My Father Died One Year Ago Today

I’m still not sure how I feel

My father died one year ago today and my whisperer has been gently reminding me all day. Suggesting that it’s time to start to write about him.

They say that you should never write from the wound, that you should wait and write from the scar.

What does one do if the wound never really becomes a scar? What happens if the final wound never really happened? Do I wait for it?

I ask this question because my father’s death was supposed to hurt deeply. I was supposed to experience a deep hurt … not for the loving experiences we shared as father and daughter, but instead for the grief resulting from not having them. The knowledge that something that was longed for for decades was now impossible to have happen at all.

There wasn’t a wound when he died. There couldn’t possibly be a scar to write from.

Instead, my whisperer has kept reminding me of the photos my father and I had done together by a photographer in his studio. My idea. Not my father’s. They were taken sixteen years ago. We looked happy. Like a father and daughter should look like.

As I think of those photos I can’t help but think of a conversation I had with my father sometime in my early twenties. About forty years ago.

We were looking at photos of his mother, who I have always referred to as Gramma Alice. They were loose in a thin, white with blue text, flat paper photo bag that was stored in a tiny cupboard in the kitchen above the table.

She was almost never spoken of and I had never met her. On the rare occasion that my father did speak of her he referred to her as his mother. I have never heard of her mentioned as Gramma Alice. That name was, for the most part, just a thought in my mind. A whisper of sorts.

As we were looking through the photos I mentioned that she looked so smartly dressed and very lady like.

“These photos aren’t real. They were taken by a travelling photographer who also supplied clothing to wear for the taking of the photo. These weren’t her clothes.”

I didn’t share that what he said hurt.

I have always wondered why he said that to me. Why couldn’t he have just let me believe this about his mother? I especially wondered how he could be so cruel to his mother by saying this about her.

If she wasn’t who she appeared to be in those photos, then who was she really? Why couldn’t she have worn her own clothes? I don’t have the answers to those questions. I never asked them. Not out loud.

As I look at the professional photos of my father and I, I wonder what I would say to one of my sons if they mentioned that we looked so happy together in them. Would I say that the smiles and happy faces on the father and daughter in the photos were supplied by the photographer? Would I say that the loving poses only happened because they were directed by the photographer and would have never happened in real life?

Would that be true?

Could it be possible that on that particular day we were happy? Did I feel loved? Did I feel like I belonged? Did I feel safe?

Was I able to glimpse, if only for an hour or two, what it felt like to be in a true father-daughter relationship?

That simple question caused me to pause for a moment.

What is a true father-daughter relationship? I want to ask if they’re the stories that are told in fairy tales and shown in movies. The ones where the father always protected and loved their daughter.

Fairy tales aren’t real. Perhaps the movies aren’t either.

That’s not the relationship I had with my father. For the most part mine was the exact opposite. Does that mean that it therefore wasn’t a true father-daughter relationship?

It had to be. It was the only one we had. And although it was a heartbreakingly painful one … it was ours. It was true.

My father died a year ago today. A lifetime of longing and wanting to be loved unconditionally by him, to feel like I belonged, and that I was wanted, ended on that same day.

Instead of feeling sad or hurt I finally felt at peace.

I wonder, is that about who the father was to the daughter, or more about who the daughter was to the father?

Who was at fault for the relationship? The father? The daughter? Both?

I don’t know the answers to those questions. At least not today. Instead, I somehow feel like I didn’t do grief properly. Maybe I didn’t do daughter-father properly either. But that’s a different story for a different day.

A year ago today I was at peace with the relationship I had with my father. Not with the experiences we shared. I was at peace only because it was finally over.

How do I feel today? I find myself wondering if I could have done something to make our story as father and daughter different.