“Say it Loud, Say it Clear: You Can Listen as Well as You Hear”
“Every generation / Blames the one before /And all of their frustrations /Come beating at your door. I know that I’m a prisoner /To all my father held so dear. / I know that I’m a hostage / To all his hopes and fears / I just wish I could have told him in the living years.” (Songwriters: Mike Rutherford and B.A. Robertson)
The opening lyrics to “The Living Years” express a son’s regret that he waited too long, till his father died, before getting a chance “to tell him all the things [he] had to say.”
Bill Shaw Sr. was my hero, but he was also my nemesis. Even though I loved and respected my father, I felt imprisoned by his hopes and fears as a young man, by his rigidly religious, cultural, and political bias, by his strict, often punishing, disciplinary codes.
We banged heads like bighorn sheep protecting turf. Whatever “victories” I achieved as a child and teenager came from subterfuge rather than head banging. As the parent of two boys, he was a strict and quick-fisted, disciplinarian. He required obedience. He hated the music, the musicians, and dance of my generation, the clothes I wore, the haircuts I tried to get away with, the black athletes and celebrities I admired. When he heard Shirley and Lee singing “C’mon Baby Let the Good Times Roll” playing on my radio as I did my homework, he thought it was “dirty” and banned rock in the house. Back to Guy Lombardo, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como.
However difficult, my father and I were eventually able to “listen and hear” in the living years. But it took a long time.
When I was fifty years’ old, and my marriage was collapsing, I sought help. Though I was skeptical of counseling, believing I could sort out my own problems, I eventually admitted I was lost. And needed help. Fortunately, I found a therapist who expertly guided my ranting, my father blaming. When I had vented my anger and finger pointing, my therapist asked me about my father and what his upbringing was like.
That simple question changed my life.
My father was born in the Bronx on Christmas Eve, 1914, to a taxi-driving father and loving mother. His mother died when he was nine-years’ old. After the loss and trauma caused by his mother’s death, he developed a stutter, which he spent a lifetime trying to control. The stutter and a spindly body made him an object of ridicule and bullying in high school. After one humiliating encounter, my father decided this would stop. He signed up at Delahanty’s Gym, took boxing lessons and also became a skilled gymnast. The bullying stopped.
My father started working when he was eleven-years old and didn’t stop until he was seventy-seven. He retired from the FDNY when he was forty-two and simultaneously halted his moonlighting photography business in order to return to school and get an associate’s business degree. He then began a successful thirty-year career as a stockbroker.
He worked his ass off his whole life. He had no patience for people who didn’t.
Because of his obsession with work, he didn’t have much time to just play with my brother or me. However, he was a champion in crisis. When I suffered third-degree burns on my ankle as a five-year-old, he carried me to the doctor’s office four days’ a week for treatment, for three months. In fact, he carried me everywhere during that healing period.
After my counseling, I realized he carried me, many times, in many specific ways, throughout my life.
When I finished my spiritual reintroduction to my father, I felt like a selfish fool. Forgiving him his shortcomings at that point was easy. Forgiving myself was more difficult. I had a lot of work to do. My father, and mother too, helped with that process. Living alone, in the early stages of my divorce, money was a problem, especially with my two kids in college. They helped out, even without my asking. My father called every day to see how I was doing. Thanks to him and my mother, I muddled through.
Before too long, the tables turned. My parents now needed me. Within a year of each other, both my father and mother experienced severe dementia which quickly devolved into Alzheimer’s. They needed total care, and I was grateful to be there for them. Once I secured power of attorney, I hired nurses to attend both parents in their home for the duration. My father died within two years, my mother within four.
By some remarkable event, my father regained a semblance of clarity and consciousness two weeks’ before he died. Sensing his own imminent death, he wanted me to know that he had money put away for his care and my mother’s, and that it was their money. I assured him that I knew that and was already on the job. I also mentioned that if the money disappeared, that mom would be fine. “I would take care of her the way both of you had cared for me.”
That moment was the first time in my life I had ever seen my father cry. He tried to wave me from the room so I wouldn’t see him weeping. Instead, I went over to him, held his bald head in my hands and kissed it. In the living years.
Terrific article Uncle Bill! I specifically remember my father telling me with less than a year left in his life how much of an impact that song had on him with respect to his relationship with his father. The song also has a major impact on me because it reminds me of my father and the things that I was unfortunately unable to tell him.
My father was loving,kind x supportive.He and my mother said they loved us with open arms.Glad to see you worked it out with your Dad in the end.