Remembering my father

Usually, when I talk about my childhood I say I was raised by a single mother. Whenever someone asks about my parents, I discuss my mother and leave it at that.

But that isn’t the full story. I was raised by a single mother, but I had two parents.

My father is dead. I was 6 years old when I watched a brain tumor rot him from the inside.

My mother once told me our lives were like a cup with a small hole, and he slowly drained out.

But I was too young for that metaphor.

Instead, I remember a series of still images: a wheelchair ramp in front of our house, car rides to the hospital, drinking lemonade at the funeral. A white face with bruised blue lips.

My father was many things. He was an actor, a pilot and a volunteer firefighter. He was also a counselor who worked with rape victims.

I never had the opportunity to ask how or why he came to that work. I can scarcely imagine the drive and will that would set a man on that path.

In the novel “Blood Meridian,” Cormac McCarthy writes that a boy whose father dies “is broken before a frozen god.”

I identified with that line for a long time. I felt disfigured by my grief. The hole inside me was ragged and raw.

In my own petty and selfish way, I tried to make other people hurt like I did.

I couldn’t sustain my anger forever. Something had to change.

After they cut open my father’s brain, a futile gesture in the end, he lost the ability to speak.

Still, he knew sign language and would twist fleshless fingers into the sign for love while watching my mother and their two sons.

We live in an ugly world. Sooner or later, it leaves its bloody fingerprint on all of us.
Indulging my own anger at the world was unbelievably selfish.

My father’s life was a testament to love, a love which he took to the end, to a place beyond time, language or limit.

He knew, and I wish that I had learned sooner, that we heal together or not at all.

I don’t know if this is a confession, a eulogy or a sermon, but if you need something to take away, there it is.

What use is it to stand around arguing about whose wound is larger when we’re all bleeding?

I still admire the emotion in that McCarthy quote, but it no longer describes me. I don’t feel cold.

I feel heat: a deep burn on the edges of the hole inside me, a wet rim around my eyes when I see pain in others, and the prickly warmth of my father’s beard and long-gone kisses.

There are times when the heat pulls all the air from my lungs and I can’t speak, moments of loneliness and shame, but they come less frequently than they once did.

Maybe that’s the lesson here. Healing takes a lifetime, however long that is.

­— atcrane@indiana.edu