My father died.
Three words for something that doesn’t fit in three words.
I made this comic about him in 2014. I only kept the good in it.
He was no perfect father, and never an easy one. For most of my life there were things between us I couldn’t bring myself to say, things I carried around and turned over for years, resenting quietly. Sometimes not so quietly. I don’t think I was wrong to. I also believed, somewhere underneath, that we would have more time to work it out. You always think that.
What I only understood too late is that resentment doesn’t lift because your parent explains or apologizes. It lifts when you watch them grow old. When the person who once seemed enormous becomes fragile in front of you. When they say something so plain and unguarded that you realize you’ve been arguing with a frightened child the whole time, one who never stopped needing things nobody ever gave him.
By then there’s no time left to be different though. That’s the cruelty of it. Understanding finally arrives, and it has nowhere to go.
I can’t stop thinking about how much lighter I would have liked to be with him, to let some things pass. To be the one who gave way first. I couldn’t. Some of that was me, most of it was the shape of what we were, which neither of us built alone and neither of us could take apart.
Now he’s gone and I’m holding it all at once. What he got wrong. The many things he got right. The love, which was real even when it was heavy. The damage, which was real too. None of it cancels out. I’ve stopped waiting for it to settle into something simpler, it won’t.
Then there’s the guilt. There always is the guilt. For the impatience, for the distance, for the relief hidden inside grief, that it’s over for him, that he’s somewhere past all of it now. Still, it makes you feel like a monster for noticing it.
I’m choosing to keep the love. His, for what he couldn’t say, or do. Mine, for what I couldn’t give, or be. There was more of it between us than either of us knew how to carry well.
He was not perfect. I will never be. I loved him. I always will. That’s how it stands.
Forgive. If you can’t, let go. Love them, now.
Au revoir, Papa. Je t’aime.
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