Pandora’s Perspective

I’m a big believer in the constancy of human nature; there are things we all have in common – needs that we all share.

We want to be loved. We want someone to love.

For me, these are fairly obvious and universal truisms.

Another is that when something bad happens or if we are afflicted by a terrible sadness, we rationalise and we personify – we create for ourselves a set of reasons and explanations for the thing that troubles us, and with it a sense of justification for our responses.

I have been reflecting on this since visiting my father in hospital over the Christmas period.

He’s in his mid/late 80s and has been unwell for several years. Heart attacks, strokes and various other illnesses that tend to hit the elderly.

He and I have had no relationship to speak of for many many years and I haven’t seen him or spoken to him for several years either.

Although he was a very attentive father when I was very young, from the age of about six or seven I felt him withdraw from my life incrementally. I could produce a very full list of reasons why I stopped trusting him a very long time ago.

On Christmas morning I found out he was in hospital again – a series of organ failures that the doctors won’t operate on because of how weak he is has meant he spent a lot of time in hospital in the latter part of 2010.

I decided to visit him. I went yesterday.

It was a car journey of about six hours, there and back, which gave me plenty of solitude and thinking time.

I realise that I have, metaphorically speaking, bundled my father and a whole heap of issues/problems/unpleasant memories into a box, and shut the lid tight.

Having no relationship with him for several years has left me the time and space to develop a significant relationship with the characterisation I have applied to him – the source of my many woes. Or one of them at least.

And this, in turn, has fed my justification for having no discernable relationship with him. If I am ever asked “why don’t you go and visit your father, after all he’s a frail old man?” I have been able to say that after many failed attempts to have any kind of relationship with him throughout my adult life I have come to the conclusion that there’s no point investing any more emotional capital in him.

This outlook has allowed me to build a pretty impressive wall between me and my feelings where he is concerned. So much so that I was able to very rationally say out loud “I wonder how it will feel when he dies?”

I also concluded that I would not attend his funeral, when the time comes.

Thing is, I’ve now taken the lid off the box haven’t I? And I’ve looked inside, taken the contents out and examined them.

I can’t put anything back in the box now. I’m committed to some sort of a relationship with him.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I’m not looking for some Hollywood-esque reunion with him. That’s not what this is about at all.

It’s making me think about the way in which we, because I don’t think I’m the only person who does this, create a bogeyman that we can attribute our fears and weaknesses to, that we can direct our frustrations and anger toward.

It’s far easier to fight an external foe than wrestle with one’s self after all.

But easy shouldn’t be our prime motivation. Nothing worth having in life was easily come by.


Post-script: this was written as a stream-of-consciousness, following a poor night’s sleep brought on by a chest-infection and a high temperature. I’m sure it’s far from being well-written and although I considered waiting til I felt better, I decided it was more useful (for me, when I come to look at this again in the future) to write this while the thoughts outlined above were still fresh in my mind.

An update: Father dear father

So... after hearing he'd spent Christmas in hospital, I went to visit my father.

I'm still working out how I feel about it.

But I'm glad I went.

Father, dear father

I don’t have much of a relationship with my father.

I haven’t seen or spoken to him in years.

This is not the time or the place to count the ways in which I felt let down by him over the years.

I’ve felt I’ve been at a crossroads with him several times but about three or fours years ago began to realise that I actually had to make a choice – try, really try, to put the past behind me and rebuild – no build – a relationship with him. Or decide that I would not continue throwing my emotional energies into fruitless venture.

I chose the latter path.

Then, earlier this year, one of my siblings informed me that our father is in terminal decline with an illness the clinicians have concluded cannot be operated on due to his old age and frailty.

In conversation with that same sibling yesterday the conversation turned again to my father’s approaching end.

I’ve mused on all of this a lot today. Clearly not the first time I’ve done that.

I have often asked myself how I will feel when my father dies.

Today I began to appreciate the importance to me of that question. And another question came to mind – to what extent has my curiosity about how I will feel, what I will feel, become more important than the compassion I should probably be feeling toward my very ill father.

I can’t be sure, but I suspect that right now it’s become a little too important.