Three Times I Lost My Father

I have wondered if my father also took me to the cemetery because he sensed he would die young and be buried here and wanted me to remember who is my real father, and perhaps find my way back to the cemetery and connect.

From what I can tell, my father had peripheral arterial disease and there is a very high mortality of persons with it following bilateral leg amputation. My dad eventually had both legs amputated and died at age 38 when I was age 12 (or grade 7) – that marked the third time I lost my father. He could have worried about my remembering him because he was living with his new wife and his adopted daughter, and my mom and I moved into my step-father’s house, and, in fact, these new situations would eventually result in cutting off with my father and his family including going to the cemetery – this marked the second time I lost my father. I only returned in the early part of the millennium to the cemetery grave where my father was now laid to rest. I had been cut-off from my father and his family for a few years before his death and my mom, step-father, and family were reluctant to validate/support my grief and neglected my mourning, but I’ve been getting what I wanted since my early thirties, when I visited my father’s grave for the first time.

This time I entered the cemetery not in my father’s Chevy Caprice, but in a rent a car. Disappointingly, the nearby floral businesses were closed for the holiday. Visiting the cemetery seemed familiar and I could get to the plot section, but it was hard to remember exactly where was the grave marker and I didn’t see a graveside locator kiosk. And I could not find the water spigot to orient myself. Thankfully, I heard a groundskeeper on a riding mower and was able to catch up to him, and he offered to walk me to my father and grandfather’s plot. As I followed him, I felt anxious, and yet when we arrived and he departed, I was tearful and only felt intimate, sorrow and grief. I took as much time as I needed and said some prayers, but before I got back in my rent a car, I took more than my memories; I took a couple of small pebbles from the plot, which I always keep in my small wallet zipper pouch. I’m still struggling with the pain of losing my father – I got teary-eyed just wondering about the whys of my father taking me to the cemetery, and I continue to revisit my feeling grief and my feelings about both his absence and death, even though I didn’t know my father all that well.

The first time I lost my father was through my parents’ divorce, when I was an infant. Though I have the faintest of memories from my first two years (like hopping out of my stroller) and I could not understand what was transpiring, I recognize that I felt the anxiety, stress, and pressure that likely accompanied my parents’ divorce and my own feeling insecure, grief, fragile, and abandoned.

I understood my world through my senses, and communicated my feelings both physically and emotionally. As an example of this, my maternal grandmother – who learned the dialect of Naples, Italy from living near my grandfather’s family – would later tell me she used to call me a little skutch or skutchamenza (or irritant), because I was prone to becoming irritable and crying when my mother was gone for any time. This said, my grandmother and I were very close and she helped me cope. The grief I experienced also made me miss the family I had hoped for, and I even roughly remember a holiday season moment when I held out hope that my father and mother would get back together despite both of them already being remarried. Nowadays, I don’t become irritable and cry if don’t see my mother for a while, but I do still grieve the first time I lost my father through divorce. I grieve the role my father could have played and what could have been the intimate details had my father and mother stayed together.

From my parent’s divorce onward, my father still occupied a particular space in my life when he regularly visited, but eventually I was cut-off from my father and his family by the end of elementary school. This marked the second time I lost my father. The year after I was born, my father had remarried a single Columbian-American mom of one girl, about five years my senior. And, more or less weekly father / son visitations ended, because I’m told my father did something to get me upset (something to do with him rushing me into bonding with his stepdaughter). Another story is told by my father’s family – with whom I reconnected as an adult – something about their taking me out and when they took me home I had a stomach ache and they were told I could not see them anymore. Whatever the case, my mom and step-dad got my father to agree to terminate his parental rights in exchange for stopping child support. And I can’t remember seeing him much after that at all. I was sold for child support by my father when I was only a child. Sometimes, my grief leads me to feel nauseated at the thought, “Is this how little I’m valued?” Ultimately, I experienced my value as a child of God, and I decided that I had more value than I was lead to believe. And yet I still grieve that my father simply gave up and decided that the cost – financial or personal or both – to see me was too high.

I wish my father was here, because I would ask him why he decided to give up, but now I have no answers. My father died on Thursday, May-15th, 1986, when I was twelve years old. This marked the third time I lost my father. I unclearly remember the moment my mother let me know my father died. We were sitting down on my bed.

I remember my mom telling me with sadness that my father died, and she asked me at some point in the moment if I wanted to go to the funeral. I kind of recall feeling sad, but mostly numb and I could not speak, saying something like I did not feel like going. I still resent my mother for her reluctance and not giving me parental support when I needed it most to let out my feelings of grief and taking me to my father’s funeral. Never mind that I did not know my father all that well and that I had not had contact with my father and his family for a while, I had a right to grieve and mourn. More recently, I did ask one of my father’s first cousins who was a hospice nurse for ten years – a more neutral party – about whether she went to his funeral service. She told me about going to the funeral with her father (one of my father’s paternal uncles), and that when they were there, my father’s family talked among themselves as to my whereabouts and if I was allowed to come to the funeral. The answer was my mother thought it best I not be there, which was sad for my father’s family and still makes me very sad. I feel valued knowing that my absence was noted by my father’s family, and I also feel deep sorrow that they “were a family that didn’t ask a lot of questions;” questions which could have changed my mother’s mind, made her respect my need to mourn, and take me to commemorate my father’s passing.

For a lot of years since my father died, the only connection I could establish with him was to wonder about the quality of life that he knew in the end and my own grief. This changed with my acceptance to a graduate school of theology. Growth counseling was mandated for everyone in seminary formation. We addressed things I told myself such as, “My father left me, so why should I grieve,” and “I did not know my father all that well, so why should I grieve his death.” My counselor addressed my losing my father and the stoppage of my visiting my father’s family. I came away from my sessions feeling courageous and free to contact my paternal grandma (the search for her phone number is another story), and in no time I felt reconnected with my father’s family. In fact, my father’s family chipped in and funded my Eucharist chalice customarily given to priests for ordination.

On the bottom is engraved my name, the day of my ordination in 2006 and it ends: “From his family with love.” I used it for the first time I presided during the Eucharist on Sunday morning, May 21st, 2006. For Roman Catholics, the published Mass time intention in the parish bulletin is the priest’s primary intention for that Mass, and the priest may have his own intention. Most often, intentions are offered for a deceased person. My personal intention held deep within my heart was for my father, lifted up in prayer a week to the day since he died twenty years earlier. I did not attend my father’s funeral, and now I was expressing my grief in my heart and commemorating his passing with his sister, two of his first cousins, and a cousin’s husband sitting in the front pew, along with hundreds of others attending Sunday Mass. With this ceremony and my private visit to my father’s grave, I finally claimed my right to grieve and mourn. To be sure, the three times I lost my father is still painful for me, but the pain of losing my father has now been openly acknowledged and communally supported.

Today, I think about the likelihood that my father had no one to speak with at home about me and that his life with his second wife and adopted daughter did not include me. My father could have demonstrated courage as a New York City patrolman in the 1970s in Hell’s Kitchen, but not at home with his second family. Some evidence for such lack of courage in his contact with divided family was shared with me by one of my father’s first cousins:

“My father and his brothers were not close in part due to the differences the wives had. When your dad finally got in touch with my father, he and Maria invited him and his wife to the house. A date was made, and he didn’t show up. My father called him. His response was ‘I sat in my car in front of the house getting up the courage to ring your bell, but I couldn’t.’ After that they talked on the phone.”

And yet, I think that I could have mattered to my father in silence, and I now feel his presence and influence, and every now and then prayerfully “talk” with him, saying something like, “Hi dad, I think you are up there in heaven with God. I hope you pray and look over me.” I believe that makes him a kind of saint for me. My belief in the Communion of Saints – enshrined in Christian thinking – gives me space to do this. So, I hold in tension my grief and the continuing bond and influence of my father who has gone from my sight to be with his father, my granddad.