My Father Died
A few hours after my Dad died, I hike up Chuckanut Ridge behind our house. I want to be in the mountains to feel my Papa, because he was always happiest in the mountains. But I can’t feel him any more. He’s gone.
The week before his death, I felt my father constantly. He was in a coma, and in that no-man’s land was accessible to me, although we live on different continents. Whenever I slowed down enough and thought of him (which was often), the message was clear: He didn’t want to be in intensive care in the hospital. He didn’t want us four daughters to fuss over him. He just wanted to be in the mountains.
Two days before his death, when we were waiting for the test results that determined if he had suffered major brain damage, I went into deep meditation. I’m trained as an energy healer and know how to access other levels than just this physical plane. As soon as I established connection with my Dad, he told me to get him out of this hospital. I brought him into the beautiful region of the Alps where we’re both originally from, and where he spent all of his 74 years.
As soon as we got there, he turned to me in his stern way and ordered: “Protect your heart.” I was taken aback, because I didn’t expect any advice from him. I stilled and felt into my heart, which was beating hard and felt clenched with stress. He nodded and explained that this kind of stress was what had been weakening his own heart over the course of his life. He said, “Stress is a killer” and looked at me intently.
Instantly I remembered the time four years ago when I was diagnosed with heart irregularities after a routine checkup. It can happen to athletes and doesn’t necessarily mean you have a problem, but it’s a good wake up call to look at your stress levels. When my doctor called me with the diagnosis, I was on a bike ride alone, and I freaked out. I called my father – something I rarely do. But I knew he had similar issues with his heart, and I knew I needed to reach out to him. I still remember the feeling of relief and comfort I felt when he explained the condition and reassured me not to worry.
Emotional support wasn’t the foundation of our relationship. Papa was born right after the war, and post-war Germany was too occupied with collective guilt, grief, and rebuilding the country than raising emotionally attuned children. He didn’t grow up with love, and like most men in his generation didn’t know how to raise highly sensitive daughters like me.
But every now and then he surprised me with his support. One of the most formative and destructive events of my life as a woman happened when I was 15 years old and attended my first dance class in preparation for prom. The boys had to ask the girls for the first dance. I was one of three girls left over without having been chosen by a guy.
When I came home, I was devastated, because my core wound was triggered: I am not wanted, I am not good enough.
I ate dinner through tears. My mother told me to not make such a big deal about this, but my father looked me in the eyes with compassion and simply said, “When I was your age, it was always the pretty girls who weren’t chosen. The boys were just too intimidated to ask them to dance.”
In the almost 30 years I’ve lived in America, my father visited me only once.
I wish we had more memories over here together.
Here’s one: When he visited together with my sister and her kids, they stayed in our little mother-in-law apartment that my husband built above his woodworking shop. I guess my Dad wanted some alone time, so he retreated into the shop one evening to work on a bamboo table for my studio.
I was looking for him to see what I should make for dinner, and we ended up sitting in front of the wood stove for an hour, talking. It was mostly him talking, which was unusual. He told me things I never knew about his childhood: how his mother was married off to the man who was supposed to marry her sister, who had died. How his parents rejected him and blatantly favored his sister. How he used to get terrible ear infections, but they never took him to the doctor but stuck a clove of garlic in his ear instead.
He opened up to me like never before and never since, and it helped me understand his own inability to be the kind of father I had always yearned for: a touchy-feely, kind, emotionally attuned, loving man.
The force of my grief surprises me.
There was a time in my life when I wished my father dead, a decade or so when we didn’t talk at all because I was so deeply hurt about his actions and lack of care.
In one of my therapy sessions I got in touch with how angry I was at him, and this turned into rage one evening when my mother called me about something he had done. I got in the car and drove to a remote logging road, where I screamed at the top of my lungs, hit the steering wheel and yelled, “I wish you were dead!” I was so enraged, I meant it.
A few days later, my sisters called me to tell me that Dad was in a medically induced coma. (This coma happened four years before the second coma.) He recovered from the first one physically, if not emotionally. From then on, he seemed to lose his will to live and his zest for life.
To this day, I feel guilty about damning him that evening in my car. A part of me still wonders if the force of my rage caused this beginning of the end.
When I look into the mirror, I see my father’s eyes. They are green and almond shaped.
Another memory of comfort: I had been living in the US for 15 years and came to visit Germany. I was hiking in the Alps with my Dad and sisters and got incredibly emotional because I had to fly back in a few days and didn’t know when I would see them again. Tears streamed down my face as we hiked up the steep incline, while cow bells rang around us. Yes, it was my decision to leave my home country all these years ago, but this was my home, and this was my blood family, and I missed them.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. Papa extended a flask to me. “Here’s some medicine for you.”
That’s how it worked in my family: we didn’t talk about feelings, but alcohol would do in a pinch.
I gratefully took the flask and poured the searing liquid down my throat, then passed it back and watched my Dad take a big swallow. He winked at me and asked, “Better?” When I laughed through my tears, he hoisted his backpack up onto his shoulders and said, “Come on. This summit won’t climb itself.”
I have reached the clearcut above Chuckanut Ridge, where the view of Samish Bay stretches far to the horizon, and to the South extends all the way down the Skagit Valley. This is the area I came to 28 years ago, when I left Germany to be an AuPair in America. I had been matched with a family in Bellingham, where I was to spend a year being a nanny for them, while receiving room and board and an adventure in a different country.
My host family brought me to exactly this spot on the mountain to show me the view of Mount Baker in the Eastern distance, the salt water to the West, and the scenic panorama to the South. We picnicked on the side of the mountain where several hang glider pilots got ready to launch themselves off the mountain.
Straight off the airplane from Germany, my 20 year old self was absolutely fascinated. Here I was in America, with glaciers and oceans and the taste of freedom on my tongue. I was free of my oppressive childhood in Germany! I was here in an exciting country, and I was watching grown men launch themselves in the air like eagles! I was drunk with the possibilities!
Four months later, I married one of these hang glider pilots. He was my father’s age.
After my Dad died, I found it impossible to sit still. I wanted to be in motion, exert myself physically. So I cancelled all my transformational life coaching clients and instead focused on transforming the gardens of my landscaping clients.
On my way to picking up bark mulch for a job, I stopped at a red light. I marveled at how disoriented and disembodied I felt, and wondered if people could feel how raw I was. Across from me sat a young man in a jeep. His blond arm hairs shone in the sun. Had he ever lost anyone? Did he still have a father? A woman jogged in place to wait for the light to turn green. She was someone’s daughter. Did she have kids? I felt a thread of connection between everyone I saw, and I wondered how long it would last til I was back in my normal bubble.
When my father hung in limbo in the coma, my best friend came over to support me. We did a ritual for my Dad to help him let go. After his death, she fed my family chicken stir fries and kept a steady supply of gin and tonics going. She showed up every day and held me while I cried, took care of my kids, watered my garden, wiped dog pee off the floor.
My husband, as usual, was the rock I clung to.
I’ve never loved anyone more and hyperventilated when I realized they could die some day. How could I manage life without them?
When I get to the top of Chuckanut Ridge, my phone rings. It’s my Mom. She has been divorced from my Dad for 30 years, after having been married to him for 20. They’ve been engaged in a non-stop battle since then, and for some years, things turned ugly.
My mom cries now and asks me: “Why do people have to die before we can forgive them?”
She tells me about her health problems, and how she decided she won’t see any doctors any more because nobody can help her. Before she hangs up, she asks me to call her more.
In the midst of raising my own three kids with my incredibly supportive husband, I understand how hard it must have been for my parents to raise four daughters. Being a parent is not for the faint of heart.
Shortly after my Dad passed away, I found a dead baby bird that had fallen or been pushed out of the nest. I kneeled down next to it and wept and couldn’t stop. My Dad kicked me out when I was 17 years old, still in high school. He had enough of me rebelling against him for a year, questioning him, defying him, and so he pushed me out of the nest.
I know people who say they couldn’t go on living if their parents died because they love them so much. I never had that worry because my childhood was so complicated, and because I was so fiercely independent from a young age. I always thought it would be a breeze for me to deal with my parents dying. I always felt I didn’t rely on them anyway.
Turns out, now that my Dad is gone, there’s a big hole in my heart.
There was always singing. My father was a member of the boy scouts, which might have saved his life because he found a sense of belonging there. They went on epic hikes and camping trips, slept in alp huts, played harmonica and learned songs.
As an adult, my father retained his love for nature and singing. I was exposed to flawless harmonies in utero, because at every gathering with his friends, they ended up singing – no doubt fueled by copious amounts of alcohol. I thought it was normal that everyone knew how to automatically harmonize to a melody, until I joined a choir in high school and realized most people can’t do it. They have to memorize harmonies.
Me, I belched out complicated tunes from an early age and later taught myself to play guitar.
Although my dad never openly told me he was proud of me, he must have been because he often asked me to play a song and sing for acquaintances when they stopped by.
Equally, he never praised me for my good grades in school – but he liked to tell his friends about me being a straight A student.
I often wonder what my life would have been like if he had been able to express his pride and love for me in a way I could understand.
One of my trusted friends told me that grief is more complicated when the relationship with the parent was dysfunctional and complex. He has done a lot of research around that topic and has personal experience with it. I don’t know if his thesis is true. I don’t know what it feels like to have parents who love you unconditionally and support you 100 percent. I only know what it’s like to be raised by a man who lives in constant fear and likes control, and by a woman who is deeply depressed and narcissistic.
What I do know is that my grief feels very confusing.
I will miss his sayings. Whenever I talked to him on the phone and asked him how he was doing, he said things like, “When I leave the bad things out, it’s going great.” Or, “Life is looking up, says the sparrow as the cat carries him up the stairs”. Or “Chin up, even if your neck is dirty.”
I often wonder how my father managed the stress of having to provide for a rapidly growing family. My mother gave birth to four daughters within six years, with a miscarriage and one abortion thrown in. I can’t imagine what the stress must have been like to cope with all the burdens, including all the financial stress.
We were always poor, compared to my schoolmates who went on vacations in Greece, Italy or other exotic locations. Back then, I was envious of their holidays, new clothes and shiny gadgets I never had.
Instead, our family went on hiking and bicycling vacations in hand-me down clothes and gear. We had cheap one-speed bicycles, which we juggled up and down our scenic mountainous homeland, picnicking on bread and sausages in dandelion-covered meadows surrounded by cows. Or we hiked far distances for days, sleeping in youth hostels, donning plastic ponchos when it rained, wearing scratchy, hand knit socks.
My father, having served a couple of years in the military, woke us up for these trips early in the mornings, yelling “Batterie aufstehen!” – “Wake up, soldiers!”, while we girls groaned and rolled our eyes.
I treasure these memories more than anything.
Then, of course, there are other military-related memories. Enter collective punishment. To build character in the army, the whole regiment was punished if one person did something wrong. So when something happened at home that my father deemed bad, he had us girls line up and order my mother to bring out the wooden paddle, which was equally distributed over our collective butts. This was to serve as a deterrent for future disobedience, which sucked because I usually was the “good one” and got punished anyway. I assume this is why things really went downhill when I turned 16, when I decided that being “good” had never paid off, and I rebelled big time.
My three kids grew up hearing some of these stories, which made them afraid of the image of their grandfather. When we went back to Germany as a family two years before Dad died, they were surprised to find a man who was fun, easy-going and kind.
On this last visit, we all had so much fun. My father was our tour guide: he took us to castles and ruins, bicycled with us on scenic back roads, ate brunch in the local 600 year old bakery, went swimming in forest tarns, and hiked to some of the mountain tops we frequented as kids.
When it was time to fly back, my entire family came to the airport. My Dad and his wife were there, and even my mother showed up, although she usually tries to stay as far away from them as she can.
As I ushered my own offspring through the gate, I looked back one more time: my sisters, Mom, Dad and his wife all waving in unison, looking like one happy family, safe and secure in their nest.
I intuitively knew that this would be the last time I would ever see my Dad again, swallowed hard through my tears, and jumped out of their nest into the embrace of my own family.
