On this day last year, on Father’s Day, my father died. He had gone into intensive care only the day before, his heart not working right. As word went out, each of his six grown children sped toward Venice Hospital in Florida, where he lay on a table in a small room, attached to various monitors and machines. Late that night, we stood around him with our mother, holding his hands and grasping his arms and speaking close to his face as he strained against some powerful force that kept on pulling him sway.
“Good-bye, Dad,” we said. “We love you, Dad. Thank you, Dad. Oh, no ………”
A breath left his body, and we turned to watch the graphs and numbers on the machines, and then we made a great groan. He was gone. It was early morning and eerily quiet, and we gripped each other’s hands around him and someone whispered, “Hey, you know what day it is? It’s Father’s Day.”
He was seventy-five years old. With his passing, I was abruptly stripped of any illusions of my own immortality, no longer might I comfort myself with the thought that he was next in line ahead of me. For any boy, that is one of his father’s silent function; to stand as a shield between his son and the abyss. With that mythical protection gone, I was alone and vulnerable and, more so than ever, responsible for my life.
I remember being five years old when, one morning after a snowstorm, he carried me on his shoulders for a mile from our apartment into town. As he marched bravely through the snowdrifts, I put my hands around his head to hold on, inadvertently covering his eyes with my mittens. “I can’t see,” my father said, but he walked on nevertheless, a blind hero making his way with me on his back through a strange, magical landscape of untrodden snow.
He had returned recently from World War II, and this ride would become my first experience with him to take hold as a genuine, lasting memory.
As he was buried, there were other memories that flooded in, but later I found myself trying to put my feelings about him into perspective. How much of a father, really, had he been? Why hadn’t I grieved more over losing him? Had I ever forgiven him for his shortcomings and faults? Had I been able to recognize, and truly appreciate, what he gave me? What was the actual journey that he and I had taken together?
From my teenage years onward, I had expected a great deal from my dad in terms of encouragement. I had assumed that he would help me defy certain traditions or conventions and give me courage; but that kind of assistance, in whatever way I was demanding it, seldom came. Over the years, I had learned to accept this gap between expectation and reality, to adjust to it.
I remembered telling him, after senior year of high school, that I wanted to be an actor. He launched into a speech about the instability of such a career: “The odds are you’d wind up holding a tin cup on the corner.”
One time, while I was still living at home, we argued over my decision to take acting lessons in New York. He stormed up to my room, where I met him at the doorway. We stood toe-to-toe and I held up my fist and glared at him, trembling, and said the issue was settled unless he wanted to fight. The red fury drained from his face, and he turned, shoulders slumped, to walk slowly back downstairs.
Ever since that moment, I have wondered what would have happened if he had slugged me. I never knew if I had won too easily. His passage had taken place in a second, leaving me on my own without his resistance.
But, general attitude of caution continued. After I did become a professional actor, for example, he came to see me in a Broadway show and later remarked, “Of course, it would be wise to have something else to fall back on.”
I fell back, so to speak, on newspaper work, only to quit when my first book was published a few years later. We had a family celebration during which he took me aside and said. “Now is the perfect time, with this credential, for you to apply to a corporation.” When I told him I intended to remain self-employed for as long as possible, he fell silent.
In 1990, when a book of mine about Ted Turner and CNN was about to be published, he was still worrying about my security: “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you ask Mr. Turner for a job?”
Long before then, I’d realized that my father’s warnings and his talk about safety were his means of relating to me. I knew, also, that while I might have wished to hear him discuss some detail of my work, even to hear him say he hated this or that about it, he felt unable to do so. In earlier years, I had thought he didn’t care; but, over time, I came to understand that he was offering what he could.
I also began to realize that in some ways he had even inspired me - not by words, but by what he had done. He had come home from a terrifying war to raise six kids in a house with a yard. He had returned, with so many other young men of his generation, to create order and stability and safety for those in his care, and to give them a future.
He spent two decades in advertising and longer in real estate, meanwhile always taking us on vacations, sending us through college and, as we grew up and scattered, writing frequent letters to us and finding excuses to plan reunions. He and my mother had created and sustained a family. My father had provided a foundation, enabling his children to feel strong enough to go their individual ways.
Just two weeks before he died, my father held a celebration for Mom on her birthday. We flew from our separate homes to Florida and, during our stay, joined him on a fishing trip. It was one of many such outings that we had shared with him over the years. Aboard the chartered boat Dad was happy to be with us, but he did not look well, and soon we began to wish that he had stayed on land.
We had no idea then how badly he felt or how perilous his condition had become. Looking back, it’s clear that he had deliberately kept all of that hidden from us to avoid spoiling our fun.
The morning we were about to leave Florida, he pulled me aside and pointed to a mysterious box about three feet long and two feet deep. I looked inside and found, to my astonishment, hundreds of clippings related to almost everything I had done in my life.
“I figured you might like to have this,” my father said.
We hugged each other, not knowing it was the last time, but he must have sensed that he would not be around much longer to give it to me in person. I lifted that box, with so much of myself inside, and carried it away.
All of a sudden I understood - no matter how negative his words had seemed to me - that nothing could erase his concrete act of having filled that big old box, piece by piece, ever since I had left home. Through all that time, it turned out, he had been there - sharing that part of my life.
Then two weeks later came word that he was dying, and it happened on Father’s Day, and then came the weeks and months of thinking about him until now, when a full year has gone by without having him around, and I miss him beyond words. What I miss most, ironically, is that time long ago when I was a boy trusting his father to carry him blindly through life and to protect him. The security, it turned out, lay in simply knowing he was there.
And the other day I found myself walking along with my own son, Benjamin, who is five years old. When I lifted him onto my shoulders, he reached his hands around my head so they covered my eyes. “I can’t see,” I said, but his little fingers maintained their grip. I walked on in the sudden darkness, feeling his weight above me, groping, the way my father had done for me when I was exactly the same age. And I felt, then, the first surge of hot tears since Dad died, and found myself becoming a new blind hero in the strange, magical land of fatherhood where the journey always begins, in hope and uncertainty, over again.
- Hank Whittemore