Hi haennie.
I think there is stiff competition among all your posts for the distinction of "best post ever." You have the gift of making people think and often, to feel.
I didn't have anything like the relationship with my father that you've described. He was often emotionally inaccessible, aloof and probably depressed. As many of his generation did, he pretty much "went along with the program" in his life, and suffered the consequences of doing so. I think my life is at least in part a reaction to how he lived his own life.
Like the rest of us, he wanted to be loved, but didn't quite know how to get there. Everyone who knew my father, mostly from work, liked him, yet he was unable to sustain long-term friendships. He often seemed content with this, but it was at least obvious to me that something was missing in his life. He didn't travel much, though in his later years he took extended trips to Greece and China, both times living in the countryside for periods of time. He also didn't change careers, and loathed moving from one town to another the one time we did so. That's not counting the time we moved from Brooklyn to the suburbs when I was about three years old. He even had a very large brick den built with a fireplace, a patio with an awning and he himself built a basketball court in the backyard to persuade my mother to abandon her ambitions to move closer to where she worked in an upscale neighborhood, and then wanted to built a vertical extension on the house before we ultimately made the move.
My father also went through a "colorful" but unlovely mid-life crisis (at a time when my mother was deep into her alcoholism) which ended in divorce and then his "disappearing" for a few years. I think he'd grown weary of living with his alcoholic wife, my mother, who only started drinking badly when she was around forty years old. They seemed to have a good relationship when they were younger, and enjoyed each others' company. He'd also raised five children with her, but he grew apart from all of us about the time we were in seventh or eight grade. And this is when the arguing between my parents seemed to begin.
He was an attentive and involved father when we were very young, but seemed to lose interest when we were older. He also seemed envious of the opportunities his children had that he didn't enjoy. This continued through our adult years. He was born right before The Great Depression of European immigrant parents who were very conservative. An unintended pregnancy resulted in the birth of my younger sister, Catherine when my parents were around thirty five. My mother was distraught and, only in retrospect, I understood that she'd suffered from postpartum depression. My father was ecstatic, and spoiled Catherine with attention. He seemed to be clueless around my mother's depression. I think that her depression and the burden of raising yet another child while she was working full-time in her career, and then a subsequent automobile accident in which she suffered chronic neck pain, may have triggered her struggles with alcohol, though it also ran very deeply in her family.
I spent a great deal of time with my father following his diagnosis of lung cancer in 1994, up until his death several months later. In two different hospitals, taking him to his radiation treatments, bringing him the newspapers and something to eat while he was at home..I was working on a flex schedule, so I could pretty much visit with him whenever I wanted to. For better or worse, I discovered that he remained emotionally inaccessible right up until his final days, and that he had crafted a very simple, though somewhat narrow and self-deprived, way of looking at life. He neither fought his cancer, nor did he fight to stay alive. It was almost as though he experienced a level of relief, knowing that he was going to die. Or did he know? It's hard for me to say.
I was in his room at Memorial Sloane-Kettering when his doctor pretty much told him that "there's nothing else we can do." After the doctor left, my father acted as though the he'd been given information about the weather for the next five days. I asked him whether or not he'd heard what the doctor told him, and asked him to repeat for me what he was told. His response was very different from what I'd heard. Something along the lines of, "Everything's fine, and we'll continue with the present treatment." Had I not been sober for around twelve years at the time, or had I not been a practicing psychologist, I would have experienced spontaneous combustion in the presence of such denial. (He and his new wife, a whole other story, continued to make traveling plans for when he "got better.") I didn't blow up his illusions. I just stayed with him and talked about where things were at the moment, and what he expected down the line. My brother Jack and I, a physician, spoke with him at a later time, but my Dad never seemed to fully accept what was to be a final judgment.
My father went out, not with a bang, but with a whimper. He was on heavy doses of liquid morphine near the end, and could no longer breathe on his own or with assistance. I was there the night before he died. He fell unconscious while I was there after a painful session of struggling to breathe. I knew he wouldn't last the night. I was, in fact, more relieved than anything else when I got the call the following morning.
My father never saw the way I drank before I first got sober or before he died, and he wasn't around for my relapse. Having survived life with an alcoholic wife and his own booze-fueled though not alcoholic mid-life crisis, he didn't quite get that I was an alcoholic, mostly because I didn't drink, or because he didn't know me as a "problem drinker" I was, though he may have harbored suspicions.
You're not alone in this. Many people die over the course of a lifetime. Most are replaceable; our parents are not.
Thank you for the opportunity to revisit something that I rarely ever think about these days. I needed a good cry. Even if this doesn't bring me to a better place, the walk will do me good.