Summer is galloping forward at a pace faster than I’d like. My writing residency is getting closer, and I was hoping to finish a few pieces, or at least first drafts of them, before I go. But I’m having a hard time writing in the chaos of summer with a busy social calendar, kid camp schedules, and wet pool towels everywhere with neighborhood friends in and out our front door all the time. So instead I’m doing that other thing I do when I can’t write: letting the ideas rest in my head and hoping they’ll take root somehow so that when I get the space to write, they’ll come out a little easier and already half-formed.
In my newest outline, there’s a hole, an empty chapter. Five of them actually. But in this particular one, I think I need to say something about grief and grit, about fatherhood, about male lineage, about what was imparted to me and what wasn't. Right now it's just a blank page.
Seventeen years ago, 26-years-old and knowing nearly nothing, in a corner of a windowless room as I stood at the copy machine preparing work for my students, a male teacher down the hall from my classroom was hovering next to me and asking more questions than I wanted to answer. He was digging a little deeper to know me better, as he always did, never satisfied with simple chat about the weather or curriculum. He asked about my family and my childhood, and I revealed my father passed when I was five. I remember he said, “Oh, so for you it’s more like a void than a loss.” Something about his comment stung, which is probably an indication of ways I was unhealed at that age – or a reflection of my annoyance at his persistent advances and my inability to tell him to stop because I was hesitant to offend him which is probably a subject for another time. Whatever the case, it stung enough that I’m here remembering and writing about it nearly two decades later. I nodded and smiled at him but inside I thought Is a void not a loss? Or now I know the real question I was asking: Is an absence not a presence in itself? In a haunting turn of events, that man died in an unexpected accident a few years after that conversation and left behind twin girls who were exactly five like I was. If there was a way to relay a message to him now, I’d tell him I’m sure all these years later he’s more than a void to them, that his absence itself is a presence.
Fatherhood wasn’t ever only nothingness for me, of course. My mom remarried, and we lived on family land so that my grandfather was just up the road from us and stepped into that role more often than anyone else. But even now, Father’s Day always feels full to me in that empty way, a presence shaped from absence. That pull of an infinite force I’ve written about before.
What are fathers supposed to teach us? Greeting cards tell me it’s something about fishing or backyard barbecue. I don’t think my father was that kind of dad anyway. Pieces of him I’ve refashioned like a mosaic from shards of memory and details told to me… He was gentle and loved animals. (Flash of memory barely in my conscious mind: his smooth young hand on the fur of a soft white bunny I had as a pet.) He was a musician. He liked to cook. (Other flash of memory: sitting on the countertop with the hiss and steam of a waffle iron, sunlight in the back kitchen window, watching him make waffles.) My mom tells me we were attached at the hip, that I’d ride along with him for errands, always choose the seat next to him, my eyes following where he was in the room. He grew up on the gulf in Pensacola and loved the water. His family was colorful, to put it mildly, five siblings who didn’t always get along, three of whom often had a hand in some artistic effort, likely a way to process a somewhat chaotic childhood. Everything in his family wasn’t repaired or revealed when he died so young, so it left a mess in its wake that still isn’t exactly mended. Some questions will never be answered.
The events of my childhood in the few years that followed his death felt mostly like some unspoken urgent whisper of Hurry hurry, clean this up, put it back together, nobody look! Everything is fine now! Sunday school and hairbows and patent leather shoes. Like a three-legged chair that needed to be mended quickly. Which I have no judgment about because we all do the best we can, but needless to say, it left me with therapy bills of my own as an adult and countless unopened doors I had to walk through eventually on my own. For years, my heart felt like some winding corridor where I kept finding doors and staircases I didn’t know existed. (Ugh, another one? I don't want to walk down that dark staircase.) I guess in ways it can still feel like this sometimes, though not at all as much as it used to, and maybe that’s what it means to be human anyway for all of us brave enough to open those doors.
Questions of nature vs. nurture haunt me often, wondering what I did or did not inherit from him, what persisted in my DNA despite his absence, what was passed on to my kids, if any of our quirks and tendencies have an explanation in bloodline. A few years ago, I was reconnected with my first cousin through Instagram. Our fathers were brothers, hers the oldest of the bunch and mine the baby of the family, but she and I are close in age together. We grew up worlds apart as I was cradled by my mom’s family after my dad’s accident and she was states away with her mom and sisters. But as it turns out she’s a writer as well, and we have eerily similar writing voices and styles. Like me, she writes primarily creative nonfiction and mines her own experiences for meaning. She was estranged from her father for years, though not through death, but they had a chance to reconcile and redeem the threads between them as she cared for him in his last years. She messaged me in his final days as he told her that he was ready to cross the bridge and he wanted to see my father again. When she came to Georgia last October and we met in person for the first time since childhood, there was some easy familiarity there, like a worn mirror I’d seen before. Our lives were hidden from each other for decades, yet somehow our creative work circulates around the same ideas, always shoveling the soil beneath us and within us to see what tangled roots we can uncover. When she cleaned out her father’s things, she found loads of paintings which were no surprise since he was a visual artist for most of his life, but what she didn’t expect was a dozen boxes full of journals scribbled by his hand for decades.
Everyone has a father. And everyone’s father will die. There are ways that my experience feels universal and ways it feels so singular that I cannot even begin to assume someone will ever see the world as I do. My grandfather’s father died on Christmas Eve in circumstances too heartbreaking to explain here, and I can so clearly remember not only that Christmas Eve but the few years after it when we’d all gather at my grandparents’ house with loud cousins, excited kids, twinkling lights, and a table full of food and celebration. I’d catch a glimpse of my grandad in an armchair by the fireplace quietly watching the holiday chaos but also not exactly watching, maybe lost somewhere and for a brief moment hearing everything his father was and all of the love he carried, like an echo in a canyon, the loudest sound in the world but only you can hear it. I recognized that in his expression because I’ve felt it, too. Like a phantom ache.
I think I was eleven when my great-grandfather died. Which means I was twelve or thirteen when I was making these observations about the grief on someone’s face. I guess psychologists would call that hypervigilance or adultification. What I know is that I hear a bass note under everything. I feel a current I’ve felt since I was five, and I cannot turn it off. It’s woven into the essence of who I am and colors everything I see. Freud claimed the most poignant loss in a man’s life is the loss of his father. Jung claimed losing a parent is the threshold to adulthood. There’s a theory about Enneagram Ones that many of us come to be the way we are because we lacked a father figure to fill that typical role of principled guide and advisor, so some piece of us steps up to create that presence in our own selves. But I’m not really interested anymore in reading ideas about how it’s burdened me because loss also deepens something inside in a way that is not always only a burden. I see things other people can’t see, hear things others cannot hear, feel things others cannot feel. Sometimes it’s overwhelming to me and terrible. Sometimes it’s a gift. Because I was so young, I cannot imagine life any other way, which is another thing that I suppose is both a blessing and a curse.
It seems we build our lives around these empty spaces. We are shaped by them, in the same way we are shaped by a presence. Some days we don’t think about it at all, like stepping over a crack in a sidewalk without a thought, just moving right along to wherever we’re going. And other days, it feels like a canyon again, a space so large you cannot see the other side of it. We can wonder what our lives would have been without it, but there are no good answers to stupid questions that are forever unanswerable.
In some weird twist of fate, when I divorced, my kids were the exact same ages my sister and I were when our father died. Is that an accident or is it some mysterious hand of synchronicity to propel my own healing? You know me well enough by now to know what I think. The night my ex-husband moved his things out, the house was half-empty and we had a few nights left before our move to a smaller place. The three of us huddled in one bed, a mattress on the floor of the master bedroom in a house that suddenly felt so large it was a mausoleum, a monument to what was, nothing but empty walls and windows and ceilings high enough to echo whispers of some other time, some other ghost. I watched them sleep, their little chests rising and falling, willing myself to do the same, and remembering what it felt like to sleep in a bed for three at the end of the hallway in my grandparents’ home in the months after my father died when my mom couldn’t stay in the house they’d shared. Only this time I was the mother and not the child, like a distorted mirror image of what once was. I know my questions of fatherhood are made louder because I’ve spent nearly a decade raising my own children in a fatherless house. (Not that they are fatherless, but that road is closed to my view.) But these years have also given me space to explore and to heal, moments to think about the shape a man leaves when he’s gone, challenges that required that I find a grit deeper than what I realized I had. Wounds reopened, and in that wreckage, I made a home inside myself around empty spaces.
I have so few things of my dad’s. A box of various small trinkets, a book, and a weathered old hatchet that belonged to him. My grandfather saved it, and when I had my son, he gave it to me to give it to Jude someday, like any other Georgia boy who would inherit a tool from his grandfather. It’s nothing special, rusted and worn and simple. An all-purpose tool you can use to split things apart, to gather wood for a fire to keep you warm.
I still don’t know where I’m going on the empty chapter or how I’m going to get there. Here I am again, the mess before my rough draft, taking you along for the bumpy ride as I try to discern what it is I even want to say, how I can begin to fill this space with the substance it deserves.
It is Father’s Day. And I’m grateful for the men who have tried to do what they can to step inside that empty space, grateful my own kids have a father, even if the view is shielded and hazy from here. I’m grateful for my own father, for the memory of his gentle hands, for the way my son’s eyes reflect the same spark I see in photographs of him, for the creative spirit that lives in the blood of his family and the way it was passed to me and moves through my own fingers to give shape to what I see. I’m grateful for the ways his absence is a presence, for the ways it breaks my heart, for the ways it has opened my ear to hear the infinite hum under everything.
And even though it might sound absurd to say so, happy Father's Day to me, as I write this line alone in the early morning stillness of a fatherless house. I have balanced the three-legged chair of my own household for nearly a decade. I’ve so often played the role of both father and mother not just for my children but for some lost pieces of myself I’ve found along the way. Absence is a presence, an uncharted wilderness, a land I know I’ll keep exploring, chopping away at whatever is left to build a fire, not only to keep me warm but to send smoke signals to wherever he is and somehow speak to him. Your spirit lives in my spirit, your blood in my blood. Look at the life I’ve built. This is what I’ve made from the space you left.
I’ve survived it all, and I’m making things I cannot yet see. I’ve used my body of memory, both the seen and the unseen, to build my own bones around the absent flesh of my father. I’ve torn open doors and secret staircases in those winding corridors of my heart with nothing more than a weathered old hatchet and empty space.
Really beautiful, as always