A FEW WORDS

The undelivered eulogy of an errant son

My father died sixteen years ago this month, and although my life has of course changed enormously in that time, I would not say there was a marked before/after effect when it happened.

While not exactly estranged, we were also never close. It came as a surprise to both me and my husband that after the initial shock, making arrangements with the Neptune Society, and easing my mother into her widowhood in Southern California, I returned to the Bay Area and wept for a solid half hour. The heart knows what it needs, and apparently, what it never got.

Since there was to be no proper funeral at graveside and my parents never belonged to any church, a memorial service was announced for three weeks later at my parents’ house. A respectable number of my father’s golf buddies and their wives, friends of many decades, and a few work colleagues milled and visited with sandwiches and wine while my mother sat in melancholy splendor in a chair receiving condolences.

As the afternoon was beginning to wear on, one of the more formal older men approached me to ask when the eulogy would be delivered. (This was the same man who, in the moments after, officiously thrust a Bible into my husband’s hands at the hospital urging him to read a passage aloud while we sat in the “Family Room;” never mind that none of us had ever set foot in a church or even been baptized, except my husband, a recovering Catholic, who calmly read something short because to call the old coot out on his presumptuousness then and there would have been even worse. This was the sort of good old boy my father cavorted with: well-meaning and generally clueless.)

In fact, I had never been to a funeral or service where a eulogy had been spoken by anyone other than the dude with the Bible. I was caught off-guard by that same guy’s now not entirely clueless question—if I’d had my wits I suppose I could have bum-rushed him up to the mantle with the urn and made him do it. But for whatever reasons of harried travel, cremation glitches (long story) and announcement printing, I had unfortunately failed to anticipate that a few words would be appropriate.

I asked my mother about it, and she off-handedly condoned the possibility of someone’s saying something if they wanted, but by then the apparent oversight had spread a whiff of embarrassment among the guests and the party wound down fairly quickly thereafter.

It was on the only adult son, of course, that the old-guard expected the honor and duty of delivering the eulogy to fall, and I fell short. In retrospect, I’m not sure I could have said anything more than a few rote platitudes, which might have been better than nothing.

In the spirit of better late than never, I’ve finally written those unspoken words with the perspective of sixteen years.

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We gather today to honor and remember my father—a good man, a decent man, the pillar of our family, gone to his reward not nine months after he was too frail from advanced heart disease to work any longer. May he rest in peace.

You wonder why, perhaps, I was unable to deliver this eulogy at the memorial service when it properly should have been, and I will tell you.

I loved my father, and he loved me—I know this—but I also know the kind of son my father hoped to have, and I know he was disappointed by the son he got, never able to make sense of the cards life dealt him.

In a moment of oxygen-deprived dementia near the end, he lashed out at his wife and bitterly reproved her for ruining his life. You see, she could not bear children of their own, and against his initial wish to adopt only a daughter, she convinced him also to adopt a son.

In the hope his boy would be a chip off the old block, I was named after him, and those first years of father and chip might have gone just fine, with wiffle balls and toy golf sets, if I had not early on begun to display a less than manly interest in dolls, make-believe, books, and quiet play, rather than the rough and tumble of sports and bravado.

Oh, he hid it alright, to outside eyes, but “throw like a girl” from a father’s own lips, and all the other subtle cues as milestones of traditional masculinity failed to materialize, soon signaled the need to everyone involved for grave concern about the future of the son most decidedly not following in his footsteps. Through my teenage years, our paths lead in increasingly different directions.

My father actually warned me against the attentions of the “wrong kind of men” as he trundled me off to college in the San Francisco Bay Area—the kind of man, as it happens, that I was destined, horrifyingly to both of us, to become. With the help of friends and counselors in college, I finally mustered the courage to face my internalized homophobia, and to believe my father had denounced homosexuals because he was ignorant of the reality of our essential humanity.

When I came out to him, he lamented balefully that I must have a death wish in the face of the AIDS crisis. His petulance and disgust toward me when I attempted to speak of my own fears, apprehension, and loneliness in my new identity lead to a total estrangement of over five years. We only ever settled into a grudging silence on the issue after I reinitiated contact. He met my husband, but we were not welcome to stay together in the same room in his house.

You must believe me when I say that in those few minutes I had alone with his lifeless body in the hospital, I apologized to my father for disappointing him, and told him I had always tried to be a good son.

And when I returned home after those first few days of settling affairs and consoling my mother in her sorrow, a dam of grief burst in me at the certainty that I had never been his pride and joy—not really, not like that—and now never would be.

Though mostly long forgotten, any remaining childish hope for that close relationship which can instill a profound sense of self-worth and confidence was lost forever. Later, my mother told me of his secret gambling addiction, and stories of drunkenness, both sociable and shameful—I imagined he felt these were the consolations due the father of the wrong kind of son.

You must forgive me if, at the time of his memorial service, I was unable to deliver a eulogy, if the sense of sadness—not so much at his death, but of our entire squandered life as father and son—weighed so heavily on me that even today I find it difficult to write these words without a deep sense of regret. You knew him as the life of the party, and so I think perhaps it was respectful for me to say nothing at the time about the secret shame he kept hidden, a shame he passed on to me.

To me, he was the hopelessly disappointed shadow over my own best self. After a lifetime of dread at the prospect of facing a troubled world without my father’s support or blessing, I have only very lately found strength and solace enough to deliver at last these few words of redemption.

I loved my father, and he loved me—I know this—and I will say no more about it.

Photo by Liane Metzler on Unsplash