This is me, my little sister, and my dad getting ready to head off into the Sierra Nevada wilderness on our annual backpacking trip. The photo was taken in 1972, I think, when I was fourteen and Carol was twelve. I posted this photo to Facebook on Father’s Day, because even though my dad’s been dead for over 40 years now, I wanted to express my gratitude for the gifts he gave me, primarily my love of wild places. So many people responded with positive comments, mostly about what a good dad he must have been.

But he wasn’t. Not really. Not in the classic sense. At the time of this photo, he and my mom had been divorced for several years. He was actively drinking, and he was between wife #2 and wife #3. My brother, sister, and I called him “Wayne,” not “Dad.” Our mom gave me and my sister those “Chicken Shirt” t-shirts for this trip – perhaps, I see in retrospect, as a commentary on our father.

There are so many questions I’ll never have answers to. He died in a skiing accident when I was twenty-one, and my mom’s been dead for almost twenty-five years. There’s so much I don’t know or can’t remember. I was just trying to keep my head above water while saving my family from drowning.

For decades, I’ve held either the good or the bad Wayne, but not both together. He was the good dad who took his girls into the woods, or he was the bad dad – the arrogant alcoholic who hit his son and his dogs and left his wife to be with other women. Somehow, his goodness or badness meant something about my goodness or badness – if he was bad, I was irrevocably wounded junk. If he was good, I needed to deny my own experience in order to defend and prove his goodness. But he couldn’t be both.

Now, today, through writing my first novel that includes an imaginative seeing into my dad’s reality, I’ve found healing and forgiveness. I’ve found acceptance of him in his totality, as far as I can know him or it. I’ve found a way into my sequestered pain and grief, and an understanding of my dad’s choices, through writing about them. It’s a sort of miracle.

I’ve learned that healing comes through listening to and feeling the pain and grief I’ve carried for half a century, and letting go of the suffering that comes from wanting life to have been different. Healing comes through accepting reality as it is, with all its messy contradictions and flamboyant wholeness, and profoundly owning my “one wild and precious life.”

Death and resurrection is the way of the universe. Healing grace – resurrection – is always available to us.

Love is always there for the flowing, even if it takes fifty years.  

Happy Father’s Day, Wayne.

Love, Barb.

PS. You can contact me here if you’d like to talk about any of this.

2020 photo credit: Jed Holdorph