Men, and what they teach us

My father, who is 79, was in the hospital last week. Not a good week.

He will be fine, but his increasing frailty makes what is inevitable even more clear. This man, who means so much, who stands for so much in my life and that of my siblings, will one day be gone, and likely soon.

Parents die. A fact of life. But it is never easy. I know this, because many of my friends have lost theirs or are in the midst of caring for their aging parents. It is a stage in our lives when we really grow up. We become aware of our own mortality, but also we finally appreciate, if we haven’t already, what our parents mean to us, how they were (are) models of behaviour – good and bad.

My father is not an easy man. He is driven and moody, and when we were growing up, he was somewhat remote, because he was always working. He was the model 1950s Dad, with his scotch after work and his newspaper in the morning at the breakfast table, a paper wall between him and us. Still, on family holidays, he was ever-present – taking us on canoe trips to the Interior of British Columbia or on a camping trip through Newfoundland. He wanted us to see this vast country. I have several pictures of my mother in her long-johns, peeking out of a tent in the morning by a river. It was how our family bonded.

The lesson of my father was one of consistency, of stability, of calmness, always. Looking back, even though he was not the modern type of father, the kind who got on the floor and played with his children, I would not have wanted anything else. Each one of us – and my mother, too – knew than when he was needed, when something had to be done, some intervention, he was there, always, without question. Once, when we were visiting London, England, we all went out to the theater. And while we were standing on the ground floor, at one of those small bars, having a drink, as we waited for the play to begin, a man, who was over in one corner, also at the bar, suddenly took a knife out and began to slice across his neck – a gruesome attempt at suicide. Everyone stood back in horror, recoiling in shock, and screaming. Then, my father, dressed in a nice suit, rushed up to the man, and from behind, took his hand with the knife in it, and said, “Don’t do that!” The man deflated in my father’s grip. The knife fell to the floor. And by that time, a policeman had been called. He took the man away. And the rest of us filed into our seats in the darkened theater. My father acted as if nothing important had happened. “Well, you can’t let someone do that,” he simply explained.

He was like that, you see. I never had to doubt his love. I never worried over whether he would be home, over his ability to provide, over his desire to help me be the best I could be. He was always there, ready to step in.

And I think, in a way, I expected all men to be like this. I just thought that was the way they were.

Life and marriage and divorce and dating tell you otherwise, of course, which doesn’t make a person bitter or angry, just that much more appreciative of the man I grew up with.

A female friend of mine, who is in her late fifties, told me recently that the people middle-aged singletons should look for as romantic partners are those who will never leave you, those who have lost some of their vanity, who know that they are not perfect, that life is hard sometimes, that courage is everything, those who will help you bury your parents.

It is not the bristling masters of the universe we should look for, the sort of man we may have swooned over in our twenties or thirties. We want a partner who can be grown-up and real with us, as we watch our parents fade, and we look into the years ahead, deserving love, peace, compassion.