A Son Learns About Life Through His Father's Death

Over at his Psychology Today blog, Going Out Not Knowing, David B. Seaburn, Ph.D., L.M.F.T. discusses being with his father the day he died, and the lessons he learned on life from being with father as he died.

I was forty-eight when he died. I am sixty-three now. I carry his pocket knife with me every day. At one time I lost his knife for two years so my brother bought me another one exactly like it. Now I can carry two. I have his watch on the night stand beside my bed.

Fatherloss is one of the most difficult experiences in many men's lives. One of the better books on this topic is Fatherloss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads by Neil Chethik - you can read the introduction here.

The Day My Father Died

Being with my father when he died taught me more about life than death.

Published on November 9, 2013 by David B. Seaburn, Ph.D., L.M.F.T. in Going Out Not Knowing



November 11, 1998 dawned grey and cold. I had been staying with my brother and mother in Ellwood City, Pa. off and on for six weeks since my father had been diagnosed with acute leukemia. The doctor had given him six to eight weeks to live. It had been a long twenty-two years since my father had had a heart attack, years littered with health problems, years of caregiving for my mother. My father was eighty years old and proud of it. His brothers had all died before him, mostly of heart disease, one at the age of thirty-six. The day before he died was my parents’ fifty-sixth wedding anniversary, something that he was unaware of. We crossed our fingers that day, hoping he would live through it.

A few days before his death, my mother and I received a call in the middle of the night from my father’s nurse. She said he was restless and afraid and that we should come to the hospital. When we arrived, he was not afraid at all. In fact, he was smiling and more alert than he had been in many days. My mother and I stood by the bed talking with him. He joked that a beer would taste good about now. At one point he asked my mother to kiss him, which she did. Then he asked me to say a prayer, so the three of us held hands while I prayed.

That was his last lucid moment. He was unconscious most of the time after that.

I knew he was dying, but I did not recognize this as his goodbye. We had been making daily trips to the hospital for weeks and had fallen into the dying routine with its waiting, and watching, and remembering, and lunches at the hospital café, and stories, and laughter, and sadness, and silence. I realized later that I had assumed that my father would just go on dying, but never actually die.



On the morning of November 11 I took my dog, Abby, for a walk in the school yard near my parents’ house. We stopped and talked to a neighbor who asked all about my father. When I got back to the house, it was a little after 9am, a later start than usual. My mother wasn’t quite ready. My brother was on the road, his trucking job not allowing him time to be with us that morning, although he was with us emotionally throughout. I told my mother that I would go to the hospital, see how things were, and then come back to pick her up.

When I got to hospital, I checked in with the nursing staff at the desk to see how my father’s night had been. Then I went to his room where he lay on his back, his mouth open, his breathing slowed. I spoke to him as I always did, reporting on the weather, talking a little about how the Steelers were doing. I put some water on a tiny sponge and dabbed his lips. I cleaned his nose. Then I sat on the naugahyde lounger beside him. His breathing was labored. I listened to him exhale and waited anxiously for his inhale. I counted the seconds between each breath. One, two, three, four, more anxious now, five, six, seven, finally another inhale and I felt relieved. Again, and again, and again. This went on for several minutes. Around 9.20am----one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine--- I stood up and looked at Dad. I listened and watched. I placed my hand on his chest. By then I knew he had died. I held his hand, his fingers still soft and warm.

Quietness.

I had the strangest sensation (perhaps my last moment of denial) that my dad would wake up and tell me all about dying, what it was like, how it had gone, as if having triumphed over the last of life’s challenges, he could give me some wisdom about what to expect.

I was forty-eight when he died. I am sixty-three now. I carry his pocket knife with me every day. At one time I lost his knife for two years so my brother bought me another one exactly like it. Now I can carry two. I have his watch on the night stand beside my bed. When my wife and I watch our two little granddaughters (ages four and two), they love to play in our bedroom. The two-year old, Makayla, always stands on the bench beside my nightstand and puts my father’s watch on. It slides up to her armpit as she holds her arm up high. When she is done, she puts it back exactly where she found it.

When I was forty-eight, I hoped my father’s death would teach me about dying. At sixty-three, I think it has taught me mostly about living; that life is short but beautiful; that even though time is measured, there is enough, if you pay attention; and that everything that matters in life is here, now.

David B. Seaburn, Ph.D., L.M.F.T.



David B. Seaburn, Ph.D., L.M.F.T., served a rural country parish, worked in community mental health, was an assistant professor of psychiatry and family medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center for twenty years, and directed a public school-based free family counseling center. He co-authored two professional books, Family-Oriented Primary Care (1990) and Models of Collaboration (1996), over sixty articles, and four novels: Chimney Bluffs (2012), Charlie No Face (2011—Finalist in General Fiction, National Indie Excellence Awards), Pumpkin Hill (2007), and Darkness is as Light (2005). He and his wife live near Rochester, NY. They have two adult daughters and two wonderful granddaughters.

Julian Baggini - The Death of My Father (via Aeon Magazine)

At 13, I was young when my father died. I didn't have the resources or skills an adult might possess to process the pain, the confusion, the anger, the almost (but not quite) invisible sense of abandonment. As an adult, when my mother died, I had the skills and I was able to think and write and process the experience through language, as Baggini describes below.

Fatherloss is an interesting topic in masculinity studies - how we are when we lose our fathers has a real impact on it affects us as men (or boys).

This excellent article by one of my favorite living philosophers, Julian Baggini, author of The Ego Trick and many other fine books, comes from the always interesting Aeon Magazine.

The Death of My Father

When someone close to you dies, the very fabric of your life is ripped to shreds. Is philosophy any consolation?

by Julian Baggini
Published on 5 July 2013

A funeral in Italy, 1951. Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos

Julian Baggini is a writer and founding editor of The Philosophers’ Magazine. His latest book is The Shrink and the Sage: A Guide to Modern Dilemmas, co-authored with Antonia Macaro. His previous book, a "Best Books of 2012" selection on many lists, was The Ego Trick.

I’m dealing with the death of my father the way I deal with most things: by thinking, and processing those thoughts through writing, fingers to keyboard. Given my philosophical bent, these thoughts wander from his particular death to mortality in general. That might strike you as cold, excessively rational, analytic. But the only rule about grief is that there are no rules. Reactions to death cannot be neatly divided between the normal or abnormal, appropriate and inappropriate, right and wrong. We muddle through death as we muddle through life, each scrambling in the dark for a way through.

At times like these, philosophers are of limited use because when they have talked about dying they have tended to focus on what it means for the one who dies. Plato, for instance, called philosophy a preparation for death, while Epicurus told us we had nothing to fear from dying. But such thoughts are not much use to those who die suddenly. My father had seemed fit as a fiddle, but he was struck by a heart attack and died on the spot. The same happened to his brother and his brother-in-law, while his own father was killed instantly by a stroke. It is as though the Grim Reaper enjoys playing a cruel joke on those who look intently ahead. Those who prepare to meet him face-to-face are just as likely to find he sneaks up behind them and takes them unawares.

A much more useful philosophy would help us to prepare for the deaths of others. I have never been sure that philosophy does a good job of that. But perhaps a philosophical outlook can help us make sense of death when it comes close to us. It seems to me there are three dimensions to this: what the death means for the one who has died; what it means for those who survive; and, perhaps most of all, the sheer shock and surprise to find death not knocking at the door but crashing through it, uninvited.

If death comes at the end of a long illness, most would say it is easier to face, even if nothing can fully prepare you for the day when it finally comes. However, when the death is sudden, almost everyone talks the language of incredulity. ‘It doesn’t seem possible.’ ‘It doesn’t seem real.’ ‘I still can’t believe it.’ I’ve heard phrases such as these again and again over recent days. My father had not lived in his native Italy for years but he was back for one of his periodic visits, and on this trip he seems to have been exceptionally sociable. The number of people who had chatted to him for the first time in years in the days before his death is extraordinary. And they all said that he seemed fit, well, healthy. Those who knew him longer talked about how they assumed this slim cyclist and vegetarian, who was a strictly social drinker and smoker, would outlive his generally stouter, less careful, more sedentary peers.

I cannot share their feelings of impossibility. Yes, there are elements of unreality about it all but, for as long as I can remember, I have been more or less constantly aware that death can come to anyone at any time. So I’m genuinely not surprised when occasionally it does, even when it’s to a member of my family. Of course, some people will have a longer life than others, but I know that the rule of chance defeats the law of averages for any given person.

So what surprises me is not that people die or get sick, but that other people continue to be so surprised when it happens. Am I unusual in this because I have devoted so much of my life to philosophy? I suspect the causal arrow is the other way round: I have devoted so much of my life to philosophy because I am unusual in this. After all, it is not as though the basic insight depends on a close reading of the Stoics, Socrates or Schopenhauer. I am talking about the facts about death that everyone knows, but cannot necessarily accept. All that it takes to ingrain them is the philosophical habit of turning easily understood ideas into the more difficult practice of how you perceive the world day by day.

Cultural norms have their part to play, too. In the village where my father died and was interred, there is no hiding from death when it comes, no disguising what has happened. Every passing is marked by posters announcing the time and place of the funeral, so wherever you go there is always some reminder of death’s omnipresence. Nor are they coy about corpses. My father was laid out in a coffin in his brothers’ house, a glass lid allowing him to be seen, and his body kept cool by a refrigeration unit. People popped in and out all day to see him, often talking over his body.

The ceremonial niceties, such as the huge free-standing electric candle sticks that were placed either side of his coffin, contrasted with the utilitarian brutalities of the thing. The undertakers, for instance, sealed up the metal lining of his coffin by putting on the lid, getting out a fiery soldering iron and welding him in. At the graveyard, he was interred into a wall, and after the priest had given a last splash of his holy water, two men in grubby clothes set to work bricking him up.

It’s very different in Britain, where bodies are whisked away to mortuaries and seeing them is something you can avoid altogether without censure. The Italian way — at least the one I saw — has to be better. Everything here seemed designed to make you as aware as possible of the reality of death and its natural place in the life cycle. But such is the human desire to avoid facing mortality that even in Italy people seem genuinely shocked to see another one bite the dust. If anyone does look at the empty cubicles in the cemetery wall and thinks ‘One of these has my name on it,’ that thought seems to be swiftly buried with the body.

These strange facts persuade me that the shock of death can be diminished by how we think about it, if we think about it as a reality and not just an abstract idea. If we really do take on board the fickle nature of fate, the inevitability of death and the randomness of its timing, then although there might be other things about a death that leave us devastated, the mere surprise and shock of it need not be one of them.

There are, of course, plenty of other things about a death to get upset about, most obviously our sadness for the person who has died. However, philosophers have struggled to make sense of this and, as a result, have often concluded that there is simply nothing to be concerned about. The person has died. He cannot suffer in any way. There is no point in feeling sorry about what he might have missed out on because there is no longer anyone there to feel sorry for. The only people who can feel any pain are those who survive.

I think there’s something deeply wrong about this. The sadness that one feels for the deceased is not that he is, in a strange way, still around but unable to appreciate life, but rather that he is no longer around at all. He is not suffering but nor is he enjoying, savouring, loving, laughing, or appreciating either. That is the cause of our sadness, for him or, perhaps more accurately, for what the deceased could still have been.

Many philosophers have been baffled by this, protesting that it is no more rational to feel sad for the unexperienced joys of the deceased than it is for those of the never born. But there is a huge difference between the time two people could have spent together in the real world were it not for an accident, say, and the time two people who had never been born could have spent together in a parallel, imaginary universe. The former did not come to pass when it very nearly could have, while the latter is just one of an infinite number of counterfactual possibilities. It takes a curiously impersonal perspective to assign the same value to both the unrealised experiences of purely hypothetical beings and those of people who lived and breathed. If we can delight in someone’s company, or even just derive enjoyment from a glass of good wine, then there is nothing irrational about feeling sad, perhaps painfully so, that someone we know who would have taken equal pleasure did not have the chance to do so.

Philosophers flounder when trying to analyse grief because the phenomenon they are trying to capture is indeed complex and paradoxical. To see a corpse in a coffin, as dozens of people did at my uncles’ house, is to be confronted by something that is, and is not, someone you loved, and love. People often say of a corpse that it looks like the person is sleeping. I can’t agree. In every living thing, asleep or awake, there are small movements, subtle signs of vitality. The face of my father was completely lifeless, not a single muscle was flexed, his chest neither rose nor fell with his breathing. He was gone. And yet in a sense this was also clearly him, what remained of him. His still being there in that state was the clearest evidence that he was no longer there. You feel for him knowing that he feels nothing, he is now nothing. And that is precisely the source of your sadness for him.

To a strict logician, this might seem incoherent. But even logicians must accept that there are times when an inconsistent description comes closer to the truth than our best attempt at consistency. The language and logic of philosophy are sometimes inadequate to capture some of the most important and real phenomena of life. At such times, the poetry of paradox comes closer than the deracinated prose of consistency. In a conflict between our best rational account and the profoundest felt experience, we should be careful of awarding victory to the rational unless we are sure it has delivered a knockout blow.

Sadness for the days not lived is appropriate even when a person is old and has had a long, good life. Life is never long enough. We almost all decline before we have exhausted our capacity to suck the marrow out of life. I accept that mortality is necessary for life to have meaning, and that eternal life would be a sentence, not a reward. But I cannot accept that 80 years (if you’re lucky) of diminishing potency is enough, and that we should not feel sad that we – and the people we love – don’t have longer.

Despite their failings, it might still seem that the philosophers who preached placid acceptance of death were not too far wrong. The existential shock can be countered and, although sadness for the dead might be deep, it need not feel like the punch in the gut that typically characterises bereavement. But there is a third aspect of grieving that is not so easily ameliorated. When you lose someone very close to you, the very fabric of your life is ripped to shreds.

The most common, and accurate, way of describing this is as a loss of a part of yourself. This is more than just a metaphor. When someone is close to you, his way of thinking, his thoughts and his biography become inextricably linked with yours. Where you end and he begins is not clear. No one would think it controversial to say that when you lose such a companion, then a part of your life is lost too. If, as I and many wiser minds have concluded, you are the sum of your experiences, thoughts, projects, plans and so on, then to lose someone who is such a big part of these things is indeed to lose a part of yourself.

Perhaps this is a better way to understand sayings such as ‘It doesn’t seem real’ or ‘I can’t believe it.’ Experiencing the death of someone close to us, we have a sense that the world has been so transformed, so disfigured, that it is no longer familiar: we don’t know how to be in it. We clumsily say we can’t believe it. What we really mean is that we cannot conceive what it even means to be ourselves any more. This can be the case even when the person is no longer a regular part of one’s daily life, but has been a constant background presence for as long as you can remember.

And yet, if the hardest thing is not that the other person’s life has ended but that our own has been ripped to shreds, then has grief become a deeply selfish thing? I don’t think so. The phenomenology of grief means that we cannot draw any simple division between self and other. We feel confused — are we crying for ourselves or for the deceased? — because our feelings for ourselves and the person we love can’t be neatly taken apart, just as we cannot neatly take ourselves apart from those to whom we are closest. Rather than being a purely selfish thought, the idea that someone was so loved that he became a part of you is the most profound form of appreciation possible. It’s perhaps also why death is so often marked by regret, which is not about just you or the one you mourn, but for the shared opportunities lost to you both.

In a subtler way, the interpenetration of self and other extends to everyone whose lives we have touched. For me, the most affecting part of my father’s funeral was when I entered the church to find it packed, standing-room only. It was not that he had dozens and dozens of very close friends. It was that, over the course of his life, he had become part of the lives of many people in his village, usually in small ways that were nonetheless significant enough to motivate them to come out to remember him. This community had lost a part of itself, and they were grieving for that. As we live more and more atomised lives, perhaps this aspect of grief will diminish in importance. There will be plenty of free seats at my funeral, for sure. When the fabric of our selves is torn apart, we will increasingly find it made of a smaller and smaller cloth. Grief will become more limited but also more private, and perhaps therefore harder to bear.

There is one more way in which philosophy can change the way we react to death. Aristotle said that you could not describe a life as good until it was over. What has gone well so far could still end in a catastrophe that would negate all that has gone before, while a hitherto awful life could yet be redeemed.

I have seen the full stop of death, closing the final chapter of a life, making it possible to stand back, look at the whole, and say that it was good. Of course, any life story is littered with mistakes, bad times and failures, as well as successes. But in the case of my father, and of some others I have known who have died in recent years, there has been some comfort in the knowledge that the overall story was a good one. Maybe there were some decent chapters that still might have been written, but there could equally have been a cruel twist or two in the tale that would have led to a less happy ending. For the protagonist, better a good short novel than a tragic epic.

There is nothing automatically soothing about this, of course. The reaper can, and often does, choose to type ‘The End’ after pages of misery, without bothering to bring any resolution. The last full stop that allows the ‘life well lived’ to be appreciated can also expose the life gone badly for all the horror that it was. That is just one reason why secular humanists should not overstate the extent to which a good, happy, moral life is possible without God. Of course it is. But bad and unhappy lives are also possible, and all too common. Philosophy provides little consolation for these, other than the knowledge that the pain is over.

I am presupposing here that death is indeed the end, as I have throughout this essay. But much of what I have described will also resonate with those who believe in a life to come. People often say there are no atheists in foxholes: that in the face of death everyone clings on to some transcendental hope. In my experience that is simply not true, and even if it were, I always reply that there do not seem to be too many theists at funerals, either. The way that the bereaved behave suggests to me that they do not feel any confidence that their loss is a mere temporary inconvenience.

My father believed that there was something more to come after this life and so, as he often did, he would have disagreed with much of what I have written here, while approving of the sincere attempt to work out the truth for myself, as he had done for himself. At the same time, his passing is a reminder that no one gets it all straight, and that even the best philosophy in the world can’t save us from ultimate extinction, likely in a state far from enlightenment. It has to be enough to have lived well and to have played a part in the lives of others too, and the only philosophy worth its salt is the kind that helps us to do just that.

However we grieve, after the tomb is sealed, the ashes scattered, or the coffin buried, all we can do is get on with trying to make sure we write the best chapters of our own lives that we can, while contributing some good lines and passages to those of others. We can’t guarantee that the great editor of fate won’t ruin it by inserting an ugly ending. But we can give the bastard as little help as possible.

Janice Woods - Effects on Kids Linger Long After Father’s Death

I am living proof of this research finding, having lost my father to a heart attack when I was 13 years old. The researcher here, Mary Shenk, Ph.D., found that older children and adolescents (ages 11 and 15) showed the largest decrease in later success. Those who had the best outcomes were the boys who were younger than 5 and older than 20.

[By the way, I highly recommend the book pictured above, Fatherloss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads, by Neil Chethik.]

In my life, my first attempt at college was failure due to drugs and drinking - didn't even make it through the first quarter. In the following months I hit a serious bottom before getting clean and trying to rebuild my life. Still, I made poor choices that left me in low-paying jobs for much of my 20s. In my late 20s and early thirties things shifted for the better (with the help of therapy and Buddhism), but then I left Seattle to move to Tucson and was back to crappy pay in a town with few employment options.

Everything shifted again when I reached a point of near-emotional shutdown in a bad relationship and a terrible job (a job with way more responsibility than my pay would indicate and which in other cities would have paid quite well). I was in therapy again at that point, and it helped me clarify my life (thanks Maude!).

I decided that any work I do in the future must be of service to others.

I became a personal trainer, then last year I became a certified clinical counselor, as well as writing and editing for other people who also work in the health, psychology, or personal growth realms. I do all three of these jobs now, and although I will never get rich, I have never been happier.

So I am an example of what this research shows, AND I am also proof that these things are not destiny - they can be worked through and overcome.

Effects on Kids Linger Long After Father’s Death

By JANICE WOOD Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on December 28, 2012

A father’s death can have long-term effects on a child’s later success in life and can be particularly harmful if the father passes away during a child’s late childhood or early adolescence, according to new research.

Recognizing the impact that a father’s death can have on adolescents could lead to improved counseling and assistance programs, especially for needy families in the developing world, said Mary Shenk, Ph.D., an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Missouri.

“Certain negative effects of a father’s death can’t be compensated for by the mother or other relatives,” she said.

“The loss of a father can result in lower adult living standards for the bereaved children. Not only is a child emotionally affected, but the lack of a father’s earning power can cause children to get married younger or drop out of school in order to work.”

“Earlier studies have focused on how the absence or death of a father affects children in the United States and other wealthier parts of the world,” Shenk said. “Our study looked at the developing world where father death is much more common.”

For her study, Shenk interviewed 403 older men and women of Bangalore, India, about their families and examined the effects of death on their 1,112 children.

The death of the father before a child reached 25 years old correlated with lower educational achievement, younger ages at marriage and smaller income later in life, the researcher reports.

However, the effects were significantly smaller for children who lost their fathers when they were younger than 5 years old or older than 20.

Older children and adolescents between 11 and 15 years of age showed the largest decrease in later success.

“For young children who lose their fathers, other factors can take over to compensate,” Shenk said. “Infants and young children often don’t remember their lost fathers, and in many cases another family member may step in to care for them.

“Also, since young children are not yet in school, their educations don’t suffer as much.”

Source: University of Missouri


Boy and mother at a gravesite photo by shutterstock.

Father's Day - Our True Father Is Not Always the Biological One

My father was not the man most people think of as a good father. He did not teach me to play sports, never attended any of my soccer games (he wanted me to play baseball, but I preferred soccer), and he generally ruled the house with an iron fist. Authoritarian, rigid, and distanced.

On the plus side, after he retired (at 50, due to heart attacks) when I was 9 years old, he too a little more interest. He taught me to bow hunt, how to grow fruits and vegetable and tend to the animals, and when I was 13, he began teaching me about balancing the checkbook and other seemingly adult things. At the time I was just pleased that he was spending time with me.

Six months later, he had his 5th and 6th heart attacks - his last. He died while I was at school.

Years later, in helping my mother move, I discovered that had stopped taking his meds. The pill bottles had their full allotment of tablets and the fill dates were 7-8 months before he died.

In essence, he had suicided. He abandoned me with a mother he knew was incapable of taking care of things (like his cremation, driving a car, paying the bills, arranging for Social Security, obtaining the life insurance, and raising my little sister). At 13, I was the man of the house and awkward, scared adolescent.

Naturally, I rebelled. Pot, alcohol, pills, hallucinogens, meth, coke, sex - anything that could make me numb. I was arrested, spend time in detention, expelled from and readmitted to school, and generally lives a strange life as a standout soccer player, druggie, talented and gifted student, and criminal. I didn't any of them well.

But I survived my teen years. After bottoming out in 1986, as an 18 year old, I went back to college and became an honors student. Doing so saved my life in more ways than one.

When I was 20 and attending Rogue Community College in Southern Oregon, I met an older man (about 12 years younger than my own father) who taught writing and literature - Bill Hotchkiss (that's him at the top of the post, in his later years). When I looked him up in the school library I discovered that he was a publishing poet and novelist.

I took his WR123 class on how to write long papers, or term papers as they called them when I was in school (our final paper had to be at least 12 pages and have X number of citations, all in MLA style). For that class, we could write on anything we wanted, as long as it was a long poem from Robinson Jeffers' Selected Poems. [Back then 12 pages seemed impossible, now that seems like a short paper.]

He had a heart attack during that quarter while teaching another class. His then-wife, Judith, who was working on her PhD in literature at the time took over for him for about 3-4 weeks. When he came back it was like he hadn't missed a beat, except that there was no more cigarette smell when he came into class.

As we got to know each other in the class, he encouraged me to show him some of my poetry. After reading it, he invited me to join his poetry group outside of school. I was often the youngest member of the group, which met once a week under Bill's guidance.

As much as we worked on poems, we talked about ideas behind the poems, and we always touched on psychology, philosophy, science, nature (Bill had an encyclopedic knowledge of plant and animals, and most other things for that matter), and anything else that came up. I loved it - I lived for those group meetings. And I was flattered that he was always trying to convince me to continue school for my PhD - even after I had been out for 10 or more years.

Over the following 20+ years he became a close friend as I finished school, did my masters, and fell in and out of love (I brought two of the young women to the group over the years and I regret that he never met Jami - he would have liked her a lot). I moved to Seattle after school, but still visited when I could, sleeping on Bill's couch.

One by one the members of our poetry group began to die. Letitia took her own life around the same time that Bill and I both lost significant relationships - his wife Judith left and I left Celeste after 6 intense years. We talked about love and loss, shared our pain and confusion. He eventually met and married a wonderful woman - Lee-Marie. I enjoyed driving down from Seattle to visit them.

In the next few years we lost Harry and Bob, whose back room we used to meet in when I first joined the group, then last year Bill suffered a major stroke and died quite unexpectedly.

I immediately regretted never telling him that I experienced him as a role model, a mentor, and a surrogate father - our relationship had many of the qualities of a father/son dynamic. We argued about politics, walked his dogs in the mountains, read poetry around a camp fire.

I will forever be grateful for the role he played in my life - he was the father I always wanted in many ways. A born teacher, a lover of sports and knowledge, an avid hiker, and a genuinely caring man who just wanted to see me happy and living out the gifts I have been given in life.

I wish I could tell him about my experience seeing counseling clients now, how nature it feels once I got past the initial fear. He would smile . . . then ask me when I was starting my PhD.

On this father's day I pay tribute to the man who was my truest father with no biological link whatsoever. A man can be a father without a biological connection - and some of us who have been through fatherloss need that "father energy" in our lives.

Tags: fathers, fatherloss, sons, relationships, life, Father's Day, surrogate, father, Bill Hotchkiss, childhood, wounds, healing, memories, regret, mentor, role model, teacher, friend, father figure

Tom Ley - The Importance of Catch

Tom Ley posted this article at The Good Men Project on the importance of playing catch. Like Tom in this article, I did not have a father to play catch with me - I had a father for a while, and he was a huge baseball fan and wanted me to play ball, too, but he never wanted to play catch with me.

I was not a very good baseball player. I was better than most kids, but not as good as I was at football, soccer, or basketball. While my father was still alive, I chose soccer in the spring over baseball, and I was sure at the time that I had forever disappointed him.

But I did like to play catch with my friends to pass time on a cool spring Saturday afternoon. Those are some of my best memories from childhood - throwing the ball back and forth, talking about our favorite players (Willie Stargell and Willie Mays), practicing trick catches, or just shooting the shit about whatever.

I don't know if kids play catch like that anymore - I hope so.

I stopped playing catch because soccer became a year around sport for me by the time I reached high school, but for Tom Ley stopped for different reasons . . . .

The Importance of Catch

By Tom Ley
May 22, 2011

When your brother is the closest thing you’ve got to a father, sometimes playing catch means a little bit more.

I didn’t come to love baseball the same way most people do, or at least not the same way that movies like Field of Dreams and The Natural would have you believe most people do. According to the final scene in each of those movies, baseball is a game that’s shared between fathers and sons. The all-American father passes down his knowledge and love of the game to his son by teaching him all about the wheel play and the double switch. The sprightly young kid starts wearing his ball cap to bed at night and asks his father if he wants to have a catch every Sunday afternoon, and the lifeblood of the American Pastime is replenished.

As a kid who grew up without a father, I didn’t quite fit into this narrative. Yet somehow, by grade school, I was head-over-heels in love with baseball. I spent large portions of my young life poring over Becketts to find out how valuable my baseball cards were, memorizing and imitating the batting stances of my favorite baseball players (I had Ken Griffey Jr. totally nailed) and most importantly, playing catch in the backyard with my older brother.

Like most kids do who don’t have fathers, I’ve spent a great deal of my young life seeking out replacement father figures, surrogates who could provide me with some kind of hodge-podge blueprint of masculinity. Lucky for me, my brother, only four years my senior, was more than capable of serving as the most important of these surrogates.

I’ve always loved and respected my brother more than anyone else in my life. If there was a song he liked, I liked it too. If there was a TV show or video game he liked, I liked it too. I respected him so much that sometimes I got huge amounts of enjoyment out of simply watching him do stuff. I’d lie on the couch and watch him build what I thought were the most impressive Lego structures that had ever been constructed. I’d sit over his shoulder and watch with unwavering focus as he played Star Wars X-Wing on our computer (we had it on floppy disk, because we were cool). So it’s not surprising that when my brother started getting interested in baseball, I was eager to follow his lead.

He ushered me into the game as well as any father ever could have. With unyielding patience, he taught me how to catch pop flies, how to properly grip a fastball, and how to line up my knuckles on the bat handle.

He even taught me how to pitch. He spent hours squatting across the yard from me, receiving pitch after pitch while giving out advice and encouragement until I could pop strikes into his mitt with ease. He did all of this while he was, himself, still a child.

Those early years spent throwing pitches in the backyard until the sun went down made for some of my fondest childhood memories. Regrettably, due to a lurking smallness within myself, my affection for these moments would begin to wane rather quickly.

As I grew older my love for baseball intensified, but it was a love that existed in the abstract. I was enchanted by the idea of baseball, by the fact that the design and mechanics of the game were so radically elegant and unique. There was no time limit, no goals standing at opposite ends of a long field or court, and the game’s most important players only showed up once every five days.

Read the whole article.

Tags: boys, fathers, brothers, baseball, relationships, fatherloss, The Good Men Project, Tom Ley, The Importance of Catch, regret, childhood, father figures

TOWNIE: A Memoir by Andre Dubus III

The new memoir from Andre Dubus III - Townie: A Memoir - is reviewed in the New York Times. I mention it here (and share the review) because the book is about the relationship between a father and his children - this one from the children's point of view. And unlike many memoirs of coming of age in the 1970s, it's a different world, one without a father (this book is described as a rebuttal to his well-known short story, "The Winter Father").

Rough Boys

By DARCEY STEINKE

Published: February 25, 2011

One Saturday night in the mid-’70s, I stood on the deck of a shabby duplex watching my teenage boyfriend — a character who could have walked out of the pages of Andre Dubus III’s powerful new memoir, “Townie” — beat another boy senseless in the parking lot below. Under the yellowish dusk-to-dawn lights, I could see my boyfriend’s blond sideburns, denim jacket and dingo boots, and I could see him punch the boy in the stomach until he crumpled to the ground, then kick him over and over until his nose and lips were split and bleeding. In “Townie,” which details Dubus’s 1970s coming-of-age in the poor mill towns of Massachusetts, there are none of the usual signifiers of today’s ’70s Nostalgia Industrial Complex, no peace-sign key chains or smiley-face T-shirts, none of the goofy stoners and ditsy girls in tube tops that American television viewers have become accustomed to on “That ’70s Show.” Instead, Dubus writes about “the apartments” where his older sister buys drugs, two rows of three-story buildings surrounded by packed dirt worn smooth, a Dumpster in back always filled with dirty diapers, used condoms and pizza boxes. He writes about an early manifestation of “Fight Club” culture at his school, where, whenever there is a fight, boys and girls rush to one spot “like they were being pulled there by the air itself. . . . Kids were yelling: ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ ”

Author Andre Dubus III

TOWNIE: A Memoir

By Andre Dubus III
387 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $25.95.

Related

• Excerpt: ‘Townie’ (February 23, 2011)

• Books of The Times: ‘Townie: A Memoir’ by Andre Dubus III (February 23, 2011)

It was his parents’ divorce that left Dubus fatherless and living in a world of violence and poverty. Dubus’s father (and namesake) was a well-known writer, famous among other things for his short story “The Winter Father,” about a man recently separated from his family. The most vivid image in the story is of the protagonist watching through his rearview mirror as his young son chases after him: “A small running shape in the dark, charging the car, picking up something and throwing it, missing, crying You bum You bum You bum.”

“Townie” in many ways reads like one long rebuttal to “The Winter Father.” In the father’s telling, there is no sense of financial desperation on the kids’ side, and it takes just six months for the father to feel connected again to his children and the children to feel safe. In reality, his father’s departure left Dubus’s family vulnerable for years, his mother always working and exhausted, their series of rented houses always dirty and often filled with “Heads,” teenagers smoking pot while blasting Aerosmith. A neighbor kid beats Andre up daily, hurling obscenities and insults his way. A drunk urinates in their hallway and a greaser throws a Molotov cocktail into his mother’s car.

The family’s exposure affects each of the Dubus children differently. Andre’s younger sister, Nicole, puts a padlock on her bedroom door and retreats behind it; his older sister, Suzanne, deals drugs and is later gang-raped; his sensitive younger brother, Jeb, starts an affair with his former art teacher, a woman 22 years older, and attempts suicide. For his part, Andre takes up weight lifting. He begins a careful and ritualized effort to bulk up, reading Muscle Builder magazine and arranging a bench and weights in the basement. He works out the way competitive bodybuilders do, dividing his body into muscle groups, eating only tuna and eggs. Soon he can bench press 150 pounds and then 200, curl 80 and perform 1,000 situps. He learns to box, to wrap his hands, put on gloves and hit the bag as hard as he can. It’s not long before he is using these skills in bars and parking lots. The first time he punches a guy who has kicked his brother down a flight of bar stairs, he experiences a sort of ecstasy: “I could feel my weight sink back on my right foot, my arms go loose at my sides, and it was as if I were in a warm bath under a blue sky.”

Dozens of fights follow, including a brawl at a restaurant. These combats are lovingly detailed, almost overly descriptive, as Dubus tries to connect to the mythic struggle of male avengers throughout history. As I read these passages I thought about how, when I was growing up, fights were inevitable. How the young men were humorless and easily offended. One boy would throw out a halfhearted insult and the other would fling his arm back and the two would be on top of each other, the fighting all the more intense and bloody because neither had anything to lose. Dubus sees himself as his family’s protector, but in my own experience these fights were less about right and wrong and more about degraded teenagers who’d developed an unhealthy blood lust. Only after challenging his sister’s old boyfriend does Dubus sense he’s become addicted to the upside-down intimacy of throwing a punch. “This was different from sex, where if you both want it, the membranes fall away,” he writes. “With violence you had to break that membrane yourself, and once you learned how to do that, it was easier to keep doing it.”

As Dubus grows into a man he begins to write stories and struggles to dissolve his attachment to violence. He struggles, too, to come to terms with his larger-than-life father. That doesn’t mean escaping him — to the contrary, he attends the same college where his father teaches, and arrives at undergraduate parties to find his father already there, wearing a cowboy hat, getting drunk and flirting with the girls. The father acts like a buddy to his son, not a dad. Worst of all, he is proud that his son can fight. He himself carries a gun, and when he hears that his daughter’s husband has hit her, he and Dubus make a late-night long-distance call to California, looking for someone to break the man’s legs.

Only when the father is hit by a car and paralyzed, in 1986, does he finally mellow, letting father and son find healthier common ground. As this fine memoir closes, Dubus is concerned with a fundamental question: Can he care for a father who did not really take care of him? To the book’s credit (and the author’s), he does not lean on easy redemption. Instead he finds tactile ways to support his dad, helping him to work out his upper body and renovating his house to make it wheelchair friendly. Although he’s never able to discuss the life he led with his siblings on the other side of the river, he enjoys this time with his “new father.” But while he eventually forgives his dad, the pain of abandonment does not dissipate. After hearing of his father’s death in 1999, the first thing he thinks of is his leaving the family years earlier, as if that first leave-taking was the real death. The image that haunted his father, of the boy following the car, is no less haunting for the son. His father saw that boy — it was Andre’s brother, Jeb — getting smaller as the car pulled away. Andre watched as the car got smaller in the distance, and Jeb scooped up a handful of gravel and ran down the hill, throwing rocks that scattered across the road like shrapnel and shouting: “You bum! You bum! You bum!”

Darcey Steinke’s most recent book is the memoir “Easter Everywhere.”

Tags: TOWNIE, A Memoir, Andre Dubus III, New York Times, Rough Boys, Darcey Steinke, 1970s, fathers, sons, parenting, fatherloss, books, The Winter Father, drugs, violence, crime, fighting, weight lifting, abandonment, poverty

Michael Frayn's "My Father's Fortune" - A Wealth Of Humility And Humor

Michael Frayn's new book about his father's life, My Father's Fortune, is profiled on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday - including an excerpt from the book. One never knows in a memoir written by someone else what the level of "truth" really is, but this seems like a loving tribute to a long-dead (40 years) father from his loving and grateful son.

'Father's Fortune' A Wealth Of Humility And Humor

February 19, 2011

Weekend Edition Saturday

[9 min 11 sec]

• Download
• Transcript

My Father's Fortune
By Michael Frayn
Hardcover, 288 pages
Metropolitan Books
List Price: $25

Read An Excerpt

When Michael Frayn's father died at a hospice in 1970, workers brought him a box holding what his father had left behind. Among the collection, there was a pair of socks, some slippers, spectacles, a signet ring and a hearing aid.

Though his personal effects were few, Frayn's father left behind an exemplary legacy — he was a man who struggled and sacrificed, yet still maintained a happy, healthy life for his children, and a warm sense of humor.

Now, 40 years after his father's death, Frayn, an acclaimed poet, novelist and playwright, has written a memoir about his dad's life. Frayn tells NPR's Scott Simon about My Father's Fortune and the lessons that his father has taught him.

Frayn was inspired to write the memoir by his own children. Now middle-aged themselves, they were curious about the lives of their grandparents, and they urged Frayn to write what he could remember about them before he forgets.

"My eldest daughter said, 'We feel as if we have arisen from an unknown place,' " he says.

Although he was originally reluctant to take their advice and start the project, he quickly changed his mind.

"I thought it was going to be ... rather a pious chore," he says. "But in fact, once I got started, I got more and more emotionally involved in it, and it became a major emotional experience and really affected me a great deal."

To begin his research, Frayn delved into his father's own childhood, which was cut short when he began working at age 14. Tom Frayn was a handsome man, a good dancer and a hard worker.

"One of the reasons that he had to work from the age of 14 is that he had a very feckless father," Frayn explains. "His father had been a drinker and my father got to go out and try and earn some money to keep the family going."

Tom Frayn was so dedicated to caring for his family that he put their needs far ahead of his own. In fact, he waited over a decade to marry the love of his life because of it.

"He fell in love with my mother when they were both very young — when he was 18 and my mother was still 14," he says. "But they had to wait for 11 years to get married because he felt he couldn't get married until he was no longer responsible for supporting his mother."

Writer Michael Frayn grew up in what he describes as "a modest but agreeable
house in the outer suburbs of London."

Frayn's father was further beset with problems when he — and the rest of his siblings — became deaf in their adult years. Again, Tom Frayn did not let this setback stop him.

"He continued to work as a salesman even though he was very deaf," Frayn says. "How he did that, how he faced the customers every day when he couldn't hear what they were saying, I really don't know."

Tom used his deafness as an advantage rather than a handicap. When making a pitch, he would simply ensure that he was doing all the talking. Or, Frayn suggests, he may have even been unable to tell when a customer refused.

The elder Frayn did not care much for material possessions. Instead his passion in life was sport, Frayn says — particularly cricket.

"He loved watching cricket, and what he really wanted was a son who was a sportsman — preferably cricket, preferably a batsman," says Frayn.

The trouble was that Frayn's talents were strongest in the classroom and not on the cricket pitch. His father tried to coach him in their garden, but to no avail.

"I was hopeless at it," he says. "I just couldn't hit the ball, I couldn't catch the ball, so I was a great disappointment to him."

Gradually, his father accepted that his talents lay elsewhere. This acceptance is one of the major themes of his memoir, Frayn says.

"Very slowly over the years, he agreed to accept the idea that I was relatively good at some subjects at school, and agreed to see that as my succeeding in some kind of way," Frayn says.

Frayn's youth coincided with World War II. Luckily, his father was too young to fight during World War I and too old to fight during World War II. This was one more of his father's "bits of good fortune," Frayn says.

Instead of fighting, the elder Frayn lived with his family in London during the Blitz. Because they were in the suburbs, they were not as hard-hit as residents of the East End and the center of London. However, they still had a close call with a flying V-1 bomb.

"On the very first night of the V-1s, one came just over the roof of our house, missed it by a few feet, hit the hillside just up the road and killed everyone in the house that it came down on," Frayn says.

Their home, and the other houses on the street, were severely damaged, but to young Frayn, this was a delight.

"It was like a kind of early Christmas — everything was special, there was no front door, there were no windows in the house, there was a hole in the roof," Frayn explains. But he concedes, "It must have been hell for my parents. All the carpets full of plaster dust and broken glass. I don't know how they ever got it out."

After the V-1 bombings, the Frayn family invested in a bomb shelter, but it didn't end up as safe as they had hoped.

"One of the few things he spent his money on was a shelter in the garden, but what he hadn't taken into consideration was that if you dig a hole in the ground, it fills with water," Frayn says. "We only ever used the shelter once, because after that, it was just a stagnant pool." It ended up much more dangerous to be in the shelter than to stay in the house during the raids, he recalls.

Not one to let things go to waste, Frayn's father came up with a practical solution for their waterlogged shelter. Because of the wartime food shortage, neighbors were buying chickens to maintain a constant supply of eggs.

Tom Frayn asked, "What kind of creature likes water?" and the answer was ducks. "So we acquired ducks. They lived in this armored duck pond the rest of the war and supplied us with eggs," says Frayn.

After the end of the long, terrible war, life changed suddenly for the Frayn family when Frayn's mother died of a heart attack. Frayn was just 12 years old, and his father faced a new practical problem — he had to find some way to look after his young children.

"Those next few years were very grave for my sister and me, and it must have been terrible for my father. He was very grief-stricken, his life had fallen apart, but he also had this terrible, practical problem," Frayn says.

He couldn't help the death of my mother, but he did his best to get around that and to keep the home going. The longer I live, the more grateful I am for that.

- Michael Frayn, on his father, Tom Frayn

Frayn's father still managed to be a supportive father, even after the tragic death of his beloved wife. In fact, Frayn credits his father with getting him into writing. When Frayn was about 6 or 7 years old, his father came across an essay that he had written for school, titled "The House I Should Like To Live In When I Grow Up."

"My father read it and said to me, perhaps you ought to be a journalist," Frayn remembers. "Maybe it lodged in the back of my mind, maybe it's one of the things that made me interested in writing."

Even though his father originally encouraged him to write, Frayn's work in journalism went unrecognized by his father for years. "He never bought the newspaper I worked for, and it was years before he admitted that he had read anything that I had written," Frayn says.

"It was the style then," he explains. "It was thought that you would make them big-headed if you encouraged them too much."

So it was not until Frayn was in his 30s that his father finally commended him. After a series of articles that he had written about Cuba, Frayn's father rang him up and suggested that he write more stories of the kind.

While he didn't overload his children with praise, Frayn's father left his son with other gifts — notably his sense of humor.

"It was a professional resource for him because he used it as a way of getting around his deafness, and I think I picked up that habit of joshing people," says Frayn.

Frayn also believes that he inherited his father's skepticism. "He was not a believer in either religious systems or political systems," Frayn says.

But most importantly, Frayn's father bequeathed him with a stable childhood and a happy life.

"He couldn't help the death of my mother, but he did his best to get around that and to keep the home going. The longer I live, the more grateful I am for that," he says.

Go to the NPR site to Read An Excerpt.

Tags: Michael Frayn, Father's Fortune, Humility, Humor, NPR, Weekend Edition, Scott Simon, memoir, men, fathers, fatherloss, sons, books, memoir, father's lessons, Tom Frayn, London

The Art of Manliness - A Generation of Men Raised by Women

Interesting article - does it matter that men are being are raised in homes without men, without fathers? Personally, I think it does matter - A LOT. Here are some statistics in support of that assertion:

• 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes – 5 times the average (US Dept. Of Health/Census).
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes – 32 times the average.
• 85% of all children who show behavior disorders come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Center for Disease Control)
• 80% of rapists with anger problems come from fatherless homes - 14 times the average. (Justice & Behavior, Vol 14, p. 403-26)
• 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average. (National Principals Association Report
• 75% of all adolescent patients in chemical abuse centers come from fatherless homes – 10 times the average. (Rainbows for All God’s Children)
• 70% of youths in state-operated institutions come from fatherless homes – 9 times the average. (U.S. Dept. of Justice, Sept. 1988)
• 85% of all youths in prison come from fatherless homes – 20 times the average. (Fulton Co. Georgia, Texas Dept. of Correction)

These numbers were assembled in 2000, so it's probably even worse now. Keep this in mind as you read Brett's post.

A Generation of Men Raised by Women

by Brett on December 13, 2010

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.”

This comment, made by the Tyler Durden character in the movie Fight Club, is one of the most memorable lines of that film and has oft been repeated and discussed. It’s sticking power is surely due to the way it resonated with many men–how it so succinctly summed up their life’s experience. Products of divorced parents, single mothers, or fathers who spent more time at work than at home, these men lacked a vital example of manhood growing up. Oftentimes, not only was their dad not around, male mentors in other areas of their life were few and far between as well. They understand well Nathaniel Hawthorne’s lament in The Marble Faun:

“Between man and man there is always an insuperable gulf. They can never quite grasp each other’s hands; and therefore man never derives any intimate help, any heart sustenance, from his brother man, but from women-his mother, his sister, his wife.”

Without male mentors, many men of this generation have felt adrift, unsure of how to deal with an indescribable but acute lack in their lives.

How did we get to the point where it is possible, as Edward Abbey put it, “to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood?”

There are three primary social institutions that have historically served to mold young boys into men: family, religion, and education. Yet the masculine influence of these institutions diminished over the last century. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Read the whole article.

Tags: The Art of Manliness, A Generation of Men Raised by Women, fatherless homes, men, sons, children, fathers, fatherloss, culture, families, schools, church, religion, education

Happy Fathers Day, Part Three: A Few More Perspectives

My father died when I was 13, so this is the 30th Fathers Day I have not had a father to honor or spend the day with. It's been in recent years that I have become aware of how deeply I was wounded by growing up without a father. Not that my father was all that great, but he was the only father I knew.

Many other men have grown up without fathers - and many of them had fathers who walked or were never present. One of my co-workers, a decade or more younger than me, grew up NEVER knowing his father - and now he has a new daughter to join his wonderful young son. He has done everything he can to be an active father - I admire him for that.

If You Don't Have a Father Today...

Maybe you don't have a dad to meet with today. It's your day too...

Published on June 21, 2009
by Paul Dobransky, M.D.

Maybe you don't have a father anymore, or feel like you never did. Maybe you never knew him, or maybe he was never around enough to know - emotionally, mentally, or spiritually - even if he was often physically in the same room. Maybe you, yourself, are also a father, or will be soon, would like to be one someday, are married to one, have a child with one, or already have a fatherly role toward others as a teacher, advisor, mentor or boss. While we celebrate and honor the great fathers who are here with us today, many millions of us don't have one, and this day is for you too.

What can you do today, and how is it that you have made it this far without a dad to reach out to through the years?

Volumes of research on human resilience exist that explain your current success and healthy adjustment. Whether you are a man or woman, taking note of the fact that you do have a good life right now at this very moment is proof that you have everything in you that you ever needed to survive the loss of a father, the absence of a father, the need for a father, and thrive anyway. As someone who lost a father at a young age - and for over a decade has specialized in helping men and women overcome the effects of that absence on their dating, relationship, and career lives - I'd like to share a bit of that research, and some things I've learned along the way.

Fathers not only make us more resilient people, but our own natural resilience also assists us in finding the fathering we need. Human resilience has been defined as:

a. a positive outcome despite the experience of adversity;
b. continued positive or effective functioning in adverse circumstances; or
c. recovery after a significant trauma (Masten et al., 1999).

My own dad died when I was twenty-two, in the midst of medical school, and had just broken up with a fiancée. My little brothers were eighteen and about to enter college, and twelve and about to enter puberty. I could safely say that the particular week my dad died was also probably the week I had most needed him, ever. And while my brothers and I dealt with the loss at different developmental stages, with different challenges and gifts, and in unique ways amongst us, there were most certainly universal effects to overcome and actions to take to adapt and heal.

I called my brothers today to ask what they are doing. One informed me that he is going to connect with his former rugby coaches, his former priest, and our father's best friend from childhood. The second is going to church with his new wife and her parents. I am going to spend time writing about fathers, assisting some of my clients on the matter, and then will meet with some good male friends whose fathers aren't going to be in the city for the weekend.

I'm also thinking about personal heroes such as an old friend and journalist who passed on many years ago - Starr Wright. He was one of many fatherly people who stepped in to help me along when I needed it. He saw a glimmer of passion for writing in me long ago, encouraged it and nurtured it. With a chuckle thumbing through my earliest clumsy attempts at writing, Starr would put out his cigarette, cough, clear his throat, and regardless of my lack of inborn talent, stoke the pure interest and passion for it, saying, "You're doing good, kid. Keep at it and don't let anyone tell you what it's worth but you. Get to work."

In all of these personal examples, there is a common thread about resilient humans - men and women both. When we can't get what we need from a single source, we adapt and get it anyway from diverse sources past, present, and future. We find fathering in our mentors and coaches, our spiritual leaders or the spiritual experience itself, from looking at our father's life and his past, those who shaped him, indirectly from the fathers of our friends and loved ones, and even from our makeshift families called "circles of friends" - what have also been called "urban tribes" that can substitute for nontraditional or broken families.

We can even look to the future with guidance from men we have never even met, and will never likely meet - our heroes. Feeling fathered, the gifts fathers bestow, life skills they teach, and guidance they provide from a masculine worldview do not have to come from a single source. They can be collected and refined from our life's experience in the social arena itself, the "school of hard knocks," and the kind and competent men we meet along the way.

I'm particularly proud of my brothers' abilities to have graduated college, found excellence in careers, and a solid role in marriage and family with no resources or guidance to begin with.

The absence of a dad is certainly known to affect the young in different ways depending on what their level of psychological development is, but it's not just what's in you that matters - how you will do with your life is also dependent on what you surround yourself with, and what you do with the circumstances you are in, to adapt. To take your "lemons and make lemonade."

Glen Elder in Children of the Great Depression (1974), identified the profound effects of historical change on human development. By comparing the experiences of children born in Berkeley and parts of Oakland, California, in the early and late 1920s, he could show that children born at the beginning of the 1920s were not as susceptible to the effects of family disruption and hardship caused by the Great Depression as children born in the late 1920s (Elder, 1974/1999). The findings illustrate that developmental processes should be viewed not only in relation to individually lived time, but also in relation to the socio-historical context in which they take place.

We live in a time of history right now that has been compared to the Great Depression. And while many of the statistics show job losses taking a heavy toll on men's health and welfare even more than on women currently, we have different resources at our disposal in the form of social networking and technology, behavioral science and education. The need men and women have for a father hasn't changed, but the pressures on fathers, and our means of accessing their gifts, have.

It's a different and more challenging social world for men to contend with than it was a generation ago.

For about a decade I have contributed to teaching an online community of men who - on the surface - seek out information with which to better their dating, relationship, social and romantic lives in general. What I found in that time was something deeper than just a public need for more accessible dating tips for men. I met men of all ages, some single, some divorced, some fathers themselves and all struggling to find a role, a place, and social satisfaction in our changing society. The universal need underneath their diversity ends up clearly being a need for a father - they all identify an absent father, a neglectful one, an abusive one, a father confused over his own role in a marriage, community, or society, or at the very least, the absence of enough practical, genuine, fatherly advice from our media to the degree and breadth of social and romantic guidance that women have enjoyed for decades in that same media.

For the past several years, men haven't been flocking to the internet "men's dating community" to learn how to date. They're looking for a father.

Fathers teach us "how to use our bodies" - which is to say, how to take action out there in the world - to take our resources and use them, face our challenges with courage, adapt, innovate, and solve our problems with our own two hands.

They teach their sons about women, and competition with other men. They don't just lecture, but literally show their sons how to play sports or fix cars, or get a job that's meaningful. By example they show sons how to grow a character maturity which will lead to someday having a satisfying marriage, career, and a legacy to give back to the world (as he will have done for us.)

Fathers teach their daughters about men, both through their stories, and through personal example - being the very first man she has ever encountered and "fallen in love with." Fathers show their daughters they are valuable and precious, and will always, always be protected and safe, but that they have guts and strength and resolve no less than a man. If he can see to it, he will always be there for you to help, to remind you of who you are when you are confused or stressed, and that you are not just any girl or woman, a statistic in today's confusing social and romantic arenas, or a cog in a corporate wheel, but his daughter.

No matter who you are, a man or woman, or whether your father is alive or available to meet today, you come from a long line of fathers - generation after generation over centuries and ages have led up to making you who you are right now. You are a resilient person from a long line of resilient people. You have the right to celebrate today with all the joy you can muster, honoring those who have fathered you - mentors, advisors, teachers, spiritual leaders, friends, bosses and partners - whether they had one minute to spare which would impact you for a lifetime, or years of devoted concern to give.

It is a day to do - to take action the way fathers are so good at helping us with, rather than just to think or ponder our lives. Here, then, are some actions you can take:

• Contact those mentors, teachers, spiritual leaders, advisors, coaches, and elder friends from your past - to thank them for their impact.

• Be with the friends, supporters, and confidantes of your present life who are your examples of good fathering, and with whom you are striving to go out into the world to make an impact.

• Remember who your heroes have been and who they are now, noticing that their own best features are always aspects of yourself - perhaps qualities you haven't yet cultivated, matured, and brought to bear in the world around you. Join one new activity that your heroes are gifted at.

• Look to the future and enjoy it now instead of waiting for it to be provided to you. The actions you will take while being your own best counsel - fathering yourself - will lead there.

• Look to the future and wonder who you will provide fathering to, the impact you will make, and the legacy you will leave behind when you're gone. Start now, and offer to help someone less skilled than you, today.

Regardless of the reasons your father is not around - whether there is unfinished business, anger at him, remorse over what went unsaid or undone , loneliness and missing him, or in a time of stress for which you really wish he was around to provide the answer - you are still here and there are real things that need to get done. You don't have to impress his memory because you never could get his attention, or vow to be his opposite because he let you down. You are resilient, and can forgive his failings while enjoying the skills for building a life you inherited anyway, if only in his DNA.

Get to work.

Father's Day is your day too, and in every courageous act in which you do what is right, even if it is difficult or uncomfortable, every ambition in which you fail and pick yourself up anyway for another go at it, you're living a genuine Father's Day. Every time you pass on what you know, assisting someone with less competence, less experience or skill than your own, you are honoring yourself, and fathers everywhere. You're honoring fatherhood itself.

You're doing good, kid. Keep at it, and don't let anyone tell you what you're worth but you.

One of the reasons those of us who didn't have fathers feel that loss is that we missed a lot of the crucial things fathers teach their sons (not sure I would have gotten these things from my father, which makes me long for a REAL father even more).

My father really didn't have a lot of male friends - usually one or two and no more - and somehow I have picked that bad trait up from him. I am trying to change that, but it's harder to make friends with men, and more so to know men with interests similar to my own. I continue to work at it.

Do men learn about friendships from their fathers?

Do men think their fathers had male friends?
by Geoffrey Greif

Did your father have friendships with other men? Did you learn about how to make friends friends from him? We interviewed 386 men for Buddy System: Understanding male friendships and asked them specifically if their fathers had friends and what they learned from their fathers about friendships. The men we interviewed were diverse in terms of age, face, and religion.

Growing up, sons constantly observe and monitor their fathers' actions - the way they slouch, talk, act around others. Sometimes they try and speak in their father's deep voice or treat others the way he does. One of my closest friends from childhood often was admonished by his own father with the words, "little man, come here." I was amazed when he referred to his own son with the same words and in the same tone of voice. Sons also observe if their fathers have friends and what they do with them. Do they come over to the house, hang out together at the basketball court, or in the corner bar? If a man was raised by a father who felt comfortable around other men friends, he is likely to adopt that same perspective with his friends.

Naturally, many men were not raised by men either because the fathers were physically absent or emotionally absent from the family. They had to rely on other men (uncles, coaches, male mentors) or women to raise them. They may have grown up longing for more contact with a man and may have become even keener observers of older men because they were short a role model in their own home. One man I interviewed for the book said that he tried to excel in sports to please other fathers, because he could not please his own absent father.

We asked men if their father had friends and learned that 45% of the men thought their father had many friends when they were growing up, 25% had few friends, and 30% believed their father had no friends! (Men who did not know their fathers did not answer the question.) Thus, over half thought their father had few or no friends. As can be imagined, some men, especially those whose father had friends, learned the importance of friendships from their father. They relayed stories of men helping out their fathers and even tending to fathers who were terminally ill. Others grew up seeing their fathers isolated from or unkind to other men. They swore they would do the opposite of what their father had done - they would make friends and not live what they perceived to be a lonely life or a life too focused on work.

Bottom line - men need to have friends both for themselves and to serve as role models for their children. People with friends live longer, healthier lives. Men can compensate for what they did not get from their own father by reaching out to others and can pass down good models of friendship to the next generation.

Finally, a poem from William Matthews (more Fathers Day poems here).

Men at My Father’s Funeral

by William Matthews

The ones his age who shook my hand

on their way out sent fear along

my arm like heroin. These weren’t

men mute about their feelings,

or what’s a body language for?

And I, the glib one, who’d stood

with my back to my father’s body

and praised the heart that attacked him?

I’d made my stab at elegy,

the flesh made word: the very spit

in my mouth was sour with ruth

and eloquence. What could be worse?

Silence, the anthem of my father’s

new country. And thus this babble,

like a dial tone, from our bodies.

William Matthews, “Men at My Father’s Funeral” from Time and Money: New Poems. Copyright © 1995 by William Matthews. Reprinted with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved, www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com.

Source: Time and Money: New Poems (1995)

Tags: fathers, fatherloss, sons, death, friendship, Psychology Today, William Matthews, Men at My Father’s Funeral, poetry, Geoffrey Greif, Do men learn about friendships from their fathers?, Dr. Paul Dobransky, If You Don't Have a Father Today