Last week I wrote about the memorial service I created for my father six months after he'd died without a funeral (see below). Years later I realized that ritual wasn’t, first and foremost, a memorial to him. We had remembered him well in that ceremony, certainly. But that night was really about marking a rite of passage for me.
It was about my becoming fully and finally a fatherless daughter.
My entire life had been shaped by losing my dad. I lost him first to his work (as an ob-gyn, he spent most of my birthdays attending the births of other children). Once I’d started grade school, he was absorbed in a secret affair that, once revealed, triggered two years of tormented back-and-forth between his lover and the nuclear family unit of me, my sister, and our mother.
It was about my becoming fully and finally a fatherless daughter.
My entire life had been shaped by losing my dad. I lost him first to his work (as an ob-gyn, he spent most of my birthdays attending the births of other children). Once I’d started grade school, he was absorbed in a secret affair that, once revealed, triggered two years of tormented back-and-forth between his lover and the nuclear family unit of me, my sister, and our mother.
On summer visitation once my dad had moved to Hawaii.
My parents divorced on my twelfth birthday. Six days later my father and the woman who would become my stepmother moved 6,000 miles away, across a continent and an ocean, in a self-imposed exile that lasted twenty years.
By the time my dad was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, I had so much practice in losing him that I knew how I wanted to do it this final time. I spent eighteen months as his part-time caregiver. It was the best our relationship had ever been. When he died, I felt incredibly grateful for the time we’d had together.
How I made peace with my father and my journey to forgiveness is a story for another post. But the ceremony that evening in my backyard when we were flooded with bright white light was the capstone of that process. As I said that night, “This ritual is about letting go of the bargains, the needs, the wounds. It's about embracing the eternal – the love that does not die, the lessons learned that leave their mark, the space in which we hold each other that transcends our physical beings.”
It was during my training as a Funeral Celebrant ten years later that I realized that there was more to say about my father. Not who he was to me, in his presence and his absence. But who he was as a man. As so I wrote him the eulogy he’d never had. I looked back through photos and reread the written remembrances I had solicited from my sister, his sisters, former patients, and family friends in the months after his death. I worked to capture and convey his essence.
On the 10th anniversary of my father’s death, I invited several friends back to my house for a simple remembrance ceremony. Once again, I laid out my father’s artifacts. I queued up the Jim Croce song. This time, I shared his eulogy. Then I emailed it to my stepmother, my mother, my sister, my aunts.
Two weeks later, on what would have been my father’s 75th birthday, I traveled up to Washington State where he had lived his last days to meet up with my stepmother and some of their old friends. We took a couple of bottles of champagne to my dad’s favorite wetlands, walked out on the boardwalk in the setting autumn sun, and toasted my father’s memory.
By the time my dad was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, I had so much practice in losing him that I knew how I wanted to do it this final time. I spent eighteen months as his part-time caregiver. It was the best our relationship had ever been. When he died, I felt incredibly grateful for the time we’d had together.
How I made peace with my father and my journey to forgiveness is a story for another post. But the ceremony that evening in my backyard when we were flooded with bright white light was the capstone of that process. As I said that night, “This ritual is about letting go of the bargains, the needs, the wounds. It's about embracing the eternal – the love that does not die, the lessons learned that leave their mark, the space in which we hold each other that transcends our physical beings.”
It was during my training as a Funeral Celebrant ten years later that I realized that there was more to say about my father. Not who he was to me, in his presence and his absence. But who he was as a man. As so I wrote him the eulogy he’d never had. I looked back through photos and reread the written remembrances I had solicited from my sister, his sisters, former patients, and family friends in the months after his death. I worked to capture and convey his essence.
On the 10th anniversary of my father’s death, I invited several friends back to my house for a simple remembrance ceremony. Once again, I laid out my father’s artifacts. I queued up the Jim Croce song. This time, I shared his eulogy. Then I emailed it to my stepmother, my mother, my sister, my aunts.
Two weeks later, on what would have been my father’s 75th birthday, I traveled up to Washington State where he had lived his last days to meet up with my stepmother and some of their old friends. We took a couple of bottles of champagne to my dad’s favorite wetlands, walked out on the boardwalk in the setting autumn sun, and toasted my father’s memory.
Theler Wetlands, October 17, 2011
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