Our second Dad died last year in the Autumn, after 4 years of being mostly bed-ridden and deaf.
As he came up to the finishing post in hospital last year, I thought his dying would not be such a shock, as it had been happening over 4 years. Mostly he hardly recognised us when we visited him at the last.
Without rancour I think, I had been remembering over those four years some of the thoughtless and harsh things he had done and said to me. I had felt sometimes a need to rebel against the 'authority-figure' he represented.
And more recently, how his judgement on many serious issues were ones I disagreed with profoundly
So, I had been 'seeing' how some of his influence on me was not what I would have desired in hindsight. In particular, I think, his acceptance of the world order that included 'scientism', industrialisation, the 'normalcy' of 'jobs', the need to 'succeed' in a 'career', without an explicit religious antidote to this "World" that "is too much with us". The Megamachine as Mumford calls it, The Technological Society as Ellul calls it, Technics as Spengler calls it, or the Non-Convivial Society as Illich might have called it.
The Megamachine is more of a Leviathan, a Moloch, than I ever dreamt, and the mental tools to engage in mental fight with this horror were not fully given to me by my two Dads, nor by by the academic and intellectual luminaries I used also as role models. And so at the age of 80 I have to find the mental tools to fight this mental fight in a landscape of broken images turned upside down, and all that was solid ideology melting into air.
But the fact remains that our second Dad had looked after us for years; helped us get jobs that suited us. Cheered us from the sidelines, helpung whenever he could. Had been our 'role-model' for many years, and up until he died, a Good Father to all of us.
And over the past year I have been feeing more and more his absence. He had been so important to us for more than 5 decades of our lives. When we were really down, like when your son commits suicide, his love for us was constant and practical. And so he was not here any more. His house gone. Furniture mostly split up. What was once a home now an empty shell of real estate equity.
When I was leaving the hospital, he looked up and recognised me at last after several hours. I said "Goodbye..." And the look he gave me was one he had given me so many times when I was feeling worried, troubled or just uncertain at the beginning of a novel project. It was an encouraging smile with a confident nod from your Dad, that said, "It'll be all right; you'll be all right." That was the last I saw of him.
Yesterday I realised how much he had loved all of us. And I regretted that I had not focused on this more over the years. How much he had loved all of us, and tried to take care of us in his own way, been a Good Father to us all.
These thoughts are extremely useful for me to prepare for my own parents departure from this realm. Thanks you for this valuable advice Moe ❤️
Very touching. It's always incredibly frustrating when those we love and care about do not understand our political, social and economic choices, or even seem to reinforce the mainstream narrative, but in the case of your (second) father one might well argue that he could have rejected you on the basis of those same dissimilarities. Love has the ability to triumph over everything, it seems, at least when people are not wearing different uniforms and happen to share a larger number of genes.