Having and Not Having a Father

It’s a couple of days past Father’s Day now — perfect for this post, because it’s about how time can bend. Didn’t Einstein do a little work on this, pulling in the whole universe in fact? I approximate, but I hope you’ll give me “close enough.” When it comes to understanding Einstein, we all could use a little give.

Being no genius, I will nonetheless posit that these two things are not really opposites: having a father who is physically present, still walking this earth, is not the flip side of this same person being absent, departed.

At least this is so in my experience, and I’m edging closer to a time when I will have lived just as long without my dad as with him. That was a startling fact to absorb a couple of days ago, on that spectacular June Sunday. But it’s also not completely accurate. The reason why the two states are not full opposites, I believe, is because what changes when a parent dies, for most of us anyway, is that the way in which the parent remains with you shifts. It’s like that concept of “infused olive oil”: a particular flavor has permeated, often invisibly, the entire bottle. This is not to say that the person’s influence becomes stronger than it was when he/she was alive, just that it’s absolutely still there, only not relying upon the kind of daily or weekly or whatever interaction that we once had.

This goes for mothers, too — and sisters and brothers and friends and anyone who, while alive, impacted the quality and even the course of our own lives powerfully.

The fact that I was born the youngest of five, and that my father was almost 30 when he got married to begin with, meant that chances were he wouldn’t accompany me into my own middle age. He died a few months after I had my first child, when I was 35 — a couple of years after this wedding picture was taken.

Each of the hundred times I’ve looked at this photo since both parents have died, I see how they’re holding hands, solidly, with almost 50 years of togetherness, next to us newlyweds, who are full of hope and passion but with much experience still to gain. And now, I also try to recall what it felt like to be standing right next to them on that lawn.

Taken more than twenty years before, here’s one that was snapped of just father and daughter, at a family softball game. Pleased to have gotten to third base, I probably wasn’t particularly aware that Dad was behind me — and why doesn’t he have a mitt on, anyway? — but I only need to look at this and I remember how, throughout my childhood, I lived with the assurance that he was in fact backing me up, at any given moment.

Maybe that was a beginning of my sensing that he didn’t need to be there actually.

I might have been a toddler when this picture was taken, but more likely not even born, although I remember this same horse, Baby, when she got older. What sticks with me is the broader memory that Dad loved to ride, and that he introduced me to riding. He’s focused, but he’s also smiling — a combination I’ve aimed for, occasionally succeeding, in activities of my own.

I was definitely not on the scene when this picture was taken; the youngest child here, my brother Steve, is a full nine years older than I am. But again, my not having been part of it matters not at all in my taking in the feeling of my parents, and my older brothers, as a unit. The Dad I see here is just about exactly the same Dad I would eventually know, when my turn came. Thanks to photos like these, and to the tales my brothers told me, I was practically there.

And I wasn’t even close to being a glimmer in his eye back when he served in the Navy, far off in the Pacific. He had only one baby son then. And he almost never spoke about that experience as the decades accumulated, either. But now that I have a son who is serving in the Army, as a new doctor, I see a vivid resemblance — a strong cord of connection. Dad’s once being off on a ship somewhere no longer seems like a fact outside of my sphere of understanding, as it did when I was a teenager. My son, in fact, just told us on the phone that his roommate, currently in the Navy, is right now departing for first-time ship duty. These current events, oddly, help to bring my father’s 30 year old self to me, to stand alongside the 60 and 70 year old person I knew much better. I see more of a continuum.

I’ll keep striving to understand Einstein’s theory of relativity, and then there’s special relativity, because I haven’t quite nailed all that yet, but the part about the curving of the universe and even how an astronaut can come back to earth slightly younger than other regular earthlings already makes sense. After all, individual human lives may seem to go in a straight line, as they’re being lived; but the people who remain for a while longer can keep getting glimpses of “before their time” moments that circle back again, sparkling like stars.