My father had moments of crystalline clarity in which he would say something that would stop me in my tracks, making me pause to catch my breath from the goodness found in his words. These brief times of peace with my father were sacred thresholds through which we would stumble together into stillness and rest awhile in the love that broke through. I recall them with great fondness because they were rare due to my father’s troubles.
Dad’s troubles began long before he attended UMASS in the fifties but the drinking didn’t help. Imbibing more beer than other boys at parties, my father drank to forget the beatings my grandfather gifted him with. He kept drinking into his twenties and early thirties, kicking it with other reporters at the Hartford Chronicle for which he wrote investigative pieces taking him all over North America. After quitting reporting and moving to Maine, Dad tried Alcoholics Anonymous but found their reliance on a Higher Power distasteful and quit before he worked all the steps. Eventually my father found sobriety through aversion therapy and began working in childcare, where he learned to soothe his own little boy inside by caring for young children. The stint in childcare was brief, and after landing in Texas and a painful divorce in 1990, Dad became a single parent and machinist. He worked long nights with his turret lathe and unruly thoughts which churned inside him along with the hum of the machine shop.
I loved my father dearly, but I was terrified of his intense moods and incurring his wrath, which he often directed at me. He was estranged from himself, like a distant uncle who was beholden to wild rage and gripping sorrow. I couldn’t discern what would set him off. His early years of abuse and eventual drinking in New England left him spent. In Maine, he basked in the glow of his newly found sobriety but he never quit that habit of rage in which he would lose control and punch walls or back me into a corner, his eyes alight with fire. After the tumult passed, he would become a child again, apologizing to me timidly and crying in regret. He never chose healing, but miraculously, small bursts of insight would break through. These moments with my father were bright lights against the dark and dismal skies of his untreated mood disorder and bitterness toward life.
We were standing in our living room filled with light, much like I’m seeing today, and I lamented about something, wondering if I’d be happier having been born in another time and place, wearing the heavy cloak of shame I’d been gifted with since childhood. But Jennifer, he said gently, using my childhood name with the bright sunshine hitting his face, the best moment to live in is the one you’re in now. I stopped speaking for a moment before challenging him to explain what this meant. He said that the best time to be alive is right where your hands and your feet are, cherishing the moments you do have. Maybe some of this was wisdom gleaned from his short run in Alcoholics Anonymous. I like to believe Spirit helped to bring a bit of peace to a life filled with great suffering.
Even as I write this down I can’t help but savor this beautiful moment, our living room at the apartment in North Texas in the mid-nineties, my old twin bed with the Southwestern comforter stuck against the wall behind us; the black-and-white television set on top of the milk crates on the shaggy brown carpet; the creamy oversized floor pillows near the opposite wall; my father’s dark wooden New York desk, filled with old papers, silver coins, paperclips, drops of grease from his work as a machinist. We were one in that moment, both of us breathing easily for a little while, a rarity because I was in high school at the time, working long hours at the grocery store in high school while doing college classes to get a headstart for university studies.
I don’t remember what else happened after, whether I went off to my room to study or dressed for my shift at Albertsons or if he left to run errands or slam poetry in Dallas, a part of himself he refused to share with me. I don’t remember if it was late afternoon when we stood and talked together. Was the evening sky tinged with blooming shades of indigo or was it the bright noonday sun we were seeing? Maybe the conversation veered completely off the path of peace because when you lived with someone who had mercurial moods and relied only on themselves for support, this sort of thing happened. There were sublime moments to be sure, moments of ecstatic joy and tender beauty, but they emerged inconsistently because of his unwillingness to seek treatment for his moods.
We desperately want our memories to connect to other joyful ones, leading to a life stringed with nothing but happiness, exiling the painful times into hiding. And yet as we open up to a deeper reality rooted in kindness, we can warmly embrace all our experiences, noting that our life with others is amazingly complex, inconsistent, rich, and even boring at times.
What I do remember is the radiance of my father’s face as he turned toward the sun pouring through the glass patio doors, the brightness bathing us in a love which broke through the confines of a dark and lonely life. Truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us the most fleeting of all, wrote the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke in Duino Elegies, and I know I touched the immensity of being as we stood in that radiance together.
As I reflect on this story now, I remember it not only as a sign of his love for me, because he did love me, and he was speaking to himself too, but as a sacred reminder of what’s possible when I open my heart to the joy of the present moment, even as I recall the past. And when I return to that incandescent moment and give thanks for that brief moment of goodness, I come home to myself, smiling in recognition of being known and touched in love.
Jenn Zatopek is a writer and trauma-informed EMDR psychotherapist living in Texas. A native Texan with New England roots, Jenn writes at the intersection of science and faith, longing to encounter the divine in the most unexpected places. She studied theology at Brite Divinity School. Her work has been featured in Ruminate Magazine and elsewhere. More at Jenn's website or follow along on Instagram.
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