A FATHER'S LOVE, REAL AND IMAGINED

The man I call my father taught me how to drive and change the oil in my car, came to my basketball games and supported my cheerleader tryouts. He came out in the middle of the night when I called needing a ride, no questions asked. He was there when I was angry and rebellious, when my son died in a car accident, when I got married – both times. He is the man I mean when I talk about ‘my dad,’ and he loves me unconditionally. However, he is not my biological father. That man was always ended up a stranger, no matter how hard I tried to know him.

My biological father loved me, in his way, so I’ve been told. Both his presence and his absence taught me to be insecure, to feel unsettled and unsafe around men and yet still long for their approval. When he died in 2018, we hadn’t spoken for fifteen years. My cousin reached out to me through Facebook to let me know that he was dying, and my aunt told me where I could find him if I wanted to visit before he passed. Did I want to see him? I did, without question or reservation, and within twenty-four hours, I was driving to Columbus, Georgia, to see my other father, Lanny Jack Templeton, for the last time.

Lanny Jack had been absent from my life in one way or another from the time I was three years old. Still, I remember him as handsome, with thick, black hair, often worn to his shoulders, soft and wavy like some dark halo. His smile, full and dimpled, was always kind, and his dark eyes sparked with humor or mischief. I remember him as being tall, but the memory comes from a child who sat on his knee or at his feet while he played guitar. He will always be larger than life in my mind.

Because that is how I want to remember him.

Because it’s too difficult to think about how often he frightened me or confused me or abandoned me.

My father was schizophrenic, or schizo-affected bipolar. I’m not sure which, or that the diagnosis mattered – not to me, anyway. I wasn’t told about it until I was edging into my thirties, long past the time I’d given up trying to have a relationship with him. Sometimes I wonder if I’d been told when I was kid, if it would have helped. I’ll never know, but I wish I’d had the chance to find out. Maybe I would have been able to understand him, at least a little.

There were so many incidents that hurt and confused me for so long: my tenth birthday when my father took me to see the movie Dune, and then got me drunk on wine coolers when the local bar wouldn’t serve me alcohol; when he took me to his favorite diner for breakfast and bought me Marlboro Red cigarettes when I was thirteen, telling me all about the voices in the garden of his mind, and how they told him to do things; when he called me the wrong name; when he came downstairs on Christmas suddenly bald-headed; when he wouldn’t come downstairs at all and stayed in bed for days.

I had no one to talk to about my father. Everyone knew he was ill, but no one ever told.

My mother wouldn’t say anything except that he loved me, and his side of the family – aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents – never seemed surprised or upset by his behavior. My grandmother had even helped to hide the fact that my father had gotten me drunk on my tenth birthday, something I also hid until I was an adult. Surrounded by the pretense that everything was normal, I assumed that it was. And I assumed that whatever confusion or hurt I had was somehow my fault.

The hospital room where my father lay dying was like most. He was intubated, dark eyes open and unaware. His chest rattled, and his once fine black hair had faded to ash. He looked so diminished and frail, the way that Death often finds us in old age, and I found myself looking not at a stranger, but at a loved one. I sat next to his bed, staring into the face of the man who had left me over and over again, no matter how many times I’d reached out. Even then, I wanted to take his hand in mine, to have him signal somehow that he wanted me there. That he had always wanted me there.

His skin was soft and thin, like threadbare sheets, fingers that had once played music and sculpted wood were now limp and dry. I talked to him; told him I was there. I said my name, called him Daddy, a name I’d never spoken to anyone else. I told him of my husband and our children. I told him that I loved him, that I’d always loved him. That I had missed him. And I waited, searching his face for some sign of recognition. None came. I sat for hours, talking and wishing and grieving, never once knowing if my father knew I’d come, or if he’d even wanted me to.

After he died, my brother and I met with our aunt to go through our father’s meager possessions. She sat with us, talking about him, about his things, his life in the last few years. My brother had been an infant when our parents divorced, and he never seemed to want to know our father, but he took small, intimate things from the cluttered apartment: a hand-carved accent bowl of deep red wood and a battered guitar. I took a matching bowl, a fox carved from an old tree stump, a small compass, and a hatchet (my father had found a love of knives and other sharp objects in his later years). Our aunt insisted we take whatever money was left and the car our father had recently purchased, but I don’t know if she understood those things were the least of what we’d come for. I can’t speak for my brother, he has always held his emotions close and un-uttered, but I’d come to find some tangible memory to cling to.

When I was a teenager, I’d tried to reconnect with my father. I wrote letters, telling him of the woman I was becoming, the friends I had, the love I’d found, the life I’d made away from him. I wrote pages of myself, wanting to be seen and loved and accepted by this living ghost who haunted the fractured parts of me. He wrote back. Short, sometimes incomprehensible letters that arrived sporadically and that often told me nothing. Still, I clung to them, saving each one, stacked in the drawer of my childhood nightstand.

When I invited him to my high school graduation, I was surprised when he said he’d come. I was excited and nervous and nauseous. He would travel from Georgia to Florida for me. His attention, his love, his focus would all be on me, and I spent hours daydreaming the time we’d have together. I would take him to the beach, of course, and to meet my boyfriend, to my favorite places to eat, and to all my teenage haunts. I would walk him through my life, share all of it, and he would tell me how wonderful it all was, how wonderful I was.

When he arrived with his girlfriend, I was surprised and then angry. Blonde and thin, walking into my graduation in her country boho chic clothes, smile bright and genuine, the soft drawl of her voice like honey. I hated her. I hated her because she was where he threw all his attention and his smiles and his praise. He stayed a day, and I saw him for only a couple of hours. Conversation was awkward. Physical affection was absent. It was painfully clear that I didn’t know him, and regardless of my letters, he didn’t know me. Heartbreak and relief flooded through me once he’d gone. There were no more letters after that, and he only reached out once in the next thirty years.

After my brother and I made our choices and left our father’s apartment, my aunt ran errands, hauling us along in her wake. To the bank to close my father’s account, to the florist to order flowers, to the funeral home to make his final arrangements – all the things as the oldest child I should have done. And as we moved from one task to the next, she told stories of her brother, a man I barely knew. It’s hard to love an empty space, but even so, I cried as I sat listening. Perhaps the tears were for the possibility that space represented, or perhaps they were for the lost opportunities I’d been too wounded to take. And though my tears were sincere, I did my best to hide them.

Eventually, my aunt took us to lunch, to a favorite spot my father had enjoyed. She wanted us to meet one of his friends, someone who was very close to him. I imagined an older man, scruffy and smelling of cigarette smoke, someone who’d heard all about Lanny’s kids. Who I met was an older woman, wild, red-blonde hair and a ready smile who only knew of us. She hugged my aunt and sat across from my brother and me at the table. She wanted to talk about my father, to assure me of how wonderful he was. Her best friend. She saw him almost every day. He watched her kids grow up. He was like a father to them.

I’m sorry. What?

Sitting in some local American-fare wannabe restaurant chain that couldn’t quite make it, picking at the remains of a mid-rate meal, I felt a surge of anger so fierce, I had to turn my face to the wall. I’m old enough to know my face gives everything away, and I was aware enough to know that this woman had done nothing to earn the venom I wanted to spew across the table at her. So, I sat there listening to how my absent father, who did the best he could and who loved me in his way, had been an actual father for this woman’s, this stranger’s, children. When I didn’t smile or engage in all the posthumous praise, my aunt filled in for me, offering up words to express what I should feel, what I was supposed to say.

“It would have been nice to have a father like that,” I said eventually, after being verbally poked and prodded by my aunt to say something. “You know, one that cared enough to be around.” I could feel the sneer in my voice, the hardness of my face as I clenched my jaw to stop the wounded words from pouring out any further.

“Oh, honey,” this woman cooed, “He did the best he could.”

“For your children, I guess he did. Not so much for his own.”

I could feel my brother staring at me, sympathy and pity folding over me like a protective blanket. My aunt also stared at me, embarrassed and irritated, the tsk of disapproval clucked behind her teeth. The woman just shook her wild rose-faded hair, as though my pain should be negotiated, but I didn’t want to ease her discomfort. I would hold on to this anger at my father for a long time.

I still haven’t forgiven him. I don’t know how.

I spent most of my youth and adolescence looking for a father figure. For protection and unconditional love. For advice on boys. For a model on how I should allow myself to be treated and loved by a man. For self-confidence. For all the things I lacked in my father’s absence, and for all the spaces my stepfather couldn’t fill. And in this search, I allowed myself to be used and criticized, abused and mistreated, broken mentally and emotionally. Always searching for the man who had given everything I needed and wanted to children who weren’t even his.

The broken, wounded animal that raged in my chest wanted to throw plates and overturn tables. To scream at this woman, tear out her hair and claw her eyes. To burn down everything around me, but I was raised better. I swallowed down iced tea and anger, held onto a smile strained in Southern politeness, until lunch was over. Shallow A-frame hugs and empty thank you followed, until finally, my brother and I were headed back home. The funeral would come later.

The last time I talked to my father, I was twenty-nine and pregnant. I was planning a small wedding ceremony at my mother’s house, only a handful of invitations for close family and friends. My mother, who’d told my paternal grandmother, who’d told my father, who called me. I don’t know if he wanted to call, or if my grandmother made him, but when I answered the phone, and I heard his voice, all I wanted to do was hang up.

“Heather Lee.” My name drawled across the phone line. Not my name. Not Lee.

He invited himself to my wedding.

No, thank you.

Apologies all around. Uncomfortable silences. Awkward small talk. Fake laughs.

A stranger called and asked for an invitation to a wedding. Another stranger answered and said there were no more.

That was the last time I heard my father’s voice. The last chance I didn’t take. Some days, I miss him, the man I imagined him to be. Most days, I wonder if I was better off without the man he actually was. I don’t know. I’ll never get to know, and I’m still struggling to make peace with that.

Heather Labay is an author, editor, and writing coach. Her short story, "Cuss Words," appeared in the inaugural volume of The New Southern Fugitives and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can also be found in Borderline Tales Magazine and is forthcoming in Mobius Blvd. Her nonfiction has been published in Business Insider and Into the Spine. She lives in Rochester Hills, Michigan.