Every day is Father’s Day

FREEDOM

Today I make an entry to mark this person, my Father, who has had a deep and lasting influence on me despite having died suddenly when I was just beginning University.

Like most people, I think of my Father every day in some fleeting way at least, and often much more profoundly. I have come to understand myself better through these reflections. My relationship with him has been a constantly evolving one. Ironically, that evolution has taken place without him being present for most of my life.

It is a function of the big journey that when we are children we see our parents as superhuman. Peering at them through a monochromatic lens, we cannot, and dare not, make sense of them as actual mortal and vulnerable people. The transition of awareness can be a painful one, as we gradually perceive their flaws that we do not yet know we possess ourselves.

It is left to the process of maturing to bring us to consciousness about our parents, and most of this takes place after we turn 20. Those of us whose parents die young are left to wend our way on our own. We bring them into focus as we age, while facing the great abyss ourselves. The wisdom that time brings reconciles so many things if we open ourselves enough.

I have come to appreciate my Father’s generation for what they faced. They coped with the Great Depression as children and endured considerable economic privation. They then were hit with a ghastly interruption of life between 18 and 24 years old, filled with horror and sent to fight a war in a foreign country for their most formative years. Many lost the golden opportunity to go to University. Others lost their lives or limbs. Those who made it back faced immediate parental and social pressure to conform to the suffocating post war zeitgeist.

My Father was a pilot who flew in one of most dangerous planes at the time - the plywood Mosquito. I cannot imagine being a young man right out of high school and facing that type of danger for six years. After returning from the Second World War, like so many returning young men, he was pushed to get a job, get married, have children and embrace the constraints of the post war lifestyle. Job, wife, house, children. There was no talk of ‘self actualization’, ‘being comfortable’ or even ‘happiness’ in those less indulgent days..

In this era of social pressure for both parents’ roles to be blended into a one-stop shopping experience for children, my memory of him is all the more clear. He stood out as the old fashioned male presence - strong, industrious, capable, decisive, fearless, a bit distant and even a bit scary at times. Those qualities are not a main course option on today’s menu for Fathers.

Our DNA is what shapes our destiny in so many ways - we inevitably become what we are already. My Father taught me many important lessons. He did not do it with words. He did it with actions, I watched him, and I learned. I learned to enjoy loons and look at the stars with wonderment. I learned to appreciate Stan Getz and jazz music. I learned to try to accomplish something every day and not wallow in setbacks. I learned not to give in to fear and especially not to be afraid of being me. This last lesson is more critical with every day in a world that insists that people live in paralytic fear from each other and from themselves.

He used to say, with a little exasperated grin, that I ‘asked too many questions’. Yet I had many more questions that I never got the chance to ask him. I suppose he might have been disappointed at how his children’s generation turned out in many ways. He sacrificed his freedom for our safety, and now the boomers have willingly sacrificed everyone else’s freedom for their protection against a cold virus. Luckily, I see hope in my own children’s rejection of that boomer culture.

My Father continued to fly his own plane after the war until his death at far too young an age. The war had bequeathed to him his favourite hobby for his life. It was in the sky that he found his peace. I was lucky to go up with him in his plane not long before he died. As we lifted into the sky, I looked over at him busy at the controls with a smile on his face. I felt totally secure and happy for him. He was in his zone.

I saw a light in his eyes like no other time. He was free.