“Your dad is an enigma,”
the heart surgeon said.

Yes, he is, I thought.
In more ways than you know.

(Be advised: This post tells of trauma related to childhood, war, death.)

Daddy at the end

In January 2014, one week after a heart cath showed advanced heart disease, my dad had open-heart surgery. Initially, it was deemed successful.

Open-heart issues

The surgeon believed what Daddy had conveyed: Except for the heart issues, he was in perfect health.

Yet major complications began to occur. The first arose three days after the surgery. It required a follow-up surgery the same day.

After five days of progress, Daddy’s vitals began to show a second alarming issue, with no apparent cause. Within three more days, another non-cardio issue that had at first seemed minor also escalated.

The surgeon decided that the two very different problems might be linked and thought he had found the link. But the procedure he thought would fix both did nothing.

Still stumped as to the cause of the problems, the medical team gave strong drugs, to try to get Daddy’s body back on track. The meds seemed to work. The next day, the turnaround came for which we had prayed.

For three days, Daddy slept, ate, walked – and improved so much he was released from the hospital. Fifteen days after his open-heart surgery, two of my siblings took him home. They arrived at his house shortly after noon.

I called at 3:00. When Daddy answered the phone, I sang, “Happy homecoming to you.” When he tried to respond, he kept coughing. He sounded irritable and exhausted. Knowing he needed rest, I quickly signed off.

Life-and-death struggle

At 11:57 p.m., my phone rang. When I answered, the sister staying with our father that night said in a strangled voice, “I think Daddy just died.”

He had been sleeping in his recliner. She was awake, and about a step away, when he suddenly stopped breathing. Calling 911, then following the operator’s instructions, she got Daddy on the floor and gave CPR, but with no apparent results.

The ambulance arrived in record time and whisked Daddy back to the hospital. The ER doctor who attended Daddy thought he was gone too. Yet contrary to what anyone believed possible, Daddy did resuscitate. The report we received from the hospital a few minutes later was, “He’s still alive – but in critical condition.”

My dad never regained consciousness or even the ability to respond to us. He lay in the hospital on life support for four days while family members said their good-byes. I was there when the surgeon pronounced him dead.

My last desperate attempt

I cannot recall ever having a heart-to-heart talk with my father. For decades, I didn’t try. When I did try, he would quickly shut it down.

Fourteen months before he died, I sent him a long email. It was my last, desperate attempt to reach him, to plead with him.

It began: “All this time, I’ve yearned and hoped for a true relationship with you. But it hasn’t happened.”

It ended: “I love you and will continue to love you. I hate the unhealthy patterns that have caused such devastation in our family. [Now at last,] I’m committed to breaking out of those patterns by God’s grace. My heart’s desire is that you’ll see and turn from them too.”

Daddy replied a day later by email. “I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you,” he said. He added only, “I can’t change the past, but I can try to do better in the future.”

I wanted to believe him. I had always believed him.

Like an earthquake is jarring

My father was a WWII veteran, a Rhodes Scholar and a successful small-town attorney with a keen mind and quick wit. He did many things throughout his adult life to help his community and the people in it.

He chaired many committees. He won many awards and honors. He coached a Little League baseball team for years. He served as a deacon and Sunday School teacher for decades. He could provoke deep thought and loud laughter. I can’t count the number of folks who’ve told me, “I just loved your dad!”

As a child, I idolized my dad. I thought he was perfect. As an adult, I didn’t even begin to know him until the last six years of his life. As I moved back closer to home and helped Daddy and Mama through some of the hard aspects of aging, the fog started to lift, and I began to see.

It can be a relief to realize that someone you’ve believed to be perfect is human after all. Yet it’s jarring – like an earthquake is jarring – to find that a parent you thought you knew is, instead, contradictory, puzzling, hiding.

How had I not seen?

With an astute word, kind act or affirming gesture, Daddy could make a person feel significant. Seen. People loved that.

Yet how had I not noticed? He could just as easily make someone feel little and less than. His method of choice? Teasing. I grew up laughing along with his joking putdowns. I thought teasing was good-natured fun; maybe, a love language.

What’s more, my father could make himself seem present when he was not. For the most part, he lived in his law office and out in the community. He came home to eat, watch a little TV and sleep. And yet, growing up, I didn’t notice that either.

At mealtimes, he would entertain and enthrall us – and somehow the memory of the laughter made his presence seem to linger through the long hours he was gone.

Shortly before I moved back close to my aging parents, I made choices that had nothing to do with my dad, yet offended my dad. Then, in seeking to help my parents, I made more choices that offended my dad. And for the first time in my life, I found out what it felt like to be the object of his putdowns.

After my father declared his love for me and spoke of trying to do better, things did change, but not in the way I had hoped. That last year of his life, he pushed me further and further away.

War stories

Another thing changed that year: For the first time ever, my father began to speak of his war service. What he said, I wrote down.

A month after his death, I traveled to northeast France to spend time with my younger daughter. There, God took me back in time to the last months of World War II.

Real shells and killing

I had long known that my father was 17 when he falsified the birth year on his birth certificate and enlisted in the army. A year later, in early 1945, he deployed to France for his first active-duty assignment.

The day he turned 19, his unit was moving through France, toward the eastern border of Germany.

The day he would have turned 88, I was in France, thinking about him and grieving. The next day, I wrote in my journal:

Tonight, I looked back at Daddy’s WWII memories and at a map of northeast France. He left the U.S. for Europe in mid-January, 1945. On the same date, 69 years later, he had open-heart surgery.

In late January 1945, his unit landed at Calais. On almost the same date, 69 years later, he stopped breathing in the white recliner in his bedroom.

He spent February-March 1945 traveling southeast from Calais, passing within 30 miles of [the city where I’m staying], and traveling to Bitche, France, on the German border.

So Daddy spent his nineteenth birthday not too very far from where I walked today.

Then came the terrifying day he “realized this was not a game – it was real shells and killing.”

Still haunted

On Easter Sunday, April 1, his captain allowed a group of the men to hold an Easter service in a church in a German town. The service ended almost before it began.

As the men sang the first verse of the first hymn, they received word that German soldiers were in the woods near the church. They received orders to engage the Germans and “clear them out.”

Young men with no battle experience entered the woods not knowing the men hidden there were from a topnotch German infantry division. They came upon the Germans without knowing it, until a barrage of machine-gun fire erupted, as if from nowhere.

Before long: “We were pinned down in furrows between two rows of trees.” And they were trying to return fire.

“Our sergeant crawled up to see where the machine guns were dropping mortar,” Daddy said, his face ashen. “But Sarge was too eager to get back. He forgot to crawl. He turned around and stood up – and got cut down by the machine guns, right in front of me.”

The Americans spent that night in those woods, hiding in foxholes, waiting for the help that arrived the next day. All night, Daddy said, he heard a weak, pleading voice that sounded about his own age and about 50 yards away. The voice kept saying in German, “Hilfe” (help).

A wounded German soldier? A trap? My father never knew. His eyes told me those cries still haunted him.

You know what also haunted him? The sight of the people in the concentration camp that he helped liberate several weeks later. Nearly 70 years afterward, he still recalled those “prisoners, men just skin and bones, eagerly smiling through the fence that held up their skeletons.”

Hidden away

At the same time I was learning of my dad’s war story, I read a novel about a young man who went to war on that same land.¹ Deeply traumatized, he lived the rest of his life hidden away.

I think my father did that too.

That is, I think he went home convinced:

• He would get shot down if he put himself out there and let people really see him.
• He wouldn’t survive if he allowed himself to feel.

Childhood shame

What’s more, I think my dad started hiding even before he went to war. Indeed, I think he went to war … to hide.

Daddy grew up poor. When he graduated high school in 1943, he received an engineering scholarship to Tulane University. But when he got to Tulane, he found he hated engineering. It baffled and frustrated him.

So what did he do? After one semester (and still, remember, only 17), he enlisted in the Army.

Obsession with admiration

Daddy didn’t talk much about his childhood. But the little I know indicates: From an early age, he felt significant shame. And by the time he entered high school, he thought he’d found the antidote to the pain:

• Be perfect – that is, “seen as admirable in every way.”
• Be admired – held in high regard by everyone.

He didn’t just want that. He needed it, like an addict needs a fix.

Somehow, he had come to count his inner pain as something outside himself, something that hinged on people’s perception of him. In particular, he feared:

• Being seen as needy financially.
• Being seen as sick physically.
• Being seen as anything less than brilliant mentally.
• Being seen as “emotional,” ever.
• Being embarrassed in any way by anyone, even and especially someone in his own family.

I think he went to war to avoid the shame of walking away from a scholarship at a prestigious university, or worse yet, flunking out. But his experiences in the last brutal weeks of World War II undid him. And though he served honorably, I suspect the war, too, left him feeling more like an imposter than a hero.

He spent the rest of his adulthood working to control everyone’s view of him – in order to silence fear and shame.

Lifetime built on a lie

But that plan rests on a lie. And trying to live by it creates huge problems. Here are two.

1) You have to hide your true self. Nobody is perfect, much less “seen as admirable” by everyone else. So you must create an illusion and always stay alert to protect it.

2) People become a means to an end. As you work to create pretend relationships, you push away the real thing. And anyone who even appears to threaten your hiddenness must be treated as an enemy combatant.

In short, hiding may work temporarily for a child overwhelmed with shame or a teenager in a foxhole, trying to stay alive. But to hide for a lifetime, you must become an enigma – a puzzling contradiction. And you must make sure no one notices.

In so doing, you hurt others, and you destroy yourself.

Oh, Daddy!

My father never wanted anyone to go to the doctor with him. He came back from every checkup joking that his internist had pronounced him, “Perfect, perfect, perfect.”

Months after his death, with his will finally probated, his papers came into my hands. Among them, I found years of health reports from that internist.

The reports told a tragic story. Multiple systems in Daddy’s body had deteriorated over time, to the point that more than one of them would have caused him significant, ongoing pain. Multiple test results – that he had so carefully saved and filed – screamed at him to act.

Yet Daddy refused to listen to his doctor or his failing body. Even when he faced open-heart surgery, he refused to tell the surgeon, and his own family, and apparently himself, the truth.

The night he quit breathing in his home, it wasn’t because of his heart. Rather, his digestive tract was so wrecked he couldn’t swallow – and he aspirated.

Oh, Daddy! Shame and fear are cruel masters. All the admiration in the world cannot hide you from them. No illusion of perfection can free you from them.

Yet remember the God you taught others to believe in.           

The Father said:

You are fearfully
and wonderfully made.
(Ps. 139:14)

Jesus himself promised:

If the Son sets you free,
you will be free indeed.
(John 8:36)²

The Spirit lives in us
to accomplish it all.

Oh, Daddy … Do you know that, now?

---

See also

• Facing shame – so freedom and favor can flow
• Newborn: Search for a parent’s love
• The dream – and awakening 50 years later
• So blinded for so long, I choose light
  
  
• The blessing of mourning
• Dear wounded, grieving one, I pray you float
• Trauma and truth-seeking: Desperation, spirit, life

Footnotes

1. The book I read is Barbed Wire and Roses, a Cultural Heritage Fiction by Peter Yeldham. ↩︎
2. See also Hebrews 7:25: “He is able to save completely those who come to God through him …” ↩︎