my hand with his leathery strong hands, still tanned after too many years on the golf course, and stopped me. He said, no, we were both lucky. Those were the last words he ever spoke to me and I’d like to think that yes, we were lucky.
So I finally I found the words to write about him.
Do I need a father? Do I need a husband? Do I need a boyfriend? No. I am part of a generation of women that look around and sometimes think, dammit, I am the man I want to marry.
Like it or not, men, do shape our lives.
Younger, older, friend or lover.
And life would be so dull without them.
Its strange to be without him. I miss him.
Months on, I hope losing him will re-charge my guts to go out and really love someone a lot again. Retire to an island in the Med and grow old disgracefully and not take no for an answer.
Ms. Magnolia
