A Bridge to Father

Fathers are a lot easier to ignore than mothers. Mothers are in our lives and in our faces from the get-go.

They say women do two-thirds of the world's work, and a lot of that is in the home doing more than our fair share of the parenting. Dads often spend more time out of the house - for obvious reasons - and do a lot of their parenting by proxy. When they are around, they can be out of sync with the family's rhythms, and explode at the wrong things or fail to respond to the right things.
And fathers are not always the best communicators. As one father said to me: "I spend the whole day at work listening and talking to people. My head gets filled up with it all. When I get home I just need... quiet." Dream on.

So fathers are a lot easier to take for granted. But most of us, sooner or later, come to appreciate our fathers and rebuild bridges that may have long been damaged or even destroyed. Sometimes a new level of understanding with our fathers can emerge in odd or difficult circumstances.

Writer Philip Roth has mined his upbringing in Newark, New Jersey - and his own family - for inspiration for his novels for decades. But possibly his greatest work is a non-fiction book - Patrimony - he wrote about his father, then eighty six years old. It's a funny, harrowing account of his Dad's last days - and the reversal of roles that sometimes occurs.

Never one to shy away from the bizarre or the lurid, Roth describes - over an agonizing 6 pages - the experience of cleaning up his own father after a messy fecal accident. It's an event he manages to describe with some tenderness, and concludes: "(T)his, too, was right and as it should be."

Roth then recalls another time, some 7 years earlier, after his mother had just passed away and he was staying over with his Dad:

"We took turns in the bathroom and then, in our pajamas, we lay down side by side in the bed where he had slept with my mother two nights before, the only bed in the apartment. After turning off the light, I reached and took his hand and held it as you would the hand of a child who is frightened of the dark."

Another artist, this time the photographer Phillip Toledano, has been chronicling the last years of his dad in pictures; images that his father (with a little more parental candor than one might invite) calls "terrible". The pictures have been assembled into a new book called "Days With My Father".

Like more than one child, it took the death of Toledano's mother to make his father's mortality real:

“Over the past few years, both my parents died, my aunt died, my uncle—everyone croaked simultaneously, like an asteroid hit the Toledano section of the continent. One of the things I realized after the Toledano mass extinction is that all of the clichés are true, which is really annoying. When they say that your parents might be gone tomorrow, the people you love might be gone in a second, so the time you have with them is really important — it’s all true.”

(Read more at the New Yorker: Off the Shelf: Days With My Father.)

Life comes at us so fast and our fathers - our parents - are always just... there. Until they are not anymore. There is an unspeakable sadness in having sent little tributes to our parents over the years: a newspaper cutting maybe, a report of a promotion, a photo of the new baby, our child's graduation portrait - only to have to collect them back again when they are no longer there. After they pass, who do you send that kind of stuff too? Who really cares, like a parent?

Fathers' Day is a cliché, and it may only have been invented as a kind of equal time commemoration to match the more established Mothers' Day, but it marks one of the most important relationships we will ever have. And as we ourselves age, that bond with our fathers becomes an ever more fragile, ever more valuable, relationship.

Some people - like Philip Roth - have honored the connection with their father in writing; some, like Phillip Toledano, in photographs. Others still, choose to honor their fathers (and their mothers) by helping them with their own memoirs - like a video biography.

We all have a bridge to our fathers. How we maintain it and build upon it defines us as people.