A Fully Imagined Life

As it turns out, Dad had a very active imagination. You’d never suspect that if you met him, attired as he always was in a uniform of matching Dickies work shirts and pants, argyle socks, and dark gum-soled shoes. He never left the house without a baseball cap or a winter cap, if the season required one. You wouldn’t have thought him capable of brilliance or complex thinking; that blank look so hard to fathom never gave away his thoughts.

With a youth punctuated by third-grade education, near starvation, and a mere wooden shelter for a home, Dad must have learned everything he would come to know through sheer force of will and human thirst to survive.

In his young adult life, he never had much to say. Verbal expression was not his strong suit; yet his restless eyes pulled in everything, studied it all and stored away information against a day when it might be needed.

During the post war years of the ‘50s, Dad was little more than a shadow that appeared in the kitchen in the mornings and evenings, yet otherwise was missing in action. He was busy as any young father of two or three children would be, of course. There wasn’t time to relax in the living room with his family, the ones for which he was working so hard to provide. I didn’t know then that was his expression of love.

In the ‘60s, the strain of living seemed to catch up with him. A brooding, angry, depressed man replaced the earnest, but quiet, soul. I’d watch for a sign that an eruption was near at hand, but it never happened. He wasn’t that type. Whatever grown-up struggles of finance, commerce, and marriage he was dealing with were foreign to me. He was just Dad. Best to give him a wide berth and go ride my bike.

There were strange happenings between him and Ma. The congested emotional highway they traveled was very loud, too loud, and filled with poisonous exhaust fumes that strangled us children. We hid in separate hiding places, made ourselves safe unto ourselves, or not, and never felt the comfort of parents or each other. Tiny islands being slowly eroded, dissolving into a sea of pain.

By the ‘70s, Dad had found some footing, but he continued his never-ending schedule of sleeping, eating, and working by the clock face. Time was money. Six a.m. breakfast. Noontime lunch. Five p.m. supper. Nine p.m. bedtime. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Yet he had somehow become more animated, as if his own maturing somehow freed him a bit and conservation slowly began to develop into something you could engage in with him over a cup of instant coffee, but only if he was sitting at his kitchen table.

He spent a great deal of time completely alone in a house full of people.

During the late ‘70s and into the ‘80s, he was starting to show interest in the world outside his schedule. Dad pursued a hobby. He bought a camper, something my son and I became beneficiaries of when he drove west, alone, to collect us from the California dream that had become a nightmare. During those long, hot days in the Winnebago, across expanses of highway and wide-open skies, along old Route 66 and new interstates, on a schedule of 500 miles per day, he opened up to me.

All along there had been secret desires, losses, deep penetrating sorrows, hopes, and even dreams, always imaginative dreams of a future where comfort and plenty factored in heavily.

He was still Dad, but I was a woman by then, and in him I saw a man, a man who had tried, failed, and tried again because, simply put, that is what a man is supposed to do.

We rode home in hours of gentle silence, in hours of unspoken understanding, in hours of seeing what I had not seen before. He spoke of his childhood, his parents, grandmother, hard work from a very early age, my mother. His inner life started to unveil itself in the confines of the cab’s front seats and his imagination, I came to understand, had been his life preserver. These revelations became my inheritance.

I loved him because he had tried, because he had suffered, because he was my dad. In later years, our bond would be tested, but never broken.

After the life-altering fall, his collision with the wall at the bottom of the stairs when the cracked skull allowed his emotional life to drain out in a puddle on the floor, his imagination was fully actualized via frontal lobe injury. Dad would reveal so much more. Not all of it was easy to deal with, not all of it was the stuff of dinnertime happy banter, but there were times of laughter, even joy. The golden years for him produced treasure I now own.

When those final few weeks of living became too tricky for him to manage even with help, when living and thinking and dreaming and imagination converged in a raging river of impossible behavior, I mourned. Now would come the time when losing him, saying goodbye, would be an eternal process for me. I could let go of the physical old body that lie in the nursing home bed, rigid joints, gasping, and then, easy from medication mercifully administered, a soft rush of air and gone. I could let go of that body, but not of Dad.

We are forced to say goodbye. It is natural, although we are often loath to accept that reality. We are left, if we are lucky, with something peaceful and good to enjoy until our own unthinking arrives and the process is repeated and repeated again.

Dad did what a man of his era was supposed to do. He loved his family to his full ability, expected little or nothing in return, and hoped against hope that everything would be all right in the end.

By Marilou Newell