1. The state of being a father.
2. The qualities of a father.
“Would the family of Robert Shaw please come to the café immediately.”
Before the static finished cracking my father’s name I instinctively moved to find my mother in the magazine stacks, not knowing she was already in the café, kneeling on the dusty tile beside my father.
The man who once towered over me lay on his back in a makeshift Starbucks, his coffee – undoubtedly black with two sugars – spilled down the front of his favorite beige sweater and soaked his copy of the Washington Times.
A scream of red neon lights drove him to the Emergency Room. The hospital was less than three blocks across the busy street, but the minutes crawled under our skin. In between phone calls to older siblings, I tried to figure out what had happened while my mother’s 35 years’ experience as an RN spouted about his ailing cardiovascular system. I didn’t care about his arteries; I wanted to know why his glassy eyes hadn’t recognized his own face in mine.
Just a few years before, I was away at a sailing camp in North Carolina when my father went into emergency surgery for an aortic aneurysm. We almost lost him that summer, but the doctors had assured us that with medication we could control his blood pressure. What he hadn’t told anyone is that he had stopped taking those medications about three weeks before his stroke. As siblings we sat in the cold, fluorescent hallway sipping stale coffee while the doctors and my mother yelled at him for his stupidity. He responded with a smart-ass comment about personal freedom and drifted to sleep.
I lost the man I’d called “Daddy” in Barnes & Nobles that night. He survived the stroke, but came out of the hospital a different man; a haunted man.
As a child, I bounded home from school to wait by the window until my dad got home from work. He would come up the stairs into our kitchen, put down his briefcase and swing me onto the center island, the wrinkles around his eyes crinkling into a smile.
“How much did you grow today? Did you get so big? That’s my girl!”
I would smile and stretch out my arms to show him just how much I’d grown. He faked surprise at how tall I was getting and wrapped me in his arms to bring me back to the floor for safety.
We spent our Sundays at the horse farm. I would ride my school horse around the ring for hours while my dad shivered in the dry air, and as soon as my weekly lesson ended he would help me sneak carrots to the aging bay mare. When I moved up a level, got my first blue ribbon, or circled my first barrel, my father celebrated with me. My victories were his, and we begged for that escape on Sunday mornings.
Puberty hit, and when we moved across town I changed schools and lost interest in both horses and being daddy’s little girl. Our relationship flat lined and, long before his stroke, we learned to coexist in silence.
My brother flunked out of N.C. State, but by the time I was old enough to form a relationship with him was First Captain of West Point’s class of 1999. My father – a Vietnam veteran - had been the one to give Rob the ultimatum between Prep School and excommunication from the Shaw house, and I can still feel the beams of pride he emitted while he watched Rob stride across the Parade Field next to Colin Powell.
The August my father had his aneurysm, my sister-in-law gave birth to her first son, Jack. He was an impish redhead with ears that doomed him to a life of elf jokes – and he was the spitting image of my father, who glowed in his new role as grandparent.
Birth and death too often go hand-in-hand, and there’s something deeply nauseating about watching a parent dissolve into helpless infancy. The aneurysm and stroke had begun the process, but I watched as the death of his parents – within just six months of each other – changed my father into a further unrecognizable figure in my life.
He brought his older daughter coffee while she was in the hospital – lying to the nurses so she could have real caffeine. He sneaked in notebooks, pens, doodles and crosswords so that she would have entertainment until her memory returned after the treatments. Daily, he visited her and boasted the latest Pho restaurant he had tried, promising her a lunch date as soon as she felt better.
Seven years after, when his youngest daughter entered the hospital for the same reasons, he stood outside the glass and watched the doctors search her for sharps. A ghost of the man he used to be, he pushed through the waiting room to sit in his car and listen to the latest Rush Limbaugh segment. It seemed his new family lived on 630 WMAL.
At sixteen I flew out to Seattle to visit my brother – nervous as I was, I was excited to finally get to know the man who had been distant from my life. Watching Rob with my niece and nephew gave me insight to what fatherhood meant; Rob had not been hardened by war, politics and an office job the way my father had. As he piloted a Sesna over Mt. Rainier, Mt. Hood and Mt. St. Helens, he told me to be patient and give dad the time he needed to come back to us.
“No matter what, though, Mags, he loves you. Don’t let anything else skew that.”
It might have been the first complete sentence Rob ever spoke to me.
I knew I wasn’t the only sibling who had noticed the shift in dad’s psyche. Not long after a particularly heated argument which very nearly turned physical, my oldest sister took me out to coffee.
“Mags, please know he isn’t the same dad that we grew up with. That’s why none of us know what to say to you about it.”
Even my mother has hinted at our distance, often grumbling that my father, now 66, hasn’t much time left and ought to be left alone to “do his thing.” To mom, fatherhood means food on the table and a roof over my head – two luxuries that, even at his worst, dad has always given me. I struggle, constantly reaching for something beyond the material responsibilities that constitute parenthood, but know I will never be the same little girl again – nor, will he be my flawless hero.
These days our conversations revolve around our dogs, soccer, whiskey blends, and my sociology degree. It’s not a perfect relationship, but in my time away from home I’ve learned to appreciate the small ways in which he is still the man I once so idolized – for instance, when our 6 month old puppy trots into the kitchen every morning and throws his paws onto the kitchen table, my dad asks him in the same tone,
“How much did you grow last night? Did you get so big? That’s my boy!”
