I Was Just Thinking Burying Dad November 2006

by Don Huntington

“You have to dig deep to bury your Daddy.” (Proverb)

I’m thankful that I’ve finally buried my dad. He’s been hanging around the edges of my life since my earliest memories. And the strange thing is, I don’t even remember him. He left my mom, left me, and left my two sisters when we were young children. I was four years old and can remember a few scenes in which he was present, but I have no memory of him whatsoever.

I realized a few years ago how strange that is. I remember the last time we were together. Aunt Helen took me to the airport to see him off after my grandpa’s funeral. I was probably five. I remember actually going onto the plane for a few moments. I remember my aunt. But every place where the figure of my father should have been in those memories is blank. It seems that I attempted to delete from my memories a person who was too painful to recall.

Ol’ dad never came back. He died ten years later without so much as an intervening phone call.

I had a difficult time burying that guy. I was a miserable little boy — a terrible student and a strange, unpopular young person. Only when I got into my late 20s did I realize that a lot of my social problems perhaps derived from my inability to cope with the absence of my father. His ghost was probably hanging around, messing me up in countless ways.

I think that people like me who are marred by dysfunctional childhood influences learn to play games to prop up their slumping sense of worth. I read once that a psychologically “safe” position to remain in is one characterized by the words:
I’m OK
You’re OK
They’re not OK

I learned to play that game. I grew up in a fundamentalist environment and we really believed that we were part of a small pool of OK people surrounded by a great sea of people who were definitely not OK including liberals, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, Mormons, Buddhists, unchurched people of any kind, plus anyone who drank, smoked, played cards, danced, attended the theater, or bought a meal in a restaurant on Sunday.

It is amazing, in retrospect, how it was possible for me to be such a deficient human being myself and yet, for example, to feel superior to a doctor who had given his life in service for poor people in Africa if he had a brandy sometimes at the end of the day.

I’ve discovered that the “safety” of such a position is bought at the price of building walls around my soul. Somebody named Gustafson once wrote the lines:

With brick upon brick, we wall ourselves in
(Because, Lord, we’re not like those “others”)
Till one day we see that we’ve not kept out sin
But walled out our sisters and brothers.

I’ve come to hate those walls that I built brick-by-brick. I’m trying to tear them down every time I figure out where they are. I’m gradually learning not to merely accept people, but to embrace and admire them. I will be the friend of anyone who will permit me to do so.

“Throw your heart over the fence and the rest will follow,” Norman Vincent Peale said with great accuracy. I’ve been throwing my heart over some fences these days and I’m finding deep satisfaction in the effort. Because, after all, my heart doesn’t really belong in my body — it belongs in the keeping of a great many other people. “Love one another,” the Bible says, “deeply, from the heart.”

I don’t think that the realization that my father was the source of my problems (if in fact he really was the source) ever helped me in any way. However, by opening my heart to other people I’ve become a happy person leading a blessed life. The love of my wife and children, the warm fellowship of a great number of people whom I love and who love me… These are all forces that enabled me to finally bury my dad.

Grace has come into my life though a variety of channels, bringing me peace and happiness, along with a Divine Presence to take the place of that great absence in my life.

I’m still messed up in a number of ways. However, my son once commented on another person, “He’s crazy. But some people are sad crazy and others are happy crazy. He’s happy crazy.”

Suddenly things fell into place in my mind. That’s me. If I’m crazy, it is in a satisfying and happy way. This is a gift and a blessing! It helps me to keep my dad buried deep so he stays out of my mind and my thinking. °

Dr. Don Huntington
Editorial Director
don@110mag.com