Here is a contribution from a woman who’s written to me after reading some of my work. She shares her personal journey of coming to terms with her father.
I want to describe the two last important times I shared with my father.
The first was in 1987, when I was 45 and he was 73. My parents were in Minnesota for our first-ever family reunion. 365 people met in a park near Northfield, MN, all descendents of two brothers (one, my great grandfather, Arnold) who came from Norway to Minnesota in 1887 to start a new life in a new land. My husband and I and our three children were temporarily housesitting in St. Louis Park after my husband was fired from his job at a boarding school.
One day during that visit, my mother and I went to the Walker Art Center for lunch. As we were finishing she said, very uncharacteristically for our relationship, that she needed to tell me something. There had been an unusual occasion in Portland when they were going to a movie, meeting up with her brother and his wife. My father had told her as they were leaving home in Hillsboro, that she would have to drive—the first time he had done that. When they got to the theater, he couldn’t walk. My mother and her brother took him to a nearby hospital for examination. When the doctor came out to report to her after the examination, he said the only thing wrong with him was that he was nearly dead drunk—that the measure of alcohol in his blood was at a point most people would be dead, if they hadn’t been building up their tolerance for many years.
My mother then had apparently driven him back home and done nothing to follow up on this startling news until a few months later, now, while they were in Minneapolis visiting us—and she confided in me.
I, though somewhat surprised at the severity of the problem, told her I had known for at least ten years that he was an alcoholic, based on my own observation of his behavior during my visits in Oregon, and having surveyed all our relatives who lived in the vicinity. Each of them had concurred with me and given multiple examples of having observed him drunk at family occasions. I reminded her—interrupting her multiple attempts to stop me—that I had even tried with her, but she had vehemently denied his being a drinker, and told me that smell on his breath was “just how one gets in old age.” Not one of the relatives, who had all agreed his drinking was a serious problem, was willing to join me in planning an intervention to get him into treatment for alcoholism. The most common reason given, if any, was that it wouldn’t work because she would never cooperate, and without her, it wouldn’t work. Some said she was the cause of his drinking, and made “poor man”-type comments.
She continued to deny the possibility that he was an addict, so I suggested we talk to an alcohol counselor, since we were in Minnesota, at least at that time one of the major treatment areas in the country, with Hazelton, The Johnson Institute, and other major centers located there. I told her the daughter of one her friends was married to a recovering alcoholic and I would be willing to call her for advise on who we could consult.
She actually agreed to this—and to make a long story short—first she and I, then my father and I, and then just my father talked with a very competent, no-nonsense, (even Scandinavian!), counselor, over the course of the next two days. In the end, the counselor told me, while my father was still sitting in the counselor’s office, that he had never in all his long experience run into a case like his. And that he did not need to be in a treatment facility. All he needed was 1) to attend a weekly AA meeting the rest of his life and 2) to have a conversation with me before they left Minnesota for Oregon. That conversation had to be initiated by my father and had to consist of one hour where he told me what his life had been like in relation to alcohol and to me; and one hour of me telling him what my life had been like with him as my father.
I arranged my parents’ introduction to AA at an open meeting, which, as it happened, was held in a Lutheran Church on Lyndale Avenue. A woman, who had been a Lutheran pastor’s wife and was now a recovering alcoholic, gave a talk. That was followed by a coffee hour. People were invited to wear nametags. My mother balked, saying she understood AA was anonymous—but eventually complied to some extent. But having such a distinctive name and among many other Norwegian Lutherans, she got drawn into numerous conversations with people she knew or who knew her or someone from her or my father’s family, especially several from our college!
I later got a letter from my father—followed by monthly letters for 3 years after they returned home, thanking me profusely for my help in getting him into AA, telling how much he loved those weekly meetings, and other more personal, friendly letters than he had ever written to me. Sadly, he developed Alzheimer’s after three years and could no longer communicate, but we did thankfully have that short gift of real relationship.
The second part of the assignment was so hard for him that they had to extend their stay with us by one or two days until he could get himself to ask me to have our one-hour-each conversation. But we did each speak one hour as assigned, with the other listening—an amazing, difficult, moving time–truly the only time we ever had what could be called a real conversation. But it went a long way for me—and I think for him—in making up for an otherwise missed lifetime of communication with each other.
The other important moment with my father was during what turned out to be my last visit with him, alone with my husband, in the Forest Grove nursing home where he died not long afterwards in 1997. After a very frustrating, sad time of sitting there with him, trying to hold a one-sided conversation and having him able only to make odd, occasional sounds; as my husband and I approached the door to leave, my father said, clear as a bell, “I love you.”
