Fathering

When my father died, some friends could not understand how I could miss someone in death who had been the source of so much pain and anguish when he was alive. They had witnessed how the contrast between my father's rageful and loving sides created more than an emotional crisis in my life--it was a spiritual state of emergency. They were the ones who helped me put myself together after yet another caustic, if not violent, run-in with the old man. However, it wasn't until he was diagnosed with cancer that real healing took place and the connection between my dad and me was transformed.

During one of my last visits with my father, I was sitting next to him while he held his grandson in his lap. After a few moments, Dad very tenderly put his hand on my head and left it there. "Does that mean I've done good?" I asked. "That means a lot of things," he replied.

Many friends called to ask me how I was and offered to help in any way possible. Three months after he died, people still asked how I was doing, but there was a hint of impatience in their voices--they were ready for me to start feeling better. After six months, they stopped asking altogether. After a year, most had pretty much forgotten about my loss.

It's been more than five years since my father died, and my relationship with him still has a hold on me. If time heals, it works in much larger increments: five years is a heartbeat.

Although my own clan and circle of friends grew tired of my mourning, people outside my circle shared their stories with me. Sometimes complete strangers would approach me at gatherings: "I heard you just lost your father. My dad passed away six months ago." "I was with my father when he died. It was the hardest thing I've ever done." When we dive beneath the particulars--cancer, abandonment, suicide, one year, two years, ten, twenty--we find our experiences are uncannily similar. Sometimes we even use the same language to describe them: "Our father was the glue that held the family together." "The old man was like a rock--he was always there with a hand when you needed it most." "My father was dead five years before I discovered how much I loved him." "I never knew my father, but when news of his death arrived it felt like a part of me had died too." "No one understood me like my father."

Losing a father is one of the most profound events in a man's life, and like the waves a stone causes when thrown into still water, the ripples of loss continue on and on. I wrote my book Fatherless Sons because I wanted to help men understand how their past experiences continue to affect their relationships with family and friends, lovers and coworkers, and themselves. To those whose fathers are already gone, I hope the book illuminates the possibility for a second chance--an opportunity for rediscovery--for men to feel compassion and forgiveness for their fathers and thereby free themselves from the emotional bonds that keep their present tied in knots, their future out of reach, and their past chained to a wounded soul.

Many of the stories I collected in my research are a tribute to men's survival of abandonment, abuse, and neglect. However, even sons with mostly positive memories of their fathers must, as another writer observed, "endure the separation of death, the affliction of mourning."

Facing death takes great courage. No matter how confusing or painful a man's relationship with his father may have been, experiencing grief is heroic and sacred work. While the path you embarked on initially was about grieving, the journey is about healing.

David's Story

David was an emotional survivor and a relatively successful one, until his son approached the same age David was when his father killed himself. At that point, instead of working from the inside out, David began using alcohol to heal himself from the outside in. By turning away from his grief, David wasn't just avoiding pain, he was avoiding recovery and the opportunities for healing that mourning provides.

For David, the catastrophe of his father's suicide was not only the loss of his dad but the loss of a chance to persuade his father to act differently, the loss of the chance to connect. Perhaps the single most difficult thing for David to accept was how much help and good information he was benefiting from that his father didn't have access to or chose not to take advantage of; and the constant wondering whether it would have been enough to make a difference if he had.

While acknowledging that his father's depression could have been worse than his, David said that what he misses most is not having his dad to talk about it with. In one of our therapy sessions, David said he felt he had inherited all his father's "unfinished business." When I asked him to say what that meant to him, David responded, "I think he thought it would make things easier on us if he wasn't around, but he was wrong. I know it would devastate him to know that I struggle with the same feelings of despair and self-loathing. I'm sure he thought he took them with him. But the problems didn't leave or go away. Only he did."

In our therapy together, I tried to bridge the gap between David's father's world and his. I saw this as part of a larger project to recruit his father as an ally in David's battle with his own depressive moods. Toward this end, I asked David to think about an activity he missed doing with his own father that he might invite his son to join him in. "I used to love to do woodworking with him," he responded.

David still possessed his father's table saw, but since his divorce had no place to put it or any of the other tools he had inherited from his father. He described a small outbuilding on the property he was renting, which would make a nice shop. His landlord said he could do as he pleased with it. I suggested David not put this project off any longer.

David asked his son to help him with his project, and when they finished, he was astonished to discover that the room they had built was almost an exact replica of his father's work space. David found this activity an incredibly gratifying and healing experience.

More rewarding than the project itself, which lifted David's spirits immensely, was the time spent working side by side with his son. In the course of putting the shop together, David said, he and his son talked more about the circumstances surrounding his father's death than the two of them ever had. His son was genuinely interested in hearing stories about his grandfather and was even more interested in learning about the kind of connection David enjoyed with him.

During one of our sessions, David asked me about my own father and whether he was still alive. I'm not sure why, but I found myself disclosing more details about that relationship to David than I had to any client prior. The harsh circumstances surrounding his own loss may have had something to do with it. I suppose I felt there was little I could say that would shock him.

David seemed amused when I suggested that it must have been harder for him to live with his loss. "I don't know, Jonathan," he said, gazing out the window at the maple tree outside my office. "Your dad sounds like a pretty complicated guy. In some ways, I imagine the memories of the man are much easier to live with than was the person. In my case, it was my father's death rather than his life I found traumatizing. He was one of the most gentle people I've ever known."

I was moved and humbled by David's insight. I felt embarrassed by my earlier thoughts about the horror of his grief and my focus on what separated us. When I looked at David, suddenly, in that moment I felt we were just two sad, lonely sons missing their dads.

Not every son who has had to endure his father's suicide shares David's feelings about the experience. Nonetheless, his remarks made me realize just how ridiculous it is to try to create a hierarchy of loss within the realm of fathers.

Who suffered more? Such a question is absurd. The simple truth might be to say that every loss is unique. "When it comes to our societal understanding of grief," writes Elizabeth DeVita-Raeburn in The Empty Room, "the important question is not whose loss is the worst but what does this loss, your loss mean to you? The truth is the worst loss is the one that is happening to you, the one that has picked you up and thrown you down and left you struggling to put your life back together."

Jonathan Diamond, Ph.D., is a psychotherapist, speaker, and workshop presenter, and author of Narrative Means to Sober Ends: Treating Addiction and Its Aftermath. He lives in Heath, Mass., and his website is jonathandiamondphd.com. This column was excerpted from his new book, Fatherless Sons: Healing the Legacy of Loss (John Wiley & Sons). Used by permission.