Stray Thoughts On Forgiveness, Part 1

This past October, my father Richard Stranahan passed away. We left at the facility he’d been in since he’d had a stroke about a year and a half earlier. At the time, I got the customary round of much appreciated condolences from friends and online ‘friends’. In talking about my father’s death.

I have almost always left out one detail because I find it somewhat embarrassing; my father and I hadn’t spoken to each other during the last two and half years of his life.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of forgiveness and so I wanted to tell this story now. This isn’t a story with a nice neat moral. It’s just true.

The circumstances of his stroke were actually cosmically ironic. It was Father’s Day 2009. For some reason that still is not 100% clear to me, my dad stopped speaking to me months before. I’m sure it had something to do with money but I think there is a wider point that my father just didn’t approve of my life in general. He never really accepted my second wife Lauren (who I’ve been with since 1997) and didn’t think I should have kids or pets and a litany of other complaints that he would periodically lecture me about. Since his complaints had become the sole staple of our conversational diet, his silence wasn’t necessarily unwelcome.

But on Father’s Day 2009 I decided that this was ridiculous and that I would call him up and tell him just that. It was time to say that it was silly that we weren’t speaking to each other and that whatever the problem was, it couldn’t possibly be so important we weren’t talking. Life was too short.

At that time, my father was living in my brother Ken’s guesthouse in Los Angeles and didn’t have his own phone. So, I called my brother and ask him to bring the phone out to my dad. Ken and I chatted as he walked out back then my brother made a small gasping sound and said he had to go. He had found my dad laying on the ground, bleeding. He had had a stroke in middle of the night and had lain there in pain, unable to either help himself or to get anyone to help him.

I never got to speak to my dad that day or on any of the 460 or so days that followed until he passed away. My father could speak; his stroke had not caused any significant brain damage but my brother told me that my dad’s mood turned even darker in his remaining time. He angrily resisted therapy and when I asked my brother to tell my dad I want to speak to them, Ken just sort of mumbled embarrassingly. I knew what that meant.

As we were packing up our house to leave New Mexico in October 2010, I got a call from my brother and just the way he said hello I knew was going on. He’d gotten word that my father just a few hours to live and that if my brother wanted to see him, he should come to his bedside right away. I’m very glad that Ken was there and able to comfort my father in his last few hours. My father couldn’t but my brother told me that when he arrived, his eyes were frightened.

For the next couple of hours, my brother gently stroked my father’s forehead and arms and spoke quietly to him. He also phoned a number of people; friends of my father from his long career as a golf pro and family. Although my dad couldn’t speak, he could listen and Ken said it seemed to help my dad find some peace.

Lauren, our kids and I were getting lunch at Panda Express when I got the call. He told me was going on and I stepped outside the restaurant, where I finally got to speak to my father after such a long time.

I told him that I loved him very much and that although I knew he hadn’t wanted to speak to me, I knew he loved me very much, too. I told him that I had thought of him often even though we both had made decisions that had separated us. I said he had had a good life, doing the things he’d wanted to do since he was young and how that had taught me to follow my own path and not to worry, that our family would go on. I said that I knew he’d done his best and I that I had, too. And I said I loved him, again.

A few hours later, Ken called to say that my dad was gone.