As I Grew, So Did My Relationship With My Late Father
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My father died when I was 14. He was 49. It was sudden in that no one saw it coming, but maybe we should have. He’d had his first heart attack at 42, which resulted in a two-week hospital stay and a profound shift in his personality.
He was quick to anger where once he’d been gentle enough to rub my back when I had a cough and lull me to sleep. He was taciturn. Private. Scarce around the house. His patience was short and thin and easily bruised.
But there were glimpses of his old self. He was fiercely proud of my sister for making the Dean’s list her first year of college. When I saved enough money for a bass guitar, he happily drove me to buy it. The evening I showed him my charcoal drawings from my favorite high school art class, he spent hours leafing through my portfolio and commenting on my progress. Weeks before his second heart attack, the one that killed him, he received a clean bill of health from his doctor, but it was gardening that wore him out.
When a parent dies, there’s a mystery that is seeded in their place. Who were they, really? What did they think about? What did they want? What did they dream of? As I pursued a creative career that carried echoes of the life he left behind for his family, I wondered along the way: What would he think of me now? Or now? Or now?
I looked for clues in his former belongings
There were things he left behind. Artifacts excavated from his dresser drawers and office desk. His fountain pen, which I used for years. His sketchbook. A sweater my mother knit in the back row of a theater as my father rehearsed onstage. His oil paintings still hang at my mother’s house. The biggest thing he left behind is our relationship, amorphous, invisible, yet always growing, always changing, always enigmatic and hard to define.
The summer he passed away, both of my sisters left home and I went from being the youngest in a five-person family to being the only child of a bereaved parent. In his absence, I decided my father was a villain, a ghost that carried with it the chains of abandonment. I blamed myself for his death. We’d fought the week before he died, after I cut my hair like Cyndi Lauper. He didn’t like that. After the initial outburst, we didn’t talk for the rest of that week, or the next or ever again. I resented that something as silly and slight and temporal as cutting my hair made him angry enough to expire.
But bit by bit, the mystery of him revealed itself in each ephemeral clue. When I was 16, I inherited his car, a hulking blue 1979 Buick Century with a bench seat. I had to sit on a phone book to see over the steering wheel. The car had amazing pick-up and I loved outgunning fancier cars when the lights turned green. More than that, the Buick felt like an extension of my father. When I turned corners, I leaned back in the seat, one arm straight, resting on the steering wheel, windows open, coasting along the same hills he had just a couple of years earlier. He hadn’t abandoned me; he’d given me my first taste of freedom. As I became fiercely independent, he was right there with me. Hands off, but ever present. I strove to be the same.
My life became a mirror of what his could have been
At pivotal points in my life, every choice I made revealed one he didn’t. As I strove to live a creative life, first as an actress, then a wig master and finally as a writer, I thought about how he’d given up on those same dreams. As a young man, he’d wanted to be a theater director, a painter, a performer. Instead, he married, had a family, and sacrificed parts of himself to support us. When I married, I resented being distracted from my professional goals and I realized he must have he felt that same resentment. The difference between us: where I worked a string of bread-and-butter jobs to support my creative life, he doubled down at his day job and painted on the weekends, if he had the time and energy.
As I ended my marriage a few years later, I admired my father for his commitment to us. He never faltered. Even when he was unhappy, he stayed the course. While embarking on a backstage career in my thirties, I discovered that I valued work to the detriment of my relationships, platonic and romantic. I realized that, whether he knew it or not, my dad had preferred work to family, too.
When I fell in love with hair as a sculptural medium and started working with wigs, I remembered how much my father had loved his grease make-up kit and how excited he was to paint my sisters’ and my faces for Halloween. One year, my sister was a zombie with smudged black and green ovals for eyes. I was a pirate with blood red lips. We were ghosts and phantoms and other strange and monstrous inventions.
My mother told stories of spending evenings in the empty balcony seats as my father rehearsed as an actor and director for a community theater. I thought of his collection of original cast albums: My Fair Lady, Man of la Mancha, The Sound of Music, Hair, still stacked in the cabinet by the unused record player in her living room. After he took me and my sister to see Fiddler on the Roof, he belted the songs in the Buick the entire ride home. He was exuberant when we saw the movie Grease. His smile filled his face, giddy with delight at the flying car, Betty Rizzo’s final number, "Greased Lightning." I think it’s the happiest I ever saw him.
I wonder what he would think of me now
During my years working backstage, I pictured showing him around. In my mind’s eye, we watched Urinetown from the back of the house and Jersey Boys from the wings, his smile so big that it hurt and so broad that it looked like it would never end. He mimicked the dance numbers and sang harmony against Frankie Valli’s falsetto. I showed him how I styled my wigs on Memphis, tight pin curls and waves, how I held my comb, the flick of my wrist, how I laid the front lace against the wig block so that it didn’t tear or wrinkle. At August Wilson’s Fences, he cried alongside Rose Maxson as she sobbed, “Don’t you think I ever wanted other things? Don’t you think I had dreams and hopes? What about my life? What about me?”
Even though he was long gone, it felt like his love of theater and art had fused with mine. I had finally become his equal, making my way in a world he’d dreamed of in ways he hadn’t allowed himself to envision. I wished I could take him out for a beer after the show and watch his unbridled joy, having shaken hands with actors and stagehands. I was a working artist. He would be proud.
In the end, my dad chose his family
The depth of my dad's love and loyalty went beyond anything I could understand. It’s one thing to give up on a pipe dream, to abandon goals that are forever out of reach. But to forsake the things that bring you the greatest joy, to relegate them to the corner of a record cabinet, a broken box of crumbling face paint, a night every couple of years at the theater seemed like too big a sacrifice. His love of making art was a part of him, a limb, and bit by bit, he let it atrophy, dwindle and wither away.
But then, I think about the day he died. In his last moments, he asked the doctor to tell my mother that he loved her. It still seems like an act of generosity to comfort the living in the face of chaos swirling around him. Maybe it’s not that unusual for a person’s last words be of comfort and love, but that doesn’t make it any less inspiring. At the most pivotal moment in his life, he chose love over fear. And his love, like our relationship – amorphous, invisible, always growing, always changing, always enigmatic and hard to define — remained.
This month, I’ll have outlived him by a single year. Cruising by, my memories of him are visible in the rearview mirror. I’m barreling towards parts of life he never got to experience, the landscape up ahead blurry and light. Until the moment our ages crossed, I couldn’t imagine myself older than him. Now I don’t have to imagine. Memories, like water, fill half the glass. Life ahead, like air, fills the rest.
Amy Neswald's new book, I Know You Love Me Too,will be available December 1 from your favorite bookseller. This essay is part of a series highlighting the Good Housekeeping Book Club — you can join the conversation and check out more of our favorite book recommendations.
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