I’ve been fully estranged from my father for 3 years.
Until a few days ago, I thought I’d made peace with his absence.
I’d worked through a lot of rage towards him in therapy rooms and at men’s retreats. I have confronted him directly with my truth and with my vulnerable desires for our relationship while attempting multiple times to reconcile with him. When our last reconciliation failed, and he showed no real desire (perhaps capacity) to repair with me, I chose to stop fighting for what he was unwilling to fight for. So I let him go. I figured our next real conversation would be over his tombstone, and I came to peace with that.
But last week, while deep in the Mojave Desert surrounded by 80 men, I hit a new layer of anger I hadn’t quite yet touched.
It was the final layer of anger that had quietly been keeping watch over my grief.
We were doing shadow work: plumbing the depths of psyche for repressed feelings and emotions. As I sat before three courageous men holding space for me to explore my depths, I suddenly stumbled upon the words, “I miss my father.”
But I couldn’t actually say them.
Literally, I was unable to let those 4 simple words usher from my mouth. Anger wouldn’t allow it. At my first attempt, I experienced a rage quickly arise from the depths like a snarling Orc from the Hell Fires of Mordor, and it was ready to fight to the death:
“Miss my father? No way. Fuck that guy. He hasn’t been around for decades. He hasn’t shown any real interest in me or my life since … well, forever. He doesn’t deserve my missing him. I won’t give him the satisfaction of my grief – not here in the desert, not anywhere. He simply isn’t worthy of it. Seriously … fuck … that … guy!”
Normally, hitting that anger-wall would be end of story: “Fuck that guy.”
But not on this day in the empty middle of a vast desert. I had come here committed to working through something deep, though it I thought unrelated to my father – again, I had that handled! Yet here I was again brought to this truth:
To go where I need to go, I must face yet again this man who never seems to go away, even though he’s hardly ever been around.
Francis Weller, author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, wrote that “grief un-metabolized turns bitter.”
Those who know me would agree I’m not generally a bitter person. Still, I do believe my resistance to touching the grief of my father’s enduring absence (and other griefs) has at times caused me to emotionally calcify in my body. As a single man that was rarely brought to my attention – or if it was, I could quickly turn away from it.
But being married to an emotionally-connected woman, who surely feels my calcification, I am unable to look away from it. Because I know she feels it, and I know it hurts her. She wants to feel more my open free-loving heart. Yet too often I fear she has experienced my grief-resistant constriction – this bitterness that sometimes runs through me like soured milk.
It’s this awareness that I took in my heart to the desert. I want my wife to consistently feel my love; not just know that I love her. And I was here to confront whatever might be in the way.
As I sat before these men, leaning into this last ferocious strata of anger, I watched it crack and give way to a great ocean of sadness lying just beneath it.
I’ve never had a harder time getting four short words out of my mouth. But as I fought through, my eyes were quickly overcome with tears. This long buried ocean surged upwards, rushed past any remaining shattered shards of anger now unable to hold it back, and finally, out poured my salty grief into the dark desert night around me.
I have accepted there is no bringing my father back to me. We might get one more crack at reconciliation someday, perhaps when his wife dies, or when his death is imminent. Or maybe our relationship will only blossom over his tombstone. I remain open to however life unfolds.
“I miss my father.”
I wasn’t able to say those words a week ago … I’d never even tried because I didn’t think it to be true.
But it is true. Deeply so.
Today I can say it with gentleness and grace because I finally touched the grief.
What loss or absence might you not yet have quite touched of the grief?
“Hold your sorrow to a degree of eloquence, whereby everyone around you will be fed by your efforts to do so.”
~ Stephen Jenkinson
📸 featured photo by David Piver