I’ve heard the quote “death ends a life, but not a relationship” attributed to several people. I first saw and spoke the line in 1993 when I played the role of Gene Garrison in a local community theater production of Robert Anderson’s
I Never Sang for My Father, originally produced in 1968. My other regular exposure to this arresting yet quite sensible notion comes once every year, when the Unitarian church I belong to includes it in a liturgy in remembrance of the deceased. And though the service is intended most for those who were lost in the year just past, you can certainly remember anyone you’re inclined to remember.
My father died at the age of 86 just after Christmas last year--December 29, 2010. At this writing, that’s only about a month ago. I don’t expect the relationship to end before I join him in the way of all flesh. In a powerful sense, our own selves are made up of the influences of countless other selves, with our longest and most significant relationships asserting their presence insistently, in a variety of ways.
Robert Penn Warren first published his essay “Portrait of a Father” in 1987 in
The Southern Review. His father had died about 32 years earlier, but of course the reflections and ruminations generated by that relationship didn’t end. In 1988, the University Press of Kentucky
published “Portrait” as a book, including the longish poem “Mortmain.” The poem’s title refers to the ongoing influence of the dead on the living. Warren himself died in September of 1989.
Warren begins thusly: “My father, as the years since his death pass, becomes to me more and more a man of mystery. I do not mean to say that I do not know the man he was . . . . What is mysterious is the personal history from which that man emerged. This involves, of course, the mystery of his family, especially his mother and father.”
So it seems safe to say that Warren didn’t finish assimilating the business of his family history, as it came through his father, before he died. People talk of getting “closure” on their relationships with parents before the old ones die, or "closure" with other significant people before they themselves die. I personally see this “closure” as not only overrated, but far more elusive than generally believed. I don’t expect my own life to end as a neatly resolved narrative. My relationship with my father--one not ended by death--remains open to exploration and interpretation. The overarching story does not end.
I know very little about my father’s father, the only one of my grandparents who died before I was born. This grandfather owned a farm when my father was born, but in 1932, when my father was seven years old, the house on the farm burned down, so he sold the place to his brother-in-law and moved to town, working as a clerk at various times in a grocery store or hardware store. My father described him as a man of few words who commanded attention when he did speak.
My father’s mother I knew well, having spent a lot of time in her company, alone sometimes, and more often with members of the extended family. I remember her as buoyant, talkative, opinionated, energetic, and not averse to an occasional bawdy joke, as long as the joke didn’t transgress propriety too far. I was very fond of her.
Questions of where my father came from--his own origins and influences--bear on the question of the distance between him and me. While it’s certainly true that a historical continuity crosses generations and holds them together, it’s also the case that most of us, especially in times of rapid culture change, see gaps, if not gulfs, of perception and interpretation of the world open up between ourselves and our parents. So in the case of my relationship with my father, we spent part of our time together and apart working out various accommodations to the distance.
In the late sixties and early seventies, we argued. We disagreed, among other things, on politics, as he was traditional and I as a young man was excited by the novel possibilities offered up by the deliciously tumultuous cultural pageant around us. And in a way, he still was the authority and I the rebel. Good conditions for establishing the kind of relationship that requires a covenant--the kind of mutual obligation growing out of a well-known Biblical form. A natural extension of our father-child bond, one that often, but not always, follows into the son's adulthood.
My father grew up in the Great Depression, and for him, work with good pay, benefits, and job security was a great blessing and all one need hope for. For me, what I’ve always seen as problematic--a system that places what’s conventionally seen as economically efficient over the needs of the human spirit--a good job would have been one I felt more at home in, one friendly to my values and natural inclinations.
His view certainly has its advantages. I’ve come more and more to feel that mine has been too idealistic, as I’ve moved in mid-life and beyond into more pragmatic territory, somewhat reluctantly toward a clear-eyed view of the world as it is rather than what I would prefer it to be. But I’ve never wanted to accept what’s there as being just and right and simply because it is in fact there.
We worked together, my father and I, in his small manufacturing business, for fourteen years, a time that ended almost 20 years ago. During those years, we intensified the informal hermeneutic of each other we’d already begun, each trying to interpret what exactly the other one was, looking for clues that were new or at least refined versions of the ones we had. I like to believe the process itself became more refined over those years. This attempt at mutual knowing, at overlapping interpretations, stretched into his last days, as we continued the longtime habitual work of knowing each other better.
And I still had the “me” of my own earlier years, the part of my capacious, often inconsistent “self” that is certainly more varied and more malleable than I used to think it was. Memories and experience from those older regions of myself were always there to resonate in a territory of life I shared with my father.
He was good to me, and followed his lights, often if not always right, in being also good
for me. As a boy I wanted what so many boys want--to be like someone who was a little farther along, allowed to do more important things. My father was in the immemorial chain of fathers who’d helped boys along that path. At one time, I’d have learned to harness a team and drive a wagon. In the time and place I lived in, I learned to drive cars. I wanted to start early, and I wanted to know not only how to drive them, but how they worked. He was helpful with both areas, as he was with bicycling and hunting. He talked seriously with me about politics, and I listened to him talk with others about it. I kept the habit of such conversations, but changed some of my allegiances.
I spoke briefly at his funeral, something I wouldn’t have thought I’d do. What came to me to talk about was what I’d learned from him about the vital importance of maintaining relationships in the presence of conflict--a vital element in the covenantal agreement. Relationships are more important than the doctrines and dogmas people cling to so desperately, as if their lives depend upon their allegiance to human constructs. Constructs must now and forever take a back seat to the fundamental need to maintain relationships. Most of us, unfortunately, aren’t very good at subordinating our ideas to the need to live with others. That’s always a shame, and often destructive. One day, it may be apocalyptically destructive.
In my remarks at the funeral service, after my father’s Baptist pastor spoke, I mentioned my own Unitarian affiliation, saying that we Unitarians are fond of quoting our 16th century European forbear Francis David, who said: “We need not think alike to love alike.” After we’d had our last conversation, it struck me that, at a deep level, my father understood this and insisted on it.
Most substantial, lasting relationships include an ongoing desire for mutual understanding. Exploring the territories of those you care about, and the territories between you, is quite possibly the most rewarding human occupation, the best thing we can do with our limited time.
Who am I? Where did I come from? That’s too complex a question for anything like a full answer. But I know some of the contributors to my identity. I feel my father’s presence among the forces telling me who I am.
A stanza from Robert Penn Warren’s poem “Whatever You Now Are” suggests the difficulty of trying to reach some, well, closure about an answer:
Is it you that flows from distance, to distance,
With the tune of time and blood intertwined forever?
Or does the dark stream of log-ripple and stone-chance
Define the pattern of your whole life’s endeavor?
What elements, shadowy, in that dream interlace
In a region past categories of Time and Space?
The poem ends with the question open even wider:
. . . music drifts to your shadowy cave
Of consciousness, whoever you now are--
But dawn breaks soon, and that self will have fled away.
Will a more strange one yet inhabit the precinct of day?
Will a more strange self yet emerge as a “you” (or me) in that forever-entwined “tune of time and blood”? It’s altogether likely. But the blood will have its say along with, and probably over and above, the shadowy elements. Time and blood together shape distinctive people who interact with each other from different vantage points.
We are shaped first by biology, then by the human history running through a very specific--unique, actually--time and place. And chance has its say as well. We have little control over most of these things, but at least some control over the ways we relate to each other. We should remember this, take care in it, and take joy in it.
