My father died almost 10 years ago. When he passed away I had contact with him for like 5 years and only sporadically by phone and once or twice a year when my work gave me the opportunity to travel to Hawaii as part of a rapid cycle corn breeding in person. I am grateful for those visits because otherwise I wouldn't have seen him before he died. When I wrote about his death 10 years ago my feelings were a little raw. I didn't know how to process the complexity of what I felt when he died. This has shifted or softened or changed over time. I have more nostalgia and fond memories of him now than I think comes through in his obituary that I wrote then.
When he died, his friends had a service for him in Hawaii that I did not attend. My father had converted at some point to the Baha'i religion. He never mentioned this to me in any of our conversations, but his friend Bill from the Baha'i had helped set him up with an apartment and got him on disability so he wasn't homeless. I had a couple of quite frustrating and emotionally draining conversations with Bill leading up to the funeral because I wasn't following the Bahai traditions for burial. Bill was trying to convince me to follow Baha'i practices and bury my father in Hawaii. I did not have the money to pay for a plot in Honolulu. Total cost for a burial plot and casket in Honolulu that complied with Bahai rules would have been almost 100K and I had no instructions from my father on how to handle his funeral. So I had him cremated and the ashes sent back to me. My mom and brothers found a small plot in Nampa. We had a family graveside service where we buried the ashes in a small wooden box. And I didn't know what to do with his personal effects that were piled in a terrible mess left after his death in his apartment that the police told me they would arrange with the landlord to take care of it because it was a biohazard and there was nothing of any value inside. He had no money or will or physical things worth salvaging so none of us went to Hawaii. Bill sent me tapes from the Baha'i service but I couldn't make it all the way through them because I was angry and heartbroken that the person they eulogized was a stranger to me.
I had one emotional wound that I kept circling back to. It still is a sore point that I haven't quite forgiven or forgotten. In my last conversation with Bill, he said to me - "It sounds like you feel like your father abandoned you."
I paused for a long time and told Bill, "He did. I didn't see him for more than 20 years."
Bill couldn't believe this. He said my father talked about us kids all the time - I asked him if he talked about his grandchildren. Bill said he didn't know that he had any. He didn't even know my children's names. My father didn't ever ask about them or much about the details of my life after we finally did get back in touch. He did tell my sister he was proud of everyone for all of their education and professional achievements but thought I just pollinated corn for some seed company - not the worst description of my job, but I was a heck of an expensive corn pollinator.
Recently, my old bishop from my childhood ward/church contacted me with a conference talk and bearing his testimony again about the church and inviting me to come back. It poked this old wound because this was someone that I desperately looked up to as a father figure, but as I moved away, got married and built a life I lost touch with him. There were three men in that ward that were pillars of support for me when I was a teen - they were mentors and confidants and friends. They took me on campouts, fed me dinner with their families, and helped my family both financially and spiritually and emotionally. I will always be grateful for them, but when I graduated their job was done and they went on to focus on their own families and new church responsibilities and projects. I didn't hear from any of them for 20 years.
Then I wrote about leaving the church and posted it on Facebook. Suddenly, I was a project again and they reached out to talk to me about my "potential" and how sad they were that I was making this choice, and to send me scriptures and conference talks. I know intellectually this is Mormon for "I am thinking about you and care about you." but it still smarts in this same kind of way because my old mentor doesn't really know me as a person now or my family.
