Meeting My Father

I met my father again for the first time. I first met him when I was about 35, and I met him again yesterday.

My father was killed in a farm accident when I was three years old. I have only two possible memories of him; I call them “possible” because they are vague and lacking in detail, as if trying to recall a dream I might have had a week ago. I really can’t be sure if I remember them, but I need something of him to be real.

I also have wisps of images of him, but no matter how long or hard I study them, mostly what I see is empty space.

When I was a child, I would ask my mother to tell me about him, and she always responded, “He was a wonderful man,” nothing more. It was not enough! Once she pulled out of a trunk his only suit for me to wear for a school play. She held it close to her, and said, “I can still smell your father.” I wanted to smell him too, but all I could smell was dusty, old wool.

I felt unfinished, as if there were big holes in who I was. What part of me came from my father? People would say, “You have your mother’s nose,” but no one ever said to me, “You have your father’s eyes or ears.” I felt as if my Y chromosome had made absolutely no contribution to who I was.

Meeting my father was no accident. I searched for him for years, looking for pieces in the fathers of my friends, teachers, Boy Scout leaders, coaches. Even ministers. My sister and I once talked about how we observed how fathers functioned in other families, trying to imagine how ours would have been in ours.

The first time I met my father was when my cousin visited me. I was 35. My cousin’s father was my father’s brother and they had been close. I knew my cousin would know something. He told me the few things he did know, but I pressed him, “I need to know more! I need to know that he had some faults. I need to make him human, someone I might be.” The little he knew helped to lower the bar enough that I felt that finally I might have a chance of getting over it.

Yesterday, I met my father again. My two sisters and I visited with my uncle and his wife, now sixty years after my father’s death. As I drove to meet them, I began to think, “I need to ask them some questions. I want some answers.”

After visiting for a while, my sister, Marilyn, said, “Jan and I were talking as we drove over here, and I want to know, did our father have a sense of humor?” I was stunned to learn that they needed answers, too. How selfish of me to think that I was the only one with big holes that needed filling. Here we were, all in our sixth decade, still searching for answers.

My uncle responded with a laugh, “Oh, yes, he had a great sense of humor, a very dry one.” He described it as a lot like another of their sons. That was the blade of spackling compound, which began filling the holes. After we talked a while, my uncle said, “That’s not much,” but it was so much more than I’d had before, and I knew that after over 60 years, they still loved my father, too.

Through the years, as I struggled to understand myself, I had believed that the sense of difference I felt was because I had no one to teach me how to be a man. Long before I understood that issue instead as one of sexuality, I attributed those “differences” to a deficiency of fathering. I thought that had my father lived, I would never have worried about being a sissy. I had spent so much time struggling with my father’s abandoning me before I was finished, trying to explain and change the way I was.

I have a clearer image of my father now. I will not be who he was, but I can be in man in my own way, as he was in his. I have come to know that my father’s death and my sexuality, each separately, have had profound influences on my life. And I am still unfinished.