By Mark Griswold | FāVS News Columnist
The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News.
My wife and I had just returned from living in Greece — the land of my father’s father — a place to which I’d felt a connection much stronger than should have made sense.
“It’s the blood,” a friend and fellow Greek said, wrapping his arm around my shoulder before we sat down to a dinner of lamb kleftiko, bread and a bottle of wine. “It ties us to the land. To those who came before.”
I had wept when we’d driven off the ferry from Italy and touched the shores of Patras for the first time in 25 years.
He smiled. “Family is forever.”
***
I don’t know if “estranged” or “disowned” are exactly the right words for the relationship I had with my father from age 12 to 31. They may be too harsh. I did see him on occasion, but during those 19 years our relationship was intermittent and distant.
He had anger issues. Perhaps it was his full-blooded Greek heritage or, more likely, the fact that he had issues with his own father. He never was angry with me — and that’s to his credit — but he was still often hard to be around.
Before he and my mother split up (they were never legally married), they fought constantly. (My mother was not the easiest woman to live with either). Afterward came a string of girlfriends and more fights. He’d also lose his temper at strangers.
I remember the last time I “regularly” saw him. My mom had dropped me off at the shop he ran for my weekend with him. A bicyclist rode by on the sidewalk. My father walked out of his shop to chastise him in a voice loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear.
That was it.
Maybe it was the randomness. Maybe it was that this stranger hadn’t really done anything worth shouting over. Maybe I’d simply reached an age where I felt I could choose not to be a part of it. My mother hadn’t left yet. I asked her to take me home.
That was the last time I regularly saw my father.
Over the next 19 years, I saw him maybe half a dozen times. He picked me up from school once and drove me home when no one else could — the whole drive filled with an awkward silence. I invited him to play golf when I was 19, and it was pleasant. I remember reading bad jokes off a Laffy-Taffy wrapper in between holes.
I brought a girlfriend by his shop once when we happened to be in the neighborhood, and it went well enough. A dinner here or there, but nothing regular and nothing to form a father-son bond that is so important to both father and son in the early years or at any age.
I didn’t hate him. I just didn’t feel much either way. He wasn’t in my life because he never really reached out — and neither did I. In my 20s, I once discussed the nature of forgiveness with someone and knew that I hadn’t forgiven my father because he’d never come to me with remorse or regret. I was reminded Christ forgave those who persecuted Him “for they know not what they do.” (Luke 23:34)
That was healing.
I chose to forgive my father that day, but only in theory, not in practice. I never called. I never wrote.
It wasn’t until I was 27 and two weeks before my wedding.
A breaking point — and a beginning
He was facing yet another divorce from yet another wife. I don’t think she was the love of his life — sadly, I’m not sure he ever had a “love of his life.”
His nine-year relationship with my mother — the only one that produced me, his only child — may have been the closest thing. Whoever this latest wife had been to him though, it was enough to bring him to his knees.
My aunt called. He was at her house, in tears.
I drove there. He apologized for being absent for so much of my life, and we hugged it out right there on her front porch. It was a beautiful ugliness — a 67-year-old man sobbing before his son.
I wish that had been the beginning of something new. We would have had more time. But two weeks before my wedding was not the time to process it. I was grateful and told him I forgave him, but it was all too much so I couldn’t invite him to the wedding. He had more healing to do. So did I.
Thankfully, he understood. In the coming months, he committed his life to Christ and the healing began, helped along a few hours at a time, sitting at the Ocean Shores McDonald’s with a bad cup of coffee and a Bible. He read through its entirety in a manner of months. He’d never been much for half-measures. When he committed, he committed.
I saw him once after that, a few months after my wedding. I’d been invited to attend a fundraiser and since it was being held near his home, I invited him. Like the times we’d met before, in my teens and early 20s, it wasn’t bad or awkward, but a true and complete healing hadn’t yet occurred. Perhaps too many years had passed. Perhaps too few words had been spoken.
The Greeks call it nostos — the long return home — and it wasn’t until my wife and I returned from living in Greece that the final stages of healing began. Oh, that my father and I had had a closer relationship before that time.
What a treasure it would have been to share the Old Country together, to remember the days of my youth when we were a family, travelling the ancient paths of the Peloponnesus, living in cheap hotels by the sea, eating lamb with the oikoyenia.
My wife and I were dining at our friend’s restaurant, something we did regularly. He and my father had been friends for some 30 years.
“Have you spoken with your father lately?” he asked.
“I haven’t. He doesn’t return my calls or emails.”
“Ah, proud, stubborn Greeks! All of us! You must be the bigger man, even if you are the son. Go to Ocean Shores. Go see him.”
“But I don’t know where he lives.”
“Xtapódi. Octopus Avenue. You will know the place.”
My wife and I made the trip that weekend. The two-hour drive was tense. It shouldn’t have been. I don’t know why I expected anything different than the reunion that was about to take place.
I imagined the worst-case scenario. He wouldn’t want to see me. A ridiculous thought given all that had transpired before. But sometimes old wounds make hidden scars.
When we reached the door — and, yes, the small home, handcrafted by my father, the musician, artist, entrepreneur and custom home builder, was impossible to miss — I knocked. He opened and it was as if the years between were never missed. Any awkwardness, pain, pride or bitterness that may have existed didn’t just melt away, it simply failed to appear, erased from that moment as well as the past.
He cooked. He’d always been a good cook. He played the piano. Two “Northwest Rock & Roll Hall of Fame” gold records hung above the black lacquer baby grand. We shared photos from our wedding and our life in Greece. We laughed. We remembered. We loved.
For the next five years, we made regular trips to Ocean Shores. We attended church services at Galilean Lutheran Church, where he served as music minister alongside Pastor Bob — “God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it!”
We sang the old gospel hymns he’d always loved, even during the decades when he’d strayed far from their message. Perhaps he’d never strayed as far as he thought. Perhaps none of us ever do.
He met his first two grandsons, Andrew and James Alexander, the younger bearing his name and that of his mother, Alexandra, born a century before and 6,000 miles away in a small mountain village in Macedonia.
He visited us at our home on a few occasions. We had Christmas dinners at his sister’s house, the same house where his tears had fallen upon her front porch years before as this journey toward reconciliation began.
The final chapter
And then the cough arrived on a cold and gray late-winter’s day. Pneumonia, but it wouldn’t go away. Cancer. He had just turned 76.
This once angry man who I’d parted from over a scene on a sidewalk so many years before wasn’t angry any longer. Nor was there any regret, sadness or fear. While the cancer consumed his body, it strengthened his soul.
He joked that he had “long outlived his expiration date.” After three decades playing rock and roll in scores of barrooms and ballrooms across the Northwest — even Jimi Hendrix, before he was famous, sat in on one of his bands — the hard living had caught up.
Too much whiskey. Too many women. Too much waywardness. But he’d escaped the worst of it somehow. After placing bets at every losing table and being down to the final chip, he had gone all in on Christ and had come out way ahead.
The doctor gave him six months. He said chemo could prolong things. My father didn’t want it. He’d already been given an eternity, not only a future, but a sliver of the past that had been missing for so many years.
Just weeks before he passed — the doctor had been generous, but he didn’t make it to two months — as he lay in a hospital bed, he shared memories. I’d heard them before, but they meant more now. His father surviving the Ottoman concentration camps as a boy. A journey across the Atlantic. No English when he landed, yet he’d become a judge. The American Dream fulfilled.
His eyes shone when he recalled his own youth, stocking apples and oranges in his grandfather’s produce shop. Military service. Racehorses. Art galleries. Jazz clubs. Names I knew. Places we’d both been, sometimes together, sometimes years apart.
He’d never been listed on my birth certificate. In the final days, I rectified that. A notary stood bedside. A bond formed by blood and acknowledged by ink.
“I’m glad we reconciled. I’m glad we had the last five years. I love you,” I told him.
The call came on a Monday morning while I sat in a meeting. I knew it would come, and I knew it would be sooner than any of us thought. But it was time — and time had been enough.
Birth. Parting. Reconciliation. Death. New Life.
At the funeral, stories. My mother came. So did former wives and girlfriends. He may have been hard to live with, but it was never boring, always an adventure. A stranger stood to speak. He hadn’t seen my father since they were teenagers, 60 years before. But he’d seen the obituary and it was important that he came.
My father had saved him once, taken him in and shared his room when this stranger had run away, estranged from his own father. It was a side of my father none of us had ever known.
A curse turned to a blessing. A ripple across decades. A wave of compassion washing over all of us now.
I did an altar call. Not typical during a funeral but no better place as those in attendance naturally pondered their own mortality. One man who’d strayed from God long ago thanked me. Perhaps the man returned. My place is only to speak, pray, plant a seed. The Holy Spirit waters. Hopefully, souls grow and blossom.
Nineteen years and only a handful of visits. A formidable youth seemingly gone. He never taught me to shave. He never taught me to drive. He never attended my graduation. He just missed my wedding.
But it wasn’t too late.
We came together in the end — and for much longer than many fathers and sons do.
Life is not measured in the milestones that we are told matter but in memories forged when everything else is stripped away. The days we spend here on Earth are but a glimpse of a past we can rekindle and a future that stretches out before us into eternity.
All we must do is reach.
The distance is not far.
The space between nothing more than an illusion.
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