August 11, 2009

A DEEPER ADIOS

My father died last night (August 10th). He’d been steadily sliding down into Alzheimer’s for a while, disconnecting more and more in all sorts of ways, so his final days were predictable, an accelerating wasting away.

He and I had never been close, but as he drew nearer to his death, I felt a deeper kind of link with him, which had very little to do with his long-solid, consistently embodied identity as Reay Masters, father, husband, horseman. His dying process unraveled the layers of personhood he’d accumulated and concretized since his early days. In a sense, he was being stripped down to essence (and regressed at the same time), though he appeared to have no capacity to understand or articulate this. His Reay-ness had, at least some of the time, become transparent.

He was found wandering a few days before he had to at last go into the local hospital (as my mother could no longer take care of him), and what he said then was that he was going home, or wanted to go home, and not to the home he’d shared with my mother for the past 63 years, but to the home he’d grown up in in Victoria. Back to his roots.

And maybe back even further, back to who he was before he took on and identified with all the traits that constituted Reay Masters. Was he conscious of this deeper sense of going home, of returning? Very likely not at all. But when I last saw him, shortly before this last partial walkabout of his, we had a moment of eye contact that was nothing like his usual gaze. It was, in its lucid sliver of time, alive with an unspoken recognition, a compelling sense that whatever was looking through his eyes was none other than what was looking through my eyes.

He was not at all stabilized in this I-to-I exchange, very likely not having the capacity to bring more than a millisecond’s awareness to it, but to the me who had suffered through far-from-satisfying contact with him my whole life, it was plenty. On the one hand, it was him as a prerational, happily transparent child, a little boy with his innocence still intact, gazing unselfconsciously; and on the other hand, it was him as something other than a little boy, something that had gone subterranean and stayed there ever since his early years.

I like to think that some of this deeper dimension of him was present for him when he wrote me a letter in 1995 telling me that he was sorry for how hard he ‘d been on me when I was a boy. It was the longest letter he’d ever written me, by far. Three pages. I’d never gotten more than a few lines before, no matter what I had written him. In my twenties and thirties I had tried very hard to get him to admit that he had really hurt me, but he had consistently refused to have anything to do with such dialogues; I admittedly went too far in some of this, getting really harsh and cutting (much like he’d been with me when I was young), for I was very angry, and did not see at the time that my approach was only making things worse.

In the late 1970s I told him that I forgave him (and for what I forgave him), and he said nothing other than something minimally social to end our conversation; only later, much later, did I realize that my forgiveness was premature, partial, forced. Nothing much changed between us. He continued to show no interest in me or in what I was doing, and I got used to it. In 1995 I wrote him, once again, about my troubled history with him, but was utterly vulnerable in doing so, simply stating facts: here’s what happened, here’s how it affected me, here’s what I’ve done about it, etcetera. I also wrote it with no hope of getting back what I wanted. And then his letter of remorse came. It was a stretch for him, and fell short of any kind of full acknowledgment for what he had done, but I was very grateful for it. By that time, I had long passed the time when I wanted him to father me, having learned the hard way to father myself.

My father partially lived his dream, with his beloved racehorses always around, but he was often far from happy, being chronically bitter and harshly judgmental about all kinds of things, which he went on and on about with no apparent awareness of his audience, especially during dinnertimes (my siblings and I had found some respite from this by reading as we ate our dinners). I don’t remember him every having a friend, or showing signs of wanting that. He was openly critical of his sisters’ husbands, to the degree that he had no more a superficial relationship with them. He had his farm, his horses, his wife, his kids, his job teaching high school, and that seemed to be enough for him.

But was it? Yes, but only partially yes. Was family central to him? In some ways his family of origin was, at least geographically, with his parents living next door to us, and his two sisters and their families very nearby; for myself and my four siblings, however, there was little real interest from my father concerning us. Yes, he worked hard, and was there for us with regard to food and shelter and holidays, but there was almost no personal touch, other than being smacked or shamed. The fact that he frequently was mean-spirited and harsh with my mother did not help matters; as a boy, I’d wanted to step in and protect her from him, but was too scared of him to do so, which only added to my sense of myself as being somehow defective.

I don’t say this to condemn my father, but to convey some sense of what it was like for me being with him. It is so common to only sing the praises of those who have died, as if telling the fuller truth about them and their lives is somehow a dishonoring of them. My father did not do well as a father or husband, despite the times when he was gentle or kind. If there was any sort of life review for him in his last days or immediately after he died, he would have seen his misdeeds and, so the story goes, been furthered by doing so, longing for new directions for himself that would remedy his tendency to behave as before. In this, I imagine him seeing himself with fresh eyes, and seeing me as if for the first time...

A year or so before he died, he treated one of my children badly, and I let him know that I was unhappy with his behavior; very soon after, he broke down in front of me (I’d never seen him weep before, not even at his parents’ funerals), in obvious remorse. I was both astonished and moved. It was an Alzheimerian gift. Yes, he wouldn’t remember this episode a few minutes later on, but it did happen, helping bridge a gap that had been between us since I was very young.

I don’t remember him ever telling me that he loved me. As a boy, I yearned for his approval and interest, having given up on getting his love; it seemed to me that he didn’t like me. His love for me only emerged when most of his persona had been peeled away by his Alzheimer’s, and that love was not particularly personal. Still, I was grateful to experience it. It didn’t pass between father and son, but between being and being.

Did I have a father? Only partially. Do I wish him well? Totally. The Reay Masters who terrorized me as a boy has been significantly shed; perhaps some of that conditioning, that way of being, will find further expression in the next stage of his evolution (assuming there is one), or perhaps not. I don’t know. All I do know is that I am here, brought into closer proximity with my own mortality through my father’s death.

When I used to travel with him as a boy and young teen to Vancouver’s Exhibition Park (where he readied his Thoroughbreds for racing), I loved watching the horses race. The announcer, Jack Short, would thrillingly describe each race with high drama: “And there they go!” At the end of his broadcast, he’d always say, “Adios, amigos.” And so to my father I say “Adios” -- for in that adieu, that farewell (fare well!), there is more than a trace of the horses he loved, the thrill of being so close to winning big, and the galloping green sweep of a bygone time, all the horses now but dust, all the memories like confetti in a dreamy storm, all the details and dramatics of a long life held in one timeless moment. The only moment.

Adios.

May you find your way Home.