Ancestral Pain
Numbing the emotions: Paternal
I think, as I heal, it’s important for me to visit living relatives to ask about what happened in their lives, and how that may have affected mine. I’m interested in how their pain, maybe their shame, and definitely some of the buried emotions, may have travelled along our family line.
Earlier this week, I visited my aunt, my dad’s oldest sister. Dad is the eldest of eight children and my aunt is next in line.
It was a lovely visit. We talked about lots of things we have both experienced, some good memories and some painful ones.
I understood a bit better why and how the shield of humour became so important in our family (and this isn’t exclusive to my dad’s side, nor our family for that matter). Sometimes it was a biting, piercing, fiercely personal jab that felt like it could rip flesh with its delivery, sometimes it was ridicule, especially in the company of others, for more effect and more pain.
Tools were lacking. No one seemed to be good at communicating emotions, in fact, FEELING in general was not welcome. Crying or expressing hurt was not acceptable and grounds for ridicule. And no one talked about chaos, scarcity, angry outbursts, fights nor about when people walked out (sometimes not returning for days, if ever). It was never explained, it was just simply ignored and moved on from.
The day after my visit with my aunt, my dad was rushed to hospital. He lives in another province. It hasn’t been a year yet since his second wife, my stepmom, died of a stroke. Dad has two boys with my stepmom, one of them is living with him. Both are in their 30s. Dad was short of breath, had trouble breathing. Once he was seen, he was intubated and taken to the cardiac unit and put on a ventilator. It was pretty scary.
Dad is a fundamentalist Christian, and an ordained minister. That happened after he and my mom split. Dad and Mom got married when Mom was 19 and Dad was 21. Dad converted to Catholicism to marry Mom. When they split, 15 years later, Dad became a Christian, met a woman who shared his Christian views and he married her. I always thought she looked like my mom, but 10 years younger (Dad’s wife, Marian was much younger than Dad). Marian had three daughters from previous relationships. Dad has myself and my two younger brothers. I was 21 when their first son, John was born and Tim came a few years later. That made 8 kids between them.
Dad and I have had a tense relationship, however, myself and my two half brothers are the only ones of the 8 kids who keep in touch. My younger brother, Jason passed away in 2016, also a heart incident.
Dad is okay. He came off of the ventilator, is eating and talking. The docs are sending him to a larger city for exploratory surgery. He may have to have angioplasty and/or a stent. He’s lucky to be alive.
He says he went to ‘the other side’ and I asked him what it was like. He said to me that I’ll never know if I don’t have a relationship with ‘the Lord’ and that was it.
He and I have had long conversations about the judgement attached to his religion and his ‘god’. We’re still at odds about that. But I don’t have any other expectations from him. I don’t expect or wish he was different.
And that’s a big thing for me, for anyone who’s experienced pain.
When I FaceTime’d Dad to talk to him, he went on and on about how beautiful I am and that I’ve never looked better, it felt icky and objectifying. He also said how beautiful all of the nurses were.
My aunt jokingly said after the death of his wife, he’s looking for a ‘nurse and a purse’.
I’d say that’s pretty accurate.