For My Father

Today is my father's birthday - had he lived, he would have celebrated his sixty seventh year.

He died thirty years ago on December 26; thus my memories of my father will always be colored by the fact that he was young when he died, and so was I.

He had a wickedly pointed and dry sense of humor, which I have inherited. I remember him most fondly as "Action Figure Daddy" - a grand player of and lover of games of all kinds. His keen competitive nature was revealed in his mastery of physical prowess and team sports as well as his love of mathematical teasers.

He had a profound fascination with probability theory and its definition in chance found in its most playful forms. My interest in puzzles and logic games is definitely due to his influence.

He had a love for travel, and a fascination with American history. He was not very sentimental nor overtly emotional.

I consider myself lucky that in addition to photographs I also have his image preserved on 8 mm film transferred to videotape [which very soon will have to be burned onto a CD to survive] with which to comfort myself, and to remind myself that he not only did exist but thanks to technology he does so still.

His essential adult personality is still shrouded in mystery to me, a mystery which remains largely intact even now. [I wonder idly whether we would have a productive relationship as adults, and whether he would approve of my husband. To the former I always reply tentatively; to the latter I most certainly know that he would, at the very least, have appreciated Mr. Fresh Hell.]

The mystery remains because when he died I wasn't an adult experiencing a mature and equal relationship with a parent; rather, I was stuck in an adolescent limbo, armed merely with my memories and a limited genetic legacy of his height and profile with which to forge a bond.

A limbo which abruptly stopped.

It took me many years and much heartache to reconcile myself to the fact that no matter how much I may have wanted to change the facts, my father was gone. Unlike my peers, I didn't have common experiences of a male parent as signposts along the way to adulthood, and often when I was younger my rage at the unfairness of it all threatened to engulf me and sometimes, to my chagrin, defined me. That rage at being cheated was often a justification for bad behavior, or a rationale for failed relationships, and not the least a ready excuse for my personal failures.

Which is not how he'd see it at all.

And when I realized that I looked at this loss in a new and different light:

One that forgave us equally for being who we were; one that cherished the few memories for their substance without bemoaning the lack of a future; one that didn't place the blame either with him nor with me, but where it should always have been, at the foot of an impersonal universe that took him away too soon; one that reconciled the man he was with the woman I have become.

Requiescat in pace, Daddy.