Sep 07 2008
Rooting for My Father
My husband and I went to the U. of Washington vs. BYU game yesterday, up here in Seattle. I know it is unlikely most of you are football fans, but neither am I. I came to the game for a very different reason, and it had a far more profound effect on me than I thought.
My father Frank Jr. was a huge football fan. I say “was” because he passed away on March 9, 2007, two days shy of my birthday. He and I had been estranged for more than 15 years. In fact, we may have exchanged less than a dozen words in that time. The last time he saw me in person, he bumped into me by accident, nodded curtly, and called me by my older sister’s name before he walked away. He was diagnosed with liver and colon cancer, his health declined steadily, and shortly after my family moved to Chehalis, WA, his liver failed and he died.
I mourned then, not so much for losing my father, but for losing him so many years earlier. You see, he hadn’t really been my father for such a long time, and his loss seemed distant to me. I can’t say I knew him, or knew the kind of man he was when he died. I still have this distance with my mother and most of my siblings.
But I knew the kind of man my father was when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. And he loved BYU more than any team, even Green Bay. He and my mother met at BYU, and he put a “1984 Champs” license plate on the front of his Suburban when the football team earned it. So, out of respect for him, I went. After all, without BYU, I might not have ever been born. And if my father still been alive, I think he would have been there at the game yesterday. If we’d still been close, I would have taken him.
Now, I don’t claim to sense that he was actually there with me. Given our relationship, I doubt his spirit would want to be anywhere near mine. But watching that game, rooting for BYU (even though I like UW, too), I felt more at peace with my father than I ever have, more at peace with the parts of me that come from him than I have ever felt. I am more like my father than I prefer to admit: I love walking out in nature, I love plants, I love classical music, I hate jarring (screaming) rock, I have a bad temper (though it does blow over quickly), and I am stubborn to the extreme. Who I am stems a great deal from my upbringing, both the good and the bad of it.
BYU won the game, but it was a murky sort of victory, in some ways caused by a referee’s lousy call with 2 seconds to go (the call was all over the sports news last night–it ticked everybody off). So, if the game was representative of my father, in some weird way, perhaps it suggests someday he and I may have a relationship again (the victory), only it won’t be easy. There will be casualties (one UW player was carried off in an ambulance), and even if we find resolution, it will be bittersweet.
I am willing to accept the peace someday, even if it isn’t purely happy. It’s just nice to know the conversation isn’t over.
I love you, kiddo. You know it. I loved our father, too, though I don’t agree with many of his choices. I often think I knew a different man than you did and that grieves me.
I hope you do find peace, for your own sake, not mine, not even his. Your happiness is important to me.
It suddenly struck me how horrible it must be for my own husband. Our father, for all his failings, Lee sees as the closest thing to a father he’s ever had. And he knew my father’s failings, too.