It's Fathers Day - a day that holds a very different meaning for many of us than it did in the past. For those of us in the Boomer generation, many of us have lost our fathers. They have either passed away or are feeble of body and / or mind. Now, celebrating Fathers Day centers on our husbands or others in our lives who have become fathers. Despite that, for us there is a hole where a father should be.
My father, died on July 7, 1996 at the age of 81 which was the age at which his own father died. While my Grandfather Vincent died suddenly after having been hit by a car; my father died after having broken a hip and an 8-day hospital stay during which nothing could be done but discuss how quickly he could be moved from ICU into a nursing home. Since that was not an option he wished to explore, he basically shut his eyes, drifted into a coma, and let death take him. It was a kind death after an unkind life.
My father and I never had a close relationship. He was not a snuggle buddy or game companion. He didn't enjoy our television watching, and he hated whatever music I listened to. He was a tightwad and didn't tolerate finicky appetites. He didn't believe in fads, and, instead, was willing (although sometimes begrudgingly) to invest in things that would last. For a teen-ager of the 1960's, buying a skirt that would last 20 years was not a top priority for me. I'd have rather had the cheap item in one of the many discount department stores and thrown it out when the next fad hit. We never went out to eat, didn't waste food, and were constantly reminded of all our father did for us. For a number of years, I shared a room (and bed) with my 8-year younger sister (which proved to be the start of yet another rocky relationship) until my mother talked my father into letting me sleep on the hide-a-bed in the den. The den then became my bedroom, so, in a real sense, I didn't have a place of my own at all.
My father was all about education, and I had no trouble getting him to pay for and transport me to private German, elocution, singing, and piano lessons. However, that, too, came with a price. Anything below an A was a punishable offense, and piano lessons came with a minimum 3-hour practice session daily (along with an additional hour of voice practice.) Nothing less than a fever of 104 would excuse me from this requirement which included my birthday and all major holidays. My father worked a shift that brought him home by 2:30PM, so he would check the clock to see what time I went in to practice. That didn't bother me as much as the fact that he always tacked on extra time. If I went in at 3PM and finished at 6PM, he would march me back and tell me I had cheated him of 15 minutes. It was maddening for me, but if I complained, he'd tack on more time.
At 17, I quit piano lessons and my father gave the Steinway Grand that had been my 16th birthday gift to my sister. At 18, I went away to college for a year, but returned home to commute because my father insisted that I was just too far away. At 20, I packed everything else in. I'd had enough. I turned in my car keys, packed only the few things I was allowed to take, moved out of the house and was married less than six weeks later to someone I'd met less than six months previously - my husband now of 42 years.
My father, in an effort, to provide a better life for his daughters than he had had, just pushed too much. He'd spent the entire period of World War II as a Polish prisoner of war and had been housed in various camps through the Nazi occupied area. An American citizen by birth, he found his way back to this country where he quickly found a job in the woolen mills of Lawrence, MA, and married my mother, a first generation Polish-American who had served as a nurse in the Pacific during WWII.
The discipline he brought into his father-daughter relationship was too strict, and I soon saw him as a tyrannical and emotionally abusive individual. I still do. But now, I understand why he was so. He never talked about his life during the war years; we never knew that he was a closet alcoholic (until my sister went off to college) who made my mother's life miserable. During his last years, he deteriorated from alcoholism, rheumatoid arthritis, and such severe bone loss that he lost nearly a foot in height and became barrel chested - his skeleton pressing on and moving his vital organs about. But it was during his last year that I found the father that was inside this man - the father who'd never made himself available to me.
I hadn't spoken to my father for several years, but I ran into my mother at her sister's funeral, and she asked - basically begged - me to come and see him. The next day, I did. For that year, we spent each holiday together. I left my then grown children and husband to fend for themselves while I spent as much time with my father as I could. Now unable to care for himself and to buy, hide, and drink Scotch, he turned to conversation and showed, for once, a sincere interest in me as a person. He was proud I had gone back to college and that I had received my degree summa cum laude two months before he died. I was headed to grad school in the fall. I think we forgave each other many things during that time, and I came to realize that it was not that he didn't love me, but that he didn't know how.
I have recently found that many Jewish people who survived the Holocaust never even told their children they were there. The experience is one that was so horrific that it changed much of the internal mechanism of those people who (barely) made it through alive. Just because my father was a Polish Catholic U.S. citizen doesn't make his story much sweeter, I'm sure.
I would not trade that year of my life with my father for anything. Fathers Day is bittersweet for me now, as I see my son and my husband in the same situation for different reasons. My son doesn't speak to his father, has no respect for him, and has shut him out of his life. I see the intense pain it has caused my husband - a pain his loving daughter cannot erase, no matter how hard she tries to. I hope some day, my son will too discover just how much his father loved him. I also hope he doesn't wait until his father's last year to find out.
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