An Arc from Rise to Fall

There’s a narrative arc in the original Star Wars trilogy that deals with the transformation of a son’s hero worship and idealization of his father into his disbelief and feelings of betrayal upon discovering the evils his hero is really responsible for. The arc completes in the father’s redemption, with the son’s support. From hero, to villian, to final redemption at death. That’s the whole line, and I can trace most of it myself in my own life.

For me personally, the hero phase climbed up the first side of the arc easily and predictably: my Dad was my hero during my first dozen years. To me, he was always the strongest and smartest man in the room. He was also the strongest proponent of his own heroic tales, and as a kid, I subscribed to them fully and eagerly, the same way teen-aged Luke Skywalker hungered for scraps of glory about his long-lost father. My Dad was fearless, he always beat up bullies, he was a great marksman with a rifle, and he could ride a horse. After his hitch in the army, he became a fireman. He told Hemingway-esque tales of adventure. It always worked out for him, the hero.

He considered himself a hard worker, and in the right in most cases. He was proud and sure of himself. What could have inspired more pride in a son than that?

Reaching an Apogee

Over the top of the arc is where one’s climb to greatness meets its limit: stories begin to sound repetitive and less inspiring the more you hear them. As I got older, I began to see the holes in my Dad’s narratives. I began to question his facts (in my mind if not aloud) and to feel less than inspired by his tales. Maybe I was in my pre-teens when I started understanding that my Dad’s stories were constructed by him. I believed the facts as he told them, but not always his role as the clear hero or obvious victim. I started to realize that whomever told a story always had the advantage. In my Dad’s stories, he was never wrong or unjustified. He was either the victor or a victim whose revenge would be justified.

At this phase, I began to mentally call bullshit on some of the hero imagery my Dad used to portray himself. I knew he was tough with his fists, but I also realized that in my experience, the only people I’d ever actually seen him strike was my Mum, or me and my sister. It’s hard to be on Team Dad after you come to that little bit of clarity. Being tough in order to protect a friend or loved one is okay. Being angry drunk and knocking your wife down the stairs and causing her to dislocate her shoulder is just fucking wrong.

Maybe Dad caught wind of my growing inner criticism. As I got bigger and stronger, approaching sixteen, he began to insist that I address him with “yes sir!”. Dad learned about authority and control in the army, so “yes sir!” was his military-style approach to respect and deference, a way to heel me and to control any growing thoughts of rebellion.

Around this same time, he also gave me and my sister punching lessons to help us understand how to protect ourselves and to have confidence in case we ever got into fights. It was really empowering to be told that I had a good strong punch. Dad taught me and Kim how to cock our fists solidly and throw left and right crosses into his waiting palms. He held his strong leathery hands up like two catchers mitts, and said “one! two!” or “left! right! left!”. The loud swack of my knuckles hitting his palms felt good, but nothing felt better than his hammed-up grimaces to show off my effect. He’d purse his lips and shake his hand out to breeze off what must have been the sting of my best punch. It gave me delight and pride – real confidence! To me, that supportive training and confidence-building is what fathers and teachers are supposed to do. That coaching was probably my Dad being his best.

Heading Downhill is the Worst

As he got past sixty, my Dad’s physical strength started waning, and I was becoming more like an adult. His emotional weaknesses, abuses, and mistakes became more evident to me. I wasn’t always paying close enough attention to him, but he did have internal stresses that came out in moments of pain or in drunken outbursts. He never admitted that he was hurting and he never asked anyone for help. He just held it in until something would break free.

Once, he accidentally banged his head on the metal hood over our stove and then started to cry. We’d been taught by his example to be stoic, and we measured our frequency between tears in terms of years. It was shocking to see our tough commanding Dad just break down for a minute and just cry. I knew when it happened that Dad’s crying was out of proportion to any slight bump on his head – it was just a little pain that caused him to release a much bigger pain that he’d been carrying inside. Probably it was the burden of how our family had been unravelling for years.

Losing Mum

Our mother had been incapacitated in one hospital or other for years by the time I was in my mid-teens, and had been depressed and passively borderline suicidal for years before that. We’d never sought any psychological help for her, and never took her to a doctor until she was practically knocking on death’s door. After she’d almost died, been saved, and then finally housed in private hospitals, I think it was a helpless loss of her from our lives that must have eaten away at our Dad. I don’t know if he worried about the effect of it on his kids, but he’d lost his wife permanently. I’m sure he carried guilt from other things (of which I was not yet aware) under his skin too, that would have been undercutting his strength and spirit. Our Mum was to be cared for by others outside the home, and he would remain working full-time to support his household. I’m fairly sure he wanted to hide his personal burdens from his workmates too and maintain an image as “good ol’ reliable Jim”.

Being a single parent with an institutionalized wife and what must have felt like a broken marriage was stressful enough, but my Dad was also physically unhealthy – at least 40 or 50 pounds overweight, with poor respiration from emphysema and a diet that we’d nowadays call high fat, high carb. His physical breaking point came in the form of a heart attack on December 21st in 1983.

The Road to Redemption

While in hospital, my father struggled to recover from a heart attack and later, multiple strokes. He would be home again after enduring weeks and weeks of stroke recovery therapy, literally learning to walk on his own again. But in spite of that hard-won achievement, and although he gained his mobility and strength back through effort and willpower, he’d not at all conquered his inner demons of pride and addiction. Before long, at home unsupervised by any doctors and nurses, he drank himself into another stroke and was back in hospital again, struggling to recover. He didn’t learn the underlying lesson of his personal health crisis. That was him at his weakest and most pathetic – too proud to admit to his addiction or the devastating effect it had on his family.

Later, doctors told him he’d developed an almost epileptic reaction to alcohol, and that if he didn’t quit he would surely die. He liked to tell that dramatic story, as if he were the hero of an adventure tale who’d narrowly survived a risky journey. The Doctor said “Mister Love, if you drink again, you will die!” He repeated that story over and over. It was the consequential line in the sand he could finally appreciate, and he was the star at the centre of the episode!

That Damned Demon Alcohol

He talked about “drinking” as if it were some dangerous thing to be avoided, not as any personal addiction that he was committed to conquering. Deep down, I still think he never really took responsibility for his drinking. In his mind, alcohol itself was to blame, rather than his addiction to it. It was the old “evils of alcohol” bugaboo, a left-over from his protestant, prohibition-era childhood. (In October of 2021, in some small way, I will celebrate the centennial of his birth.)

There’s one more crime that I wouldn’t learn about my father until after his death in 1989. The victim of this crime is still alive and it’s not my story to tell, but next to killing someone, it’s probably the worst thing you can do to another person. I’ll just add that it’s the sort of crime that morally strips one of any right to be called a parent. Throughout most of my life, my father had been perpetrating a terrible form of abuse that caused his victim lifelong, ongoing emotional damage.

I am your father…

He had started out as my hero, later, became my burden, and finally closed out his time being seen as the villian. Of course, it’s much more complicated that that.

Looking back at my memories of his final years, I’m convinced that deep down, my Dad knew what he was guilty of, but he’d never acknowledge or apologize for it. Things were just left unspoken and unaccounted for, with no payback or closure allowed for his victims. Admitting that there was a victim would be the same as admitting to his own complicity. Because of this, in my heart, there’s no redemption for my father’s worst acts of violence and selfishness. He did not receive any punishment, except perhaps, I hope, in his heart. He did not redeem himself to the victim I’m thinking of, and he left his family with the most important tales untold and questions unanswered.

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/05/luke-i-am-your-father/484484/