The morning after my father died, I cleaned out my refrigerator. My Australian friends call that activity a “fridge tantrum” and this one really was. One moment I was looking for an unexpired yogurt, the next I was furiously rinsing out jars and separating recyclables from the compostables.
My Dad died on December 19, 2019, just two months after he found out that he had such an aggressive form of cancer that treatment was futile.
You won’t really know how the death of a parent will feel until it happens. I felt sadness but mostly relief. That he didn’t suffer very long, that he passed peacefully in his sleep, that I got a chance to visit him twice after not really speaking or seeing each other for 8 years.
Unfortunately, I have much recent grief and heartbreak to compare it to. Just months before I lost a beloved pet, and several cherished relationships ended. Those experiences flattened me in a completely different way. I was sad for me. The version of the life I imagined, the one with those beings in it, ceased to exist, and I was mourning that loss.
This time, there was no future to mourn because my father hadn’t really been a part of my daily life for a long time. Our rift began when I married the man he disliked, and his own third marriage deepened it when he became a person I did not recognize for his new partner. We stopped speaking altogether a decade ago for reasons that are too embarrassing for both of us to explain.
But it would be an understatement to say that he shaped the person I am today. He taught me to value art, distrust authority and all mainstream things, live by an extremely vaunted set of personal values and morals. I know those all sound like “good things” but they’re not always: on a bad day, I’m a stubborn, judgmental hipster.
And even though I felt that he didn’t understand me as an adult, he was an amazing Dad during my childhood. We went on trips together, without my mom. He took me to school every day, taught me “boy” things like woodworking, and never, ever resorted to physical discipline: all outstanding accomplishments for a man of his generation in our culture.
When we moved to America, he worked a series of menial jobs to house, feed, and clothe me, while going through his own hellish divorce. For a while, he drove me to high school in Manhattan from our home in Queens, an hour trip each way, just so I could sleep a little longer before my 8 am classes.
He made me into the independent, self-assured adult I am, even if that very quality destroyed the relationship between us for a time.
My father’s life was defined by women: the mother who sacrificed herself to save him during the war, the adoptive mother who raised him in a country still reeling from its destruction, his three wives, two daughters.
So when a female Unitarian minister showed up for his funeral, five months pregnant, with an Irish trinity tattoo on her foot, I knew we got just the right person. She spoke the words to ease our grief, and give us courage to go on without him.
In the Russian tradition, on the ninth day after death the soul, which had been hanging out with the body since death, departs the earth to present itself before god. So on this ninth day, I say goodbye to my Dad as he sets out on this last journey.
I hope you can finally rest easy after a fascinating and difficult life.
