His chair was less like a throne and more like a hiding place. And possibly like a comfort blanket.
To his children he was the deep tones to the song of their life; a constant rhythmic strumming of the last two strings of a guitar.
And to him, his wife was the first string – bringing light and life to the heart that lay behind so many layers of muscle, flesh and clothing and layers of memories of nobody-really-knows-what.
He would sometimes be caught looking at nothing in particular with his eyes unblinking, while clearly replaying something in the eye of this mind. It had the effect of making him appear as though in painful meditation. Then his chest would rise and he’d then exhale. Blink. And would be back in the room.
Nobody knew where he went in those moments.
But there was something in those exhalations that felt like a goodbye that was too painful for him to say properly. Not before he’d blink. And come back into the room.
His hands were at once hard and soft. He wouldn’t squeeze a man’s hand any more than needed when they shook, but they were unmistakably hands that were unafraid of hard labour.
And most importantly, hands in which his family enjoyed feeling held at times.
The one meal he knew how to cook was something special, precisely because it was nothing special. But it was made by him. A rarity.
He was always pleasant to guests who came to visit. Friendly with a hint of formality. He always appeared to be relieved and mildly exhausted when they left. He seemed to be in a rush during the pleasantries at the door as he and his wife saw them off. Nobody knows if he was just in haste to return to the solitude of his chair or whether it was all goodbyes he struggled with.
On the couple-of-handful of times he got angry, he felt to those closest to him like a tiger, like they were staring death in the face. And yet somehow in there was something loving. And his heart seemed to break every time. He was always sorry for several days after.
His children didn’t know his father’s first name until they became adults.
He didn’t drink often but when he did it was the same drink. Or sometimes the other one. But when he sat at home, it was always in that one chair. Never another.
Though he knew lots of people, he had few friends. And even amongst those, it seemed that none of them really knew him as much as he knew them.
Traditionally, women and children are put together. And the men apart. And so too was it true in the echoes of his home like an unspoken tradition carried in the tones of those last two strings.
His chair empty now, there is something unchanged for his family in his absence; an absence that is simply now more absent. He was the man who was always there but never wholly there.
Man alone. Man apart.
Man of secrets.
About this piece…
It’s not an uncommon experience for us to discover as adults that we don’t really know our fathers or what exists in their hearts.
And to cover over the shame we feel for having never felt the need to inquire into the inner world of this man without whom we wouldn’t even exist, we keep the light shone on “men don’t speak enough”.
To distract from the grief we feel for having never felt connected to our fathers’ hearts, we collectively make a joke of it. We make ‘father’ synonymous with ‘buffoon’; à la The Simpsons, Family Guy, Peppa Pig, Married with Children, Malcolm in the Middle… the list goes on.
Change will come when we get honest about our deep yearning and need for ‘him’. Without shouting it at him or shaming him in the process.
Then, he may just feel safe enough to let himself be known. Slowly but surely.
To expect him to speak his heart into a world that is not really asking for it in a healthy way, and when he doesn’t have the tools to do so because his father did not have them to hand down to him, is childishly unrealistic.
Like Pinocchio, you must rescue The Father from the belly of the whale.
