Some thoughts on Father's Day
My dad was a complicated and melancholic person. I think about him a lot.
It’s Father’s Day, and as holidays go, it’s.. honestly not much of one, is it? We sort of intuitively get why Mother’s Day makes sense — moms are so long suffering and so fundamental to our upbringing, and the debt we owe them is so profound. But Father’s Day wasn’t even established as a recognized holiday in the United States until 1972 (thanks, President Nixon!). And at least in my family, while Mother’s Day always necessitated nice and thoughtful gestures — it had the aura of this is a real thing we’re doing — Father’s Day was acknowledged at most with a card.
But of course, having a particular holiday to think about and honor dad is still useful. And given that my own dad passed away in 2014, it’s nice to have a day that causes me to remember him and reflect on things.
My dad was born in 1931 in Castlebellingham, Ireland. His family moved not long after he was born to Dunshaughlin, a small village of about 200 people, 20 miles or so outside of Dublin.1 At the age of 11, dad left home to attend boarding school at St. Finian’s College in Mullingar (a proper boys’ school, with all the history and prejudice you’d expect — it didn’t admit girls until 2003). To the extent that we might tend to think of a mid-century Irish Catholic boarding school as an enchanted Hogwarts-type castle, St. Finian’s was not that. If I were to use the language that’s in fashion today, I might even say it “traumatized” my father, but of course dad would never, ever have described it that way. He just hated it. He never forgot how cruel and how isolating and how horrible it was. He felt robbed of an essential part of his childhood. But that was really all he’d ever say about it.
He eventually graduated from St. Finian’s and, being the smart, motivated, male child in a family of four children, he was dutifully enrolled in the seminary thereafter. I don’t know how much choice he really had in the matter. I don’t think the notion of “choice” was even really much discussed or thought about in those days. It’s just what was. Dad trained to become a priest. In 1959 (or maybe it was ‘57, I can’t remember), he moved to the United States to continue his vocation, he attended graduate school in theology at Nortre Dame and Marquette, and he was eventually assigned as a diocesan priest in Springfield, Missouri.
Dad was a priest for 16 years, from 1959 until he married my mother in 1975. Though they met in the United States, my parents were actually married in England, after they had moved back to Ireland in the early 70s (they would then move back to the US shortly before I was born). Even though Mom was also Catholic herself, it caused no small amount of scandal that dad left the priesthood to marry someone sixteen years his junior. There was also plenty of scandal to go around on mom’s side of the family, given that she ran away to Ireland and got married under these circumstances. It all sounds so rigid and old fashioned now, but.. the twentieth century was full of weighty expectations about how things should be and what people ought to do, wasn’t it?
Dad was a priest, but by the time I came along he was at best agnostic on the subject of whether God even exists, much less whether He’s good and wants good things for us.2 Dad absolutely eschewed the idea that there was some profound, deeper meaning behind life’s struggles. Suffering simply is. People can be kind and loving, and they can be cruel and hateful. Everyone is capable of ignorance and enlightenment, and there’s no real through line that ties it all together. As a parent, this philosophy absolutely made Dad the more understanding of the two, between he and mom. Mom could get mad and scream and yell. Dad would be disappointed or even sanguine about things, but always resigned to just accepting that life was like that sometimes. When he lost his temper, it was always in sort of a flailing, tired, and hopeless sort of way — never because he actually felt ill will toward me or my brother. He always felt terribly ashamed and sullen in the aftermath at having let things get to him.
Growing up with a non-American parent was its own unique experience that I wouldn’t have traded for anything. At the time, yes, it was a reason I felt I “stuck out” and sticking out is the absolute worst thing in the world for a child. My dad was older and he had a funny accent and he talked with an almost Moira Rose-esque vocabulary. I was self-conscious about it. But I also knew that it gave me a perspective I would never have had otherwise. Dad saw Americans through the lens of an outsider. He saw our habits, our traditions, our oppressive, rapacious, monolithic consumer culture that gets re-packaged and exported all over the world — as something that could be remarked on and assessed. “Fish don’t know they’re wet,” the saying goes — and I don’t think other kids my age had the opportunity to actually appreciate the water they swam in as Americans. Dad never stopped being fascinated (or at times repulsed) by all of it.
Was I close to my dad? I think a lot of people struggle with this question when it comes to their fathers. Certainly there was more between us that was tacitly understood than was said explicitly. He knew I was gay, and he was fully accepting of that. I think his experience as a priest taught him there were so, so many people who were profoundly unhappy because their sexuality stood in the way of letting them find peace. So he was grateful I was lucky enough to be able to take a different path. I’d like to think I grew to understand him. And I was grateful for having him in my life, and I learned a tremendous amount from him. Of course, I mean that he taught me things like the rules of baseball and chess and how to ride a bike and how to cook spaghetti carbonara. But more than that I learned about politics and people and history and how the world works and what it means for things to be fair or not fair and what we can change in the world and what we must accept. I’d like to think I learned patience. And steadiness. And I learned that when all else fails, one can simply read a book and escape a little.
My dad had a very strong personality that naturally drew people in, but he also hated anything that felt like a spotlight or could be viewed as attention-seeking. I think Dad was fundamentally very melancholy about a lot of life, and that’s probably a sensibility I’ve largely inherited. “Melancholy” doesn’t mean depressed, of course. It just means an appreciation for the more somber, muted side of things. To be melancholy is to appreciate and reflect on the sadder bits in everything that happens. A little sad about birthdays and big events. A little sad at New Year’s as we mark the passage of time. But it also means being content and even a little comforted by that lingering sense of sadness. It’s a thermostatic condition. As long as I can tap into the little bit of sadness that exists in life’s most joyous and celebratory moments, I know I’m not going to get too carried away with unbridled, irrational happiness. I’ll be grounded. And then the actually sad times won’t be quite so miserable. Everything will maintain a sense of balance.
Dad passed away before the age of smart phones took over absolutely everything and before Donald Trump and all the terribleness and ugliness of the modern political world boiled to the surface.3 Before the pandemic, thank god. But he had lived through World War II as a child, and he remembered hearing the planes dropping bombs over Dublin as he sat at home in the middle of the night with the windows covered. And he had been a priest through the violent and chaotic 1960s in the United States. He had family who had taken part in and been victims of the brutal Irish political struggles of the twentieth century. He had a profound appreciation for how bad things could really be, and thus how truly wondrous and remarkable it was that, on the whole, things usually weren’t all that bad. I don’t know that he ever put much thought into making weighty choices in life — I don’t think he ever really charted an intentional journey from a village in Ireland, to the priesthood, to the United States, to getting married at 43 and having kids at the age of 48 and 52, to living in a small town in Missouri and happily reading and playing golf. These things all just kind of came together for him.4 And that was ok. Isn’t life kinda like that for most of us? Why bother trying to plan it all out — it’s going to unfold in ways we can’t possibly predict, as long as we’re open to what comes along.
My dad died in March of 2014, about six weeks after Sam and I had our first date in DC. He had been dealing with congestive heart failure for about ten years at that point, and after one particularly bad trip to the hospital he was told he’d need to start dialysis if he wanted to continue living and he quickly dismissed the idea of doing so out of hand. He was 82. He was very much at peace with the fact that his time had come. My mom sometimes expresses a worry that my brother and I don’t think about Dad enough, or that we don’t feel sad enough about his passing. I suppose people who lose their spouses (particularly at my mom’s age — she was in her mid-60s) feel an enormous sense of unease about what life’s going to be like now that their spouse is gone. But losing a parent is sort of more natural. It’s just — the time that comes, when it comes. I was fortunate to be of an age that I was more or less ready for it. I do think about him a lot as I get older. I think about his influence on me and on my brother, and how grateful I am for the things he taught me. I wish he had gotten the chance to meet Sam. And to see our life here. But .. I have my memories of him. I’d like to think there are times I have his patience, his wisdom, and yes, melancholic disposition that I can draw on for strength. That means a lot.
Today Dunshaughlin is a Dublin exurb, with a population of 5600. So still small, but not quite a one-road village anymore.
I was baptized Catholic at my grandmother’s insistence, but didn’t have anything that could be called a “religious” upbringing. Except insofar as it was Missouri in the 80s and 90s, and Protestant Christian fundamentalism was in the air that everyone breathed. I went to Baptist vacation bible school with my friends because otherwise I would not have had friends.
Credit where credit is due, when Obama was elected in 2008, and Dad and I would talk politics, he was adamant that this did not mean there was a new dawn of racial peace and equanimity coming to the United States. He swore the backlash was coming, and it would be intense and ugly and it would show just how ignorant and backward people can really be. He sure as hell got that one right.
He had a stoic insistence that “people only make their problems worse by talking about them.” Which, admittedly, doesn’t sound great to today’s ears. But there was also a kernel of comforting truth in it. “Don’t persecute yourself,” he told me more times than I could count. If you’re angry, upset, anxious, frustrated with life — stop first and just ask, is letting go of this an option? Can I just accept and move on? It’s not a universal truth to live by, but it can help.