On My Father & The Act of Crying
Yesterday my Dad turned sixty-two years old. In the last year, he’s undergone a couple of surgeries, including a fancy new titanium hip and another I won’t mention much about other than that he watched it on a computer monitor while it was happening and called me immediately after to tell me the colour on the screen reminded him of one of my paintings.
My dad remains the most physically active person I know. While he loves to golf every chance he gets like, literally every other white, upper-middle-class man I know, he cycles daily and has usually racked up over 30,000 steps on his Fitbit before 9am on most weekends. “I must have climbed up and down that ladder eighty times,” he said one morning as I was wiping the sleep from my eyes while simultaneously trying to wash away the taste of stale Old-Fashioneds in my mouth. “Treat yourself,” he would say before hanging up the phone or saying goodbye from a weekend at home, “go for a work-out.” After awhile this became a joke, once he came to terms with the fact that I basically retired from all physical exercise when I quit the swim team upon leaving for college. "I'm feeling...soft," he would say, referring to his lack of exercise, on doctor's orders to relax after his hip replacement. "I think I'll only take one Percocet today so I can have a cocktail tonight."
Now that I think about it, he’s had his fair share of surgeries. When he was twenty-one for example, he was tobogganing down a hill when he lost control, flipped, and landed on a tree stump, rupturing his spleen. From there he had to have it removed, and his life was never the same. The spleen, he claimed, was the emotional control centre of his body. And his tears didn’t discriminate. While usually reserved for romantic comedies or dramas, the hardest I remember seeing him cry growing up was at the end of Homeward Bound. Catching a re-airing of this a few months ago while down for a visit proved that my elaborate childhood memory hadn't been remotely fogged over the years. Before you call me a monster, you should know that I myself, spleen intact, am also an emotional wreck. I cry at everything. I cry at Patti Smith songs. I cry at a really nice compliment, when I see extreme kindness or hardship. I cry when I see elderly people eating alone. I cry when I witness a child being particularly insightful. I cry any time I see my mom cry, no exceptions. Once I cried trying to explain to my husband how a pop song made me feel. I saw a dead baby bird last week outside my apartment and didn't cry, but I really wanted to. I've cried at every single wedding I've been to and some of them were complete strangers, many of them terrible couples. And yes, I cried during Homeward Bound. I think perhaps what is most incredible about my father's crying is how quickly it happens. He can be shouting at the TV watching college football and suddenly a Gatorade commercial comes on and before I even have time to ask myself what the hell that sound is he's already wiping his face with his shirt. "I have something in my eye," he'll say, preemptively. I wasn't there when my brother told him he and his wife were expecting a baby this summer, but my guess is he straight up lost his shit.
All jokes aside, my father's incessant crying has taught me a thing or two about his character. He's taught me, of course, that it's okay to cry. It's okay to be a six-foot-tall muscular sixty-something year old and still show your vulnerable side, and it's not lost on me that I ended up marrying a man who (albeit far from six-feet-tall and muscular, not that I'm complaining) also embraces his vulnerability. My dad's taught me that it's okay to be confused, that it's okay to not to know what the hell you want to do with your life. "I went back to school at thirty," he'll remind me when I'm feeling particularly disoriented. "Don't be afraid to stretch yourself; you're never too old." More than anyone else in my family, he understands the emotional reaction I can sometimes feel toward something as arbitrary as seeing a plastic bag stuck in a fence. He can appreciate a good silence, and sometimes, he can even appreciate the act of doing nothing but enjoying the view. Once, during a short visit home, after sharing a bottle of wine, he called me from the other end of the house to show me something. When I got there, he was peeking out the window, watching the shadows of the skeletal stems of the sleeping lily-of-the-valleys waxing and waning with the wind, their movements coinciding with the sound of the waves from the lake. "It's nothing," he said. "I just know you're someone who can appreciate this sort of thing."
"We go through life and we have to make decisions. Sometimes they work out, sometimes they don't, and you just have to hope for the best," is something he has said to me every time I've come to him with a decision I suspected he might not like. Every time he's found me in a sobbing heap, crying over a boy. Every time I've emailed him for advice when I'm having a disagreement with a friend. Every time I've felt lost in my life or confused about which path to take. Always ending those conversations with, "And remember, no relationship is more important to me than the one I have with you. Nothing you can say or do will ever change that."
I love you, Dad. Happy Birthday. Thanks for keeping your shit together at my wedding.
P.S. Did you cry?
