My father died two weeks ago. He was seventy-seven. He died the way he had lived, without pain, without having to feel anything.
I asked to clean out his home office. It is a small room; it was his kingdom. I knew that, for me, cleaning his office would be a final rite of passage.
His presence hung in the little room like the smell of old pipe tobacco, familiar, haunting. The walls gave evidence to all that kept my father going and protected him against the world, and from us. Family pictures papered the room, old letters tacked up like friendly ghosts, travel mementoes from happier days, birthday cards and anniversary poems which told of his history among us. My eyes feasted on these closeted walls, straining to glean the silent rapture my father felt in placing here his captured feeling.
Things stuffed in every possible cranny throughout the room cradled him here those many nights he sat to pay the family bills. Round cans of eight milometer films which hold the history of our family ties: our first step, our baptism, Christmas mornings, wedding days. His favorite novels. Travel scrapbooks. Medical books, outdated now. How-to instructions for appliances, old coins, rocks. His things, once deemed clutter, now sacred.
I touched Daddy’s file cabinet. I felt excitement surge within as I opened it and slipped silently into his “secret stash,” to learn what he could never reveal about himself. My heart quickened, eager to touch somehow his internal world.
The drawers creaked beneath the strain of its bulging treasure. Old family photographs engaged my being — vaguely remembered ancestors, photos of my parents as children, familiar landscapes of our family pilgrimage, pictures of my siblings, not entered in our usual family albums.
My father’s sensitivity emerged with each turn of my hand. Old files with letters my sister and I wrote from college, telling of our adventures and noting needs from far away. A letter detailing reasons why I chose to live in New York rather than returning home after college. Old papers I wrote in college, defending civil rights, Southern literature and a social conscience. A note signed by my dad and my brother, then an adolescent, “My father promises to pay me $500 if I do not drink by the age of 21.”
Hand made Father’s Day cards, words of affection he secretly digested. A piece of paper scribbled by one brother, “One free gutter cleaning.” Death notices of his own departed siblings, carefully clipped and cataloged. A history of his feelings and gratitudes emerged, unspoken during his stay with us, denied except in death.
Hours passed without my emerging from this secret place, my father’s interior world. Feelings so deep, wordless, memories so alive yet so secret, hidden in life from us, now so poignantly present. My father had slipped into his file cabinet a history of relationships, a lifetime of family, without so much a gesture to those of us he loved of its importance to him. We can only guess.
I did not want to leave this place.
Alone, among all these ghosts, these treasured images and symbols of lives linked together, I got it, firsthand, how love kept at bay was my inheritance. Stored away in his file cabinet, he hoarded all the potential moments of his life, all the things he held dear — fantasies upon which he could muse, at arms length, in his quiet hours alone — precious thoughts he could not act upon in the real world.
Storing this in his file cabinet rather than living it. All his potential caring, all his potential fathering, his potential being-in-the-world. And here I was, alone in his study, feeling all the feelings, reliving all the memories, fantasizing about all the potential exchanges never granted in life, just as he did.
There must be some message in why he saved all these memories for us. A message about his life, perhaps, a message I don’t think he figured out himself, but left for us to figure out. For my part, I got what I needed for the moment. I gathered up this precious cargo, this treasure-hoard my father left us as his last embrace, and carried it gently downstairs. To share with my brothers and sister, my mother and children. To make it live within us, alive with all the meanings hidden. Alive with Daddy.
— December 1994