The death of my father

Shortly after 11:00 pm one evening last week, my sister called me to let us know that my dad had physically died. Hospice had relocated him back to his Assisted Living Facility from the hospital that afternoon because he wanted to go home. Once he was there for a few hours, he went to his real home. ?My dad died just short of his 96th birthday.?

MK and I were so glad we had been with him three weeks before and watched him take part in a “scooter relay race” and saw him full of energy and quick of spirit.?

I have been told that losing your last parent often leaves you with a loss of an anchor or sense of stability.? It hasn’t felt that way for me so far. ?I have grieved the loss of my dad as a father figure for the last several decades.

I believe the way a relationship is experienced in life informs the way grief is experienced in death.

I had a unique relationship with my dad, much different from my three siblings.? I would suppose that most children in a family have different relationships with the same father or mother.? This is because the father/child or mother/child relationship is influenced by birth order, gender, surrounding events, personality, expectations, and a myriad of other factors.?

I discovered early in my adulthood that my dad and I disagreed on most important decisions in life. This was primarily because we came from such different places in the way we developed our values.

He was street smart; I was book smart.? He had practical wisdom; I had intuitive wisdom.? He read action-oriented fiction, and I read nonfiction from varied disciplines.? He didn’t like conflict; I valued tension as a necessary part of good decisions.? He wanted uniformity. I wanted unity with differences. He was quick to form opinions of others; I sought to understand why others were so different. He lived outward; I lived inward.? He was hesitant to praise; I am quick to praise. He used sarcasm to keep people at a distance, which I initially embraced and later rejected.?

But we shared some significant similarities as well.? We both respected authority when it was rightly practiced but were quick to challenge it when it wasn’t.? We were quick to buy things within our budget that were fun.? We enjoyed playing games.? We liked to win.? We enjoyed influencing others.? We were risk-takers.? We are willing to express our beliefs.? We were curious why things worked like they did. We form beliefs quickly; however, later, I learned to revise mine.?

As I look back at my 70 years with him as my father, at 18 years old, I was very much like him, less like him at 22, and I continued to be less every decade thereafter.??

Because of these differences and similarities, I chose not to follow his wishes on a number of major decisions while in my twenties:

• Where to go to college?
• Which job to take out of college?
• Which woman should I marry?
• Whether I should leave General Motors and to go into pastoral ministry?

Later in life he disagreed also with me on:

• Should I get advanced degrees?
• Whether I should be the executor of my parent’s estate?

Very late in his life he said:

• I took his car away, (the doctor actually declared him legally blind)
• I put him in “prison” (the assisted living center was recommended because he was unable provide for his basic needs)

So, I learned early in my life NOT to depend on his affirmation or guidance in decisions of importance.? I felt like I had little credibility in his eyes. I had to become self-defined through other means rather than based on his belief in me. ??I learned early to look for those kinds of things in my mentors which I have written about previously .?

My relationship with my dad was good because I did not look for him to be a father figure from whom I gained affirmation, direction, and identity. It took a while for me to see my dad as someone who would give me his perspective, which I should consider but not automatically accept.? Even in the last year of his life we had great talks about a lot of things: my careers, Healthy Growing Leaders, my leadership, our relocation to Greenville, my Tesla, even current technology. We were like colleagues however, not like a typical Father and Son.?

What is extremely important to note, but hard to fit into this picture, is that I never doubted his love for me.? In spite of all that I have written above, when I got in trouble (which I did quite often ), he would step up and be there for me in significant ways.? In times of crisis, he never let me down.? I am convinced that he loved me dearly, but he didn’t know how to show me his love apart from times of crisis.? After all, he was a fireman his whole life! ?He often saved lives in times of crises, so he knew how to sacrifice himself for others in times of great pressure. ?He also expressed his love for us by sacrificing things he wanted, to buy us all kinds of cool toys to play with like motorcycles, snowmobiles, dune buggies and the like. He never hesitated to run a race or wrestle us when we thought too much of ourselves.?

In my forties I told him that I had never heard him tell me that he loved me.? After about 20 minutes of role playing on the phone, he finally was able to mumble it.? From that day forward he would tell me he loved me at the end of every conversation.? So he did keep learning.

This is why I believe the way a relationship is experienced in life informs the way grief is experienced in death.? I know my dad loved me, but his death is not what I grieve. For decades, I experienced grief in not having an intimate friend who knew me and affirmed what he knew. Because I never doubted his love, I am secure, but due to a lack of affirmation of who I was created to be, my relationship with my father became a peer relationship.

He expressed his love in many different ways, but words of affirmation or appreciation were not part of his repertoire. Ironically, later in his life, he was not capable of caring for me in crises, so he lacked the ability to express his love for me. From this situation, I learned that whatever language in which you express your love for others, it must be able to transcend your age or season of life for it to be lasting.