My Father's Story

Of the two it was my father I thought I might see again. He would come back in dream or vision to tell with a nod or by celestial appearance—the restoration of his hair and some sort of ageless look—the truth of all I’d staked my life on. Why I thought it had to do with how I perceived him in life. A man of childlike faith, no guile, no biting tongue or sour wit, no deceiver. Which is not to say he had no sense of humor—I learned to tell a joke from him—not to say he never frightened the child who peaked in, fingers curled around the door, and heard him yell at Mama in the kitchen, and not to say my mother might just stand and take it. But that was the fearful part, and why is it so to a child’s ear? That mother and father fighting noise. But this is not about jokes or occasional domestic discord. I must begin again.

Our lives are encapsulated, each of us carrying with us the world we inhabit, the world of our own making. Knowing little of anything else, we think a dead parent might have time or inclination or ability to find our small sphere and bring a message to it, that the dead parent might not simply be at rest, the veil pulled shut between us, or simply dead to go no more anywhere. And that’s the thing I feared the most and is what this is about because he did not come back.

Here is my father’s story. His mother was afraid to die. A pretty, delicate-looking woman in the one small photograph I’ve seen, she did not want to go alone, long before her husband. And my father sat with her one night and prayed that God would take him instead of her because he had just divorced his family, as he put it, and thought he had nothing to live for. He would die, he said, to go before his mother and meet her when she came. But God would have none of that plan and took his mother Margaret that very night, as if my father’s prayer made up His mind. All of which assumes God takes those who die, that some kind of life persists beyond this one, and that we can find someone we love in that large place, if there is that place.

My father wept, and he grieved long because she was so frightened, until one night he dreamed his mother back. “Oh mother,” he said, “how glad I am to see you.” His mother Margaret embraced him, then spoke. (Could he have heard her actual voice?) She told him not to grieve, not to worry. “It’s all right, Wilford. Wilford, I’m all right.” Many dreams seem reality, only to break our hearts when we awake, but not this one of my father’s. For him it was real enough to live on sixty-one more years, never doubting. It should be clear why I might expect to see him, why I would want to so I could live the rest of my life never doubting.

But it was my mother who came, and though my sleep was filled with dreams of her for years after her death, this—if it was a dream—I dreamed while awake. I saw her. She stood in the aisle next to the church pew where I sat, head bowed, while my husband held my baby girl up front to give her a name and a blessing. My mother looked young, with blond hair, though she wore the black dress she loved in middle age. She stood, listening, then reached out her hand and touched my head.

I think our first inclination is to believe, we human beings, at least mine is, and then we set our minds to work, start thinking things over, begin to doubt. That’s what I do, anyway, and I could say that such a vision cannot be believed. These things don’t happen, or I wanted it so much I dreamed it up. And after all, if they do happen, it was my dad who would do such a thing, not my mother. She was not the kind to come back. Perhaps we do this kind of thinking and doubting so as not to appear too childish to others or to ourselves. I will put that more accurately. Perhaps I do this kind of doubting so as not to appear childish.

Today as I write I say the easy thing is to doubt. It is more acceptable, more sophisticated. To question is good. And I have done it all my life. If I had dreamed my father here, I would have questioned it, too, because I do that, because I am likely not the one he would have come to. But the purpose of questioning is to find answers where or if they exist, and if we find them, ought we not to accept them? So here I write the answer, the truth for me. She came. I saw her. She touched my head. Now it becomes my mother’s story, my story.