The Funeral of a Man I Barely Knew
My father was hard on me, absent from my life for thirty-five years, and impossible to reduce to either villain or saint.
My father was hard on me, absent from my life for thirty-five years, and impossible to reduce to either villain or saint. I went to his funeral anyway by video link. I am glad I did.
My father, Frederick Page Wright, died after having been absent from my life for thirty-five years.
There are sentences one can improve by adding adjectives. That is not one of them.
Thirty-five years is too long to call a disagreement. It is not a quarrel, nor a cooling of relations, nor one of those charming little family estrangements that novelists repair conveniently in the final chapter. Thirty-five years is a substantial portion of a human life.
He was my father.
And he was not there.
Both things are true.
People have an extraordinary appetite for simplifying the dead. Death apparently confers upon a person either sainthood or damnation, depending largely upon who is telling the story. Funerals are particularly accomplished at this. A complicated human being enters the coffin and, somewhere between the hearse and the lectern, emerges as a collection of admirable adjectives.
I have never found adjectives terribly trustworthy.
My father was hard on me.
Very hard.
He was a soldier, and soldiers are trained in a profession where hesitation has consequences and softness is rarely listed among the required qualifications. Perhaps some of that followed him home. Perhaps too much of it did.
There were things I resented.
There are things I still resent. But, in passing, so do these.
I see no virtue in pretending otherwise simply because the man is dead. Death deserves respect, but it does not deserve perjury.
Yet neither does resentment deserve sovereignty.
That may be one of the more inconvenient discoveries of growing older: eventually you realise that the people who hurt you were themselves unfinished human beings. They had histories before you arrived. They had failures you never witnessed, battles they never described, fears they disguised as anger, and hopes they were frequently too proud or too damaged to articulate.
Understanding that does not erase anything.
Nor should it.
But it changes the geometry of the thing.
My father had failings. Serious ones.
He also had a life.
And, in some respects, it was a life worth living.
He served. He endured. He built things, broke things, made decisions, made mistakes and continued occupying his small and stubborn portion of the world. He was not merely the man who disappointed me. No human being should be reduced entirely to the role they played in someone else’s unhappiness.
That would be convenient.
Convenience is very often the enemy of truth.
I wish he had lived differently.
I wish he had discovered earlier that strength and tenderness are not enemies. That being hard is not the same thing as being strong. That authority can compel obedience but cannot manufacture affection.
Perhaps he learned some of that eventually.
Perhaps he became a better man.
I don’t know.
And there is something strangely important in admitting those three words.
I don’t know.
We live in an age terrified of uncertainty. Everyone must apparently have a verdict. Good father. Bad father. Good man. Bad man. Victim. Villain. Hero.
Human lives rarely cooperate with such tidy bookkeeping.
A man may fail his son and still possess courage.
A man may behave badly and later behave well.
A man may spend decades becoming someone his children never get the opportunity to meet.
Or he may not.
I simply don’t know.
For thirty-five years, my father and I occupied different worlds. There will now be no grand reconciliation. No cinematic conversation. No final explanation in which everything that happened is rearranged into something beautiful.
Life is rarely so considerate.
The account is closed with several entries unresolved.
And yet I went to watch his funeral.
I am glad I did.
Not because attending rewrote history. It did not.
Not because death erased what came before. It cannot.
I went because he was my father.
Without him, there is no me.
That fact is almost embarrassingly obvious, but obvious truths are often the ones sophisticated people work hardest to avoid. Whatever else passed between us, my existence began partly with his.
There is gratitude in that alone.
Not obedience.
Not absolution.
Gratitude.
They are different things.
I stood there not to declare that everything had been forgiven, forgotten or magically made right. I stood there because a life had ended, and because that life was connected irrevocably to mine.
Perhaps funerals are not really about settling accounts.
Perhaps they are about finally recognising that some accounts cannot be settled.
My father was hard on me.
Perhaps some of what I became came from resisting him. Perhaps some came from imitating him despite myself. Fathers have an irritating habit of surviving in their sons in precisely the places where the sons insist they do not.
There are qualities in myself whose genealogy I can probably trace back to him.
Persistence.
Stubbornness.
A certain refusal to surrender merely because surrender would be more comfortable.
These characteristics can be virtues or catastrophes. Much depends upon where one points them.
Perhaps that was true of him as well.
I wish he had found a better way to live his life.
I wish he had found it earlier.
That is not condemnation. In some ways, it is the saddest compliment I can give him: there was more there than what he managed to make of it.
Perhaps there was more in all of us.
The dead do not require us to lie about them.
But neither do they deserve to be imprisoned forever inside the worst thing we remember.
Frederick Page Wright was my father.
For thirty-five years, he was not part of my life.
He was a soldier.
He was hard on me.
He was flawed.
He lived.
And perhaps, somewhere along the way, he changed.
Maybe he became a better man.
Maybe he did not.
I don’t know.
But I attended his funeral.
And I am glad I did.
Sometimes there is no reconciliation.
There is only recognition.
And sometimes, at the very end, that has to be enough.