Goodbye, Daughters

When a single moment becomes a snapshot you'd rather not frame

My dad at age 18 with two of his sisters. Happier days.

Thinking about Father’s Day this week brought me back to a poem I started tinkering with several months ago, its title a phrase that has rattled around my brain since I was sixteen years old.

My dad was older. I was born when he was in his late fifties. So it’s not surprising that I lost him at a younger age than many of my peers lost parents. But despite him being a lifelong smoker, I don’t think any of us expected he’d die when he did. He always looked young for his age and stayed active. They found the spot on his lung in September, and by the first week in November he was gone. He didn’t fight cancer, he embraced it.

These days we’d say he struggled with depression. Back then, well, nobody said much of anything. He wasn’t unkind or angry, but he was unavailable, locked down, stoic. He was from a generation that didn’t talk about feelings and the people who knew him when he was younger and different were either gone or no longer in his life. There was nobody left to call him back to himself.

He was a very good man who dedicated his life to education and service. He was handsome, charming, and heroic. I still hear stories today about the lives he changed. I regret that I didn’t know him when he was full of life. I see pictures of him in his youth and younger adulthood and I see smiles that are infectious, yet unfamiliar to me.

He’s been gone so long and he was part of my life so briefly that I can’t exactly say I miss him on Father's Day. I miss the idea of a father, what it would have been like to live into adulthood with a dad. And I am sad for the girl who never knew how to grieve a father she loved, but didn’t really know.

Father’s Day for me is about the here and now. My husband is the world’s best, kindest, funniest dad. My father-in-law is brilliant and big-hearted. My kids are very fortunate to have these loving men in their lives. And they are lucky, too, in their maternal grandfather who gifted them many fine qualities through the genetic lottery. My children connect me to him in a way I couldn’t have imagined before I was a parent, and I am their best lens for viewing him. Together we do what we can to honor the parts of him that live in us.

---

Goodbye, Daughters

An ashtray, a maroon mug
filled with coffee or Dr. Pepper,
a book, his place marked 
with a used envelope, 
or a program from church

I'd sometimes steal sips
of his sweet coffee grown cold,
but never the Dr. Pepper

When he sat during the day
it was always here, his chair
at the dining room table, 
the only one with arms

At meals we each 
had our place: 
my mother to his right, 
my sister to his left, 
and me, the youngest,
at the foot, looking 
back up at him

My own dining table, chosen 
after years of hand-me-downs,
is round. No head, no foot,
no assigned seats. 

Adolescence is not 
a great time to lose 
a parent in a family where 
emotions are only taken out 
and displayed for special occasions,
the rest of the time packed away 
like fine china or secret weapons

Their occasional raised voices 
are indelible because they were 
so singular, like saturated colors 
in a house awash in pastels;
the last few years were quiet, pale

He was a good man,
but tired and sad,
and when he left
for the hospital 
for what we all knew 
was the last time, he rose
from his place at the table,
in dress slacks and a sport coat,
turned back at the door and said
Goodbye, daughters.

---

I am particularly grateful on Father's Day for the writing of Jeremy Mohler at Make Men Emotional Again which raises awareness about the epidemic of loneliness afflicting men today. And for the work of 15thCenturyFeminist whose scholarship on patriarchy advocates for liberating men as much as it does women from the constraints of a system that damages everyone.

Thanks for reading, everyone!