"Dear Daddy"

I was speaking with a friend recently about family dynamics, and specifically about relationships between men. During the conversation, I shared the story of the last meaningful moment I spent with my father before he died. I captured it in my memoir like this:

I would only see him a couple more times before he died after falling and hitting his head on his 82nd birthday. I flew to Texas one last time to see my father after his fall. He was in a nursing home, and it was hard not to think back to my mother’s last days. It was a different facility 2,000 miles away, but it was just too familiar. This time, I wasn’t fooling myself like I did with Mom. I knew there would be no recovery. This was the end of the road for my father.

On the last day I spent with him, I sat by his bed alone with my thoughts and watched him lay there staring off into some unknown place. I thought back on all that we had gone through over the last two years since my mother’s stroke. For all my life, I had loved him, and at times feared him. I had spent half a century trying to live up to his expectations and always feeling as if I came just a bit short. Now through the distance of time, I realize that it was my own expectations of myself that I had failed to meet. He was always far prouder of me then I ever was of myself. I tried so hard to be the man he was and lost sight of the man I was in the process.

Just before I was about to fly home to Oregon, I leaned forward and quietly said something I have no memory of ever saying to him previously: “I love you Dad.”

Can that really be the only time I told him that?

Recently, Marilyn pointed out the difference in the way I say goodbye to my two adult children. When I hang up with my daughter, I almost always say, “I love you, sweetie.” When I end a call with my son, it is usually something more like, “Take care, man. Talk to you later.”

The strange thing is that I do not love him less. If anything, Jonathan and I are probably closer right now than Jennifer and I are. We talk more often. We see each other more often, if only because he lives near me in Colorado while my daughter lives in Los Angeles. My son’s career is also not all that different from the one I once had. My daughter works in the beauty industry in LA, a world I appreciate but cannot personally relate to, as anyone who has seen my photo can probably attest.

And yet, Marilyn was right.

Somehow, the language changes.

It certainly is not a difference in the depth of my love for one over the other. If anything, I suspect it is more a reflection of the emotional language I inherited from my father.

The only clear memory I have of my father openly telling me he loved me happened when I was preparing to graduate from high school.

I had only considered three schools: Virginia Military Institute, my brother’s alma mater, the University of Maryland, and Old Dominion University near where we lived.

At some point, I began questioning whether I really wanted to attend VMI or stay home in Norfolk and go to ODU instead.

My father was thrilled when I applied to and was accepted at VMI. A career military man, I imagine he saw it as the better path toward a more certain future.

We were sitting at our kitchen table. I still remember the little nook it was tucked into. The small round table with its red-checkered vinyl tablecloth. The metal-framed chairs. He sat across from me as I told him I wanted to stay home and attend ODU.

For me, ODU not only offered a mechanical engineering degree that appealed to me, it also meant I could stay close to my friends. I had never known that kind of stability in my life, and the idea of remaining home felt comforting.

Then suddenly, he burst into tears.

I can still see his hard face distorted as he tried to cover it with his hand. He told me how hard he had worked to build a better life for me and my brother than the one he had known himself. How afraid he was that I would never become what he believed I could be. And how much he loved me.

I graduated from VMI four years later.

I cannot say what my life would have been had I gone to ODU. I only know it would have been a different path than the one I ultimately took. While there are certainly regrets in how I arrived where I am today, another path would likely have carried its own regrets as well. Despite all of it, I have nothing but gratitude for where I am now.

I love the life I have today. I love the people in it, my family, my friends. And it amazes me how clearly I now see just how much I admired and loved my father. I think I miss him more with each passing year.

And I cannot think about my father without thoughts of my brother filling my mind. Not only were they closer than my father and I ever were, they were far more alike. For some reason, loving my brother always felt easier than loving my father did. I suspect my mother had something to do with that, though I cannot fully explain why. But it is there.

Mike and Dad somehow existed on the same wavelength.

In some ways, that feels a lot like my relationship with Jonathan.

A few days ago, I received my new passport in the mail. As I swapped it out with my old one, a small folded note slipped out. I had carried it through multiple passports and hundreds of thousands of air miles over the years.

It was from Jennifer when she was in second or third grade. She had written the note on a piece of Jonathan’s stationery. His name was printed across the top, scratched out in pencil and replaced with hers in a child’s handwriting.

As I unfolded it and read it again, my vision blurred, this time from tears rather than my retinal disease.

“Dear Daddy,

I love you soooo much just wanted you to know that! Because you are great! And you are also one of my heros.

I LOVE you!!!!!!!!!!

Love,

Jennifer”

It occurs to me now that there may be some parallel between all of this and the relationship between the two main characters in the novel I am writing. They love each other far more deeply than either knows how to express. One is too uncomfortable with vulnerability to openly admit how much he needs his brother in his life. The other feels much the same, but years of mistrust leave him terrified that if he opens himself emotionally, he will only be hurt again.

So they remain stuck.

Only now am I beginning to realize that I may have spent the last year and a half writing about two fictional men struggling to say things I still struggle to say myself.

Maybe fiction is sometimes where we rehearse truths we do not yet know how to speak aloud.

Maybe that is part of what lies behind what I write.

As I sit with all of this, I realize the question is not whether I love my children equally. Of that, I have no doubt.

The deeper question is whether they fully experience that love in the same way.

Love is not the problem.

To borrow another small piece from my memoir, I remember telling my therapist, Chad, that every time I pulled back the cover on my feelings, all I found was another layer underneath. “How do I get to what is at the core,” I asked him.

“You may never completely unravel that ball of yarn,” he told me, “but maybe, for the first time in your life, you are beginning to see that it exists. You can’t think your way through this. The only way is to feel it, and that is what you need to learn: the language of emotions.”

The problem is fluency. We can inherit emotional languages that are rich in loyalty, sacrifice, humor, responsibility, and presence, yet strangely limited in direct tenderness.

My father loved me deeply. Of that, I no longer have much doubt.

But looking back now, I am not sure either of us fully knew how to let the other feel it.

And maybe that is what I am still learning at this stage of my life.

Not how to love my son.

But how to make sure he never has to wonder.

Because the older I get, the more I realize I spent much of my life chasing something that was there all along.

My father’s love and respect for the man I already was.

And in trying so hard to become the man I thought he wanted me to be, I lost sight of that man myself.

The tragedy is that I now know he was far prouder of that man than I ever was.