Fatherhood Fable: One Daughter Weaves Her Own Tale

By Emily Shavers Edgell, St. Louis.

Remembering a dad in the month of June, a celebration of fathers.

Exactly ten years ago I was riding through the beautiful and rugged roads of Northern California with my brother in the driver’s seat and my father’s ashes still warm in my hands. We had made the pilgrimage of thousands of miles to collect his body from that remote coast after receiving the unexpected news of his death. He had just turned 50.

My father was living in northern California at the time.  He had been camping several hours from home with a group of his tai chi students when he drowned in a river near the campsite. No one saw it happen. No one knows how or why it happened. His cremation and our immediate departure with his ashes were a practical necessity due to limited time and resources. The feeling of the urn in my hands was indescribable.  And it occurred to me that the circumstances of his death were much like his life, bewildering, mysterious, heartbreaking, and rather beautiful.

An extraordinary man
That was the day that I started to write my father’s story for myself. When the person you love is still with you, they are who they are; your idea of them is formed largely by actual interactions. When that person is gone it is up to you to remember them and make sense of his life in the way that you will.

To me, my father was the most extraordinary man in the world. He was a building contractor with a philosophy degree. He was an early and avid proponent of natural living with a sweet tooth and a secret nicotine addiction. He was a black man raised in a St. Louis ghetto who could answer obscure questions about the religion and history of far flung lands he had never seen. He was an intensely private and solitary man who could be the life of the party. He was something of an oracle, a tai chi master, a spiritual teacher. He was a seeker who, it seemed, was never able to find peace. He was a nature lover, constantly seeking solace in wild places like the river where he died.

A man for all seasons
As a child I remember him as serious and gentle, a gardener, the family chef. He was constantly giving to others: friends, family, and strangers. He would visit our aging neighbor who was always angry and sometimes violent but also utterly alone. He would pick up strangers at bus stops during awful weather and deliver them home.

When I was a teenager my father was consumed with the care of my terminally ill mother. He managed almost singlehandedly for five years, until her death at the age of 44. With no medical background he wrote a research review of an emerging drug in the treatment of breast cancer. He believed it could help my mother, but it was not a part of her physicians’ regular treatment approach. It is now a widely accepted treatment for breast cancer.

In my college years he was famous for his whole-wheat cookies which he’d send on odd occasions, hastily wrapped in recycled bread bags and duct tape. His notorious phone sign off, a gentle and loving, “is there anything else you want to tell me?” had my college roommates spilling their guts when he’d call for me and I wasn’t home.

Different perspectives
He knew things, could do things, and moved people in a way that I have never seen in anyone else. These are the broad strokes and details of his life that have remained with me and that I’ve used to weave his story.

It was a shock to realize, several years ago, that even my two younger brothers and I don’t have the same story to tell. Making dinner one night I heard my six-year-old nephew in the next room telling my kids about their grandfather, the real-life Jedi knight who died in a magical river before any of them were born. My brothers remember different things and frame his story in their own ways.

Why, I’ve wondered, do I need to create this story? Obviously, so I can tell it to my children. But also, as I move through the tasks of adult life — like career, marriage and parenthood — without my parents I find that I look to their life stories for instruction. I hope that the themes and ultimately the morals of their stories will guide me. Even as I recognize the irony of trying to glean wisdom from a tale of my own creation I can believe that there is something essential of my father in this fable of him.

The story continues
So, what have I learned from his story? The answer is different today than it was five years ago and will be different still five years from now. I find what I need in it.

My dad would have been sixty this year. I remember him still — because you’ll never convince me otherwise — as the most extraordinary man in the world.

By Emily Shavers Edgell, TheVillageCelebration Contributor