Stories My Father Never Told Me

Aivazovsky_-_Strong_WindMine is not a family of storytellers. I don’t know what my father did in World War II. I don’t know if his heart skipped a beat the first time he saw his future wife, my mother. I don’t know if there was an instant he doubted he would live when his sailboat was torn to toothpicks in a hurricane a mile off the Florida coast. That was an event. But he never made it a story to pass on to his children. And so I don’t know why or how he made it to shore across a mile of stormy seas, only that he did.

It might sound funny to wonder why he survived. But plenty of people wouldn’t have made it. Even people with the swimming skills and physical strength to make it. You also need a powerful will to live and the courage to face what look like insurmountable odds. He was sailing solo, so there was no one else to help make the decision to ride out the storm with the ship or to brave the raging seas. There was no easier choice to just follow someone else’s lead. Decisions don’t come any harder than the ones he had to make in his life. This was only foreshadowing what was to come. Stormy SeasDid he quickly calculate his odds and swim for shore as soon as he saw the boat was foundering, or did he try to hold her together till there was no hope left, braving seas that were by that time dramatically worse to try and save the boat he had lovingly built by hand? Did he risk going down with the ship by groping frantically through rising waters in the below-deck cabin for one treasured belonging he couldn’t bear to leave behind? If he did, what was so valuable that he risked his life over retrieving it? And when he reached shore did he walk away unscathed, or were his nights haunted with nightmares of drowning? A sea of churning water stood between him and life on that…that what? I don’t even know if it was night or day. Either way, he lived to not tell about it.

As a child I one time skipped down barefoot onto a gnarl of fish hook cactus that lodged deep in the sole of my foot. My father came toward me to take it out and I warned him away with screams and tears. He laughed and asked if I intended to leave it there forever. Without an ounce of bravery, I had to think about it for a minute. If it had been me in that sinking boat, the smallest doubt of whether I could swim over raging seas and make it to land alive would have had me clutching to the last bit of floating debris of that boat like it was God Himself, and only He could save me from being swallowed by the sea. My fate would rest on how buoyant my bit of detritus was. I would use all my strength trying to make that shard of timber float, unable to trust my ability to survive a swim to shore.

Cast up by the Sea - Winslow HomerNo such complications for my father. All my life he whistled while he shaved, sang while he worked, and went about his business with good cheer. Each day was a new opportunity to enjoy life, and whatever stories his past held, that’s where they stayed. When I grew up and became interested in him as a person as well as a father, one day I asked how he had the sheer guts and strength to get up and go back to work shortly after breaking his back and being paralyzed (for life) at 35. All he said was, “I had to, I had a family to feed.” Those words were plenty to tell me what he was made of, but I wanted all the elements of plot. I wanted the how and the why, and the who, what, and whereAnd yet I didn’t have the guts to ask.

I wasn’t born yet when he fell off the roof of their new home and into a wheelbarrow, but I hurt to even think of all the crashing of bones and nerves and hearts and hopes and dreams that started when his body came freefalling onto the edge of that wheelbarrow spine-first. I wonder about the pain, how scared he must have been, how dashed his dreams, how fearful for his future, no less his pregnant wife’s and two young sons’.

In the hospital after his injury doctors tickled his feet. They poked his calves and pressed their fingers into his thighs. Nothing. No feeling. So they wouldn’t operate. They said it was no use. My grandmother stormed the hospital and they relented, slicing a 14-inch gash down his back. They poked around a bit, sewed him back up, and said, “Yep. He’ll never walk again.” He didn’t talk for a month. Then he dragged himself out of the hospital, stuffed his bodycasted self in the family Jeep with my mother and brothers, and said goodbye to their new home in Denver. They couldn’t think clearly there. They needed to re-gather their lives within the familiarity of the house they still owned in California, among loving family and concerned friends. For the next six months he taught himself to walk with a complex series of movements that began with swinging his hips and legs forward with the strength of his glutes. When his uncle, Pappy we called him, told him it was time to saw off his body cast and see what he had, that’s what he did. After fits and starts he began walking with two canes, then one, then finally none. Still with no feeling below his hips. But it was something. A miracle of the will.

After the injury he developed other strengths. His arms could hold all us children at once. His calm could make any problem, however seemingly tragic at first, suddenly approachable. His courage could hold the weight of all our worlds on his shoulders. But part of that courage came by refusing to consider himself in any way but like everybody else. He simply refused to treat himself as paralyzed, and damned if anyone else would dare. So if I asked even the most innocuous question about his injury, would opening up and talking about it, satisfying his cherished daughter’s curiosity, open a hole that let all that long-ago pain come rushing back? I wouldn’t risk it.

Harrrison - Ocean NocturneThat’s what I know. And I wouldn’t ask him for more. It wasn’t really lack of courage that stopped me from asking. I know that now. It was respect. Every day my father lived his life as a man with full use of his body would. He never gave in to physical limitations, never mind self-pity. He would not use handicap parking spaces. He coached and umpired Pony League baseball. He climbed on roofs and pounded them with sheets of shingles whenever that needed to be done, and I doubt he ever considered that irony.

He was a man of few words and was a firm believer that the value of a person’s life is in his deeds. That didn’t make him hard. Quite the opposite. He knew what a man is capable of. But he also knew how a man can suffer. Just seeing my father and what he did every day was enough to tell me the worth of the man. I didn’t need to know how he made it to shore to know he was strong. I didn’t need to know what he did in the war to know he was brave.

All this happened. And it affected our lives in unimaginable ways. In aggregate the consequences of that accident hurled our little family off orbit. He spent months at a time in the hospital because of internal injuries and infections and other complications. My mother tried to hold it all together, keeping house and feeding and caring for her three beloved children plus being a more intimate nurse to her husband than she could have ever dreamed of. But her struggles are a different story. The family is still trying to regain its balance now, a decade after he’s gone and well into his grandchildren’s adulthood. We’ll make it. In another generation the pain won’t even be a memory. But the family will be strong. Partly because he refused to let us be weak.

When he was late into his 70’s, on kidney dialysis for some kind of a record dozen years, his speech a little slurred from mini-strokes and body wasted by decades of the complications of paralysis, it finally occurred to me that he was not immortal. I asked him to write his life story. I wanted to know whatever stories he wished to share with me. He said he would, and so he spent his days at dialysis filling notebooks. His hands weakened and his handwriting deteriorated. We got him a dictation recorder, but he didn’t want to bother his fellow dialysees. So he went on with the notebooks, filling them with barely legible sentences and paragraphs and pages, pouring out his life with clearly apparent joy at what he had lived. He started with his grandparents, describing their lives, and four yellow-lined legal notebooks later he ended with his own early adulthood. That’s as far as he got before passing away on August 31, 1997, at 1:55 in the morning.

He never got to the part about the sailboat. But that’s alright. I know everything that’s important about my father.

Art - Winslow Homer - Sunset Fires

11 thoughts on “Stories My Father Never Told Me

  1. This story about your dad made me think so much of mine… I write this with tears in my eyes after reading it twice. My dad would have been about the same age as yours, and your narrative of him always moving forward no matter what, always taking care of family as best he could, always minimizing his accomplishments, hit home. “That was an event. But it’s not a story.”- I can almost hear your dad saying that, and mine too. I often ask myself why I did not learn more about his life, but my dad too was a private man, and out of respect, as you said, I did not want to pry. Thank you for helping me better understand my own relationship with my father- great stories will do that.

    You have a beautifully written, insightful blog, and I will enjoy following it. Welcome to GeneaBloggers!

    • You and I are lucky to have had fathers that engender such love and respect. It allowed me to learn by deed, not by rule. In his last years he had more time and inclination to reflect on his life. In the journal he started for me he said he regretted not telling us children that he loved us more. I wish I could have told him that he didn’t need to tell me – I never doubted his love for a second. His style of parenting made it abundantly clear that nothing was more important to him than us.

      Thank you for reaching out.
      Mulberrygrrl

  2. Pingback: May I Introduce To You . . . Cynthia Berryman | GeneaBloggers

  3. My family was like your father in that stories were never told. I believe it was because of unhappy childhood experiences. (My father’s mother died when he was a few weeks old and his father later remarried a woman who did not like my father and showed it.) I wish I knew motives for some of their decisions, where they got the strength to do some of the things they did, but they’re gone now and I can only surmise.

    How brave your father was — and your mother, too. Your dad had a lot of courage and, obviously, quite a lot of determination and self-control. Great post!

    • Thanks, Nancy. I think my father didn’t tell stories simply because they weren’t interesting to him. He was pretty good about staying in the present, not focusing on either past or future more than necessary. I understand not telling stories because of unhappy childhood, though. Not looking back in that case is probably a good survival mechanism.

  4. So like you, I don’t know my fathers stories. I’ve pieced a few from stories I’ve heard and I treasure what I have. He served in the Navy onboard two ships, what tales he could have told. I searched out the ships and one, USS Blue Ridge was quite impressive as he was onboard when the ship was at Bikini Atoll at the atomic Bomb tests in 1946. But what I wouldn’t give to have known that firsthand.
    Jeanne

    • Yes, we seem programmed to not care about our family’s history until it is too late to ask those who experienced it. I so wish my father had more time to finish his memoirs – or I had thought to ask sooner.

  5. Hi Cynthia! this is an absolutely wonderful story, a joy to read, although it brought tears to my eyes also! Your Dad was brave beyond measure! Sometimes I get angry over my husband’s quietness, but he is a wonderful husband and father also, just not a storyteller! thanks for reminding me look at that a different way!

    • Thanks, Helen. I’m glad you enjoyed the story. It brought tears to my eyes too; writing it, remembering things about my father, pondering for the first time why things happened the way they did, why he did things the way he did. I encourage everyone to “write deep” about their parents. You’ll learn so much. About your spouse, too!

  6. I’m sure that if he were reading what his daughter writes about him right now, he would be very happy. (PS: thanks for sharing, now everybody can learn a great something from him)

Have a Comment?