Two Truths

My dad died on New Year’s Eve. I’ve been struggling to figure out how to write about him, because he was never someone I knew how to make sense of.

He neglected my siblings and me. He couldn’t be serious and wasn’t there for us emotionally. He totally dropped the ball on my mom. When my dad lost my brother’s mom when he was just a baby, he began a spiral into depression and addiction and became homeless, leaving me as my brother’s full-time parent shortly after I graduated high school. My brother became like a son to me. He is the light of my life. But taking on that role so early forever altered the course of my life and left my brother with scars he is still recovering from. That is the hardest thing to grapple with. I felt bitter anger toward my dad for years because of it.

And at the same time, in the moments when he was present, my dad made me feel more loved than anyone else in my life ever did. He told me often how much he loved me and how special I was. He dressed up with me every year on Halloween, his and my favorite holiday. He took us camping on the Oregon Coast every summer and played with us the way only a true puer aeternus could. He made me believe in dreams. He had these Aquarian, humanitarian, convention-breaking ideals that totally moved and inspired me. He could talk to anyone. So many people who knew him loved him. He was always telling us to spread love.

Some people in my family wanted me to cut off contact with my dad, and some of them did. They wouldn’t let me say anything positive about him without reminding me of everything he’d done wrong, and I understand why. But I couldn’t do that. I knew if I had, I would have lost something deeply important to me.

Losing my dad and trying to write about him made me think about something I learned years ago about adult children of alcoholics. It was the tendency of people who've experienced deep traumas to engage in black-and-white thinking. That really struck me because I had already noticed it in myself and my siblings.

When something threatens a child’s survival, and not getting the care you need from a parent absolutely qualifies, it puts you in survival mode. There is no room for nuance in that state. People are either safe or not safe, good or bad. And if you are a kid when this happens, before you have had the chance to understand how complicated the world actually is, that pattern can become how you see everything.

Today, it often feels like the world is in a kind of collective trauma response. Social media throws us so much complexity that no one can really hold it all, so a lot of people shut down nuance and go into survival mode. Everything becomes black or white. Everyone is either a hero or a monster, with no in-between allowed. I watched that happen with my dad, within my family. And I think refusing to do that, choosing to hold the full, complicated truth of someone, might be one of the hardest and most important things any of us can do right now.

My dad was neither a hero or monster. He was a real, broken person who hurt people, me included, and who also gave me irreplaceable gifts. I am still learning how to carry both truths at the same time. I think that is the work right now, for me and maybe for a lot of us.

Rest easy, Dad. I love you.