Written in writing group:
When I was born my father was away at WWII. I was three years old when he came home. He came in the front door and I was in the hall. Mother said “This is your daddy” and I said “That’s not my daddy, my daddy’s upstairs.” Not perhaps the best way to start a relationship with one’s father, and I don’t think it helped our relationship at all. What neither parent understood was that I thought my “Daddy” was the frame with glass in it and a picture of a man behind the glass, but I had no idea that picture represented a real person. This is something we have to learn, it doesn’t come naturally.
Stories I suspected, but didn’t know. I don’t remember what I was told about my father’s war experience. I know he never talked about it. One story was that Mom had got pregnant hoping it would keep Daddy from being drafted, but it didn’t. I know she was resentful, and it’s true it was hard being at home alone with a baby. Another story was that as Dad’s company of soldiers moved up through Italy, he left them and went looking to buy some liquor for them all. But when he came back, his whole unit had been blown up.
My father was an alcoholic, I think he was medicating PTSD from the war. I remember that I only saw him sloppy drunk a couple of times, talked to him sober once — after he’d been operated on for colon cancer, and the rest of the time he was just drunk enough to dissociate but not drunk enough to be sloppy.
A few weeks after my father’s 70th birthday, he was pretty sick. My brother Jack called me and said Mom and got drunk, and Dad had called him and he had called an ambulance to take him to the hospital. But now he wanted to come home and watch the tall ships sail up the Hudson on the 4th of July. So, Jack said, one of us had to go home & make sure Dad’s all right since Mom can’t be trusted. And I was chosen. So I went home, Dad came home and was able to watch the tall ships on his own TV in his own house. Then he was taken back to the hospital. I remember I was standing on the stairs crying as they started wheeling him out to the ambulance. Suddenly he looked at me and it was like his whole soul came into his eyes. It was like he suddenly realized he would never see me again. His last words to me were “Thank you!”
The story of watching the Tall Ships on the Fourth of July is told in detail here. I don’t remember how I learned the stories I suspected, possibly from another member of the family.