a modest look at life

Yeah, my daddy was a difficult man. I never disliked him, but I often felt sorry that I didn’t have more of a connection with him. And, as his son, I was often thought to have the closest relationship with him. At times it made me feel so uncomfortable hearing others talk about my father with animosity, knowing that I was the one who spent the most time with him. Though, I can't blame anyone for struggling to cope with him. I struggled, too. But even just sitting together in resolute silence, like two proper muted norsemen, I think I got to know the sort of person that he was.

He wasn't a mean-spirited man, but he wasn't a considerate man. I think he could have done so much more to make others feel better, to make them feel more content and more happy, but I don’t think he ever meant any harm to anybody else. In many ways, I think he wasn’t equipped well-enough to deal with life. Mentally or emotionally. My father lacked that special “something” needed to make it easier to create deeper bonds with others. Possibly not aided by the fact that he had such an icy relationship with his mother, who once openly told him she never really wanted him, at all.

Was my father autistic? I don’t know. I want to say no. Because if my father was autistic, then the form of autism he had, it led to nothing good. I am autistic, and I like to think of myself as receiving just as many positive traits from my peculiar neurology as negative once. I think of autism as complex, and frankly wonderful, in its own way. It’s a smashing rainbow of diversity, with so many ways it can manifest itself, for better or for worse. My father just seemed so, monotonous. Especially late in life, when all he did was wake up and watch sports, then go to bed, rarely eating anything more than some bland porridge and a carrot. But I guess that sticking to one's routines is considered a hallmark of autism.

I don’t want that existence to be the one I have to look forward to. My father never really seemed to express any real enthusiasm for life in the end. I’ve heard that the seventies is when people are supposed to be at their happiest, but my dad died at the age of seventy-seven, and he seemed more depressed than ever. It's sad to think that your close family member died dissatisfied with life. A lot of it had to do with his busted knee. He could not walk, the way he used to. He used to go on these long walks, and he used to have friendly, if mostly shallow conversations with a wide range of people. Again, my father struggled with forming profound bonds with other people, but he wasn't a surly or misanthropic individual. He seem to have been positively well-liked by most of the people who casually knew him.

I grew up in one of those places that’s something of a bland mix between a suburb and a small town. It's the best of two worlds, and the worst of two worlds. I can't say I love the place I grew up, but I also can't say that I hate the place I grew up. Some of the folks that my father ended up casually connecting with were people that he had been roughly familiar with for a long time. They shared the same stomping grounds, they walked the same earth, they drank the same water. We’re never going to feel as interconnected as we once upon a time felt when our little village was all that we truly knew of the world. But, there is something to be said about being able to pass by some house you haven’t seen in a while and knowing who exactly lives there and how you are, even in the most esoteric and faint way, known to them.

“Oh, don’t you know that kid you once went to school with, that you once played football with for a summer back in the nineties? Well, it turns out I had a really good chat with that person’s grandparents.”

Yeah, dad, I am vaguely familiar with that kid, sure. He had really blond, almost white hair, and it was very curly. I remember playing football with him, though, I never liked him and I certainly never liked playing football. It is easy to regard your surroundings growing up as something of a prison, or the trial process you're over-eager to get done with. Most of the kids I remember growing up alongside I would never as an adult choose to spend any time with. They were dreadfully dull people. I am not sure any of them would appreciate me starting this blog post by referencing Camus.

My parents decided to move here. I did not make the decision to be born here. Now, I am not all that struck by wanderlust. I wish not to move to some other country or some other region far away from home. I'd be quite content one day owning a quaint little house, with a sizeable area for me to convert into an artistic workshop, somewhere north of Stockholm, in Roslagen, the part of the country that I am from. But ideally, it shouldn't be exactly where I am from. If I could move some slight difference away, say some neighbouring municipality, then I'd be most pleased. Like I think most people, I want more of the same, just also vaguely not quite the same.

It always felt like my father was fixed in place. Permanent. Actually, it felt as if my father was some damn heavy rock, some soul that would always stay where he was, in just that position, forever and forever. Stubborn. Inflexible. Unyielding. Like those glacial erratics, big giant boulders found around the northern hemisphere. Part of me is as shocked by the disappearance of my father as I would be if some ancient mountain where to simply vanish. Tom? Dead? How did the gods allow that to happen? Fathers can die, just like that?

But in his youth, he wasn't so sedentary. My father used to entertain us with stories about his wayfaring youth. His adventures in France. The joys he felt going skiing. All the wine and cognac he drank. That time he got accidentally engaged with some farmer’s daughter. In all his tales, he seemed like such a different person, an individual so lush with life and with enthusiasm. I was enraptured hearing these tales from my dad, a person superficially so passionless. But it also hurt. To learn that a person so close to you used to have a daring and exciting life, then things changed just as you came into the picture.

I guess that this post is coming too late. I could have written this when he was still alive, I could have done something to express these thoughts to him when he was still capable of responding to my woes. But, at the same time, I don’t think I’d have the same perspective. The memories I have of my father are conflicted. Confusing, actually. But only now am I beginning to see some greater narrative emerging. We all need that. Some story to tell ourselves. It is important not to fall into the predictable traps, not to make reality seem more black and white than it really is, but... Just knowing where we belong, in the great chain that is our lineage, is instrumental to finding peace in grief.

And, even if he was still with us, I never would have learned if he too had autism. That man would ever have subjected himself to the kind of neuropsychiatric evaluation that I went through. It is really a pointless question to ask. The state of my father’s neurology was something that I was never going to learn about, and I am peace with that. Some people are more susceptible to these discussions than others. I am happy to occasionally hint to my mother that she may be “somewhere on the spectrum,” but I would never have felt at ease telling my dad he might have some significant neurological condition.

He could have been autistic, he could not have been autistic, I might as well pick up a flower and begin to pluck out the petals, that might just be the most reliable way for me to find out. He wasn't the sort of person inclined towards deep self-reflection. And it is true that my mother's family also exhibits traits of autism spectrum disorder. Especially my grandfather Erik, the other daddy I was named after.

I’ve written all of this late at night, after I've had some wine and some vodka. In so many ways, I am a chaotic person. I’ve always struggled to get to bed early, I’m always at my most productive those hours of the day I am supposed to be doing something else. I’ve always related to odd and weird people, those who seem to view the world from an outsider’s perspective. I am not good at behaving “normal.” One thing I could never comprehend was my father’s capacity to go to bed, every night, at a reasonable hour, and to awake early and before noon. I longed to see some dysfunction in my father, to see some evidence that I was truly his son, but all that he hid behind several walls of emotional sterility.

My father had a secular burial. It was quite a lovely little ceremony. We had a woman doing live performances of some of my father’s favourite bluesy songs from the 1970's. His family was there, some of his neighbours, also me and my sister, our mother and her sister (our aunt.) And I cried. A lot. My father’s older younger brother also cried a lot. He looked real tormented, actually. I felt acutely sorry for him. I have two uncles on my father's side, but one uncle is much younger than the other. My father and his brother closest in age grew up almost being twins, only one year separating them, they were really close. I have an older sister, no brother, so I can only imagine what it is like to have a fraternal relationship like that. I had my father for thirty-two years, he had him for seventy-six.

I am going to art school now. I am hoping that I will be able to keep going down this track, making "fine art," perhaps one day even receiving some recognition for my work. Working with these things physical, sculpting and painting, it gratifies me more than manipulating anything digital. No, I am not bitter. I am happy with where I am. But I am also paying for my current education with funds my father provided me with. Actually, the last conversation I had with him I called him to remind him to please send me some money so that I could pay the invoice I had just received. I could have regrets about that, wishing that our talk had been about something more profound and less tawdry, but I don't have any regrets. That's just life. And money is an integral part of it.

I am filled with heartache, and I am filled with confusion. I am not feeling a lot of summertime bliss this year. It’s been months, yes, but grief is four-dimensional. Grief doesn't care about linear time, it comes and goes seemingly at random. At some times you may feel at peace, then suddenly, you remember that your dad is gone and a profound sadness overtakes you. The complexity of your relationship with him doesn’t really matter when you’re at that point just repeating in your head “my daddy is dead, my daddy is dead, my daddy is dead.”

Grief is primal, and sorrow is animal. It’d be much easier to deal with it all if we were just a bunch of logical aliens, some cold androids, but we’re messy human beings, no matter our diagnoses. It really doesn’t matter, in the end, if my father was autistic or not, all that matters is that he’s now no longer with us, so all we’ve got left is our memories of him. And one day I will figure out exactly what kind of narrative I wish to tell about his life, just how I wish to capture all the confusion I feel when I think about him. Maybe it wouldn't be all wrong if I chose to focus on the good things.