Daddy Issues

on grief, death and the way we love

Last weekend Father’s Day hit me with unexpected grief. The phone rang with my father’s death announcement the summer before my entry into junior high school. I had lived with him in South Carolina for 6th grade, while my mother figured some things out. My other sisters went to live with their fathers, too. My 3 sisters and I went from sharing rooms with bunk beds to not seeing each other for a year. When she was ready for us to return home, my mother moved us into a small, new apartment in the north suburbs of Chicago. We had all by then outgrown the tiny spaces she was trying to raise us in.

I had my own room at my dad’s house, with a TV and cable. We had a deep freezer full of meat and greens that Aunt Margaret had made. I had a bike that I not only didn't have to share but could jump on and ride at any time as long as it was light outside. Sharing a room with 3 other siblings after that was a special kind of hell.

When that phone rang on that Saturday afternoon, it meant that that hell was my new forever. I would never return to my daddy’s house after that. For my mother, that day shifted everything. My dad’s death, specifically the death annuity and insurance payout that came to me upon his death, gave my mother the relief that she was in need of. Before the start of the school year, we moved even further from Chicago to Zion, a small suburb with 10 stoplights, tops. We moved into a house, and we all got bikes. The scoundrel of a second husband got “the calling” and became a preacher, leaving her high and dry to raise my younger two siblings on her own, and my daddy’s death was a temporary salve on that wound.

My dad was quite the scoundrel himself. Last year my fantasy of my dad dissolved as I heard first hand from my brother how much of a monster he was to the women who loved him. We had such short time together that I painted a superhero image of him that only a child could imagine, and I held on to that story into my forties. My mom won’t talk to me about why she left him, but she did so quietly and with the quickness, while pregnant with me. My dad was many things — he was charismatic and fine, made good money and came from good stock. He was also a war veteran, a functional alcoholic, and an abusive womanizer. He died three months after his 50th birthday, which was too young I guess to apologize to the women whose lives he turned upside down, but the bit of money he left was reparative at least.

My dad has been gone for almost 4 decades now.

This year when Father’s Day arrived, I was fresh out of a four-day grief ritual in the Colorado Rockies, where I wailed for him being gone for the first time since 1988. I have always told lovers that I had already suffered my greatest loss of love the day he died, allowing his death to serve as some protective barrier between me and any future possibility of grief. Lovers could come and go, as my commitment to non-attachment was solidified on July 30, 1988 when George Hampton took his last breath. That day was my villain origin story and relationship anarchy became my super power. I would allow myself to fall in love over and over again, as long as I sat in whatever waters looked deep but felt shallow enough to not drown in.

“My daddy died so I don’t take no shit from niggas
Nigga love me back or pray I do not pull that trigger
Intelligent I play dumb you should watch your back
I get my way then act up daddy taught me that
I don’t know how to act” earthsignchels, Daddy Died

I cried really loud the day that call came in, I cried until my head hurt and my mother’s head hurt. I cried until my grief became so uncomfortable for everyone around me that I was told it was time to put it away. So I cried quietly, away from every one. Grief took over my jaw, building tension in my neck, sculpting my traps into armor around my heart, but it was neat and quiet and tucked away.

And that became my practice. To put the grief away so that everyone but me could be comfortable. To love in a way that doesn’t allow grief’s wounds to be revealed, because they were ugly and loud and they made everyone uncomfortable. When I was called into grieve in ritual it meant grieving all the times I had loved only with enough space to leave if it ever looked like hearts could break. That doesn’t leave that much space for care, though.

In the aftermath of what turned out to be a very emotional Father’s Day, I have been wondering what I get to allow in love and pleasure when grief is actually allowed to be as big and as loud as it needs to be. Is the anarchy softer and more rich with care? Are my hips able to open up wider? Does my throat get deeper as my jaw releases? Do I allow my heart to break into smaller pieces? Do I trust that someone will care for all those pieces while they are still being put back together?

bell hooks said that ‘the practice of love offers no place of safety,” yet my body has tensed against every imagined possibility of harms that comes with the love I allow. There is a hardening that engulfed my 10 year old heart the day my daddy died and it has spread into my joints and my fascia, becoming a part of every choice I make in my own becoming. That has always been my daddy issue. The vulnerability that is required to be with grief and still in love and in community is a choice I get to make. It softens me as much as it terrifies me, but if I have to choose (and we all do) then I choose love over safety every time.

“Vulnerability is the only authentic state. Being vulnerable means being open, for wounding, but also for pleasure. Being open to the wounds of life means also being open to the bounty and beauty.” ― Stephen Russell, Barefoot Doctor’s Guide to the Tao: A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior

To learn more about the Grief and Eros Ritual that was so beautifully held by Victor Warring, Bernadette Pleasant & Z Gris, please visit https://www.embodymorelove.com/grief-eros-film-ritual