It’s around six months since My Father died, so I’m surprised when he materialises. And even more so by his appearance. He looks a lot better than last time I saw him, in the hospice. He looks much younger. In fact, he looks about the same age as I am now, which is 45.
My therapist, Bernard – a big bald bearded man with a faint lisp that makes him sound insightful – seems to be expecting him. He pulls up the Empty Chair, so that it’s at a right angle to his and mine, and gestures for My Father to sit. For a long moment, no one says anything.
Me: (to Bernard) What the holy fuck is he doing here?
Bernard rubs his hands together, and raises his eyebrows, mischievously; he prides himself on bringing a certain playful quality into the therapy room.
Bernard: Well, we can explore that. But perhaps I should start by thanking Your Father for being with us today. It can’t have been easy.
My Father seems disorientated. He is looking down at himself – his clothes, the backs of his hands, his body generally – like a man waking up from a coma and wondering not just where, but who he is. His hand goes to his head, presumably to check the whereabouts of his hairline.
Me: (definitely not taking it well) For fuck’s sake! What…. how did….
Bernard: (enjoying my discomfiture) All right, just a tad reluctantly, I will explain, a little. You’ve been talking to Your Father by means of an Empty Chair in almost every session since he died. I thought it would be good to have him here in the flesh – so to speak.
Me: But how –
Bernard: Let’s not get bogged down in the “how”. What I can tell you is that this is strictly a one-time thing, so we have…. (glancing at the clock behind me)…. just over 45 minutes to work with Your Father, live – so, also, to speak!
Bernard twinkles playfully.
My Father shakes his head a couple of times, as if to clear his vision. He breathes in deeply, and lays his hands flat on his knees. He speaks in a monotone that suggests he is making an effort to remain rational and calm.
My Father: Where am I? Why am I here?
Bernard: Well, as I understand it, because you consented to my request to join us. I’m not entirely familiar with how the procedure works, but I know you were given a choice.
My Father: You’re some kind of shrink?
Bernard: If you mean a psychiatrist, no. I’m an integrative, humanistically-orientated psychotherapist, who occasionally teeters over into a Gestalt modality. And your son is my client.
Me: Why is he…. (gesturing in the direction of My Father’s appearance)?
Bernard: You mean, why is the age he is? Well, when I arranged this, it turned out I had a choice – and I thought it would be most interesting if he was the age you are, so that you can talk as…. peers.
Me: (feebly) You had a choice?
Bernard: I hope you’re not going to waste the entire session repeating things I’ve said?
My Father has crossed his legs, and is jiggling his right foot rapidly – something he does throughout his life when he is bored or impatient.
Me: I was just interested in the process of ordering up a recently deceased parent to attend a therapy session; the options available – “as at time of death”….“prime of life”…. “just starting to lose marbles”….
Bernard: (mock-stern) As I said, let’s make good use of the time we have with Your Father. What do you want to say to him?
Me: Well, thank you, I suppose.
Bernard: Thank you? Should my sarcasm sensors be quivering, just ever-so slightly?
Me: No –
Bernard: (cutting me off) Tell him, not me.
Me: (to My Father) No, I meant that entirely sincerely. I’m very grateful to you for being here today – and for having been such an excellent role model.
Bernard: Still quivering.
My Father: Role model? Sounds like psychiatric gobbledegook.
Bernard: (unable to restrain himself) Please! Psychotherapeutic gobbledegook….
Me: OK then, jargon-free, I’m very grateful to you for having shown me so clearly what kind of man – what kind of father – I didn’t want to be.
Bernard: So a negative role model? (To My Father) How does that impact you?
My Father: Impact me?
Bernard: How does hearing that affect you? How does it make you feel?
My Father: Surprised. Puzzled. A bit pissed off.
Bernard: (delighted) Good!
My Father and I both glare at Bernard.
Bernard: What? I’m happy with how this going – so shoot me! (Sensing that neither his client nor their guest shares his upbeat mood; to me, more seriously) Perhaps you’d like to be more specific about what Your Father did that made him such an excellent negative role model?
Me: It was more what he didn’t do.
Bernard: To him, not me.
Me: It was more what you didn’t do. You were never there.
My Father blows out his cheeks, in exasperation.
My Father: That’s a bit of an exaggeration.
Me: You were never there when it mattered. When I think back to things that happened in my childhood, you’re not there in any of my memories. You never –
Bernard: Can we agree to eschew “You never” and “You always”? They’re hardly ever productive, and almost invariably unhelpful.
Me: (grudgingly) When I think about my childhood, my overwhelming sense is that you were absent – you just weren’t around to do the stuff that dads are supposed to do. I can’t remember you ever watching me play cricket or rugby, for example. Or picking me up from a friend’s house. Or taking me to buy a pair of school shoes. Or teaching me how to use tools.
My Father: “The stuff that dads are supposed to do”? Who’s doing the supposing there?
Bernard: Valid point. I think you’re suggesting that the assumptions we make about things like parenting are culturally, and historically, specific?
My Father: I wouldn’t have put it like that, but it’s certainly true that nobody supposed my father would be around to wipe my nose, or watch me play hopscotch, when I was a child. Even if he’d wanted to, which he wouldn’t have done, it would have been difficult for him, since from the age of nine, I was at school here and he was in Palestine.
Me: So you’re saying that because you didn’t see much of your father –
My Father: I didn’t see him at all – once the war started. I was here, he was two thousand miles away – and the sea between us was swimming with U-boats.
Bernard: (calculating) And let’s see…. you would have been 13 when the war started – (turning to me) almost exactly the same age you were when Your Father left Your Mother?
My Father: That may be true, but it’s a ridiculous parallel to draw – global cataclysm versus mundane marital bust-up in suburbia.
Me: (sulkily) It wasn’t mundane for your children…. but anyway, your point is that because your father played virtually no role in your life, for whatever reason, I didn’t have any right to expect anything different from you?
Bernard: “Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf….”
Not getting the reference, My Father and I both look at Bernard, puzzled.
Bernard: Larkin. Ghastly misanthrope, but sometimes quite perceptive. (He zips his mouth, and then splays his hands towards us, in a “you carry on” gesture.)
My Father: No, I’m not saying that. With you, I was nothing like how my own father had been with me. I changed nappies. I got up in the night. I told bedtime stories. I wanted to be involved in your life.
Me: I don’t remember any of that.
My Father: That doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
There’s a pause, while this sinks in.
Bernard: How does it feel to hear your father saying that – telling you he was a loving parent; that he did want to be involved in caring for you?
Me: It’s of no value to me, because I don’t remember it. Either it didn’t happen –
My Father: It did.
Me: …. or it did, and then at a certain point, he got fed up with being a half-way decent father, and virtually disappeared from my life. And maybe that hurts more – having had a father, who then decides that, actually, now that he knows what the job entails, and what his children are really like, he’s got better things to do than waste his time on fatherhood.
My Father: It wasn’t like that.
Again, silence falls. I am staring at my hands, sulkily. My Father is jiggling his foot furiously and looking around him, as if wishing he was anywhere else on earth. We seem to have reached an impasse.
Bernard: Well, what was it like?
My Father: It was a different time….
Me: I think we’ve established that.
My Father: But I don’t think you understand how different it really was. We just didn’t have the choices that you’ve had – I mean about how to live our lives. Women like your mother didn’t want careers, they wanted babies – and once they had one, that was it – their working lives were over, done, finished. So, whether men liked it or not, we had to go out and –
Me: Oh for god’s sake, you’re not expecting me to believe that you were forced into putting your career first, against your will – that you’d rather have been at home baking fairy cakes with your kids, instead of carousing round London in the swinging 60s, buying boozy lunches for Cabinet ministers and trying to shag their research assistants?
My Father can’t prevent a nostalgic smile from flitting across his face.
My Father: Well, there may have been a bit of that. But what mystifies me is why you didn’t want the same thing. We were all – my generation, I mean – so driven to –
Me: Men of your generation, you mean.
My Father: We were all hugely ambitious – but not just for ourselves; for the country, too. After the war, and then building our careers, we wanted to make things better, and we believed we could. I never saw any of that in you. You were so complacent, so domesticated – so tame. You just wanted to earn enough to live comfortably –
Bernard: Just to clarify, is the “you” here your son, or him and his generation of men?
My Father: Both. You seemed happy to stay at home with your family, to be a “house husband”. And your generation couldn’t be bothered to build on our achievements. Just look at the mess we’re in now.
Me: Hang on, when is “now”? Do you mean today, in October 2002? Or “now”, when you were the same age as I am, which I suppose would have been…. late 1971?
Bernard: (putting his hands over his head, as if to protect himself) Whoah, let’s not even go there! Once we go down that rabbit-hole, I’m not sure we could ever extricate ourselves. And anyway, I think this is all getting a bit too…. socio-historical; I’d much rather keep it on a feelings level.
My Father: (scornfully) A feelings level?
Me: (goaded by this) Yes, you know, feelings; nasty inconvenient things that can cause all kinds of complications, if you let them – but basically unimportant, uninteresting, of no value.
My Father: You forget I was a novelist; an acclaimed novelist, widely admired for what I think one critic called my “withering perspicacity in regard to modern relationships between the sexes”. I couldn’t have been that if I was really uninterested in feelings.
Me: Don’t remind me how much I hate your novels.
My Father: (smoothly) That’s a pity because I rather like your children’s books. What’s that one about the pig that thinks it’s an owl – or is it the other way around? Anyway, it’s sweet.
Bernard: So…. anyhoo, gentlemen…. what I’m picking up is that (to me) you feel angry and sad because your father was never a warm and reliable paternal presence in your life…. and that (to My Father) you also feel angry, and unfairly criticised, because you did your best to be a good father – and certainly a better one than your own father had been to you – within the constraints you were working under?
My Father and I both sit and glower.
Bernard: What does it feel like to be properly angry with each other?
My Father: Properly angry? (He seems amused by the idea.)
Bernard: You find that funny?
My Father shrugs, as if unwilling to get into this.
Bernard: Well, we would say – here, in this room, in 2002 – that there’s nothing improper about feeling anger; that sometimes it’s the most appropriate emotion to experience, and one that needs to find an appropriate outlet. Anger is nothing to fear, or be ashamed of!
My Father makes a very expressive face – one which I also make myself – that involves pulling the corners of his mouth down as far as they will go while raising his eyebrows to their highest extent. It means, roughly, “Uncomfortable with the way this is going; get me out of here.”
Me: (looking at Bernard, as if to say “Now do you see what I’m up against?”) Oh, for fuck’s sake….
Again, no one has anything to say. Bernard is sitting with his hands on his knees, looking from me to My Father, and back again. He would call this “holding the space”.
Me: (eventually) Do you want to know the main thing I’ve felt since you died?
Bernard: I think you’re going to tell him, anyway….
Me: Nothing at all. I haven’t felt anything. At first, I kept expecting the grief to kick in. Or maybe the anger. Or maybe the regret you’re supposed to feel when someone dies and you realise that now you’ll never be able to tell them all those things that you always wanted to say to them. But…. nope, nothing at all, not a sausage. And you know why that is?
Bernard: Again, I’m pretty sure you’re –
Me: I suddenly realised a few weeks after you died: it’s because I’d already done my grieving, when you were still alive. I pre-grieved – years before you died, when I eventually allowed myself to accept that you were never going to be a proper father to me. That you didn’t want to be one. That you weren’t capable of being one.
Bernard: (seizing on this) You weren’t only incapable of being a proper father to your son; you didn’t even want to be one. How does it feel to hear him say that?
My Father: I’m tempted to say it makes me “properly” angry…. but it wouldn’t be true. It makes me feel guilty; crushingly guilty – which is how I’ve felt for almost every moment of my adult life – at least, since the day I married your mother, knowing, quite certainly, that at some point I would have to leave her. I tried so hard to stick it out – mainly for you. But when I finally left her – when I was the age you are now – (he looks down at himself) – the age I am now – after 20 years of marriage – you can’t begin to imagine the sense of liberation I felt; the sense of dragging myself out of a vast all-consuming pit of negation and despair, where I’d been floundering, hopelessly, for all that time. It was like being born; emerging into the daylight; starting a new life…. and however unfair it may have been, you and your brother and sister were part of the life I was escaping from. I couldn’t take you with me –
Me: Hah! As if you wanted to!
My Father: Even if I had wanted to, I couldn’t have taken you with me. But I didn’t want to, because I was in love – properly in love, for the first time in my life – and I needed to dedicate myself to that love; immerse myself in it; be rescued by it.
Me: Ah, the redemptive power of a good woman’s love, for even the most desperately bad man – I seem to remember coming across that in one your novels. Or, hang on, maybe in all of them.
My Father: I’m sorry, I really am. I felt so terrible about it, but it was like being washed away by a tidal wave – too powerful to resist – I needed to be with her – and you – well, you were part of a life that would’ve killed me if I hadn’t got out when I did. You were part of her – your mother – part of what was trying to drag me back down.
As he finishes, My Father allows his head to slump forward, perhaps to avoid meeting my eye. He seems to be staring morosely at the backs of his folded hands.
Bernard: So you – and your siblings – were part of that vast vortex of despair that Your Father had to escape from, in order to be healed and become truly himself?
(Bernard prompts me when I don’t respond) And now he lives with the crushing guilt of having made that escape…. (Realising what he’s just said) Well, maybe that’s badly phrased – now he experiences the crushing guilt of having made that escape . . .
Me: Yeah, he was always good at guilt. “Boo-hoo, poor me! Look how badly you’ve made me behave!” But that’s worth precisely nothing to me. It wasn’t then, and it isn’t now.
Bernard: (quietly) I’m thinking of what you said about having “pre-grieved”. Isn’t that sadness I’m hearing now?
I don’t reply. I sit looking at My Father, whose head is still bowed. I wonder how closely we resemble each other. He’s balder, and heavier, and his eyebrows are more pronounced than mine. But otherwise, we’re strikingly similar; no DNA test required to establish paternity. I wonder how I would have lived his life; and how, from this point on in my life, I will live mine. And I wonder if somehow, before the end – which will come about as a result of prostate cancer in my mid-to-late-70s, if heredity is any guide – I will find a way of being reconciled with this handsome, clever, sad, childlike man in the Empty Chair opposite me. Although I can’t see his face, and he makes no sound, I wonder if he may be weeping.
Me: All I ever really wanted was to feel that you –
But now something strange is happening to My Father. At first, it’s barely perceptible; a kind of flickering around his edges. He seems unaware of it, and starts to tell me something.
My Father: But I always –
The flickering intensifies, and now his entire body becomes unstable, insubstantial, provisional. He seems to be dematerialising before my eyes. His speech is rapidly fragmenting, too, though he seems to have something he wants to communicate.
My Father: But I always – but I always – but I alw – but I – but-but-but-but….
Bernard: Damn, we’re losing the connection. They warned me that might happen….
Me: The connection?
Bernard: Well, I’m not exactly sure of the technology involved – but I was told he might not last the entire session.
The Empty Chair is empty once again, although a ghostly echo of My Father’s voice can still be heard, but-but-butting, as if from somewhere on the far side of the universe.
At last, My Father’s voice fades away completely, and there is silence.
Bernard: I’m afraid that’s probably it – I don’t think we’ll get him back, do you?
Me: (shell-shocked) Probably not.
There’s a long, long pause.
Bernard: (brightly) Well, we still have almost half an hour….
He leans forward in his chair, and does the mischievous hand-rubbing thing again.
Bernard: So, I wonder where you want to go from here?
*****