“Some Belated Father’s Day Thoughts”
My parents expected to age as their parents did — retire, find a hobby to help you kill whatever time you have left until your health takes a nose dive; then you croak. The main difference being that their generation had the new, improved version of aging — it lasts longer — so now you find yourself raising puttering and dawdling to an art form, while stoically avoiding any mention of the “D” word.
For a while there, my parents played out their expectations with a certain flair, if not gusto. My father, true to his own hermit-like inclination, spent the first 20 years of his early retirement hanging around the house. He did manage to go outdoors long enough to take my mom on a few vacations, which turned out to be a plus, since it gave her a chance to visit non–Ohio parts of the country before she died in 1994.
My dad entered a difficult period of grieving, but then a strange thing happened: He noticed that he was single. He decided to take advantage of this unexpected turn of events. He was only 70, and still youthful. Waitresses everywhere flirted with him. And so he stepped off the path that had been laid out for him so long ago by HIS parents. He started to reclaim some of the adolescent verve that had been left on a closet shelf to fade and die.
He placed an ad in the “personals” of his local newspaper (shaving a few years from his age.) He jumped into the dating ritual that he had largely missed in his youth and found a couple of agreeable companions along the way.
That was 12 years ago. At 83, my father has now re-evaluated the beliefs and attitudes of a lifetime and thrown out much of what he now sees wasn’t healthy for him or anyone around him. In this he has joined me in breaking away from the “Hausler heritage” of holding on to all your grudges for, well — forever. At any given moment, fully half of the Hausler clan (not my mom’s side — they were all Finnish immigrants whose days were filled with heroic attempts to utter at least every other word of their “English” recognizably) would have banished the offending “others,” and sides tended to shift and morph in ways that confounded logic and left me scrambling for the nearest exit.
Frankly, I am still amazed and downright giddy at the thought of what he accomplished. My father was a verbal abuser, controller, and rage-aholic throughout my formative years. Our relationship had always been strained — a few times even broken. In the last few years, that rift has healed. Now we talk and laugh and even forgive each other for the pain we inflicted over the last half-century.
How could he have the beat such odds? My theory is that sometimes it takes a disaster of gigantic proportions to shake a person free from the private hell they constructed long ago to keep them “safe.” My mother’s death was that freeing disaster. Suddenly everything was up for grabs. And if that wasn’t enough, the Universe threw in a little prostate cancer and an angioplasty for good measure in recent years.
We will all experience losses as we age. I am so grateful to have a living role model for not only surviving those losses, but transcending them. Thanks, Dad. I love you. You have been my greatest teacher.