I lost my dad last month.
Or, did I lose him in June when I sat right across the room from him, staring into his pale blue eyes and couldn’t find him?
Or was it in January—after the fall—when he could no longer operate a phone and I could no longer reach him and he could no longer reach me?
Dementia, like alcoholism, is a progressive disease. A disease that takes everything. Your relationships. Your freedom. Even your fear of death.
The confusion is contagious. Bearings are lost. Fixed things, unfixed. It’s not so much the loss to be “so sorry for.” It’s the losing. After all that losing, the loss is a gift.
For me, the most difficult thing about my dad’s death has been looking at my own child and understanding that the one person who felt about me the way I feel about her is just…gone.
Sifting through old photos, I was struck by the way that he looked at me, this soft gaze of reverence and joy. I couldn’t see it then, of course. The natural and developmentally appropriate narcissism of the child wouldn’t or couldn’t allow it. My focus was elsewhere. As it was supposed to be. I was pre-programmed to get mine. And more of it.
That’s something most grow out of.
But the alcoholic doesn’t. The alcoholic carries on with the narcissism of the child, the self centeredness, the entitlement.
As such, for a long time, I made my dad my problem.
I had a problem with his authority. A problem with the quality of his protection and provision. And I was half right. I did have a problem.
If I took the low road, he didn’t put me on it. How I longed for that not to be true! But alas, the alcohol problem is a problem of perspective. And the truth hurts.
When I got sober, I healed myself. And in healing myself, I healed him. I healed us.
I felt into the wounds of his childhood, removing myself from the center of our story. There, I found a liberating grace in the recognition that we aren’t more entitled to our pain than our parents are to theirs. In this new story, we were together in this, not apart.
It’s because of sobriety that I got to make my amends.
In sobriety, business is taken care of, not left unfinished. I can let him go knowing that nothing was left on the table.
It was only because of sobriety that I felt his unconditional love for the first time.
And I came to the realization that it had been there all along.
And it’s still here now. The rare permanent thing in an impermanent world.
I cannot emphasize this enough: The single greatest gift of my sobriety was squaring our relationship on this plane.
The testosterone-mired interplay between fathers and sons is cunning, baffling, and powerful in its own right. What are we to make of the father figure, the patriarch, the man of the family? It’s challenging. We all have our daddy issues. Good, bad, present or not, as Jung writes, “the father is decisive in the destiny of the individual.”
My dad wasn’t perfect. Who is? He had an explosive temper. And that was his tragic flaw. He yearned for closeness but created distance.
He drank gin martinis. And we all know how that can go. Until dementia, of course, took those from him, too.
But he was a gentleman. He was trustworthy. He was generous. He was modest. He was good for a laugh. For a long time, I assumed everybody was. And then life showed me that he was actually the outlier.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve come to the belief that there is a verison of our parents that we can’t see until they are gone. All of the stories shape our sight. What we see when we look at our parents is the furthest thing from objectivity. It just really isn’t a pipe.
I was so lucky to have had a dad who had my back, who always supported me. Not everybody gets that. And sobriety has given me the gift of getting that, too.
For a long time, I believed that I shaped myself in opposition to my father. It was the tension, the conflict, the contrast with him that made me, me.
And I see so clearly now how wrong I was—that the things that I like the most about myself, he had, too.
Years ago, I got to tell my dad, “I like who I am. I like where I’m at.”
And I’m blessed to have had the opportunity to thank him for that, long before the long goodbye.