The day after

I’m posting this a day late because–well, you’ll see.

Father’s Day always brings up contradictory feelings for me: happiness for my friends who post on Facebook about what awesome dads they have/had, sadness because I don’t have memories like theirs, and awkwardness because I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer by posting that my own father died when I was six.

But it is what it is. He died. And I can count on one hand the memories I have of him (not counting the view of his rouged, powdered face in the casket — that makes two hands.)

So, what Father’s Day means to me is… loss

I didn’t know what I’d lost at the time, and not even for years afterwards. I didn’t miss him at all, to be honest. Except when I noticed that other kids had dads and I didn’t, not that I knew what I was missing.

I actually thought it was cool to be a half-orphan.

This is what I remember of him:

1. My earliest memory. I think I was only two. My father, mother and I are standing at the top of the basement stairs in our little house in St. Paul, Minnesota. Daddy is aiming a shotgun down the stairs and Mommy is holding me back. I am screaming, “NOOOO! Don’t shoot the mouse!” And then there is a terrific bang. I am furious with him.
2. My dad and I are in the car, me standing on the seat next to him, in the dirt driveway between his sister Babe’s house and her husband Bert’s red barn. His Camel cigarette pack is rolled up in his shirt sleeve. He is turning the wheel with one hand on a shiny, plastic doorknob attached to the wheel.
3. I am visiting him in his room at Babe and Bert’s house, after Mommy and I moved to Gramma and Grampa’s house. I must be four now. Daddy is rolling a cigarette. Then he wraps a belt around his arm and sinks a needle in his arm. “Insulin,” he says. I am fascinated.
4. Another visit, this time to his new digs in a railroad dining car, which I find very impressive. Daddy takes me to visit his friends in a dark tavern next door. He sits me on the bar. They call me Blondie and tell me I will break hearts some day.
5. Mommy takes me to visit him in the hospital but I am not allowed upstairs. It is 1953, and kids under twelve aren’t allowed upstairs. She brings him down to the lobby in a wheelchair. He looks very thin. “Here,” he says. “I thought you would like this.” And he hands me a jar full of pennies, three dollars’ worth. I can’t believe how heavy it is, and how much he must love me to give me such a gift.
6. I want to lean over the casket and kiss his cheek goodbye but Mommy says no. She seems embarrassed and angry. We go to sit with the others. I wonder why Aunt Babe is crying so loudly.

What my mother told me about him:

• He was funny
• Everybody liked him
• He  regaled customers while flipping burgers at a well-known diner
• He was the love of her life
• His farmer father was blind due to diabetes, and viciously abusive, beating his wife and children — when he could catch them
• He blamed the beatings for damaging his pancreas and causing his Type 1 diabetes
• He died at 29 or 30 of diabetes, pneumonia, and tuberculosis
• Mom was with him when he passed, and she cried

And then there were these stories that didn’t fit my idealized view of my father at all:

• When Mom told him she was leaving and taking me with her, he said, “If I can’t have her” — meaning me — “no one can,” as he sped up the car. Mom persuaded him to slow down.
• And shockingly… after I grew up… she told me he killed my dog Chief, by accident, in a fit of anger and threw his body into the river (at the time, I was told Chief had run away.)

Twenty-five years later I finally cried for my father, in a dream

Aunt Babe is driving me to a house in St. Paul.

“I have something to tell you,” she says. “Your father isn’t dead.”

I am shocked.

She pulls up and parks. We go inside. I recognize it as the old farmhouse of my great-uncle Ben and his wife, who are sitting in the living room waiting for me. The linoleum floor is worn. There is a free-standing furnace in the middle of the room.

A faded curtain covers a doorway. I lift it aside and see my father in bed under a threadbare blanket, looking sick but no older than when I last saw him.

I am suddenly filled with rage. I think of the conspiracy, of all the relatives who knew and kept the secret from me all this time, of all the times I needed a father and didn’t have one.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I demand.

“I didn’t want you to see me like this,” he says, his voice weak. “I’m sorry.”

And my anger disappears, replaced by grief for so many lost years, and happiness to see him again.

I lean over him to kiss him on the cheek, and hear someone weeping. I turn to look… and see my own bedroom ceiling. The weeping I heard was me. I am in my bed, awake, tears streaming down into my ears, grieving my father at last.

The dream was many years ago. The tears have all been shed. I’m not grieving any more. Sometimes, I imagine that there is an afterlife and that he might be waiting for me (and Mom too) but I don’t really believe that.

Why did she leave him? I never asked my mother if he abused her but from the clues she gave, I think he did. I don’t know where to put that thought, to be honest.

Do I love him? Yes. Do I wish he was still alive? Oh, yes.

Do I want to know the truth? I’m not sure.