My father died last night. He was 87 years old. It was his time. He was ready. I wasn’t. But then, I suspect that we never are. We only have one father in our lives and, if we’re lucky, he’s a good one. Mine was.
I can’t think of my father without thinking of fishing. I love to fish, he taught me to fish, and I passed that along to my kids. But the most meaningful fish of my life is a fish I never caught. Now, anyone who has ever fished with me knows that the world is full of fish I’ve never caught (why, the laws of physics may even be bent; I may have not caught more fish than have ever existed). But the fish I’m talking about was a flounder in the summer of 1984 or so. I was a teen. Being that age, I had a particularly difficult relationship with my father at that time. As I grew into myself and worked on figuring out who I was, a good part of that exercise was me pushing back on everything my father was, everything he wanted, everything he said, everything he even thought. I was….an unpleasant adolescent. And my father did not bend to my will. He pushed back. He loved me enough to stand fast, and to make me hate him, because he wasn’t going to stop being my father, even if that required standing strong and letting there be conflict.
There was a great distance between us – the greatest it had ever been and ever would be. We had functionally nothing in common. We could go weeks without meaningful conversation. But we had one thing – ONE THING – that we still shared; we loved to fish, and we still liked to do it together. So, reaching out to me, to try to hold on to that last, tenuous thread holding father and son together, he suggested we go on a fishing trip to south Texas, to the bay house of dear family friends where we’d had so many great trips before. I agreed, because hey, I loved fishing.
We had a great trip. We ate giant chicken fried steaks at the Brush Country Inn. We fished from a lighted pier all night long, every night for three days. And we caught fish, mostly speckled trout. But one night, I hooked into something big. My rod was bowed, it was a fight to get whatever it was to the dock. We were going to need the landing net. As I fought the fish close enough for us to finally get a glimpse, we saw that it was a beautiful, enormous flounder. Truly, the biggest flounder I’ve ever had on the line. I maneuvered him to the pier, my father laid out on his stomach with the landing net so he could reach as far out as possible to net the fish. As he lowered the net into the water, the flounder turned, shook his head once, and swam off. I felt in an instant when he threw the hook. My father flailed with the net, trying to scoop the fish before he got away. No dice. I was laughing – because of COURSE the best fish of the trip just shook the hook and swam away. That is the way of fishing with me. But what struck me was my dad’s reaction. He flailed with the net, and had a look of real anguish on his face. Anguish that the fish he wanted me to catch got away. Disappointment FOR me. Not IN me, but for me. He cared. In spite of all I’d put him through, how much I had alienated him, what mattered most to him was seeing ME have success. After all that had come between us – and still WAS standing between us – he loved me. Totally. Completely. Unconditionally. It still took us a long time to heal, and grow back together, but as we did so, I always remembered that fish, and how much he cared.
Through everything, my father’s love was an anchor. His love for me. His love for my mother – oh, how he loved my mother. His love for my wife – a relationship that was far from easy, but was bound up in that same complicated love that I experienced for a time. A relationship that drew upon her pastoral strength and presence, which when he needed it, at the very end – it was there. Given freely, with grace, and with a connection to the divine that, well if you know wife, you know from which it flows. And love for his grandkids. To a person, everyone I’ve talked to about my dad since his passing has mentioned how he adored them. How proud he was of them. How they reminded him of my mother, my wife, me, and sometimes even of him. To the end, he talked about how his love for them was what kept him going. What he loved the most about each of them was their kindness – their intelligence and their achievements mattered, but when he spoke of them, he always spoke of how good and decent they are.
Which makes sense, as his kindness was his enduring feature. There are things I knew of and saw along the way. When a family member was in a bind, how money was sent to solve the problem, no questions asked, and no expectation of repayment. And mind you, we were not a family of any great means. There also are things I didn’t know of before – how they opened their home to a young man as he started his cancer treatments in Houston and needed a safe place to stay. Again, no questions asked – just sharing of what they had, being kind because – well, why wouldn’t you be?
My father was a child of the border, and all that entails. Some of it was hard; he was separated from his parents often at a young age, because they weren’t going to send him to school in the crappy little Mexican ranching town they lived in. So he grew up mostly in Eagle Pass, with family. He found opportunity in education – a high school teacher told him and so many of his classmates that they could go to college, driving them to A&M – yes, A&M – in the local school bus to see the campus and watch a football game. He got that education, which let him live a life that took him on adventures around the world – his years working in Argentina, living in Buenos Aires with my mother, the two of them together living a life of dreams, was one of the highlights of his life.
Indeed, my father’s story cannot be told – not even a little bit – without talking about my mother. The best things in this world are love stories, the real love stories, the stories of a love that is tied to your very being. Theirs was that kind of love story.
My father was a freewheeling young man living in the valley, working in the oil patch. My mother was a striking beauty, but the product of a hard life of fleeing an alcoholic father, abuse, poverty, and betrayal. She desperately wanted a man who would be kind to her, and who could someday provide her the life she barely dared to dream of. They met. My father couldn’t believe that he’d met the beauty he'd seen only from a distance. And my mother couldn’t believe that she’d met a man who was so kind, and so devoted. They married having dated for only a few weeks. And they were together for decades after that. He gave her the life she dreamed of – a son, a home, safety and security – until she died three years ago.
He was her rock. She was his love, his adoration, his heart. And dear God, did he miss her so. Every day.
In the end, he was ready to go. So he went. On his terms. He was ready to see her again. I hope that is a thing, that we do see each other again in some beyond. In our last conversation – which I knew was our last – we talked of the universe, and stardust. And how we are at once insignificant pieces of coalesced stardust in a universe of trillions of galaxies….but that same infinite, incomprehensible universe cannot have its story told without speaking of the time that some coalesced stardust was my father. And some other coalesced stardust was my mother. And together, they found and fostered a love fitting for an infinite universe. We are in awe of the universe, but the universe itself should be in awe of love. We matter. Love matters.
My heart is broken. My parents are now both gone. My children are devastated by loss. My wife is my rock, a guide and pillar for me as I grieve.
And I am lucky. I am so goddamned lucky.