Healing Shades of Shame: Father Edition

Letter of Healing and Celebration to my father.

Hey Papa,

There are many parts of reality now that run deep and unrealized with you gone. The tiny details of your day and the tiny details of mine you asked to know were continued healing of the lost time. Your death carves my peace into negative space where shame wants to seep in.

I continue to talk to you through every medium of creativity I can, to celebrate and heal the aching parts. You and I both chose writing as the means to deep dive into our hearts-wanting, so it feels poignant to dive into mine with thoughts I want to tell, questions I’m scared to ask, and a need to let so much go to heal and celebrate.

Healing: I wanted it to be you (and now, is it so different?)

I have been writing letters to you like I have to mom. After she died, I often had the wish it had been you instead. I think I knew there would be no relief. The rawest version of me that cried for that, and it felt so true in 2015. I hated you as I loved you and harbored this tortured plea for a death I thought might be less painful. I never told you even as it hovered in the space between us. I have tenderness for 23-year-old Kels wishing that if a parent of hers must die let it not be Terri, and in my present self, a shame for wishing you gone. Because now that you are dead, too, I am drenched with sadness for the end of any new moments with you.

And for how true that want was, sometimes I feel as though not much has changed. It is a normal feeling for lengths of time to pass without word from you. In my youth it devastated me and in my young adulthood it numbed me. With enough doubt in your return, your absence felt like death. In my early adulthood, the weeks between calls sat easier with me because I grew in my voice and I trusted you would return and return again. I had endeavored to live out these healing practices, and I did not need you as I did when I was young. So, again, now that you are dead, it takes a saddening amount of time to realize your death is real, a permanent absence, one familiar enough to be numb to.

Celebration: love still alive

What is more painful; unknown love or love taken away too soon? For many years I knew yours as an idea, more of a heavenly endowed theory rather than solid with evidence. But as I look through photos, ones I hadn’t seen in years, ones shared by family new to my eyes, I realize there are many memories. They are as significant as the absence between them and I am more pressed to gratitude than resentment because you were there. Yes, too long of time in between, still, the love stays evident.

As I entered my early 20s, I hadn’t yet experienced such a comprehensive awakening. I ached to stop the want of loving you as much as I did because unreciprocated love from a parent is trauma in deep tissue. Still, I felt something grow from a shriveled place. When you stayed the night with mom in the hospital, when you answered my call at 3am because of my grief, when you affirmed my poly identity, mending was occurring. Again, evident love. The missing reciprocation. A patch to a draining heart.

Healing: if love is still alive can my anger be too

Can my anger still live from the empty promise-reigned seasons? I felt the threat of cruel words sit at the edge of my lips, so ready to lay them into you. The I wish it had been you. They were poised to hurt you from the well of anger I suppressed. There were so many times where my voice did not enter the space between us. I asked you once in college why you left and you offered a dissertation of your life, never once an acknowledgement of a mistake, only the saviorism of God. It took me yelling in the drive home from our Nevada adventure years later for it to resonate in your own grieving muscles. My voice needed more volume and vulnerability for you to know that I did not (and do not) condone your gratitude for leaving your children because God spoke to you through them. Your children encouraged you to leave them and I should celebrate that? Bullshit. That revelation you shared to share your gratitude with me made my welled anger seethe and rupture.

From my rupture, for the first time, you finally said the words I’m sorry. You stayed present with my raw truth as I saw the pained realization on your face. I then realized you didn’t know the depth of my hurt because I always smiled and confirmed I believed your empty promises. Each visit held so much hurt you yet read my smiles as I forgive. I wanted to forgive you for your attempts at built bridges like the horse farm you said we’d buy and the goodness of God to restore all things, but the attempts gathered dust like the book of horses grew dusty and God’s pronouncement remained silent.

I wanted to forgive you for your politic and ignorance, the harmful queerphobic thoughts that hit me as a proud queer person. You blamed your age and a want to understand, and I grappled with whether that was enough. Your affirmations existed alongside the disdain, but you’d try because I was your daughter. For a stranger that could become a friend, you didn’t. If I was a stranger, you wouldn’t. It was tiring. 

I hold anger in your death, an anger that exists alongside the good. I knead the tension in my heart for space to love you, honor me, and remember your love is alive in death. Alive in all the ways it wasn’t when you walked as much away from me as toward me. And my anger is not just an emotion to heal, it’s one to celebrate, because I become more aligned with my honest self when I let anger cry, too.

Celebration: lonely not alone

Our spirits are still in communion. Summer of 2024, I sat at my desk, feeling proud as I researched design philosophies for children with autism for a pediatric clinic project. Proud that after some damn long pondering, I began to make sense of a confusing article. The clarity was so validating, and your validation rose to my mind. There were so many times you asked me how school was going and what I dreamed of doing with my degree. Your interest and genuine welcome of any answer no matter my doubts, encouraged me. 

I can feel that ache steer me toward the deep sadness of your death, of never having that same kind of conversation again here as we are, and I see that is not my only option. The photo of you and words you wrote for me are on my altar, when I strum the two chords I know on my guitar, I hear you playing the drums next to me. It feels resonant, something beyond measurable physiology, that is not my own. It resides in me and beside me.

The sadness still exists. It is deafening to my energy, and I am sometimes ladened to one place, unable to stay connected to my body. And, my soul patiently awaits the reunion. There is a calm restoration in all that was and continues to be with you. The joy of my present accomplishments and the joy of your past praise is where I want my energy to rest. The bass of your voice exists in my memory and if I could call you right this moment, it would exclaim loudly and richly. Death has made your voice lost to my ears but there are other ways to listen for you.

healing: I don’t want my end to look like yours

There is fear in this. Now at 34, I am finding myself imagining how much my life (and lifespan) is going to mirror both you and mom. In some darker moments, there is a resignation that I am going to die at 57 or 63. A destiny my God has not spoken into my spirit. Again, in tenderness, this fear is understandable. Breast cancer is generations old, and I witnessed from whispered insights from you, Papa, a tortured soul who questioned his worth. I imagine how that made caring for a sick body very hard. I wonder if you grew too tired to keep fighting against the chronic barriers. I don’t fault you and I feel shame that I can’t hold the gratitude enough to not want the same end for me. See, I say I don’t want my end to look like yours, and if I strip the veil away, I do.

Heal as I celebrate, celebrate as i heal

Both can be true. Both are true. And love is messily at the center. I have repeated the narrative of the dead parent enough times that it is integrated into my identity. Sometimes that has felt comforting. My body holds the memories deep in synapse and muscle because of their deaths’ massive impact. And I don’t want it to be so necessary to live life.

Shout out to Bell Hooks for her offerings on love. I learned that staying stuck in telling one’s story over and over again, holding onto grief that restricts, places blame on others. I’d say it also creates twisted idolization of others, too. There is a loss of self as I depend so fully on the fact that they are gone.  Instead, I am capable of reorienting to myself through constructive life affirming thoughts. These new patterns help me walk new paths and revisit old ones without the same defeatism and fear. Essentially, I can give myself evidence of the love I think is wanting in me. What healing would come if I gave it to myself? I know you want that for me, Dad.

I give myself love by marveling at the body’s ability to experience multiple emotions simultaneously. Emotions that span years; anger in 2015, confusion in 1999, joy in 2018. All weave together. There is a constant unearthing of wounds that make my heart palpitate to the beat of the question’s cadence; is this the moment when it finally bursts?

I think it already has. Multiple times with another burst after the last suture. With my bursting heart so near to the ground I water the wounds by crawling. Shame is upon my back, the weight forms deep impressions in the earth from my palms and knees. Miraculously, with time, my legs have begun to lift more, the shame slips more, and I am a little less burdened.

When it comes to my father, the joy is decades old as the pain. His death has made way for a new stretch of decades healing and a strange ease in my planted knees in prayer.

Talk to you soon, Papa.

.Kels.