My father abandoned me more than twenty years ago. This was not an act that came without warning: he had divorced my mother in a spite-filled, accusation hurling frenzy some years earlier, and in the process I had gone from being an adored girl who found constant favor in his eyes to a bewildered young woman who realized with dismay that I would never find favor there again. Still, it was a shock to learn, through old family friends, that my father—who had remarried three months to the day that his divorce from my mother became final—had moved to Israel, without the courtesy of providing a forwarding address, or even saying good-bye.
My response to his leaving followed a predictable pattern: I wept, I raged, I had sex with a dozen different partners in a misguided effort to prove to myself that I was worth something to some man, even if no longer to him. Eventually, though, all this Sturm und Drang passed. I fell in love and settled down. I had two children, made a home and built a life filled with the enduring pleasures of a long and happy marriage.
It’s not that I didn’t think of my father; I thought of him quite often, but these thoughts had mercifully lost their raw edge, and with it, their ability to rend me in two. Instead, I had come to feel that he was lodged in the past—distant and dim—not in the present. And so I thought that when he died I would not mourn him because I had done my mourning already. He had been dead to me for so many years; what difference would his actual death make to the now well-insulated fortress of my heart?
But then an old family friend, Saul (not his real name) had a massive stroke and died shortly thereafter. Saul and my father were the same age and had known each for years; my parents introduced him to his wife and the four of them had been friends for decades until my father jettisoned him, the way he jettisoned so much when his marriage to my mother ended. Saul was a part of my childhood, playing the role a benevolent uncle, never obtrusive, but always there. And when, as an adult, I visited the home on the Jersey Shore he shared with his wife, the talk inevitably turned to my father. Saul was equally puzzled by my father’s behavior, and equally hurt by his loss; on more than one occasion, he urged me to try to contact him although I was never able to bring myself to do this. As time passed, it became apparent to me that not only was Saul one of the few people I knew who knew my father, he was one of the only ones who still loved him. Now Saul was gone and when he went, he took with him one of the last links I had to the parent who had left me.
My mother and I went down to the Jersey Shore on a cool spring day for Saul’s funeral. It was held in a local synagogue whose pews were packed with people who had loved Saul and were there to say goodbye. His son gave a eulogy in which he talked about his father’s life with both candor and affection. The rabbi spoke; a cantor sang and it was over. Throughout the service, the ride to the cemetery, and the meal back at the house afterwards, I wept and wept. When I was not weeping, tried I vainly to keep from starting again. I returned to my home in New York that evening feeling gutted by grief, as if it had been a blade which had cleanly scooped out everything inside. I kissed my husband and children, and then mounted the stairs to bed. But the awful hollowed-out feeling was there the next day, and the next, and the day after that. It took a full week for it to dissipate. At the end of that week, I realized that the reason for my sorrow was not confined to Saul’s death; I was grieving for my father too. Small wonder.
I do not know when or how my father will die, nor, assuming I outlive him, how I will learn of his death. Will his wife call to tell me? Since she has not seen fit to try to contact me once in all these years, I highly doubt it. More likely I will learn of it the way I learned that he had left the country—through some third party, a friend or acquaintance from the past. There will be no chance to ask how or why he could have excised my brother and me from his life with the precision of a surgeon confronting a cluster of cancerous cells, no chance to say good-bye. No funeral, no eulogy, no somber trip to the cemetery in the company of other mourners, no shovelful of dirt thudding softly onto the blank, unyielding surface of the lowered casket. What I do know is that to be excluded from my father’s death, as I have been for so many years from his life, will be a fresh wound: a laceration, a burn, a blow. I had thought myself exempt; I believed that having been so hurt before was an inoculation and that I would not succumb again to the brute force of grief. I was wrong. When it comes, though, I will be ready. And readiness, if not all, is at least some small comfort. It may be the only one I will be given.