For Once in His Life

I was nervous about my 78-year-old father coming to stay with me in Minneapolis for a few weeks. Aside from being physically frail, he was depressed. He’d had bouts of depression or at least melancholy for a long time. During my adolescence, I’d become aware of how Dad’s heavy drinking seemed related to unresolved pain from having been bullied – perhaps even abused – at the school run by ‘the so-called Christian brothers’ as he bitterly called them, and how his father used to punish him for complaining about it. The other recurring theme was about his struggles to make good in England – how in 1950s London, for example, boarding house vacancy signs had noted ‘no Blacks no Dogs, no Irish’. Years later, he was still convinced that all the family members who’d stayed on in Ireland were better off than he was.

But it was difficult to reconcile Dad’s negative attitude and dark moods with my earlier memories of him when he’d been funny, affectionate, and a great storyteller. Even when I was a teenager and he first began to seem haunted by the past, his self-pity was far less noticeable than the compassion he demonstrated for others. Having worked his way up to the position of foreman in a steel factory, he felt responsible for the workers in his section – befriending two Caribbean men who were facing racism, bringing a heroin addict home to stay with us, and patiently persuading a compulsive gambler not to take the family’s rent money to the casino – even when the man was at our door, tearfully begging for the cash.

My mother’s sudden death had been hard on my father, and he missed her more than ever since his hopes of moving back to Ireland had fallen through. He needed to stay in England where my brother and sister-in-law could keep an eye on him – something he resented and unfairly took out on them. They deserved a break, so of course I was happy to have him come and stay with me, but part of me was dreading his negativity. I heard it every time I spoke to him on the phone: it was so omnipresent that I felt disloyal if I said anything too positive.  Sometimes I’d even fabricate some worry or problem with the car or central heating system so that he could give advice or at least sympathise, rather than complaining or going silent. On my way to the airport to pick him up, I worried about whether I could be patient with Dad during his stay. I was sure he’d be as critical of my parenting as he was of my brother’s, as unkind about my cooking and housekeeping as he was about my sister-in-law’s . . .   

Although he could still walk reasonably well with a stick, my niece had arranged for him to be escorted from the plane in a wheelchair, so as the party of three approached, I braced myself for protests about how he hadn’t needed the chair. But Dad seemed to be accepting the help as cheerfully as he’d once have enjoyed providing it to someone else. They’d been travelling for around eleven hours by this point, but my niece seemed more tired than my father, who was gesticulating as he talked while the person pushing the wheelchair was laughing. ‘Your Dad is so cute!’ she said to me after helping him into the car. Reading the look on my face, my niece grinned at me.

Next day I drove us around the Minneapolis chain of lakes, and we stopped for a picnic lunch at Minnehaha Falls, where I was amazed to hear Dad recall parts of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha which he’d learned at school. The mention of school did prompt him to repeat the story of the teacher who used to slide his belt off while saying ‘Let’s see if we can make Fitz cry today’, but he put more energy than usual into the punchline about running away, how he’d be ‘off – across the fields like a hare’. He still loved being outdoors, and as we sat within earshot of the creek and waterfall, he declared that he’d be happy to stay there all day long.

The visit continued in that vein, another highlight being that while I was showing him around the campus where I worked, we bumped into a group of my students who made a great fuss of my father, telling him they were honoured to meet him and so on. They all wanted to invite us to eat, with the Somalis and the Ethiopians arguing about whose food was better.  Remembering how my father used to say he’d rather starve than taste the leftovers of Indian food my brother would occasionally bring home, I was desperately trying to think of an excuse. But I needn’t have worried – Dad ate everything that was put in front of him at the Somali restaurant and thanked our hosts graciously.

When my brother heard how well things were going, he commented that Dad was being positive for once in his life, and I agreed. But on later reflection, I felt a bit guilty for thinking that way. After all, ‘his life’ to that moment had encompassed a lot of years during which he had faced challenges – like illness and loss – we’d never heard him complaining about.  I thought maybe we should be a little more tolerant, a little more respectful.

By Renata Fitzpatrick