Synopsis:

Commitment. Trust. Intimacy. Self-confidence. Independence. These are critical areas of personal development in the passage from adolescence to adulthood. However, this path toward self-identity can become particularly difficult for women to navitage when, as adolescents, they lose one of the most important relationships of their life: their relationship with their father. Written expressly for adult women, Lost Fathers is a healing, authoritative guide to understanding how behaviors, relationships, and sense of self in adulthood are shaped by the experience of losing one's father during adolescence to death, divorce, abandonment, incarceration, or addiction.

With gentle expertise, Laraine Herring blends poignant personal stories, the latest information in developmental psychology, and guided writing exercises in this much needed therapeutic guide.

 

Book Excerpt:

Excerpted from the Introduction: Ghost Dance (c) 2005, Hazelden

 

Trapped

It is only a few moments
on the clock of my life.
Each year that passes increases the space
between when we were family
and when you were dead.
The who I was when we were family
stopped moving somewhere on the way out of the coffin toward the sunflower field.

It is very gray here
because even though the clock stops
time still passes
and gray looks like blue or yellow or green
whether my eyes are open or closed.
It’s the same.

Let me sleep here wrapped in the gauze of my wounds.

When the coffin is closed
and gray turns inside out I will scarcely notice
the colors that dance on the black canvas spinning away.

I will have died with you,
your skeleton locked around me.
If only you would move your arm I could stretch,
but you can’t because you’re dead
and I, dutiful daughter,
will never break that bone.

—Laraine Herring, 2002


I sleep in the arms of a ghost. You’d be surprised how strong those arms are. How tightly they hold. How much they resist release. I pray to an absence—a hole that has been with me so long it fills my spaces. I seek counsel and direction from the silence and in my search for connection no one can penetrate the cavern.

I have constructed this ghost, cell by cell, since I was a child. My sanctuary is in the invisible. After suffering for twelve years with degenerative heart disease, my father died when I was nineteen years old. He had a massive heart attack the summer of my seventh year. My childhood was wrapped around his dying and his death, and my adulthood has been wrapped around an attempt to make meaning of these events and to undo some of the beliefs that developed during the time of his dying.

When I first thought about writing a book about adolescent father loss and its effects on women, I thought I’d see what other information was out there. I found wonderful books on mothers and daughters. I found books on fathers and daughters when the father was abusive, drunk, or absent. I found books on fathers and sons and the importance of that bond. I couldn’t find a book, in the mainstream press or in academia, that specifically addressed the intimacy issues of adult women who experienced the death of their father while in adolescence. Was the taboo gender relationship that develops when a daughter hits puberty still too unsettling to discuss? Was it because women, in relationship to men, were still not considered important enough to write about? Or, worst of all, was I the only one who had experienced this type of loss, so was there no need for this discussion?

Once I began the research for the project, I discovered that this loss is a hidden loss, a disenfranchised grief. Adolescents, ages twelve through twenty-one, are often overlooked in the grieving process. They look like adults, so they are not always given the tools necessary to work through the grief that occurs in their particular developmental phase. As I started my investigation, I discovered many women willing to share their stories with me, and many women grateful to talk about something that in many cases no one had ever asked them about. Through their stories, I gained connection and the confidence to pursue this project.

Addressing this topic through a feminist lens, I have struggled to locate my identity separate from the male—separate from the father, lover, friend. As I became an adult, I saw men differently. I saw that none of them was my father, yet, paradoxically, all of them were. All of them were, in some way, leaving me.

For years, I thought my inability to connect with men stemmed from the betrayal I felt from my father’s death. I have come to see that even though that single event brought its own set of difficulties, the roots of my intimacy problems began long before the day of his death, September 18, 1987. They began when, as a child, I learned of death and illness. I learned that what was strong yesterday could be struck down today. I learned of impermanence at a time when I desperately needed to believe in the idea of safety and security—no matter how unrealistic that concept was. The coping skills I developed during childhood turned into belief systems that prevented me from living fully in adulthood.

For twelve years, while growing up, I saw my father every day for the last time. I wondered if he would be alive when I came home from school, or if he would have fallen asleep in the orange La-Z-Boy chair, tired from a trip to the grocery store, or if he would be dead in the bedroom, mouth open to the sky. I’d walk past his sleeping body and listen for the breath, the rasping in and out of a life. As each day passed and he left us a little more, I pulled back, re-created and re-imagined him as a new form. A form I could control. A form without ending. During a series of surgeries, I saw the man I loved the most leaving cell by cell. The man I would create in my mind would stay. This man would hold me and whisper stories in my ear and show me, for sure, which path to take, which man to love, which doors to open. As the man in front of me grew weaker, the ghost became stronger, and on the day my father died, the ghost took over as everything my father could never be—physically strong, a protector, a warrior. Permanent. I held hands with this ghost and promised an eternity to it, even as its fingers robbed my flesh of warmth.

A dance with intimacy is precarious at best. Everyone comes with baggage. Everyone comes with expectations. Everyone hopes the other person will somehow keep the cold away, keep the wind from breaking down the door. When one sleeps with ghosts, the ghosts have their objectives as well, and one of their biggest objectives is to stay alive. When the time comes to kill a ghost you’ve created, you’ll be surprised at the army that is there. Ghosts come in many sizes and shapes. Some are silent. Some talk non-stop. But all ghosts need a host body to live off. Parasites, they rely on the living for fuel and energy. When too much time passes, the host and parasite change places, the host sustaining its life from the dead.

Adolescence is our most traumatic passage since birth. We are shaking off the familiar. Rejecting home. Experimenting with ways of being in the world. When death pulls us, attaches us to that which we should rightfully be leaving, what do we do? At fifteen, sixteen, nineteen, twenty we don’t have the tools or life experiences to adequately and gracefully move away from childhood into adulthood while at the same time maintain a healthy relationship with the dying parent. Most of us can’t even ask for the keys to the car without a traumatic event. It is the exceptional child who understands unfinished business; who understands that we have this moment—no more, no less—to be authentic in our relationships. Paradoxically, although children tend to live almost religiously moment by moment, it takes the wisdom of years to understand the fragility and the impermanence of a single moment.

When death comes to an adolescent girl’s home, I contend she will do one of two things (and most likely parts of both) in an attempt to reconcile her own changing body and world and the newness and vastness of her future with the heaviness and permanence of death inside her home. She will either run as fast and as far as possible away from the dying man, or she will attach to him, and subsequently to the family, for far longer than is healthy.
I did both. I moved out of the house at eighteen but couldn’t make the move to another city where I had been offered a scholarship to college. In truth, I remember very little of what actually happened during the last years of my father’s life. I remember clearly what went on in my mind and the fantasies I constructed around his dying. And it is that reality that I operated by through adolescence and into adulthood.

This story begins in 1976 and is still ongoing. I have traveled through depressions, addictions, abusive relationships, and self-imposed solitude. I have moved from Christianity to atheism to Buddhism. I have moved, at last, away from my family and into my life as mine, not in the shadow of one who is dead. For fifteen years after my father’s death, I defined myself by his loss. Through this book, I hope to share with you that struggle and offer you ways of working through your own intimacy issues and moving through loss and transition with as much ease as is possible for you.

I am not finished with this process. I know these issues will surface periodically throughout my time on this planet. What has shifted in me is awareness, and compassion for self and others, and a conceptualization of my role in the permanent impermanence of our existence. I am not offering quick fixes. I am offering a process. When a young woman loses the most significant man in her life while she is growing up, she fears that loss again. Many behavior patterns surface, which will be discussed throughout this book.

There are many paths on the attempt to reconnect with the missing man. Only through acceptance of this primal, first painful separation can we see the beauty of the cycles of life each of us must go through. We can no more avoid or change these cycles than we can stop our monthly blood flow or the shifting of our bodies as we age. I hope, through sharing my own experiences and struggles, I can help you connect to this unnamed loss and help you create a future in which, though you are shaped by your loss, you are not defined by it.

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Topics/Categories:

Grief, Women's Studies

Type of Work:

Book

Publishers:

Hazelden Publishing and Educational Services

Purchase From:

Amazon.com

Original Publish Date:

2008-05-05

ISBNs:

159285155x

Formats:

paperback