I don’t think there’s been a time I’ve listened to this song, “Most of All”, when it hasn’t made me cry. Brandi Carlile has such a gift for reaching into the heart and speaking the truth that lives there. ❤️
There are so many layers, each of them essential, to making up a relationship of depth and meaning. My relationship with my dad is no exception.
May I be real for a moment? My heart is full of so many emotions when I think of my dad. There’s not a linear pattern, or single thought, or even a singular emotion. He was a man of willpower, strength, spirituality and deep feeling held carefully in place. Music and the word of God (aren’t they often the same thing?) were two places where I believe he found it possible to show how deeply he felt.
We always had music playing in the car, and we were in the car a lot. During my childhood Dad and Mom always chose to live away from the fast pace of the city, so long drives were a common occurrence. In fact, William and I were making one of our many, multi-hour drives between here, there, and somewhere a few years ago, and discussing the feeling of “home” as we traveled. What home feels like to us, WHERE we feel it. And I had an epiphany: I feel at home on the road. I WANT to feel at home in a single place, where my roots can grow deep and permanent, but the road is where the feeling of home comes easily to me. Music playing, motion around me, and time for pondering before I reach my destination. It’s a meditative space and I learned to use it from my Dad. I learned the LOVE for travel from my Mom. She was always the one who wanted to go, to see, to experience. But it was Dad who taught me how to use the travel, the sights, sounds, and feeling of it, as a time for fitting the puzzle pieces of life and experience together.
Recently, the father of a friend of mine passed away. She shared an honest, beautiful post about how the keenest part of the loss happened years before his death. In responding to her I wrote the following:
“One of my favorite elements from any book is the “Speaker for the Dead” from Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game”. In honesty there is healing. That’s where the atonement fills in the gaps…
‘I didn’t know your dad, but your words paint a compassionate picture of a man who loved the best he could, while honoring those impacted by his limitations. I truly appreciate the humanity of that.
‘I wish all eulogies could be so wonderfully real. We’re born in the honesty of physical nakedness, I wish we could all die in emotional nakedness, with forgiveness following us on our journeys.”
—
I loved my Dad. I loved the hours spent working with him on the farm, talking about gospel topics over the kitchen table, walking up and down the subdivision roads in Lakehead. I miss hearing him clear his throat right before he expounded upon some point of doctrine. I miss watching him start to get jumpy, rattlle his keys, and say “we better head home, mom” after just arriving for a visit. I miss watching him load hundreds of dollars worth of food into the trunk of his car to take to someone who needed it. I miss his clear way of cutting through excuses and double-speak to get to the heart of a discussion or disagreement.
I often didn’t understand my Dad. I think that’s a common enough problem between parents and children. A lot of people spend a good portion of their adult lives trying to navigate the fallout (trauma, false notions, habits) resulting from their uncertainties surrounding the adults they dealt with when they were children. There are therapists who make lots of money helping people come to terms with their “mommy” or “daddy” issues, all without ever really coming up with a satisfactory explanation or answer to all the “why” questions their clients ask. I wanted to understand him better, and probably more, I wanted to be understood by him.
I was hurt by my dad. Not physically, though I was raised in the era where no one worried about whether a smack across the rear end was going to damage a child’s psyche. I was hurt because I needed things he couldn’t give me, and I expected it of him. Knowledge I craved, wisdom I wanted, certainty I found elusive. That hurt led me to seek for those answers elsewhere. In books, in study, in relationships, and ultimately within myself.
I have come to understand that the hurt I felt is common of all children who grow up and realize that their parents were people. People who were imperfect but trying, doing their best but usually failing somewhere, loving with everything they had and hoping that what they had was enough. And it never is enough, that’s why children grow up, move away, seek learning, get a career, a family, and probably a therapist to address the nagging feeling that they’ve misplaced themselves somewhere. Only to come full circle when we finally locate ourselves and find that, like the words of this song, it’s our parents staring back at us in the mirror. Imperfect, doing the best we can, loving but messing everything up on a regular basis people.
When I look in the mirror and see the stamp of my Dad’s features on my face, it’s easy to believe that I’m closer to understanding the things that were stamped on his heart. So I beg for your understanding when I offer to him the honesty my heart craves, and what I know his heart craved as well. The honesty that, like the Speaker for the Dead, tells the truth of our lives, knowing there is healing in truth, and that the atonement is big enough for all pain, and that we can be who we truly are, flaws and all, and still be worthy of love, compassion, and forgiveness.
This is who I see in my father’s face in the mirror:
A young man who was a parent before he really knew how to be an adult.
A strong man who dived into responsibility fearlessly.
A son who didn’t always know how to let pride take a back seat to love.
A man of determination who had little patience for his own flaws.
A man who put aside his own hopes and dreams to do what he felt was best for his family.
A man for whom the spectre of grief was so huge that he could never face it directly or truly visit it with anyone else.
A man who found true words of love easy to say, but moments of tenderness hard to endure.
A man who made silence easy to share with him.
A man who was a rock in a crisis and who fell to pieces in the calm after the storm, when few could see it.
A man who valued work and had little respect for those who didn’t.
A man who wanted to forgive, but who felt slight keenly enough to make forgiveness difficult.
A man familiar with pain, but one who didn’t always know how to share it.
A man who would have shouldered every sorrow for those he loved if he could have, but who struggled to know how.
A man who laughed with children and made them smile.
A man who worried and prayed over his family and friends.
A man who reverenced God and hoped for His forgiveness.
A man of wisdom, who didn’t always have the words to share it.
An imperfect man, but a very, very good one, and the best father I could have.
Happy Father’s Day, Dad. I’m grateful for all your efforts, for the life you gave me, for the life and growth we shared. Thank you for teaching me what you knew, and for not having all the answers but teaching me how to find them. I am grateful for all the things you got beautifully right, and for all the mistakes that led you to where you might not have gone, but where you learned and became the father I knew, and loved, and will always love. Forever and ever and a day.
I miss you.
I
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