I buried my dad Wednesday. I even cried. Understand, my relationship with my father was rocky at best, hate-filled at worst. It's a long story, filled with many things that will stay buried with him, but the turn around came when I introduced him to my husband.
Relationships are hard. Interracial relationships are even harder. Interracial relationships in the south... well, you get the picture. My father was not the most open-minded man in my younger days, so I didn't expect the meeting between him and my intended to go well. My dad met him, heard the news that we were engaged, and gave him a real handshake, talked to him a little and never changed a thing about who he was or how he acted. Many people in my family did change because of my husband's race, but the first person I expected to shun him did no such thing. For that, I will always honor my father.
Do you remember those Oreo cookie commercials where the dad feels like his adult daughter doesn't need him anymore? Then she lets him open her cookie for her to symbolize that she will never stop needing him... do you remember that? That was not my life. I stopped needing my father when I was about 10. I mean, c'mon, I needed him. I just got used to the fact that he wasn't going to be around. While I thought I was so tough and self reliant, I usually ended up with guy friends who just wanted to protect me, who would do anything for me. In a way, my friends became my family because what I needed as a child, as a person, I never got from my family but I always got from my friends - whether it was tough talk, laughs, hugs, enjoyment, validation, or forgiveness. I used to cry at those Oreo commercials because I wanted that relationship with my father. I wanted to need him.
When I found out he had cancer... well, I've already written about that. And when I heard he died, I was blank. Nothing. I wanted to cry and I wanted to feel nothing at the same time. When I was 19, I found out that the man I'd hated for 9 years was not my real father. While I should have felt relief, I suddenly realized what he had done for 19 years. Good or bad, he had made me feel like I was his child. It was the first grown up thought I'd ever had. In my mind, when I wished I was adopted, I'd come up with scenarios of how I would push my non-relation to him in his face, but when faced with the actuality of not being related to him, I found that I didn't want to do it. I struggled through 3 more years of trying to forgive him, never fully understanding why I felt I should. In that time, while seemingly being hit on by a much older man, I met someone who knew my biological father, who told me when he died a couple of years later. I'd already decided I wouldn't search for him and the possible half siblings I might have. Yet for a brief moment, when I heard the news, I felt sorrow. It was a sorrow for all the things that would never be possible.
Maybe that was what I felt this Wednesday as I looked down at his body for the last time, but surely something more. Surely more than what I felt for a man I never knew, I hope. And despite never knowing the man that brought me up and accepted me as his own, there is a piece of him that will always be a part of me. Maybe that is why I never told him that I knew. Maybe it is because I was a sucker for that daddy/daughter moment and I couldn't take it away from me by letting him know I knew the truth. Even as we looked at each other, knowing the truth until the day he died, we both kept quiet. Whatever the why, I did stand at his grave, watching them lower him down, and said goodbye. I am sad in ways I don't fully understand, maybe won't for a while. I cry when I remember, in strange places, like getting my battery replaced or on aisle 3 at Kroger. No reason, just crying. But I'll be okay.
He and my uncle are together again, only space separating them. And God bless the poor soul that has to lay between them for eternity.
My dad has cancer. He has it because he drank and smoke most of his life. I have a conspiracy theory about his time in the Vietnam War, but we'll save that for another post.
I don't see him often. We were never really that close, but 2 years ago I lost my favourite uncle to cancer. It happened so fast that two months after I found out, he was dead. A year later, my dad was diagnosed. I didn't want the same thing to happen. So I started visiting my dad more often. The first visits were at the hospital, so depressing because he was sliding downhill while they delayed his chemotherapy to wait for insurance to cover him. He refused to talk because he thought talking might mess up his voicebox and the tracheotomy would be permanent. I believe he nearly died, but they started him on chemo and I got to see him doing well right before I left for Europe. I saw him a few more times and then right before and right after Africa in July/August, I saw him. He was thin, shockingly so. His voice rasped because he still had his trach. But he was getting better he was less morbid and his sense of humour was returning. I saw him one more time where he convinced me to take him to the store to play the lottery and he bought me a peach soda like I was his little girl.
I saw him again last night and he'd aged 30 years in a month's time. He sounded the same, he walked the same, but he looked like his dad, my grandfather - he looked like they were brothers and not father and son. I don't know what my face looked like when I saw him, but for any of you who know me, you know the emotion was plainly on my face.
I don't know how to be, but the resolve to visit my dad has grown. Which will make my grandmother happy, although she doesn't understand that my dad like people (especially people visiting) even less than my husband. So we'll see how it goes. I think, for the sake of the only good conversation my dad and I ever had, I will be there during the election to see if we will watch history together or if we will once again be disappointed.
Death makes me feel small. I feel it waiting, watching the proceedings. Death doesn't smile with glee, it just bides its time. It knows that this is inevitable. In a macabre sense, I know that my dad is ready, has been since he stopped being so morbid. He's been enjoying life, getting out, doing things that, I think, he always wanted to do. Being responsible for something when he was always afraid to before. Taking the time to get to know his children as people and not as, well, as children. We don't visit as much as my uncle's children did and still do because we didn't have the same kind of relationship. While my uncle's children were abandoned by divorce, my dad abandoned us while he was still there. Not all of it was his fault, but he is reaping the repercussions of not having a close relationship with any of us.
But we're growing and I hope we get to learn new things before Death decides it's time to go.
