I want to write about the songs for the 10th and the 13th, but it may be hard to get right.
January 10th last year was the day he died. "The Living Years" by Mike + The Mechanics kept coming to my mind, but it didn't feel like it was about me and and my father (or about my mother and my father).
It felt more like it would be between my father and his own father.
He was estranged from his parents when they died. It had mainly been a fight with his father, but he wasn't talking to his mother either. She was really upset about that and had talked to my mother.
They might have made up eventually, but then my grandparents were dead in a crash, with no real warning.
Based on the number of times that my father disowned children who displeased him, I can only assume he refused to learn anything from that. I still know it affected him, including him suddenly wanting to have another child: me. (A string of cousins born pretty close together tells me that his reaction was not unique.)
I didn't think "The Living Years" reflected us because I had communicated with him about what our relationship needed many times. It never got anywhere, but I had tried, and I believed I had tried enough.
I revisited the idea periodically, and I was afraid I was going to have to reach out and it would be hard, and then he was gone. It was sad, but mostly a relief. When he stopped speaking to me for two and a half years when I was seventeen, I told myself that it was easier not dealing with him, but I was not really okay with it. Many years later, I had a better grasp of what I could control and what I couldn't and there really was peace, even though it was still sad.
"I Can't Make You Love Me" by Bonnie Raitt was definitely for Mom and Dad.
She tried really hard. I saw her do so many things for him, coming up with little surprises and honoring even his most unfair whims.
That's not to say that she was always perfect. She would get frustrated and freeze him out sometimes, but I think she learned everything she knew about the silent treatment from him. Also, there was far less in the way of attempts to make her happy on his side, and lots of criticism of what she did try. That criticism also changed, where things that had worked before became unacceptable.
Look, there are reasons none of their daughters got married.
One thing that helped me understand him was a passage from Jane Eyre. Mr. Rochester is explaining his guardianship of Adele through his relationship with her mother, his mistress, as well as briefly mentioning two others. He explains that a mistress is always inferior socially and often by character, and it is degrading to live familiarly with inferiors.
It is possible to find in that an indictment of the English class system and various patriarchal systems (speaking of patriarchy, it is sad how similar so many other fathers of that generation were). What I saw as an adolescent girl was that Dad thought he was better than Mom, and he treated her as inferior. That was not great for her, but it also damaged his love for her, which continually got worse.
She had to be bad so it was his fault that he cheated or was a jerk in other ways. Then she deserved it, and he kept viewing her as lower and lower, so kept treating her worse.
He also did that with his children.
To be fair, he needed to be better than everyone, not just Mom. For people who didn't deal with him a lot, it may not have been noticeable. For people who lived with him, it was hard, perhaps more so because it was never stated outright how you were supposed to be to make him happy. You could try picking it up from context clues, but in fact, you could not make him happy and he would never see that as a him problem.
Its origin was his problem, but living with it was ours.
I found myself in the song too. It's not that he didn't love me, but there was a problem with his love, or with how love didn't change things... I could not fix that. That's why I stopped trying.
So there I was in the other song as well.Because I had tried, I didn't think I had regrets, but I can believe now that he would.
I don't know what the time frame is, but I really do believe that eventually the self-deception fails in death. Maybe you cling to the denial really hard, but eventually it gives out against the stark reality of death.
I can believe he has things that he would have liked to say to us in the living years.
That window has closed, but other ones will eventually open.
I hope he has been able to make peace with his father.
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