David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

family

Relationships he couldn’t mend were the real tragedy of my father’s death

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My father died this morning, but I actually lost him many years ago.

There was a tragic pattern in his life, one which I couldn’t see while it was happening, but which is plain to see now that his life is gone. He was desperate to be loved and needed — something which I can understand — but he managed to destroy every relationship he ever had for long.

He attracted people to him with his good nature and charm. He drove them away with his need to control them — and with his incessant lies about just about everything.

His three children once loved and adored him. One by one, he pushed us away. My mother loved him when I was young, but he crushed her spirit and destroyed her love. He screamed at her. He belittled her. He tried to force her to be like him in every way.

Mother’s loving and childlike spirit was wounded badly — and she walked away from us because she came to believe she was either going to kill him or kill herself.

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Goodbye, Daddy

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My father died a couple of hours ago.

I’ve wondered for years what I would feel when my father died. I still don’t know, because I can’t feel anything about it right now.

I woke up a few minutes ago to find two messages from a nurse at Regional Medical Center in Anniston, Ala. That’s the hospital to which he was taken a little more than a month ago.

When I called back, the nurse told me he died at about 4:30 this morning.

In the end, it was his lungs that failed him. The nurse couldn’t tell me much more about the medical situation at the end, but she did say he was comfortable and not in pain. There’s no way to put this on a medical chart, I suppose, but the truth is that he had lost the will to live.

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What if we planted for the future instead of just providing for today?

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For an 8-year-old, it seemed like a lot of work, but I didn’t mind, because it seemed important.

My father and I left Meridian, Miss., early one morning on a mission to plant pecan trees. My father’s job kept transferring us to different places — Meridian was the fifth city where Southern Railway had sent him — but planting the trees held the promise of something more permanent.

I don’t remember how many trees we planted that day, but it seems as though there were around a dozen. We were planting them on land which we had inherited after my mother’s father had died. He had owned a farm in the country — where my mother had spent her summers when she was younger — and we now owned part of that property after it had been divided between his three children.

My father’s plan was for us to move there one day. We were planting trees for what would be our future home.

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