Let me work through my thoughts and emotions
in front of you now. Helps me, as a writer, to do so in this way – and I suspect
my experience of people’s sympathy might help all of us moving forward. With
loving intentions, we speak words of comfort to one another. I understand well that when we do so, we inject, we transfer our own feelings about our own family into the stories of others. Surely they feel as I did or would. Comforting words are all comforting, but then
at the same time some aren’t so comforting, or aren’t connected to reality,
feeling like little pin pricks to fend off. I don’t fault any of the hundreds
of people who’ve reached out to me. I am humbled, and so very grateful. I feel
loved. My story with my dad probably explains why I need that – but then why
everybody else does too.
My dad, Cecil Artus Howell (known as “Jack”
as a young man and in old age) and I had a complicated, infrequent, and
maddening relationship. Grieving might just be harder, or at least very
different, when this is the case. And I know (given my work!) that our relationship, while unique,
was hardly that unusual. I suspect that’s why Jesus stored up his best energy
and imagination for that story about the wonderful father who threw a party for
his lost son – as if Jesus knew some of us who have a hollow or painful place
where “father” is supposed to be would desperately need to know that God is our
father and is like that father, instead of like our own fathers.
Positives: my dad was raised in a warm,
hard-working, pious Baptist family in Oakboro, a little town in Stanly County
about an hour from Charlotte. Growing up, I spent much time there with my
grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. It was heavenly, like a womb of
compassion and joy. I wonder if God grants some of us an experience of such an “other”
place so we will know to long for and even expect that beyond this life there
really is a “better place.”
My dad’s family endured the Great
Depression. Tough people - and, like many Depression survivors, always a bit
fearful you might run out of money one day. He never went to a day of college,
and covered this fact up deftly throughout life, which is not easy. As a
mechanical engineer producing nuclear fuel at Westinghouse in his second
career, he hired and supervised college- and graduate school-trained people. He
always knew he knew more than they did. He could fix or build anything,
diagnose what was awry in any machine and make it all good. He changed the oil
in his car into his nineties and did his own plumbing, not because he was cheap
(which he was), but because he wanted to be sure it was done right.
As part of that “greatest generation,” he
left the small Oakboro school after grade 11 and joined the Army Air Corps. Flew in
World War II, the Berlin Air Lift, and briefly into Vietnam. He did what Sarah
Palin claimed to do: stationed in Alaska, he and other flyers kept an eye on
the Russians, back in the 50's. Like most World War II veterans I’ve known, he was humble about
it (even about being shot down over Europe), with no trace of rah-rah patriotism.
I was born on Hunter Air Force Base in
Savannah, where we lived until I was 8. My dad earned stripes, and taught me to
march and shine my shoes (which were duly inspected every Saturday evening). In
1964, he retired with full benefits, moved us back to North Carolina briefly,
then landed his job with Westinghouse in Columbia, SC, where he worked until
retirement – which he flunked twice, returning to work after a few weeks of
realizing he didn’t have much else to do.
Having come to adolescence during the
Depression, money mattered in a big way to my dad. He was frugal with what he
earned, and invested aggressively and smartly in the stock market. After
retirement, he became a day trader, watching the ups and downs of stocks all
day, every day. If I called and said How
are you doing? his answer indicated if the market was up or down. Into his
90’s, he bore that stress all day, every day. His knowledge of corporate America was astonishing. For an uneducated guy with zero
family money, he made a lot, and was proud of it. And cheap. I always paid for
dinner; he put up no fight at all.
Now to the harder aspects of things. My dad
was, somewhere deep inside, a tender, loving soul. His family was that way. It
would peek out now and then. But mostly I experienced him as distant, cold,
critical. He never said things like I
love you. When he died, many Facebook comments said “I know he was so proud
of you.” But this was not something he ever said, to me or anybody else about me. I read
the words, and feel a slight jolt of wishing he had been. He was sharply
dismissive of my going into the ministry, thinking this was a “waste” of my
life. He abounded with criticism. My clothes, my car, my inability to fix a car, my friends. Nothing suited.
He was distant: when he was in the Air
Force, his work took him away for weeks, even months at a time. When he
returned home, he gave great hugs. But then he was gone again. In adult life,
he just was distant. His telephone evidently was a one-way contraption. It
could receive my calls, but it seemed incapable of calling me. He never ever in
calls or visits asked things like How are
you doing? How are your children? How is your work? I’ve wondered if he had
some kind of narcissistic disorder. Intriguing to diagnose maybe, but not a
happy circumstance when it’s your father who’s the narcissist. He very rarely
saw my children. I don’t believe he saw my son, his only grandson, until he was
nearly 3. He never came to a ballgame or a ballet recital. He rarely remembered
anybody’s birthday. He never volunteered. He never made a donation to a non-profit
or church.
I don’t blame him all that much, oddly. He
married my mother, and they waged a long, dispiriting, bloody war with one
another (like so many marriages, although people cloak this fact and pretend otherwise). Shouting, throwing things, physical battle, stomping out in a rage:
this was my home life. It is a gross understatement to say my mother was a prickly,
difficult person. Yet he loved her. A touching moment, very late in his life: after
he was mired in the nursing home, with no visits allowed due to Covid, I began
printing out and mailing him old photos every day – from his teenage and early
military years, of his siblings, his parents, his flying buddies. He loved this!
I found photos of his wedding to my mother. After hesitating, I sent them
anyhow. He phoned me: his phone actually was a 2-way phone! and spoke tenderly
of how beautiful she was, how much he had loved her, how he wished he could
have made it work.
But it didn’t work, and their battlefield
was littered with the debris that was my childhood, and my sister’s. I remember
telling him I was going to college. He seemed puzzled, and tried briefly to dissuade
me, suggesting I get a job and support myself. Mind you, he didn’t support me.
I worked my own way through school, and with no regrets at all. About that
time, he reconnected with an old flame, Bonnie, the deep love of his life. An
ugly divorce case ensued – but then he was free from my mother. He and Bonnie spent every
waking minute together. In their 30 years of marriage, they spent one night
apart. But she was icy, didn’t want to be around my dad’s kids, or my kids.
And so I don’t blame him so much. Yet,
people say “Enjoy your happy memories!” I can recall a handful from childhood. His
hugs when returning home. Playing catch a few times. He came to a couple of my
football games in high school. But in my entire adult life, it would be hard to
point to some moment and say Aha, now
that was a happy memory. Naturally, I blame myself too often about this.
What could I have done to make things different? I tried. But maybe I was too
proud? Did I get this trait from him, along with a tenacious work ethic and a resilient
stubbornness?
I was
impressed at times by my dad. His third wife, Lorraine, began to suffer from
Alzheimer’s shortly after their marriage. I watched him visit her in the
nursing home, when she showed no flash of recognition – and he held her hand,
kissed her, spoke tender words of love to her, combed her hair, every day. That
is a memory that makes me happy.
People have said many religious things to me
since he died. “He’s with God,” or “You’ll be together in heaven,” or whatever.
I most certainly hope so. Yet he not only thought it was a waste of my life to
be a pastor. He seemed to believe church was a waste of time. He never said so,
but then he never attended. Well, he came to my wedding in a church, and to one
of my three children’s baptisms in a church, to an occasional family funeral,
and even to worship at Myers Park Church a couple of times, clearly dragged
there by Lorraine before her dementia set in. I did ask him late in life if he ever
prayed. He laughed, and then growled, “Yeah, I pray for my stocks to go up.”
So if you believe my dad is in heaven, now,
you have to have a pretty expansive theology of who goes to heaven. I have
space in my theological mind for people like my dad who don’t go to church, who
don’t pray, who don’t believe, who don’t make the slightest effort to follow
Jesus, who don’t do anything for anybody else, to be with God forever. I’ve been stridently criticized
by church people over many years for writing and thinking such thoughts. Yet I
know I am in good company with many of our greatest theologians and church
leaders, from Origen to C.S. Lewis to Karl Barth. If you prefer to think of him in eternal perdition, I pity you. I believe he is with God, not because he was my dad, but because of what we know about the heart of God. Fortunately, God has
liberated us from having to know or decide on such things. Ours is, of course,
to hope.
I suspect Freud was right in some ways I
cannot fathom just now. Since my dad died, I’ve been in a funk. No tears. At least not yet. But a
numbness. I’ve not been answering the phone, even when called by my dearest
friends. I don’t really have words I can attach to this mood, the drumbeat of
feelings that aren’t the usual kind of grief. I’m not mad, or resentful. Even
his impassioned admonition to me as a 20 year old who had just announced I was
going into the ministry, “You only have one life; don’t waste it,” I still
welcome as giving me the laser focus I needed for why I would do such a thing. I
think I’m just sad. Maybe. I’m not fond of could’ves or should’ves. My father
died. Period. A complicated life. Like everyone’s, I suppose. With lasting
impacts on others. Like everyone’s. He was my father. I favor him. He's tangled deep in my soul. Always will be.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to every
person who has reached out to me. You’ve buoyed me up and encouraged me. I
think of the times I have most likely assumed things about relationships that
were off kilter, maybe a little hurtful. I hope they too were well-received as
bumbling but sincere expressions of love and care. Let’s never assume though.
Let us never say I know how you feel. If you ask How do you feel? you might get an earful, like this blog. Or the
person might do the best she can muster in the moment, which is to say Fine. We are. And we will be. Mostly
likely, and hopefully, forever, if God our Father’s love is as all-encompassing
and tender as we dream it surely must be.
