Finding My Father

Ten years old, playing alone in our backyard, in the midst of a ferocious sword fight as both Sir Lancelot and his archenemy.

Mama called me in.

We sat at our kitchen table, bright yellow Formica with metal trim. A film of summer sweat covered me.

“Your daddy just doesn’t like you all that much,” she said. “Just avoid being around him.”

I looked down at the table and nodded. My finger ran along the crack between the two halves of the tabletop, full of the grime and filth accumulated over years of family meals, waiting in vain to be cleaned.

Seven years passed of strained avoidance. Alone in my bedroom, I picked up my latest copy of The Atlantic Monthly, a magazine I subscribed to because Emerson, Stowe, Twain published in its pages.

I read “Shaving,” a story by Leslie Norris, about a boy my age whose father is dying of cancer. The story is set in the UK and my paternal grandparents were English, my dad Canadian, but I considered him English. The boy tenderly cradles his father’s head while he shaves his face. “It was as if he had never known what his father really looked like. He was discovering under his hands the clear bones of the face and head, they became sharp and recognizable under his fingers.”

As soon as I finished reading the story, I read it again.

And again.

My father was not dying, thank God, but we were strangers living in the same house, separated by more than walls. I couldn’t wait for him to be on his deathbed to learn the contours of his face for the first time.

Another seven years passed of trying to know my father. We lived hundreds of miles apart, but I came for visits whenever I could. I’d been writing letters and calling my parents almost every week for years, taking care to close with telling them I loved them. My mother replied in kind; my father, in silence.

Until this one time.

“It’s been great to talk with you, Dad. I love you.”

Pause.

“Me too,” he said. “But in reverse.”

We hung up. I smiled. I couldn't remember ever hearing him say the word “love” before. Not in talking about the weather, the country, the family, me. “But in reverse.” I knew this was as close as he would get in his own voice. Could get.

Just eleven years later, my father passed. Countless phone calls, letters, and visits throughout those years. I kept that phrase in my heart like a cherished line from a treasured story.

“He leaned his head tiredly against the boy’s shoulder. He was without strength, his face was cold and smooth. He had let go all his authority, handed it over. He lay back on his pillow, knowing his weakness and his mortality, and looked at his son with wonder, with a curious humble pride.

“‘I won’t worry then,’ he said. ‘About anything.’”