I love photographs of my father's face. There is the youthful one from his years in the navy, when he leaped to serve his country for a cause he believed in. There is the playful half smile captured in a picture with arms around four grandchildren still slippery from his condo pool. Another frames the dark headed minister dressed in snowy robes with an open Word in his hands.
There are people whose creases remind me of my father. Worn down from a typhoon of mental illness. Not that they themselves have a personal diagnosis, though sharing a home with someone who explodes hurts by association. It turns out there is enough sadness to go around.
My father wavered between withdrawal and a willingness to lower the barricade and forgive my mother. There was reluctance too because the storm often showed up when he was ill prepared. Well there was the tantalizing reprieve. Seven months or even a year. Long enough to tell himself they had reached safe shores. The hurricane was finally over. Only to have it pick up and blow them back out to sea.
When my father was closest to the breaking point I was a youngster. Young enough to believe that love can smooth over the worst parts. Patch it together like wallpaper over a foot shaped hole.
Flying home to help strong arm my manic mother into another locked facility I clung to the surety that this time, this time, this time she would see the light.
“I’m terribly sorry. I’ll control myself now.”
Which of course she couldn't.
When he reached the brink, or rather just shy of it, my father went away. Packed his bag and moved outside of screaming range. Sometimes it meant leaving me alone with her, though we both knew she would never blast me as brutally as she did him. Which breaks my heart somehow. He who loved her. Forgave her, and loved her again was even less deserving of her wrath than a mouthy teenager. But since when does deserving have anything to do with it?
I have no answers. Even though my father died in another state, out of reach, lugging the oxygen tank that was heavy with regrets, his final years were quiet. She called to rant of course but he could answer or not as his stamina allowed. Or simply turn up the music.
The perspective of two decades provides a cushion for heaviness. I know that my father's face is smooth once again, and so is my mother's. They have untangled the sticky web of circumstances they did not cause and could not cure. Or rather God did. There are no hurricanes where they live now, only skies of cerulean blue, and concerts that expand their hearts with a joy that crescendos above the heartache of sixty short years.
