What does a son need from his dad?
I recently finished writing a book called FatherLoss, for which I had the opportunity to interview 70 men about how they dealt with the deaths of their fathers. In the course of those interviews, I also had the chance to ask about the fathers’ lives. Specifically, as the father of a 7-year-old son myself, I wanted to know: What makes a good dad? How does a father’s role change through the life-span? And what, if anything, can a father do to help prepare his son for the father’s death?
Here’s what I learned:
In childhood, boys need from their fathers something that can broadly be called “affection.”
The men I interviewed didn’t always use that term. Affection has the connotation of holding, cuddling, hugging, kissing, and other forms of physical contact. And indeed, when that occurred between a father and son, it seemed to have an unusually positive effect on the child.
For many of the sons I spoke with, their fondest memories of childhood were wrestling with their dads, being tossed into the air or carried piggy-back, or some other form of direct physical play.
One son told me: “On Saturday mornings, when my dad had been gone all week, I’d climb into my parents’ bed. He had horrible breath in the morning. We played a game where he tried to breathe on me, and I hid.” This son actually remembered this game with fondness! It’s an indication of how much sons want to be close to their dads.
I wondered why wrestling, bad-breath games and other physical affection so warmly remembered by sons. I eventually came to see it this way: Physical contact between a father and son gives the son a close-up view of the beast he will one day become: a man. The boy experiences, in his body and bones, how a man moves, feels, smells. Just as importantly, when the father’s touch is playful and loving, the son learns that men are strong, but that strength can be harnessed, restrained, and used in a safe way.
Of course, some fathers do not easily go to physical affection. Perhaps they were raised without such contact with their own fathers, and find it alien, even unmanly. Fortunately, I discovered in my conversations with sons that affection could be administered in a variety of ways. Ultimately, affection was less about physicality than about loving attention by a father toward his son.
Some fathers show affection by simply talking with, and listening to, their sons. Others showed it by playing chess, checkers, and other games with their sons. Still others played catch, coached little league teams, helped with confirmation or Bar Mitzvah preparations, took their sons to concerts, ball games and the like. The key was to focus attention, especially on activities that the son initiates.
When a son doesn’t get affection, in any form, from his father, the resulting wound can be deep and lasting. Second only to the abuser in generating resentment among the sons I interviewed was the faraway father, the distant dad, the patriarch who was unavailable or uninvolved. Whether the father meant it or not, the message to the son was clear: You don’t matter.
One man’s comment struck me a little close to home because I love to read. A man I spoke with told me this: “One of the memories I carry from childhood is Dad’s bookshelf. My dad read a lot. He would come home from work, sit in his chair, and read for most of the evening. Maybe it was his escape.... Sometimes, I’d go to that wall of books, and try to figure out what was there that was more fascinating than me.”
Now, I’m realistic. I don’t expect myself, or any other parent, to always be attentive to our children. It’s not possible, or even healthy. But it has been good for me to pay attention to how much I pay attention to my son, and toremember how good for him it is to have my active presence in his life.
In the course of my many interviews, there was one more thing that sons said they needed from their dads: a proper farewell. This need is illustrated by the story of a man named Clyde.
Clyde was 34 years old when his father informed him just before dinner together one night that he was dying of cancer. The news “knocked me back like a boxer,” Clyde recalled. It had been just five years since the two men had begun a reconciliation following a long period of anger and estrangement. In the weeks after his father’s diagnosis, Clyde visited the older man regularly, first at his father’s home, later in the hospital. And then the father, a physician, took a sharp turn for the worse.
In the father’s hospital room one evening, a memorable incident occurred. Clyde told me that retelling it was “like walking on sacred ground.”
In the hospital room, Clyde had been sitting on a couch a few feet from the side of his father’s bed. Clyde had been there for most of an hour, as his father alternated between turbulent coughing fits and labored breathing. The older man still maintained his barrel chest, and full gray-black beard. The skin on his face, however, as Clyde could see from the couch, had become pasty and drawn.
During a break from his coughing, the father reached out a hand toward Clyde. Clyde rose from the couch and clasped the hand. He stood beside the bed. For a long moment, the father gazed at his son’s face. Clyde noticed that father’s eyes, normally brown, had gone gray.
Then, in a gravelly voice, the father forced from his ravaged throat the few words he felt he had to say. Clyde recalled that they went like this: “You’ve got a beautiful wife, and a gorgeous child. You’ve got a good life. You’re going to be fine.” The father then beheld his son’s face again, brought it to his own, and pressed his lips against Clyde’s cheek. Then he said: “Good-bye. Now get out of here! Go, go, go!” He then released his son toward the door.
Clyde left the room without looking back. He wept as he drove home. Several hours later, his step-mother called. Clyde’s father was dead.
In retrospect, Clyde marveled at “how much selfless effort it must have taken” for his dad, “being pulled in the other direction,” to offer such a good-bye. Had the encounter not occurred, Clyde told me, he would “probably have doubted a lot of things. I would have wondered if he was still angry. But I never worried about it.... (The good-bye) reduced my mourning to the sadness of losing him.”
Indeed, we may think that it’s hardest to lose family members we are close to. But my research indicated that the sons who struggled the most with the loss of a father, and for the longest time, were those who were at odds with, or estranged from, their dads. Instead of dealing with their sadness after the loss, these sons were weighted down by regrets, resentments, and guilt.
Which is why it matters that we fathers, if we have a chance, offer this last gift to our children - the gift of closure, completion, forgiveness, good-bye.
Indeed, if we are able to be affectionate with our young sons in whatever way is most comfortable to us; if we can bless our children as they grow into adulthood; and if we can say good-bye when the time comes, we will, in my mind, have been the best fathers we can possibly be.
I want to tell you about the most important words my father ever said to me.
The year was 1984, I was 27 years old, between journalism jobs, living just a few blocks from the small Miami Beach apartment my paternal grandfather had set up after his retirement. It was the first time in my life that Grandpa was close-by, and along with meals of pot roast and potatoes, I soaked up the stories of his harrowing childhood in Eastern Europe, desperate emigration, and eclectic life that spanned the century.
Then one day I got a phone call from a doctor. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” came the voice, “but your grandfather has had a heart attack, and he has expired.”
The next day, my father flew to south Florida from his home in Michigan. I picked him up at the airport, and we drove in silence to the hospital to identify Grandpa’s body, collect his watch and wallet, and make arrangements to ship the body north for burial at my grandmother’s side.
Then my father turned the key to my grandfather’s home, and we began sorting the material remnants of the old man’s life. We discovered curled black-and-white photos from the early years, key-chains from more recent times, passbooks, matchbooks, coins, coupons, and a pack of stale generic cigarettes. Working in different rooms, we’d occasionally exclaim to each other about a special find. Mostly we sorted in silence.
We kept at it until the glow of the afternoon sun had waned. Then my father and I collapsed in my grandfather’s heavily pillowed living-room chairs, glasses of the old man’s scotch in hand. We shared memories for awhile, then quiet. Finally, as the room faded into near-total darkness, I heard a guttural groan. At first, I was startled. Then I realized what was happening. I had never before heard my father cry.
I rose, and knelt by his side. After a couple of minutes, he spoke. “I am crying not only for my father, but for me,” he said. “His death means I’ll never hear the words I’ve always wanted to hear from him: that he was proud of me, proud of the family I’d raised and the life I’ve lived.”
And then my father directed his voice toward me, and he uttered the words that continue to resound. “So that you never have to feel this way too,” he said, “I want to tell you now how proud I am of you, of the choices you’ve made, of the life you’ve created.”
Much of the pain that is inherent in father-son relationships dissolved for me in the calming resonance of that blessing. And in the months that followed, I felt stronger, more confident, especially as I re-started my career.
In the nearly 25 years since my father’s pronouncement, I’ve discovered that father-pride is a prominent theme in many father-son relationships. Our mothers can shape us in myriad ways, but it is generally our fathers from whom we seek a blessing. So, if you are a father, of whatever age, remember the gift that so many of our sons desire, but will not request. Simple words, expressed sincerely: “Son, I’m proud of you.”
Neil Chethik will be leading a workshop for men with Jaco B. ten Hove Sept. 26-28. Click for details.
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