Head down, scowling... the man I revered
MOST kids look up to their dads, but my two brothers and I were actively encouraged to regard ours with outsize awe. My mother constantly waxed eloquent about how lucky we were to have such an impressive father – brilliant, handsome, and accomplished. For a while, the campaign worked.
Although a full-time Presbyterian minister for only a few years, after he segued to theological higher education, Don Shriver continued to deliver guest sermons. I may have hated going to church, but when he swept up the aisle in his flowing crimson robe from Harvard, I basked in importance by association.
He always thrived at a lectern, swelling to fill the role of orator. I may derive my own ease with public speaking from listening, rapt, to those sermons.
He recycled anecdotes for different venues. I was especially captivated by his ritual retellings of The Velveteen Rabbit. I still fancy that concept of being ‘loved real’. Maybe it’s not just bedraggled stuffed animals; maybe that’s what we do in families. We love each other real.
Yet into my adulthood, that pressure for admiration I grew up with began to backfire. As an atheist, I found it difficult to square my father’s intelligence with his embrace of what to me were religious fairy stories.
Love and admiration aren’t synonymous, and can be at odds. The awe we had drilled into us was distancing. My father was already remote – often out of town, impatient when the dratted kids needed to pee, and distracted at dinner – from which he bolted, the better to get back to work.
He always seemed to crave our reverence, when what he really needed was the opposite: affection, intimacy, and good-humoured ribbing.
To have felt truly close to us, he’d have had to give up on bidding for a veneration that you should never expect from family, and isn’t much use, frankly, from anyone.
You can’t feel known and revered at the same time.
What has humanised Don Shriver, and greatly enriched
his relationship with his two surviving kids, is the humbling of old age.
He’s 90 now, and I can’t express how much it pains me to watch him inch tremulously across the living room, resting on his cane, holding on to chairs. Not long ago, he was still a vigorous man, splitting firewood into his 80s.
When we were kids, he’d galumph down the street, head bent, scowling, planning his next speech.
We couldn’t keep up with him. Now the challenge of keeping pace is walking that slowly. Of course, I’d rather his body decay than his mind. Fortunately, he can still rail cogently against Donald Trump, and I’ve laid down the law: he has to live long enough to see the back of that guy in the White House.
I’m not grateful for his infirmity, but I am grateful for its effect. There’s a new tenderness to our relationship, on both sides.
Once unheard of, he confides in me. My mother’s massive stroke means he’s often lonely.
He needs me now, if only, as he says, for ‘someone to complain to’. He’s mortal. I prefer my father mortal. My father has finally been loved real.