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Finding Peace With My Father’s Memory at Thanksgiving
Compassion and gratitude helped this fatherless daughter move from feelings of abandonment to forgiveness.
The dying of an estranged family member can be as difficult as the dying of a close loved one.
The last time I saw my father alive and well was the Sunday before Thanksgiving in 1996. We hadn’t talked since the 50th-anniversary party of his parents a decade earlier. After just moving back into the old neighborhood, we bumped into each other, as neighbors do.
We exchanged awkward pleasantries and after brief chit-chat, I invited him to have dinner with me for the holiday, thinking it would be a good opportunity to get re-acquainted. He agreed and accepted my invitation, but when the day arrived, he didn’t. My father stood me up; deserted me just as he had done when I was a toddler before he and my mother divorced.
I remember that last day we were a cohesive family. I was three and we lived in a garden apartment on a busy street at the edge of the city. I was standing on the couch looking out the window, waiting for him to come home from work. He was late and my mother was worried and upset. He got out on the passenger side of an old beat-up red pick-up truck…
