Readers of this blog and my Oregonian column are writing heartfelt, moving letters. The one below is excerpted from an email sent by “Rhonda” (not her real name). Her story is a poignant reminder of the profound, enduring loss felt when a father leaves his daughter’s life.
My father died when I was seven years of age. I was brought up to “be a brave girl and not cry” or maybe that was just my solution to dealing with it so that my mother didn’t have to worry about me. I just remember that’s what I thought about all the time – be brave, don’t cry. So of course I did “cry” in my own way. I cried at night when no one could hear or see me and I did this even into my twenties. I missed him every day, and even now, for the times we didn’t have. Death is so final. There’s no longer a Dad around.
If you cover this subject in a future column, I would appreciate my real name not being connected with it. At 72 it’s a bit embarrassing still being vulnerable!
Rhonda
Dear Rhonda,
Behind our masks of composure, we’re all vulnerable. Look around: You’ll see people who have lost parents, siblings, children, lovers, friends, their own childhoods, their jobs, their homes. Being fully alive is to be vulnerable.
I interviewed 50 women for my book; about 45 of them cried during our time together. They cried because of the love they lost when their fathers died; because of the cruelty they endured; because of the love they never felt. Sometimes they cried because of their gratitude for drawing the King of Hearts when the dad cards were dealt.
For anyone like you who’s lost a father, I have two short stories –meditations on living, loving and loss–from women who shared them with me.
Blanca received an MBA from Berkeley and a JD from Santa Clara law school. Her father came to the U.S. from Mexico as a guest agricultural worker, so that his daughters could get an education. He did backbreaking work all of his life. He and his wife raised their daughters in the servants’ quarters of the upscale Carmel Valley home where he was a landscaper. When new homeowners acquired the property, they wanted to demolish the servants’ quarters. Her father, Blanca said, “begged with them to not demolish the home, as he had raised his daughters there. And they sold the home to my dad.”
The first night we met, Blanca cried for four hours. She told me the story of her father’s lifelong sacrifice for his daughters, and his unyielding conviction that if you want to change the world, you help women get educated.
Four years ago Blanca stayed at her father’s bedside, in those servants’ quarters, for the last week of his long life. “I sat in the bed with him in the living room,” she told me. “And I kept thinking I wanted to bottle his breathing. His breathing gave me some assurance, like he’s still alive. So I called my office and I taped his breathing as a voice message. I still have it there. And when I need a little boost, I just listen to it.”
Blanca is one of the strongest, most determined women I know. I met others along the way as I spoke with women from 17 countries. And so many of them were strikingly open and vulnerable in their self disclosure. A week before she turned four years old, one of the women lost her father when he was hit and killed by a drunk driver.
“As a child that loses a parent, you just want to know,” she said. “I used to tell my mom, ‘I don’t even know what he sounds like.’ Or I can’t just ask him something stupid, like, ‘What’s your favorite color? What did you think when you first saw my mom?
“My mom says, ‘I remember you coming home and saying, ‘We did this project at school and I just want to have a dad.’”
As a girl she and her sisters would ride their bicycles to visit their father’s gravesite. “We would leave all sorts of stuff—pinecones, notes, little plastic flowers, little bows. When I was older, I went over there a lot more with my high school friends. I left pictures, like my graduation pictures.
“I always wanted approval or love or just to have him know me. That can make me start crying right now. It’s like, ‘This is my way. This is who I am. Please pay attention.’ I used to pray to God that he would please just know who I am, that he would be able to pick me out if he saw me, all these years later, that he would be able to say, ‘That’s my daughter.’”
I lost my mother, first as a young boy when she was too sick to have her children live at home, and later when brain cancer paralyzed her at 45, then slowly sapped her life. You are anything but alone, Rhonda. There are more than seven billion people in the world. They come in two types: Those who know they’re vulnerable and those who don’t or won’t accept it.
You can erase the tape that says, “be a brave girl and not cry.” Delete the file. It takes more courage to feel, express and share our vulnerability than to suppress it. Find that little girl inside of you whose pain was suffocated, hold her in your soul and let her cry her heart out. Loss is timeless; you can run but you can’t hide from it. And if you are lucky enough to have someone in your life whom you love and trust, ask them if they will hold you so you can cry in their arms.
Kevin Renner appears on Thursday, June 6 at Powell’s Books, in Beaverton at Cedar Hills Crossing, where he will read from his book “In Search of Fatherhood: Daughters Praising, Speaking Up, Talking Back.” He invites readers to submit questions for future columns, which run on the 3rd Thursday of each month. He can be reached at InSearchofFatherhood@yahoo.com, on Twitter @kevinrenner, Facebook at Kevin Renner In Search of Fatherhood, or his blog at www.kevin-renner.com.
