We Are Still Daddy's Girls

Friends are losing their fathers this fall and I feel for them in a way that can’t be expressed in a simple “sorry for your loss”. I'm older than most of my friends; I’ve gone through this passage and come out on the other side. I remember that after the hospital and the funeral and the condolences, you enter a landscape that seems to be missing some of its elements, and it’s hard to navigate for awhile.

         As a girl, your father was your first love, your protector (even if he was away a lot, like mine). He was the force that introduced you to the wide, wide world, hovered over your adventures and screened your boyfriends.  As you moved on to marriage, childbirth, career, you were still Daddy’s girl, and that Daddy force surrounded you, warding off evil. Maybe you had to develop the Daddy force in yourself (as I had to).  In any case, you had that force in your life.  I’m here to say that even when he dies, the Daddy force lives on. It will just take you a little while to recognize it in yourself.

         My father was a powerful man and I learned a lot from him, but I never felt that he loved me like my girlfriends’ dads loved them. We had many angry confrontations, but we never shared our innermost thoughts with each other. When I had matured enough to understand him, Alzheimer’s had erased his thoughts. In effect, the man he was had died.

         One year while he could still travel, he and Mom visited me in Washington, and I had a little party for them. Dad must have pulled up an old social script from his unconscious, because he circulated among the guests making such polished conversation that everyone thought I was exaggerating his illness. As the evening wound down, Dad came walking toward me as if he had spotted someone he recognized from the past. “How are you?” he asked with his famous smile.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

He smiled wider and began to move on, but something stopped him and he turned around with a worried look.

“Are we…you and I…are we okay?”

And I said yes, “We are just fine.”

“Good", he said, satisfied that he had settled things with someone important.

I like to think it was me.