Sometimes, You Just Have To Let Go Of Dad

The house is quiet and tidy, the thermostat set where it belongs.

The newspaper, stacked and alphabetically sectioned, remains undisturbed.

The dogs, too, are silent, each lying in his favorite spot, like furry props in a play about home life.

The lifeless order, my friend admits, is starting to get to her. She misses her father, misses him a lot.

A week before her father fell and bumped his head, her whispered comments over the telephone hinted at his steady decline: “Just a minute, I’ll be right back. There’s dithering going on. He’s turned the heat up again.”

Over the years, my friend, like many women, moved into the role of live-out caretaker for her aging father. Until the day he fell and was taken to a hospital for observation, then to a nursing home to heal, his days and her days intersected - at mealtimes, for the nightly news, on holidays, and for doctor appointments.

But it was more than daily routines that drew my friend to her childhood home to help her dad. That much is clear to her, now that he’s no longer where he’s always been, in his easy chair in front of the television set.

Fathers love daughters differently than they love sons, and daughters love fathers differently than they love mothers. That is neither good nor bad, it’s just so. Daughters often learn who their fathers are not through conversation, but through a lifetime of images, sights and smells. Fathers hoist us up on their strong shoulders, wear Old Spice, teach us how to pitch a softball, and change the oil in the beater cars we drive as teenagers.

When our hearts break, they hold our hands and listen more than they talk. They make us feel pretty when the rest of the world can’t see beyond the unwieldy eyeglasses that overpower our pre-pubescent faces, not to mention the oily skin and lank hair. They make us feel smart when we master geometry, and take secret pride in our ability to curse like sailors.

Fathers, their strength different from that of mothers, are ports in the storm, sturdy, omnipresent hulks with whom we entrust our little girl sensibilities. Which, perhaps, is why it’s so discomfiting to conceive of them as fragile, as somehow breakable, in their later years.

My friend had been reluctant to acknowledge that her father’s lucidity had been slipping, that the comforts of home, always familiar, no longer held the ability to center him. And, he’d come and go.

“Looks like our president’s in trouble, big trouble,” he commented astutely from his TV-side post when the Monica Lewinsky story broke.

But there were days when, if my friend was late getting out to the house for some reason, he forgot to eat, or neglected to take his medicine. She felt tremendous guilt when, after finally managing to take a much-needed one-day trip, she returned to find her father had wet the bed.

The nursing home arrangement is temporary for the time being, but my friend guesses that it won’t be long before it’s permanent.

“It doesn’t seem to bother him, really, which is kind of scary,” she said. “He doesn’t seem all that upset that he’s not home.”

In a way, I think, she’s glad the transition happened this way, without a lot of uncomfortable talk, without having to steal her father’s pride in a discussion about “what’s best” for him, without him having to reassure her of the decision’s rightness.

Maybe his resolve is a quiet and graceful gift to her after all these years, an acknowledgment that her care and attention mattered to him, that now it’s OK for her to keep on walking through her life without walking to him first every day.

And like the first time, years ago, that he let go of her bicycle handlebars and let her soar away free, it’s time for my friend to find her center.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration

MEMO: Kathleen Gilligan is Lifestyles & Trends Editor of the Spokesman-Review. Contact her at 459-5481 or kathleeng@spokesman.com

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Kathleen Gilligan The Spokesman-Review