I went to visit my dad on Sunday morning. It’s not the first time I’ve seen him post-surgery but it was definitely the first time no one else was around. So, we managed to chat uninterrupted for about an hour before my mom showed up. Outside of the fact that it was in a hospital, and we weren’t drinking coffee and nibbling homemade biscuits, it was a nice, and open, visit. We talked about a wide range of subjects from my grandfather’s time in the war and his being taken as a POW the same day as his promotion from sergeant, to mundane life matters, siblings, and money.
And then, during the discussion of family relationships, my father’s armor finally slipped, cracked, and fell. I watched, somewhat dumbfounded, as my 73-year old father did something I’ve never seen in my 41 years of life. He cried. And in that moment, a hard battle lost, I saw the pain he’d been hiding for so many years. Pain that could so easily have been avoided had he grown up allowing himself the honesty of being true to his emotions and sharing/ talking about his feelings.
I’ve never seen my father cry. And the effect on me… I can’t even barely explain it. The reasons behind it were so sad… how he grew up, how much of what he was expecting old age to be like and how much it’s not like those dreams… even how much he longed to be back in his own time, in the small village he was born and grew up in – even after more than 40 years in Canada…
That was so much pain laid bare. Pain that can’t be swept aside without his accepting of many, many things about how life truly are. But, hopefully, he can start to do so. At least now I have knowledge about exactly what those are and can begin to pry him out of that shell. He has to learn, some day, that being gruff with your family is not the way to healing pain that can be cleared with understanding and love…