Modern Love rejected this

I stood there in the fading light of the humid June evening.  In the distance, a barge horn sounded.  He was not more than four feet away from me and yet the distance between us was insurmountable.  The question remained frozen on my lips and he studied me wearily wishing I would just come out with it.  My family had already gotten into the sandy rental car we had driven up from Sanibel that day.  I felt the grit of dried sweat on my arms and wondered briefly if the other diners in the yacht club had been bothered by our appearances.  "Ok, then we'll see you later," he tossed nonchalantly.  In all likelihood, I would never see him alive again and he was letting me, his only daughter, his oldest child, simply walk away.  I thought there really must be nothing left for us to say to one another.  In 36 years, had we ever said anything meaningful to each other?

After our cars had left the lot, and we pulled out onto separate highways, I did my best to swallow my resentment.  He was 59, riddled with cancer and dying yet he had accomplished everything he had set out to do in life.  General.  2 Stars.  Remarried, removed from his first life.  He simply left, started over.  I wondered now if he ever thought about his own father, who died at 60.  After all, this was a man he reviled in life and reinvented in death.  Would I do the same?

We got back to the hotel, showered and put the children to bed.  As my husband and I sat in the dimly lit hotel hallway, sharing a bottle of cheap wine, my anger bubbled up and spilled forth.  I called my brother and fumed at my father's indifference.  As I drank and cried, my sentences and rationale broke down and I ended up rambling about years of perceived neglect.  Even in my deluded state, I realized as my brother patiently listened that I stood alone in my hatred.  Both of my brothers seemed to have had a reckoning about our father and their reactions incensed me.

I was 15 when my father left our family.  Acne and the subtle signs of forthcoming manic depression pocked me.  My father's infidelity both titillated and horrified me.  He had failed and I relished his failure.  His smug demeanor was marred and I delighted in his embarrassing plight.  Yet I was devastated for my patient, catholic mother.  However sorry I felt for her though I was thrilled that my father would no longer be a presence in our home.  I couldn't remember a time when I had enjoyed his company.  I had always felt unwanted and now without him around perhaps we could all be happy.  My brother though at 11 was less relieved than I; I hid in the garage and waited for my father to leave as my brother tearfully begged him to stay.

At first our lives did not change that much.  Our father had never been a willing participant in family events anyway.  Gradually, though his absence was felt or rather his new presence became a burden.  He had visitation rights and wanted us to visit him 2 weekends a month in Washington.  Nothing appealed to me less.  I was in high school, with plenty of activities and certainly didn't want to spend time with my father in his bachelor pad.  After a year of forced visits, I finally announced that I couldn't neglect my commitments to soccer, ballet and drama.  There was no opposition.  Even so, I was secretly disappointed when he didn't attend my recitals or plays or see me on the Homecoming Court.  I figured he was the adult and if we were to have a relationship, he should be the one to make it work.  

My depression deepened, coinciding with graduation.  College seemed more like a punishment than an opportunity.  I bounced from one school to another, leaving a wake of confused friends and vacillating GPAs.  My father went to Iraq and then to Bosnia.  I protested the Gulf War.  He sent strange distant letters cataloguing his experiences.  I wrote back and to this day I am unsure of what I must have written.  Accounts of boyfriends and Latin 303?  I intensified my disassociation from him.  I referred to and addressed him as Sandy, his given name and when my mother remarried and I believed her husband to be more of a father than Sandy I had ever been, I began to call Sandy Bio-Dad so my friends could distinguish him from my stepfather, to whom I referred as my dad.

By the time I had met Tim, I had been diagnosed as bi-polar and began to receive proper treatment.  When we decided to marry, Tim called my mother and stepfather and asked for my hand.  We made big decisions, consulting mostly each other and my mother and his parents.  We moved to Texas.  We got pets.  We became pregnant.  We moved back to Virginia and had another baby.  Sandy was updated as we saw fit.  A new address card.  A birth announcement.  He was in Pakistan when his wife called me crying.  He would be flown to Landstuhl immediately; lung cancer had been diagnosed, stage IV.

The rush stung me.  It wasn't grief so much as incomprehension.  Hadn't I believed that someday he would mellow into a kind-hearted old man who would dote on my children?  We flew down to South Carolina for his birthday party.  He looked like Daddy Warbucks and I wished that my heart would soften but I couldn't embrace him.  I had a few too many Manhattans and whispered that we would always take care of his wife.  He didn't blink and I receded.

A year passed.  There were a phone calls.  I wrote a few letters.  Then that sticky evening in Tampa.  I wanted to ask him if he would have done anything differently, if he had wished his own father had done anything differently.  We left each other without asking a thing.

He fought hard.  Seven months later, he lay in ICU.  He was on a heavy morphine drip.  I was crying but still couldn't even whisper "I love you".  I held his unresponsive hand and told him that I would bring the kids to see him.  He opened his pale blue eyes and looked right at me.  Maybe, perhaps, he truly saw me at that moment.  Maybe.