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From Make Me An Eagle
By Robert Yehling
The day before I headed back to the Midwest to spend Thanksgiving with my family, I walked towards the kitchen for a glass of iced tea. Dad stood beneath the entrance to his den, one hand holding the wall. His other hand grabbed my forearm with a strong, sure grip. Good. He's still got some strength. Twenty years prior, I would've slapped his hand away and provoked a fight. Now, I wanted him to hold me like that.
"I want to talk to you about something," he said in a raspy, hoarse voice. He'd been coughing all morning. He'd wrestled that awful demon in his lungs and, after many hours, recaptured his ability to speak. A small victory: Mom and I constantly sought and recognized the small victories as they manifested.
"Sure." He released my arm and I followed him into the den.
"I want you to tell me about your teenage years, what it was like for you, and why you never gave up on me."
The statement and its directness stunned me. "You're my Dad; I'm not going to give up on you." I sputtered like an aerated fish.
Dad's eyes blazed; he wasn't going to let me off the hook that easily. "No, I mean it, Bob."
"We got past that years ago, didn't we?" I did not want to go there again. I attempted to send this conversation right off its tracks: "And besides, you should've given up on me, the way I treated you."
Dad's eyes did not waver. "I've been thinking about this, and I just need to know."
"I don't know if I want to talk about it. It's over."
Dad slapped my shoulder softly with the palm of his hand, in the tough but sensitive manner one bar patron greets another as he sits on the stool. "Do it for your old man, then."
So simple, so direct, so wise: He knew exactly how to change my perspective to meet his needs. At this point, I would do anything for him. He knew I would never do speak out exclusively for my personal gain. Adult onset epiphany set in. In this manner, Dad and I were exactly alike. Our eyes always scanned the landscapes of our family and friends to make sure that everyone was safe, that everyone was well cared-for, our own well-being be damned. Self-absorption was Public Enemy No. 1. We could steer back to the same time, twenty years prior, to see that it almost killed him. And I almost killed myself. The difference was that now, he knew how to communicate with an ultrasensitive oldest son whose inner world he could never crack before.
All it took was this brotherly slap on the shoulder and a quiet request.
I had no choice. "Okay, Pops, if you want to do this, we'll do this." My eyes and voice sank toward the ground. "Let's just get it over with."
I started to tell him about how I roamed in the canyons and eucalyptus stands of Hosp Grove near the house in Carlsbad, how I roamed aimlessly. I couldn't talk to him; I couldn't reason with him; I couldn't get him to understand my world. I couldn't even be in the same room as him. He wanted to drink and sulk in his haze of alcohol, piecemeal jobs and memories of better times in the Marines; I wanted to grow my hair long, listen to my music and experience my freedom. Military officer, meet aspiring hippie. By the time I turned 13, I felt I had nowhere to live but somewhere to hide, and I hid.
The memory rose like a thick, amorphous shadow from the bowels of the earth, a sticky, seductive vampire straight out of Anne Rice's New Orleans. To my troubled 13-year-old, it felt like a fuzzy blue cocoon, an utter detachment from the real world; I've heard that the heroin high is quite similar. Now, it passed through the fabric of the sofa on which I sat and sucked out of my mind whatever momentum I'd built up. My skin prickled; I squirmed on the sofa. I hated the feeling. "I can't go on with this."
Dad nodded. For a minute, he stared out the window as if flying to a safe place beyond his yard, beyond Oceanside, somewhere deep in the Pacific where his ashes would be scattered in a few months. Or, perhaps, he rode the rails through the high country, skipping from job to job, well clear of the depressing scene of multiple-layered torment that racked his family back home. I don't know where Dad went. I just know he went somewhere. He always traveled with his memories and his dreams.
He gazed at me. His green eyes shimmered in two different shades of light, the way sunlight diffuses at the edge of a thick forest while it sparkles on the nearby lake that pools in the open. "It's hard shit to talk about."
I circle back on this moment with Dad, this one blip in time when he tried to re-open the floodgates of my early teen years to allow any remaining gorgons and goblins to escape. I circle back all these years later, and it is still the most difficult piece of my life to put down on paper. How do you describe a descent into hell, with your own father stoking the fire with one hand and feeding you with the other? How do you go there when you now journey on a path that dispels shadows and your father is full of love? I circle back and recognize the inner strength, humility and courage it took for Dad to say, "I want you to tell me about your teenage years, what it was like for you, and why you never gave up on me." Why would a dying man want to relive this period of his life, unless it were to release the ghosts that still haunted him?
My friend, shaman and elder Gerald Whitefoot, pointed out years after Dad's death, "It makes him feel ashamed." Gerald spoke of a feeling that entered his soul. The way in which he accentuated the present tense of the verb hit me flush. Dad never fully cleared the shame of those years from his soul before he died. The shame has ridden unwelcome shotgun on his journey since. I could not return to that place and provide Dad with the words and energy of that time; Dad needed that energy, the divine energy of forgiveness, to fully exorcise the demon of shame that encrusted his treatment of me. I just could not tell him; I could not suspend the space of utter love and esteem in which I held my dying father and return to a place of utter loathing and hatred.
I circle back now, and see it is time to tell a story that encompasses the bad days. It is time to reach inside and expunge the shame and remorse from the souls of father and son, to release the shadow into the blazing light of eternal time, where it will dissipate and shame us no more. He is not here to do the dirty work; I am, and so I shall.