When My Father Died, Words Failed Me

I seem to always have something to say, but I couldn't discuss his death for years

Sqeeeeeak. Squeeeak. The soundtrack of my early childhood was the sound of my father leaning back, then forward, back, then forward in the old squeaky office chair that had been his since he was a teenager. During the quiet evenings of my childhood, when the silence was broken only by the sound of crickets, I would walk into my father’s room, inhaling the scents that always defined him — the smell of skin that had been in the sun all day, musky sweat, and he malty smell of beer and smoky scent of whiskey, his constant companions. I would walk into the room silently and sit down. He didn’t ask me why I was there; he didn’t need to. The desire to talk was unsaid, but crystal clear.

He was always reading, and when I came in, he would put the book down, and we would start to talk, sometimes for hours. There were moments it was like talking to another version of myself, one who understood all the secrets the world had to offer.

Did you ever have someone who simply understood you and who you understood? No one understood me like my father.

Our communication was almost subliminal. We could finish each other’s sentences and would roll our eyes at the same topics on the news, or at my mother’s unintentional silliness. While we could communicate without a sound, it was our “philosophical discussions” I enjoyed most.

These talks will always be among my favorite memories — of both my father and my childhood. There was nothing we couldn’t talk about.

We discussed Dante, Walt Whitman, and The Lord of the Rings. We discussed capitalism and communism, the meaning of life, men and women, freedom and constraint, the evil nature of power, and most often, his dislike of organized religion, an attribute I not only share, but that we found out from ancestry research is a family characteristic (I had a relative in Germany 200 years ago who apparently said the Virgin Mary was no more a virgin than his own wife, he lost this teaching job over it). I was empowered, even encouraged, to disagree with something ny dad said. We would be at it for hours until my mother insisted repeatedly that I go to bed.

We had many of the same gifts, but many of the same curses as well, such as strong tendencies toward clinical depression, rage, anxiety, and misuse of alcohol, though it took me years in therapy to see it.

When I was young, I only knew there were certain things we vehemently disagreed on and could never discuss rationally, particularly discrimination, sexism, and above all, racism. He was raised with deeply ingrained hatred for anyone who wasn’t like him, and let his rage and fear take control of the discussion.

There were also other times we couldn’t talk — when he was particularly angry, when he was loud, when even I could taste Jack Daniels on every word he spoke. He could be hateful to certain groups of people, but when I was a kid, it was always clear that any condemnation of women didn’t include me. Being his little girl made me special.

As I grew up, it hurt when I felt my special classification slowly disappearing.

I’d always been a vocal advocate for women’s rights, but now I was equally so for POC and LGBTQ, causing us to lock horns often. We’d watch the news when Trump was at his worst. I’d insist the man was a racist, a misogynist, he hated people like me, he hated everyone, only for my dad to scream “Good, that’s why like him!”

It was impossible to speak to him anymore: I no longer wanted to talk and he couldn’t hear what I said anyway. It seemed profound to me that he lost his hearing entirely the moment we had nothing left to say to each other.

Through all this, I never doubted how fiercely he loved me, or my own veneration of him, however complicated and flawed he may have been, but despite being in the same house every weekend, we rarely said more to each other than “pass the salt.”

Ultimately, the end came fast. He had a fainting spell, and after that, he faded. I watched my father become a breathing skeleton as he sickened and lost weight.

The talks I’d once taken for granted were now impossible. As we both processed his imminent death and the emotional wall between us, the two people who could never stop talking to each other suddenly couldn’t get past the rocks in our throats.

I hugged him, told him to take his medicine, and whispered “I love you” to him the last time I saw him alive. I don’t believe he heard me, leaving our last words not unsaid as much as unheard.

I understand now that he was my hero and my dark mirror at the same time. He taught me valuable lessons, like that authority was only due the respect it earned, to listen to my own voice louder than anyone else’s, and to speak my own truth, which I’ll do the rest of my life.

Saying “I love you” loudly as often as you can is one of the takeaways of this story. But the real message is that it’s not only okay, it’s predestined, for the student to learn more lessons than the master intended to teach. My father taught me the power of having a voice, but I taught myself I can choose how to use it.