02/20/98

A Father's Awakening

Dick Searles, a father and close friend of mine, expresses his regrets about wearing the masculine mantle of silence for too long.

It was the day before his scheduled surgery -- his first. He did not think the hernia repair procedure would threaten his masculinity, but submitting to general anesthesia was another matter. There could always be complications. He had rationalized his being there by recollecting he had probably brought this on over years of exertion -- the end result of lifting heavy loads the wrong way -- moving trees to plant, building the stone wall, digging post holes ... But it was worth it all. Besides, it was probably just a structural defect of the species, he recalled the doctor having darkly suggested.

He was being readied now to undergo those preliminary tests by which modern medical science takes a man's measure -- a check of all the fluids, all the functions -- heart, lungs, and temperature, even family medical history. Nothing had been done to him yet, but when he sat down in that wheelchair in the lobby, something in his psyche had been surrendered up. The pajamas in the middle of the afternoon made it all too obvious.

Now he knew he was vulnerable, as much so as the incredibly old man on the other side of the drawn curtain, his roommate, whose only vital signs were a feeble cough and then a sigh. He was no longer a casual visitor, but a resident, about to have things done to him. The frailty of the human machine was unmistakably his. But he would tell himself again before he went to sleep, that this was only a "routine maintenance procedure ..."

He overslept, he thought, but sure he was awake, went quickly to the bottom of the stairs by the kitchen and called up, "Tim, hey Tim, it's late," anxious for his son not to be late for the ride to school with him. Then a rush of realization. His son was not upstairs at home, nor in this place, either. Still in his dream, he remembered how, in fact, and half asleep, he had stood, confused, at the bottom of the stairs, at home, and called, "Hey - Tim ..." His son was not at home, but at college, three hundred miles away, having left a week earlier. And now he was away from him again.

Too many times he'd said, "Come on, buddy." "Come on, pal," masking the things he'd meant to say, but which remained unspoken. Awakened out of the dream now, he guessed fathers and sons were a special breed, bone of bone, and flesh of flesh, even mind and mind. He tended to project onto his son the same youthful inarticulate gropings and limits he had felt. Perhaps that's why it was so hard, the attempt to reach out, without hesitation, to embrace a son. Some vague disquiet blocked the gesture and the words, that a mother's embrace of a son, even Tim's age, makes so easy and so natural. His own father had died when he was just eleven.

But Tim was the best of all possible sons, sensitive, wise, thoughtful of others beyond their realizing. The father's urge in him longed to release the words, that gesture. He told himself that he had not been so bad a father after all. Still there remained those moments of unease, something nearly like a palpable ache, because he had not seized so many chances to say his love, to savor the fleeting, rare moments of deep comradeship, of mutual grins, of an opportunity to praise, to say thank you, to touch, to linger, and to bask in those transitory, irrecoverable times of shared silence. To say, I'm glad you are my son.

He sat, slumped in his pajamas, on the edge of the bed, unwilling to acknowledge that his need to act the father was diminished. One part of him still clung to the wish that his son was still in need of protecting, of providing for ...

Then he saw he could not stay the imperceptible, implacable, inexorable forces wrought by time and distance -- the weaning away of sons from fathers.

"I love you, Tim," he spoke. But no one heard. The nurses had not yet begun their early morning rounds.

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