The 9th of October 2003 was a seminal day. My father had major knee surgery that involved having a halo frame fitted to the leg. It was supposed to fix significant leg and knee pain, but that five-month journey sent him close to the brink of despair.
But the 9th of October 2003 was also significant for a short conversation I had with my mother about my commitment to never drink again, my first marriage in tatters. Little did Mum and I know just how close Dad and I would get over the ensuing months.
The frame around Dad’s leg needed regular adjusting, and the wounds where the metal bars penetrated the skin into his leg needed cleaning morning and night. He was basically immobile and each and every time he moved his leg over those months involved acute physical pain.
One day he was moving in the house on the walking frame or crutches and he fell hard and it was a traumatic experience for us to help him up he was in that much pain.
It was during these times Dad would break down, and though Dad is a gentle and humble man, he’s also not given to tears.
I know the sort of pain that Dad was enduring—the physical pain—was made doubly worse because of the vicarious emotional pain he was suffering seeing me suffering. I would sit there with Mum and Dad in the living room at times and just lament, repeating the same narratives of grief and torment, having lost wife, easy access to my daughters, home, etc. Mum and Dad would sit there and be present in my pain, which must have been just so painful for them. But they never reacted angrily, with advice, or in any harmful way. They just listened to my repetitious lamenting and stayed with me. Every. Single. Time.
There were more than a couple of times when Dad and I broke down together and embraced each other. I don’t think we’d ever hugged as father and son before this. I was 36. It’s just not what sons and fathers did in our culture or time. (We’ve hugged regularly ever since.)
The pain that Dad was enduring broke him, but it made him more available to me. The pain I was enduring broke me, but that pain made me more available to him—especially given they were my chosen helpers, besides sponsors and friends in AA and later the church.
Even though we would never choose to return to that season, and even though we both hated it, it made our relationship stronger than it’s ever been.
That ‘manly’ culture of needing to be too tough for tears melted away in the midst of our pain. That macho way of doing life fell away amid pain machoism has no answer for.
You either bear the pain in brokenness or you evade it through substance abuse or some other form of denial. For us, both of us non-drinkers, there was no escape other than to be broken every now and then. Tears were never truly far away in the lament we were both experiencing, and Mum faithfully rode that journey together with us.
Thankfully, the journey of pain and loss meandered and changed throughout that year, and I found myself back in church and embraced and growing there, while Dad had the halo device removed and gradually enjoyed more function.
Our relationship was strengthened through our weakness. What softened us both did us no harm. What was set to break us didn’t destroy us. Indeed, we were stronger for bearing the pain in the only right way we can bear pain—by continuing to show up after it had broken us, again and again.
Sometimes it’s the very thing that we never see coming, that challenges every semblance of sensibility, that becomes the cause of the making of us.
One thing’s for sure: I love my Dad, and he loves me. And I know that my two brothers feel the same way.
**Whenever I think about how much I love my Dad, I’m inspired by James Blunt’s video Monsters that depicts his love for his Dad (in the image).
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