Feeling Relief

Sometimes when friends post about their grief at losing a parent, I admit, I feel angry. And a little confused. And then sad.

I don’t feel grief at my father’s death. I don’t miss him. I don’t think about how he used to treat me and wish he was alive again. Maybe this makes me a bad person. There may be some people who feel this way about my father, even some of my siblings. But I feel—only relief.

Relief that I don’t have to flinch at the fear that he might hit me.

Relief that I don’t worry about him arguing uselessly with my mother. Again.

Relief that I don’t have to bite my tongue when talking to him about a thousand things that matter to him and that he would lecture me about.

Relief that I don’t have to pretend to be someone I’m not.

Relief that I don’t have to listen to him pretend to compliment me about the things that he may or may not actually be proud of me for.

Relief that I don’t feel the sense that he is pressing “femininity” on me.

I don’t think I’m missing what grief feels like. I’ve felt grief for other people who have died. My grandmother, who was cantankerous and sometimes racist, died at age 96, when I was only 20. I miss her sometimes. I like to look at old photos of her in her pink bathroom, her hair crazy wild, and remember her cackling about some joke of her own. I loved her, all of the contradictory parts together. I miss my father-in-law and often wish he was still around at events that he would love to be at.

I don’t miss my father. I can sometimes still hear his voice in my head, yes. It’s not a nice voice. It’s a cruel, perfectionist voice that demands that I set myself up to an impossibly high standard and that told a child she was never, never good enough—until she believed it. She kept hurting herself to try to be good enough, though she always knew she would never be.

I generally tried to keep a good distance from my father. I lived far enough away from him that I didn’t see him often. By the time he died, I’d set a boundary for myself that I would visit him and be kind and polite as I would to any other person, but I would not tell him “I love you.” I don’t think he ever noticed this because I don’t think he particularly cared if I loved him or not.

Frequently, I find myself wondering what made him the man he was. Any time I spend thinking about him now, it is me puzzling over the life circumstances that twisted him into the harmful shape he became. Yes, mostly to his daughters, though he would have insisted that he was the most egalitarian man ever. Even though he left us nothing and deeded his properties only to his sons. If this makes it sound like I care, I do not. I’m glad he left me nothing. I don’t want anything of his.

I also puzzle over the conundrum of those who loved my father and who would tell me I’m a bad person for not loving him. I don’t particularly care about those people’s opinions anymore and don’t feel any need to argue with them and try to convince them that the man they knew is not the man I knew. But I find it interesting that one person can be so different to different people. I suspect that I am also very different to certain people. I am a villain in my ex’s story of the world, something that I’m aware I have no control over and am slowly learning not to care about.

For most of my life, I tried very hard to make myself into someone everyone had to love because I killed myself to help everyone. And never took care of myself. And then found out that no one else was going to take care of me, which is sad, but perhaps a simple reality of living in this world. We are essentially alone when it comes down to it.

My father was not an affectionate man. If you forced a hug on him, he might accept it. He might also try to extricate himself from it. I suspect on some level, he deeply loathed himself and that this self-loathing came from an abusive childhood which he never spoke about and perhaps didn’t even remember. These are all unknowns.

Still, when it comes to friends who feel the lack of a father who encouraged them onward and who they wish could have continued to live and to be part of their lives—this is something that I can only vaguely imagine. What would it have been like to grow up with a father who was like that? With a father I wasn’t afraid of in almost every way? With a man who treated me (and my mother) like being a woman wasn’t a bad thing? With a man who could laugh at himself and maybe the rest of the world? With someone who wasn’t always concerned primarily with how my actions would make him look to other people?

I can never know what that would have been like, but I assume it would have been better than the relief I feel at my father being gone and me no longer having to make constant compromises with my fear of him and my sense of filial duty.