My Life

Today is my father's 81st birthday and while I believe unhappiness has dragged at him for the better part of his adult life, despite a few triumphs of sorts, it's only this week that he's admitted to being unhappy. And scared. Jean, his partner off and on for 30 years, was diagnosed with lung cancer this past Monday. At some time today or tomorrow, she finds out if it's been invasive and, if so, how much. She's 68, and strong, and since her mother's looking at 100, we all just assumed Jean would take care of and outlive my dad. I know he's assumed it, too. But now she may pass before he does and my poor dad who's never had any practice or inclination at expressing his own turmoils doesn't know, really doesn't know what to say or how to say it if he knew.

But he's got to be scared. A cloud of confusion has been slowly settling on my father in the last year it seems. It's just another thing he won't speak to because it doesn't cloud his thinking all the time and he can take care of himself well. But that cloud is surely there. He couldn't, for example, understand the Father's Day card from my brother, Scott. On the cover of the card was a comic rendition of a golfer, but my dad kept saying to Jean, "That isn't Scott!"

He fakes comprehension with me sometimes by just saying, "Yeah" in a monotone to just about whatever I say or ask.

He just passed his driver's test. He has no friends, nothing to occupy him with other people. And though he plays golf most days, he always insists upon playing alone. He says, in front of Jean sometimes, that he misses my mother who died in 1985, about eight years after my dad left her. "We'd've gotten back together again if she'd lived," he says. He left her because he was bored. Boredom with her, he must figure, would not be as troubling as the constant tension and contentiousness with Jean.

But now Jean could die in months. And my dad would be left alone 3 hours from us.

My life could get more complicated quite soon. And that's as it should be, I suppose. I wonder, perhaps a bit selfishly, how my, how our freedom, Tina's and mine, will be inhibited by my dad's loneliness and needs. How will it effect our happiness? Because Tina and I are happy. We've been happy for a good 28 years or more. That's the care and gift I wish I could've given my dad: happiness. But it has eluded him.


Photo by tonyvel