I love my father. The distance is real. Both of these things have been true for as long as I can remember, and I have not, in thirty-eight years, found a way to put them in the same sentence inside a conversation with him
I want to write about something I have been carrying for a long time, that I have not, in thirty-eight years, found a satisfactory name for, and that I suspect a great many other men of my generation are carrying as well, also in silence, also without good words for it.
The thing is this. I have a father whom I have loved my entire life. The love is, by every honest accounting I can produce, real. The love is also, by every honest accounting I can produce, conducted across a particular kind of distance that neither of us has, in nearly four decades, ever directly named. The distance is not estrangement. The distance is not coldness in the obvious cinematic sense. The distance is, more accurately, the structural condition of a relationship between two men of two different generations who love each other and who have not, by the available cultural vocabulary, ever found a way to put the loving and the distance into the same sentence at the same time.
This is not, in the standard cultural register, a grief. The grief categories the culture has language for involve things like absence, abandonment, the deaths of parents, the breakdown of relationships into estrangement. My father is not absent. He has not abandoned me. He is not dead. We are not estranged. By every external metric, our relationship is one of the functional ones. We talk on the phone every Sunday. He has visited me in Bangkok twice in the last two years. He still walks me to the curb when I leave, and stands there for the extra few seconds I have written about elsewhere.
None of these categories captures what I am carrying. The thing I am carrying is more specific, more daily, and structurally harder to articulate. It is the quiet ongoing fact of having loved a man my whole life across a distance neither of us has ever been willing to name out loud, and of the love being real, and of the distance being real, and of there being no conversation available, in our shared register, that admits both.
What the distance is, exactly
I want to try to describe the distance precisely, because the cultural register tends to assume it is one of a few stock things, and in my father's case it is none of those things.
It is not that my father is incapable of warmth. He is warm, in his own particular vocabulary. The vocabulary involves attendance, provision, reliability, the small ongoing logistics of being a father across decades. He showed up. He provided. He was, by every external measure, present. The warmth was conducted through these channels rather than through the more direct verbal channels that have become standard in subsequent generations. The warmth was, in some real way, the substance of how the men of his generation expressed love. The substance has been there, my whole life, in a form I have, with some effort, learned to recognize.
What has not been there, ever, is the direct articulation of the substance. The "I love you, son" that I have written about in another article, which has only recently started appearing at the ends of our phone calls in the form of a soft mumble, was, for the first thirty-six years of my life, structurally absent from our shared vocabulary. The absence was not, in itself, the distance. The absence was, more accurately, the most visible symptom of a wider structural condition, which is that the parts of our interiors that would have been the substantive material of a close relationship were, by his generation's training and my inherited adaptation to it, not part of the available conversation between us.
I did not, in my entire childhood, have a conversation with my father in which I told him what I was actually afraid of. He did not, in my entire childhood, have a conversation with me in which he told me what he was actually afraid of. We did not, in any of our many afternoons and evenings together, do the kind of interior exchange that, in retrospect, I now recognize as what closeness between a parent and a child structurally consists of. The not-doing was not a refusal. The not-doing was the available shape of how a father of his generation and a son of mine were able to be in a room together. The shape was the shape. The shape did not, in any explicit sense, include the interior.
The distance is this. The distance is the part of me that did not, across forty years, ever quite know how to bring my interior into a room with my father, and the corresponding part of him that did not, across the same forty years, ever quite know how to bring his into a room with me. The interiors have been there. The bringing has not. The not-bringing is what the distance is.
Why this has no name in the cultural register
The reason this grief has no name in the standard cultural register is that the register is calibrated for clean categories. The father is either present or absent. He is either warm or cold. He is either loving or withholding. The register requires a verdict.
The grief I am describing does not produce a verdict. The father in question is, by any honest accounting, both warm and structurally inarticulate at the same time. He is both loving and unable to put the love into the words his son's generation would have known how to receive. He is both present, in the structural sense, and absent, in the interior sense. The register does not have a word for the man who is doing all of these things simultaneously. The register, accordingly, does not have a word for the grief that being the son of this man produces.
So the grief is carried without a name. I have, in the last few years, started to recognize it in other men of my generation when we talk about our fathers. The recognition is mostly nonverbal. A particular kind of pause. A small shrug. A sentence that begins with "my dad" and then trails off into territory neither of us has the language to enter. We all, I now suspect, are carrying versions of this. We do not, in most conversations, articulate it. We exchange the small gestures by which we recognize, in each other, that the carrying is happening. The carrying continues. The articulating does not.
What the grief is, specifically
I want to try to be specific about what the grief actually is, because the not-being-specific has been, in some real way, part of what has kept me from being able to address it.
The grief is not anger. I have, at various points across my life, been angry with my father about various things, but the anger has always been about specific events rather than about the structural condition I am describing. The structural condition is too diffuse to produce anger. Anger requires an object. The structural condition does not provide one. The father is doing his best with what he was given. The son is doing his best with what he was given. Neither of them is, in any meaningful sense, the villain of the situation. The anger has nowhere to land.
The grief is not longing in the simple sense either. I am not, in any active way, longing for the father I did not have. The father I had was, in his own register, a good father. I am not waiting for him to be replaced. I am not waiting for him to transform into someone else.
The grief is not, on close examination, resentment. Resentment would require me to believe that my father was deliberately withholding something he could have given. I do not believe this. I believe, on the basis of considerable evidence, that he gave me the most direct articulation of love he had access to, given the generational training he had received. The articulation was structurally limited. The limitation was not, in any moral sense, his fault. The resentment, accordingly, does not have anywhere to attach itself.
What the grief is, more specifically, is the quiet daily fact of having loved someone my whole life across a distance that neither of us has been able to close, and of knowing that the not-closing was not, in either of our cases, a refusal of intimacy but a structural feature of how the available vocabulary worked between us. The love is real. The distance is real. The two have coexisted for nearly four decades. The coexistence has, in some real way, been the texture of one of the most important relationships of my life. The texture is not, by any honest accounting, what either of us would have chosen, if a different vocabulary had been available. The vocabulary was not available. The texture is what we produced inside the vocabulary we had.
What I have not been able to do, and what I have
I want to be honest about what this grief does and does not allow for, given that the parties involved are both, in some sense, still here.
What it does not allow for is the cinematic late-life conversation in which my father and I, finally, after forty years, have the substantive interior exchange that the previous forty years did not contain. I have, in various optimistic moments, imagined this conversation. The conversation does not, in my honest assessment, occur. My father, at seventy, is who he is. The structural conditions that produced the original vocabulary remain, in his case, mostly in place. The recent appearance of "love you, son" at the ends of our phone calls is, on examination, about as much of a structural shift as is going to be available to us. The shift is not nothing. The shift is also not the conversation I had, in younger years, hoped might eventually happen between us. The conversation will not happen. The not-happening is, in some real way, part of what I am, in my late thirties, slowly accepting.
What it does allow for, more modestly, is the slow recalibration of my own internal relationship to what we have, in fact, had. The recalibration involves giving up the idea that the relationship we have should have been a different relationship than it was. It involves recognizing that the relationship we have had, structurally limited as it has been, has been a real relationship, and that the love conducted across the distance was, by every honest measure, real love, even though the vocabulary did not allow for the direct articulation of it.
The recalibration is, in some real way, the grief work. The grief does not, by this recalibration, fully resolve. The grief becomes, more modestly, livable. The structural distance that I have, my whole life, been carrying alongside the love, is not by this process closed. The distance remains. The distance is, in some real way, a permanent feature of the relationship. The recognition that the distance and the love can coexist, that the one does not cancel the other, that both were real for the entire forty years they were both running, is what I am, slowly, learning to hold.
The hardest part is that there is no public ritual for this. There is no language available, at the family dinner or in the eulogy I will eventually give, that captures what I am describing. The available language will require me to either flatten the relationship into the warm version or to flatten it into the cold version. Neither flattening will be accurate. The accurate version is the one I am writing here, in an article I will publish to an audience my father will not read. The audience is, in some real way, the only audience available for this particular grief. The articulation here is, in some real way, the only place this particular thing gets to be said out loud.
I love my father. The distance is real. Both of these things have been true for as long as I can remember. I have not, in thirty-eight years, found a way to put them in the same sentence inside a conversation with him. I am putting them in the same sentence now, in writing, for whatever it is worth. The putting is, in some real way, the most honest thing I have ever written about him. It is also, in some real way, the closest I will ever get to closing the distance that the available vocabulary, between us, did not allow us to close in person. The closing is small. The closing is also real. It is, for now, what I have.
