Dead Daddy

I probably started my journey out of religion as soon as I started my journey into it. I was raised in a home that taught me to learn and seek and question. I became a believer as a very young child, and continued to grow and ask and learn. I did a communicants class as soon as they would let me, and then advanced to an adult bible study because the youth study was vapid.

I went to college intact. I graduated intact. My understanding of god had changed over the years, but that change wasn't something I couldn't deal with. I was born a pinko, so going to college didn't have some kind of earthshattering effect. The trick for me was my graduate study, which, through my own efforts, centered on genocide. I couldn't convince myself, as my mother suggested, that the bible was given as an example, but not necessarily as a guide of rightness. Her final suggestion was that the stories were given as an example of what not to follow. But I couldn't swallow it. I already had no reason to believe any of it.

I guess I'm fortunate in that I never really benefited from the social support of religion. I've always been an outcast. And, being a dirty liberal, I often was told I wasn't really a christian anyways. So much for that. The really hard part of leaving it, and the reason it took five years to let go, was that I was letting go of my father. He died when I was 9, but I was led to believe I'd not lost him to infinity. I now had to willingly lose him all over again, but forever this time. I also had to give up the supernatural father I had created for myself who would watch out for me in my father's absence. Certainly, the universe didn't change, but you know what they say about perception. I'm not sure I've finished grieving that.

The problem with grief is that you have to redefine your life without the missing part. And when you redefine your life in other ways, even years later, it shifts the position of the missing part, opening it back up again. In the last few years, I've been nurturing a precious friendship with my mother. I value her counsel and her love, and we have become close as adults, as equals, as peers. She told me the other day that she admires parts of me that are more mature than she. And I certainly identify those parts of her that are wise beyond my years. We comfort each other. We share struggles. We gossip a bit, I'm sure. I treasure it. I will never have this relationship with my father. I can hear stories about him. I can be told how like him I am. I can sort through his things. I can even (and intend to) spend years fussing through his endless photographs. (He owned a Pentax. I can forgive him, I suppose.) But I won't know him. All I will know is an invention I've pieced together from faint memory, the tales of others, and bits of flotsam still remaining. But, unlike the other paternal invention, at least I know this one was once real.