Grieving the Loss of a Parent When the Parent is Still Alive
I don’t remember my writing posing a point of contention between my father and me. I suppose I was clever enough not to talk about it, keeping my stories to myself.
But at the age of nineteen when I finished writing my first novel, everyone in the family passed the binder full of printed pages from person to person. It was not surprising my father got ahold of it, though if he’d asked me, I might have told him not to bother reading it.
He came to my room to talk about my book after he’d finished it. He said some things about it being a big achievement, etc. Then he critiqued my characters—how none of them were good characters—and that the only person in the book who seemed to have any qualities was the father in one of the families.
The irony of this was not lost on me, as the character he referred to was one I had created to increase conflict and played the role of resident asshole and might have resembled someone we both knew.
I decided it was best not to mention this, as my father continued critiquing my work. He sandwiched the conversation with more accolades for how hard I had worked. Then he left.
Several years later, during a particularly difficult time in our relationship, I used what little leverage I had to get my father to meet with a mediator. My best friend’s father had similar family values, and I knew he was one of few people my father respected. The two fathers also met alone a few times.
After one of these father meetings, my best friend’s father told me my father had brought up my writing as an example of my rebellion.
Again, I don’t remember this being a point of contention between my father and me, so the fact he raised the issue confused me.
Either way, I remember my friend’s father growing very sad. He glanced away from me and said, “I just feel like—if my daughter told me she wanted to be a writer—I feel like I’d do everything I could to help her be a writer.”
The words left me feeling numb, but the fact I remember them nearly two decades later proves their impact.
My first novel, Hartfords, released when I was thirty-six years old. I made sure my mother knew I did not want my father at the book signing in my hometown. A few years before this, I finally severed my relationship with my father completely. The only reason I’d held onto it at all had to do with a damaging Christian teaching that we must always leave room for the offender to repent, which was just another way of saying the offense never happened.
But a lifetime of abuse is more than an “offense” and a lifetime without repentance is a pretty sure indication that repentance will never happen.
I believe you cannot really forgive someone unless you acknowledge the magnitude of the damage they caused. Christianity often prevents people from acknowledging the damage and has a lot of teaching about forgiveness and repentance that protects abusers and allows them to operate without consequences.
I believe I finally forgave my father after I severed the relationship. Only when I lived my life in such a way as to acknowledge the truth of the horrible things he had done, did I finally begin to feel genuine compassion for the pain he was causing himself. I finally relinquished any responsibility for his health or lifestyle. He is a grown man—and I should have never felt responsible to begin with.
Greif is a strange emotion. It has no timeline. Often it doesn’t follow logic. Waves will hit you out of nowhere.
A tsunami hit me one morning while I was writing.
The scene I was creating was a conversation between a father and a daughter. The daughter is trying to decide if she wants to marry her boyfriend. The father is listening and assuring his daughter that he trusts her to make the right choice and that he would support her whatever decision she made.
The wave gave no warning before the mass of it hit me in the chest and consumed my whole body. I began weeping. Tears like a waterfall began running down my face.
I would never have a father like the character in my story.
I would never have a father who would support me no matter what choice I made.
I would never have a father who would trust me to make good decisions.
I would never have a father who would keep copies of my book in his house, just so he could show them off to his friends: “Look, look, my daughter wrote a book.” I would never have a father who was capable of being proud of his daughter.
I would never have a father who was capable of love.
The tears continued to flow off and on throughout the day. The mass of grief continued to press against my chest for days.
I felt the strangeness of grieving the loss of a person I never had in the first place.
I fictionalized a tender relationship between a father and a daughter—I knew what that relationship looked like, but I had never, and would never, experience that sort of tenderness in real life.
Every moment of perceived tenderness with my father paraded before me in their true colors: my father only mimicked love. He never actually felt it.
I understand why people want to hang onto shards and shreds of a relationship with an abusive parent. It is excruciating to acknowledge the hole left by an absent, cruel parent.
But both my parents failed me in monumental ways.
I deserve better parents.
The absence of a loving, supportive father is worthy of all my grief. I don’t expect my grief for such a loss will ever fully end.
I can continue to create tender moments between fathers and daughters in books.
But for one moment, fiction was not enough.