When I was a kid a lot of people used to think that my Dad was really my grandfather. Only sometimes did it bother me. Most of the time he just made me feel like we had a secret, something that no one would understand anyway. He would smile at me and wink from the corners of his eyes. After a while I started smiling back, ignoring the mistakes of strangers.

When my mother died six years ago, I was shocked that it would now be my father that I would turn to. For eighteen years I had gone to my mother with everything. I don't think anyone thought that he would outlast her, least of all the two of us. I remember the first mornings after she died. He and I would sit together at the dining room table, drinking coffee, at a loss of words for what we would now do with each other. Really, what are an 18 year old girl and an 76 year old man supposed to do when the one person that had always bound them together is suddenly gone?

Slowly, we got used to each other. It was like meeting someone for the first time or like finding out that I had a father for the first time. I guess it was both, for in the year after my mother died, I came to know him as a father and as a man. For the first time in my life, I started to really listen to his stories, listen to the things he had to tell me about life. And there was a lot.

He was a father when I needed him to be, when I woke up in the middle of the night crying, when I couldn't sleep and when I couldn't face the fact that it was now just the two of us. The rest of the time he was a man that I got to know. And I was a girl. In the evenings we would sit in the living room and he would instruct me on the proper way to drink cognac, each of us with a cigarette held between our fingertips, our palms warming the alcohol from below.

That was one of the worst years of my life but it was also one of the best. Had my mother not died, I may have never come to know my father as I did. Sometime in that year together we made a silent promise to each other, one that would bind us as close as possible. Slowly over that year, I came to realize that he would do anything for me and in return, I promised the same.

Like a secret handshake, sworn and carefully memorized through the branches of a tree house, we never forgot. I was there when he was bored and up late at night, flipping through channels. I tried always to answer my phone, even on Friday nights in Manhattan. He was there when I had trouble figuring out how to be an adult, when I was scared or in debt or when I was sick and simply wanted reassurance.

Truthfully, I don't feel like I've lost my father. Because really, how could I truly lose this person who is so ingrained in my being? Every decision I ever make, every place I ever go in my life will have something to do with him and who he was. He taught me never to be scared, to instead look at everything in life as a challenge, an adventure. He taught me that it is never too late in life to make friends, that it's always worth it to love and to allow yourself to be loved.

I imagine that when my father returned home from Germany, from the prison camp in which he had been kept for six months, that he felt a certain obligation to his life. That, because he had survived and fought so hard to do so, he must then make his life worth it. I feel the same way. As though I have a legacy to live up to. Because I was once given the gift of knowing a man like my father and because I have now lost him, I must make the rest of my life worth it too.
1:20:33 PM     comment []