What was lost

My father recently passed on, and I've been left with a lot of memories that I would rather not have.  To be very honest, his passing wasn't that difficult for me to deal with--we had never had a strong relationship, and he was suffering a great deal, so dying was actually more of a release for him than anything else.  In fact, he was refusing any treatment at the end, so everyone knew he wanted to die.  The sad part is that he died alone in hospice, because there really was no one who felt called to be there with him at the end, not even his wife.  My mother, for her part, is more relieved that he's gone than anything else, as he tended to bully her quite relentlessly during the 60+ years that they were married.

When something like this happens to us, of course, one of the most important things that we can do for ourselves is process what has happened.  We like to know how we feel, and we like to understand just how we're affected by such a loss.  In my case, the last two months have been spent processing the fact that I really didn't feel anything when he died--he simply moved on, and there was no real sense of loss on my part.

Instead, what I've been learning as I've reflected on our relationship and the ways that he acted as a father is that I'm grieving more for the relationship that I never had with him than I am for the loss of the relationship that I did have, or the loss of the person he was.  I'm grieving more for the loss of a childhood that he caused than I am for the loss of someone I loved dearly and will miss dearly.  For the truth of the matter was that he was a mean person who drank an awful lot and who did awful things when he was drunk, and who didn't do very many kind things at all when he wasn't drinking.  He was a person who liked to put other people down, to call his kids offensive names as a "joke," and who spent virtually no time at all trying to help us kids to grow and to learn when we were young and impressionable.  In fact, he seemed to spend as little time as he possibly could with us, passing on the entire burden of raising us to our mother, who really wasn't up to the task of raising three kids on her own.

But there are those people who will say, "Yes, but he was your father, so you have to mourn his loss."  And the simple truth is really no, I don't.  Because in all honesty, it isn't a loss at all.  "Father" is a claim that he could make only biologically, but he really did nothing to earn or to reinforce that title while we were children in his care.  Like my mother, I feel more of a sense of relief than anything else.

What this experience teaches me is something that I've known before, but that I often have difficulties putting into practice.  I've learned very clearly over the last few weeks that it's not up to me to tell someone else how they "should" feel in certain situations.  It's not my place to analyze their situation and figure out what's right and what's wrong for them.  Rather, the best thing that I can do is simply be there for them when and if they need me, without judging their reactions or their actions.  Their lives are theirs to live, not mine, and their feelings are bound to be different than mine because they're more intimately involved with what's going on in their lives.

It would have been nice to have had a father who was loving and caring and supportive, but that's not what I had.  Unfortunately, neither my brother nor my sister were able to rise above their upbringing--both of them dropped out of high school and ended up being severely addicted to drugs and alcohol and dying rather early deaths--but that's another story, I think.  I was for some reason lucky that for some reason I was able to make my own way through life and succeed at accomplishing a few things that I wanted to accomplish.  But the death of my father isn't something that triggers mourning in me, and I honestly can't think of any interactions with him that I'm going to miss.  And that's okay.  Life is what it is, and my life has been what it's been, and my duty is to move on and make the best of what I have in the here and now, and try my best to live fully and do all that I can for others while I'm here.  These are lessons that I've learned in spite of, rather than because of or from, my father.

I still will say, though, in all sincerity, may he rest in peace.  Life had to be very difficult for him, for him to have turned out the way he did.