Craig Martin

I could have gone to see my father as he lay dying in a nursing home bed in Lancaster, Pennsylvania; he was only two hours away. My older brother had driven up from South Carolina and was keeping a vigil.  He and my father were close, sharing the same all-encompassing religion-infused worldview from which I had long since parted company. That system of beliefs had left us deeply divided, not by hostility but by a profound emotional silence. And so I stayed home.

> It began with sex. In my father’s world, sex outside of marriage was sinful and not to be spoken of. His approach to my sex education was to give me a book from a Christian press called “For Boys Only”, which focused largely on masturbation as a forbidden activity. (Ironically, one of my father’s assignments while stationed at a Stateside Navy base during WWII was to teach sex education to sailors; I looked but never found the classroom materials!). As to direct conversations with me on any sexual subject, none happened. And that was the beginning of secrecy and the end of transparency.
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> I had grown up in a closed circle: Christian friends and relatives, a Christian school and a very conservative Christian church that held frequent weekend-long services conducted by traveling preachers. Outside of that lay “the world”, a cesspool of iniquity into which I longed to dip at least a toe. Inside that circle, however, there was little room for doubt or skepticism.
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> The principal of my school taught our class in Bible studies my senior year. in one lecture he discussed the traditional arguments for the existence of God, among them, the complexity of nature, and the near-universality of religion. He concluded, “Each of them is a weak argument, but together they make a strong argument.” Mentally I was waving my arm, but knew better than to protest. At least I was able to attend a secular university, though I struggled socially. I knew how to maneuver in the Christian world, but felt at a loss with peers for whom religion was by comparison of minor significance (and sex, of major importance).
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> The farther away I moved away from what my father expected of me (and after spending some length of time pretending still to be a believer), the more I kept my thoughts to myself, and the greater became the divide between us. He had to have known, at some point, that I had changed, if only by my lack of response to his religious observations. But despite his willingness to stand on a street corner in South Philadelphia on a Saturday night and warn passersby of God’s wrath to come, his voice amplified by speakers on the roof of our ‘53 Chevy station wagon (me in tow as a teen, wishing that I could disappear into the sidewalk), he never challenged me directly.
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> I spoke at his funeral,and for the first time said publicly, and to members of his circle, that how he wielded his religion had created a huge divide between us, and which I regretted. I had imagined, in writing those comments, that I was making an affirmation of myself, and assigning him the large part of the blame. That, of course, was false. My passivity and avoidance left that divide unchallenged (although I have no idea how I might have changed it). And I was surprised by the tears that came to my eyes as I struggled to finish.
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> I at least helped to make his death more peaceful. Recognizing that he was nearing the end as his lungs filled up with fluid and his other organs failed, I spoke to his doctor, who agreed to stop the hourly finger sticks and begin morphine. But his final words to me captured our history: “Have a nice day”.
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> In an episode of the TV series “The Pit” a man came to the emergency room to see his dying father, from whom he had long been estranged. He lamented that he had no idea what to say to him. The doctor suggested these words: “I love you, I forgive you, I hope you can forgive me”.
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> I wish I had known that.