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I suspect that most of us recognize our father's full humanity too late in the game. They’re no longer alive, or their memories and mental acuity are failing. Naming grievances, or what I think was wrong with my dad is too easy. Seeing him as fully human? Very difficult. I missed that chance while he was alive.
I wish I could’ve known him without all the biases I accumulated along the way. I constructed truncated identities for Dad without ever knowing I was doing it. Then, for the whole of life, I kept him bound to the caricatures I’d created. This doesn’t mean that I didn’t learn anything of depth about him, or occasionally see him in some new and positive light. Because I did. And I also have the memories of how open-hearted, generous and funny both my parents could be. They were stellar grandparents too.
And then, without any warning, Dad was dead, all too young at fifty-nine. Thankfully, my mother lived into her eighties.
When your parents are gone, you can’t compare notes anymore, empathize with each other, unravel mysteries, put words to the unspoken thoughts and feelings, show complete transparency, or forgive and be forgiven. You can’t champion each other. You can’t ask them about their freshman year of high school, whether it embarrassed them that their teeth were so crooked, or why they quit drawing when they were obviously so good at it. The opportunity for such things has passed.
So, in the most basic sense, there is a son I wish I’d been — one more faithful, respectful, attentive, kind, and loving. In another, more abstract sense, there is a son I wish I’d been which was impossible for me to be while they were alive. I was incapable of the necessary insight, curiosity, and empathy to be that son.
Today, as a sixty-seven-year-old man, I’m ready to be the son who asks his parents about everything, who ferrets out every story. I’m prepared to do this and feel no pressing need to illuminate for them what I’ve thought, felt, believed, valued, and accomplished. My need to honestly know them is far greater than my need to be seen and understood. Maybe this is how you find out you’ve finally grown up. It’s unfortunate when the parents are no longer alive to receive such maturity and benevolence.
In the years since my mother passed, I’ve had the opportunity to process the last vestiges of my parent’s lives.
The more I understand my parents as people, as I would a friend or neighbor, the more empathetic and forgiving I become toward them.
I can see the known or probable source for just about anything I didn’t like about them or respect them for. I can see the connections between the pain they endured and the pain they caused.
Several years after my musician father had died, my mother told me, “You know, your dad never had any encouragement from his father regarding music, and so he had no example of how to be with you.”
There was a forty-year period when I really could’ve used this information. That one sentence both wrecked me and made sense of so much of my relationship with Dad. It helped me to see him as a boy who wanted his father to take notice of him, to see what a good musician he was becoming. Dad became the best in high school. He had the encouragement of a teacher, who was a band director, arranger, and former Army musician. Dad, 18 years old and fresh from high school graduation, joined the Air Force to play in the jazz/dance band. Four years later his service ended. Only days before my birth, he came home, formed a band, and got to work playing clubs and dances while earning his higher education teaching credentials.
Now he had a steady salary as a music director plus the extra money coming in from gigs every weekend. Confidently, he went right out and bought a brand new 1963 Chevrolet Impala. The first thing he did with that car was to load the family up and drive directly to his parents’ house. At that moment, showing off a shiny new car his father couldn’t afford, Dad was asking without using words:
- “Do you see me now?”
In contrast to the circumstances I was born to, which were modest, my parents came from far less. It’s why they valued so much of what I took for granted, and ultimately dismissed as the unnecessary trappings of suburban life. I failed to appreciate how much they’d achieved. It was their labor and grit that allowed me the space to have improbable dreams.
Dad knew how much work it took just to get where he got. Where I wanted to go was beyond his ability to see or imagine.
Repeatedly, chronically, I proved to Dad that he was wrong about me. I showed him that my vision of a successful musical life could be accomplished. Then I brought my version of the “Chevrolet Impala” to his doorstep, over and over, year after year. “Do you see me now Dad, see me for who I am? Not someone with a music job but an artist living an artistic life?” How foolish of me. How could he not see me? I was the most successful music student of his career.
No habit has been harder to kick than proving my identity and worth — even decades after Dad’s death the impulse remains. It took so long to wind it up, it’s taking equally long to unwind.
By grace, I’ve been given time and the means to kick the habit of assumptions, expectations, and pushing beyond healthy boundaries. It has been my trials and failures (not the successes) that have helped me let go of the son I was, making it possible for me to become the son I wish I’d been, and finally, the son I actually am. One who loves his parents, though always imperfectly. One who respects and gives props to his father, his teacher. One who repents incompletely. And yet, one who receives grace upon grace.
As that graceful son, I release my father and mother once-for-all to be fully human, two of God’s image-bearers, historical figures with complicated stories, flawed and beautiful, forgiven and admired. I pass no further judgment. Rest in peace until we meet again in the shalom of all that is good, in the cathedral of God’s hands.
Excerpted from Why Everything That Doesn't Matter, Matters So Much, by Charlie Peacock, copyright Charlie Peacock.
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