Before & After Times

"There's something like a line of gold thread running through a man's words when he talks to his daughter, and gradually over the years it gets to be long enough for you to pick up in your hands and weave it into a cloth that feels like love itself."
John Gregory Brown

It's being taught to ride a bicyle, getting help with your homework or delivering Girl Scout cookies, being driven to school on a snowy morning, learning to ice skate, having company when you practice chords on the piano. It's listening to music and sharing crossword puzzles, being tucked in at night, getting an advance on your allowance. It's being taught to play bridge, ice cream cones after church, a shoulder to cry on no matter what, a hug on a bad day. It's holding on and letting go at the right times and for me it was loving through a bitter estrangement right up til the day he died.


Such are the things I remember about my daddy, a good if flawed man with a perpetual look of weariness and an over developed sense of responsibility. It's difficult to be loved and protected by one parent and considered an affliction by the other. I never found peace with my mother, didn't love her, couldn't even bring myself to like her and in the end was repulsed by her. My daddy overcame his own conflicts and stayed by her side all through the lost months of cancer. Perhaps he blamed himself, perhaps he found a way to forgive, perhaps he believed he had no other choice. He had made his bed and he would lay in it without complaint. I chose not to be a part of this drawn out, inevitable drama and accepted our estrangement as a consequence. Looking back seemed useless.

In hindsight, I wonder if we did little more than finally arrive at a predetermined destination on a road we had been traveling all our lives. Neither of us understood the other - his belief that death overcame our history, that only reconciliation mattered in this final time, that we must all surrender our personal needs and emotions to be part of a grieving family, all seemed heartless to me. He saw my refusal to forgive as stubborn and vindictive, an ultimate last strike at a dying woman - petty, selfish and wrong. The gold cloth that we had woven over the years - in all fairness, mostly behind her back and possibly never as strong as it seemed -
had frayed, become ragged at the seams and finally come apart.

It was a painful time and I like to believe that he came to feel some regret, as I did. There were times when I considered retracing my steps and taking back my words but the damage had been done and my own flaws - pride, anger, obstinacy - held me back. It would have been a hollow apology and I suspect he would've seen right through it.

Some three decades later I still think of those last days and wish I could alter the outcome. I wonder if time travel were possible, would either of us have done anything differently, all the while knowing in my heart that neither of would have or could have. Family shapes us to meet a collective need, a greater good or a greater evil. The lessons we learn are no match for free will and we either embrace it or escape it. We all have something to recover from, sacrifice for, or simply live with.

We all follow whatever threads we weave for ourselves.