What My Father Gave Me Without Knowing.

My father has been on my mind more than usual lately. He’s always there. I think about him daily, about my mother too (they left their bodies a few years ago), and I have what can only be described as full conversations with them in my head, which is strange and ordinary at the same time. But recently, he’s been closer somehow. More present.

I think I know why. I’ve been going through a stretch where I’ve found myself reacting to difficulty in ways I’m not proud of. And in those moments, almost involuntarily, I find myself asking: how would he have handled this? He almost never lost patience with us. He led with understanding first. I don’t fully know how he did it. But I find myself reaching for him when I feel myself falling short of who I want to be.

That reaching is what this piece is about. Or more precisely, what he left in me that makes the reaching possible.

There is an image of my father I return to often. He is at a table. It doesn’t matter which table — it could have been our kitchen in Ottawa, or a backyard in Buenos Aires, or a restaurant somewhere between the two. What matters is that he is surrounded by people, and he is fully in it. Not performing warmth. Not managing the room. Just there, in the particular way that some people manage to be there, which most of us spend our whole lives trying to learn.

He was like that with everyone. Friends he hadn’t spoken to in decades, he would track down over Skype just to hear their voice, just to reconnect. Not because he was lonely. Because connection was simply how he moved through the world.

Admittedly, I took him for granted for most of my youth. I think most children do. Our parents are furniture to us, in the kindest sense> always there, always solid, something we lean against without thinking about the weight we’re placing.

It wasn’t until I moved abroad in my mid-twenties that I really began to find him. The distance did something. Suddenly I was calling him every day over Skype, confiding in him, sending him long emails about a girl I’d met or a decision I couldn’t make. And he would write back. Sometimes he’d send me an email just to tell me he’d dreamed about me. That he’d seen us together somewhere. That I was on his mind.

Distance had made him visible to me. I had needed to lose proximity to understand what I had.

I didn’t know, then, how cruelly that lesson would repeat itself.

In February of 2017, my brother called me in Norway. My father had fibrosis in his lungs, and things had turned. They thought he might be leaving. I flew back immediately, leaving my wife at home, heavily pregnant with our second child.

The day I arrived, I went to his room. My mother and brother were there. My father looked at us and said he was so happy that he could leave this world with all of us around him. And then he fell asleep. And over the next few days, something shifted. He got a little better. I would help him shower in the mornings. Help him dress. And once, against the wishes of his nurses, I took him out for a drive with his respirator, just because he was still alive and still my father and a drive is a drive. It was one of the most beautiful weeks of my life.

When I left at the end of that week, he told my wife on a phone call that maybe all he had needed was time with me to feel better.

I didn’t know that would be the last time I would see him.

On May 17th, 2017, I was in Dubai for a work conference. I was walking through what they claim is the world’s largest mall (a place of extraordinary, bewildering abundance, utterly disconnected from anything that has ever mattered to me) when my brother called. My father had just left his body.

I stood there. The crowd moved around me. I asked my colleague if we could go back to the hotel. I went to the bar and had a drink. And I felt the particular dissociation that comes not just from grief, but from the sheer absurdity of the container; the wrong city, the wrong building, the wrong everything for something this enormous.

Hearing my mother’s voice later was the worst of it. There are some sounds you don’t have words for.

Rohan, my eldest, was already here. Ray, my second child, was weeks from being born. My father was leaving just as my family was taking its full shape. He would never meet Ray.

I have thought a great deal, in the years since, about what he left behind. Not in the formal sense but what actually transferred. What got into me without my noticing.

When my kids were small, my father’s sister used to call us his “Fisher-Price”. She meant it as a compliment. He would play with us (really play, fully in it) the way you play with a beloved toy. Time meant nothing. We were everything. I remember it the way you remember things you didn’t know you were storing.

I am that father now. I want to be in the play with my children. Fully in it. Because I understand something about time that I didn’t understand when I was young, and it is not a comfortable understanding.

He also gave me something subtler, harder to name. He rarely lost patience with us. When things were difficult, his first move was always towards understanding. I used to think that was temperament, that he was simply built that way. Looking back though, I think it was faith. He would tell me, often, that Jesus’ hand is not far away (he was a devout Catholic his whole life). That in times of doubt, I could call on something larger than myself. And he meant it. It organized him from the inside.

I find myself doing something similar now. In hard moments, when fatherhood presses on me in the ways it does, when I feel the weight of what I am trying to be, I call on him. Not as a ritual, not quite as a prayer, but as a reaching. The same reaching he taught me, just aimed now at him.

He became the thing he pointed me toward.

This is what I didn’t understand when I was young, leaning against him without thinking about the weight: that he was not just my father. He was a demonstration. Of presence. Of warmth. Of what it looks like to be fully in the room with the people you love. I absorbed it without knowing I was absorbing it, the way children absorb everything: through proximity, through repetition, through the slow accumulation of ordinary moments.

I didn’t learn it from a conversation. I learned it from a table. From how he sat at it. From the way he looked at the people around him.

He gave it to me without knowing. Or perhaps he knew exactly what he was doing, and simply never said so out loud.