Finding My Father
I lost my father when I was just a three-year-old kid, but his death, at the early age of forty-five, led me to become a nurse.
Growing up, I had no memories of him. Of course my mother told my brothers and me stories about “Daddy.” We knew he died of a heart attack in our home. We’d heard the story so many times we could picture him sitting in the big red chair in the living room and then just slumping over, leaving us. We could almost hear his newspaper rustling as it fell to the floor. But we weren’t there.
That was our mythology as we jumped in that big red chair or passed by my father’s photograph, a handsome man looking out at us wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a maroon tie, a man with kind eyes, a half-smile.
But we didn’t think of him. We had my mother. We said a prayer to him every night, a prayer rattled off like a jump-rope rhyme. On some level he was there, the thought of him present in the background of our lives. But we were kids. Deciding who got to wear the Davy Crockett raccoon-tail hat or discovering what was for dinner was more important to us than thoughts of our dead parent.
School changed that. My fourth grade teacher handed out forms for us to complete. I tackled mine until I came to the blank for “father.” I stopped. Everyone else was writing busily. The teacher had her back to me. I raised my hand and kept it up until finally she turned around.
“What do I put for father?” I asked.
She studied me for a moment, as if she were truly seeing me for the first time. “Deceased,” she said curtly and swung back to her work.
What had she said? What was that word? I didn’t even know how to spell it.
But that day, and for many days after, that was my father. Not a pilot or a doctor or a man who carried a briefcase. Not a presence in my life, someone to take me to the Father-Daughter breakfasts, those ordinary affairs with diluted orange juice and stacks of donuts. But they would have been amazing for me had my father been there. In the pre-divorce age of the 1950’s my brothers and I were the only children in our grade school without a father.
I felt the sting of this hole in my life even more as I grew. Graduations. Dating. My friends claimed they could convince their fathers of things more easily than their mothers. I ached for this connection and found myself yelling at my mother when we argued about boys. I would turn away from her, wishing my father were alive—he would understand me.
And maybe I was on to something. I was surviving his loss, taking care of me. He had left me. I felt no solid connection to him and knew little about him. To change that, I sat with my mother, who I really, truly loved, and asked her to talk about my father.
He was a dentist. She told me how my father’s wonderful sense of humor helped offset the pain he had to inflict on his patients in those years prior to modern dentistry. At that time everyone hated the dentist. But not my father. When he died she received numerous letters stating how much he was loved and that there would never be anyone like him. This made sense to me, for often the mention of my unusual last name elicited questions from adults who had known my father, praised his reputation and stressed that his early death was a true tragedy.
Then my mother took out some old photos, including a series taken of my father in his new dental office.
And then there was one more photo.
“It’s from dental school,” my mother explained of the black and white photo of my father and a large group of students in white coats standing in a medical theatre near two cadaver tables.
“It’s gross I said,” turning away.
And I was right. It was gross anatomy.
In my thirties when I discovered I had a benign heart valve condition, I suddenly wanted to know more about my father’s medical history. This led me to read every article about medicine I came across and to search for information about heart valves and heart disease.
I read books by Dr. Oliver Sacks and Dr. Richard Selzer. I slipped my father’s lavaliere from dental school onto a gold chain and wore it.
I kept reading. I read about diet and high cholesterol and plaque and blocked arteries. I was approaching my mid-forties. And I was my father’s daughter.
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