Essays and Assays

No Tears for Dad by James W. Lewis Copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved James W. Lewis is a 31-year-old Navy enlisted man stationed in San Diego. He has been writing short stories for about 15 years now. His publishing credits include 3AM Magazine, EyeShot, Circle Magazine and Taj Mahal Review. His website is at www.jameswlewis.com

I had just found out my father was dead.

But for some reason, I couldn’t feel anything.

It was the summer of ’98. I was sitting in front of my desktop, tapping away on the keyboard. I had just rediscovered my love in creative writing, pouring ideas out of my head and shaping them into a short story. It was a little after 11 p.m. My wife was asleep and there was nothing motivating me to grab the TV remote. It was just me, the computer screen, and my imagination.

Then the phone rang.

It was my mom.

Right off the bat, my heartbeats sped up. Always makes me nervous when my mother calls at night. I knew it couldn’t have been good news.

I asked, "What’s wrong? Everything all right?"

"James," she said, her voice low, "baby, I need you to sit down."

My face was getting hot. I could feel agitation coming on. For a second, I forgot I was already sitting down.

I swallowed, expecting the worse. "Mom, what’s wrong?"

She sighed. There was a long pause that made my heart bump harder.

She said, "I ... I found ... found out --"

"Mom, what is it?" My agitation was growing.

She took in a breath. "I found out your ... your father died two years ago."

My back slumped against the seat. My jaw dropped, but nothing came out. Spoken words failed me.

Mom told me she’d been scanning the Internet and making phone calls to various places to find my father’s whereabouts. She had his social security number, which proved very helpful. And since he was prior Army stationed in Vietnam, she was able to get the info she needed in no time.

But it was info she didn’t expect. She found out he had died June 24th, 1996. She didn’t know what killed him or how –- she just knew he was dead.

I still didn’t speak; I guess I was stunned. But what really surprised me was the fact that I didn’t really feel anything. If I did, it was like, "Wow. My father’s dead. Man."

No sadness, no tears. Nothing.

I just couldn’t muster any grief for my father. In my mind, he had chosen to evict himself from my life when I was a child. I was 26 when I found out he was dead; he left me at seven. How could I feel anything?

But he was still my father. And my father was dead.

Last time I saw him was ‘78 or ‘79. Don’t really remember for sure. I do remember me, my mother, and my older brother moving out of our three-bedroom house to live in my grandma’s much smaller townhouse across the street. I was sad and confused. My young mind couldn’t comprehend the issues of adults and why they sometimes chose to break up families. I wanted my father with us, but we left him in our old house … alone.

To be with him, I sneaked out of grandma’s house and ran across the street as fast as my seven-year-old legs could carry me. I knew my father would probably be in the backyard, so I ran toward the back of the house. I didn’t see him, so I banged on the backdoor.

No answer.

I kept banging and banging–still no answer.

I beat the wooden door until my little hand hurt. The door opened.

My father towered over me. I shook at what I saw.

I had never seen so many tears running down a grown man’s face before.

I tried to walk in, but he pushed me away, then closed the door in my face. I couldn’t understand why. Maybe he didn’t want me to see him so vulnerable –- I don’t know. I ran back to grandma’s house, tears streaming down my brown cheeks. My father’s rejection had broken my young heart.

That was one of the last times I ever saw my father again. It was also probably the last time I felt any true emotion for him, too.

We stayed with my grandma until my mother was able to get a place for us. It was a small apartment, but suitable for three people. My mother and father eventually divorced, and my father moved back to his home in Tulsa, Oklahoma –- and out of our lives for good.

Over the next ten years or so, like thousands, maybe millions, of strong black women in the past, my mother became another statistic struggling to raise her two boys the best she could. With the burden of doing it all on her own, becoming a father to us also fell on her shoulders.

It was hard for her. We went through some difficult times, but I think I dealt with my father’s absence just fine.

My adolescent, pre-teen, and teenage years flew by. Memory of a man who had literally created my DNA faded. I didn’t make an effort to find out where he lived in Oklahoma nor did he try to contact my brother and me. No one-on-one basketball games; no auto-repair or oil change instruction; no father-to-son heart-to-hearts. My brother and I had to do that stuff on our own.

I had lots of friends, was out of the house a lot, and got into a lot of things – good and bad – that boys do. My father became a thing of the past; like an adult male roommate who had overextended his welcome — then severed ties with the Lewis family for good.

My older brother Kenny and I didn’t have the same father. Sometimes I wonder if my father’s flight bothered him. He seemed to handle the situation just fine, too, though.

I looked up to my big brother. In high school, he was athletic, popular with the girls, and an all around cool guy. In many ways, I wanted to be like him. As I idolized my brother, never once did the memory of my absentee father come into the picture. I was supposed to idolize him. Better yet, idolize him and my older brother.

But "Dad" just wasn’t there. Can’t idolize empty space.

I didn’t grow to hate my father for it; I just became apathetic about the whole situation. I was like, "Oh, well. Whatever." In some ways, feeling no sympathy is just as sad as feeling hate for him. Maybe it was my self-defense mechanism. Who knows? I guess apathy shielded me from the pain of not getting any love from him.

Sometime in 2000, I came across something on the Internet that chilled me.

Browsing the Internet had become a big hobby of mine. Sometimes, with boredom and a gazillion mouse clicks, I would stumble upon some weird Web pages. One night, I found a website that showed where celebrity and non-celebrity people were buried.

After about an hour of searching through records of famous gravesites, I started looking for old friends and family members that had long passed on.

Then I got a wild idea.

I typed in my father’s name, year of death, and the state Oklahoma, where I thought he was buried. I didn’t think the huge database of a million records would have any info on him, but I had to try. I hit Enter. My heart raced from anticipation –- then skipped.

I found him. Within minutes.

The query showed date of death and, to my surprise, the exact location of his burial. I couldn’t speak. Finding my father’s final resting-place on the Internet was an eerie thing.

Now that I knew where he was buried, another idea popped in my head: I could get a death certificate.

With a certificate, I could take a small glimpse into my father’s last days; maybe find out where he last worked, where he lived, if he had kids and a wife, and of course, what killed him.

Didn’t take long to find out how to obtain a death certificate. Got the info from the Internet and ordered it the next day from the Oklahoma State Department of Health.

An envelope came two weeks later. I couldn’t open it fast enough.

The certificate had everything I needed. I just sat quiet for a long while, staring at the paper, trying to imagine what kind of life he led up to his death. From what I could tell, life wasn’t so rosy for him. His last job was as a janitor and he had died of a heart attack. The doctor wrote alcoholism might have been a contributing factor to his death.

Couldn’t help but wonder what he looked like … and if I still looked like him before he died. I wondered what kind of person he was, the way he talked, the way he laughed, how he looked when he smiled, if he was depressed.

Did he wonder about the son he had abandoned so many years before?

I kept staring; strange emotions began to stir inside of me.

I began to feel something … began to feel … remorse.

I guess the love for him was still there–and may always be. But the tears still won’t fall. I doubt they ever will.

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