Call Me, I'll Come

After my mother died, something in my father loosened.

Or dimmed.

As a younger person I sometimes thought of it as him not paying as much attention, and there was truth in that. Some vigilance left him. Some energy that had once held the whole system together seemed to drain away.

At the time, I felt it mostly as a son.

As loss compounded.

I could not yet imagine the pain of a husband.

Only my own.

Now I see more.

He was probably not inattentive so much as lost.

There is a difference.

Grief can resemble withdrawal from the outside.

But inwardly it may be labor of another kind.

I did not know then how much of him may have gone with her.

I know it better now.

And what moves me, looking back, is how even in that bewildered period he was still trying to be a good father.

I remember him telling me very clearly: never drive drunk.

Call me if you ever need a ride.

Any hour.

I’ll come get you.

It was such a simple statement, almost ordinary enough to pass unnoticed, but it has grown in meaning for me over time.

It was care offered in the grammar of practicality, which was often how he loved.

Not a speech about morality.

Not a sermon.

Just:

Call me.

I’ll come.

I didn’t drink at all until I was thirty-five, so in one sense the warning was almost unnecessary. My parents had already raised in me a deep lack of temptation toward those risks—not through prohibition so much as example. There was a kind of steadiness in our household around such things.

And I look back on that now with gratitude.

Not superiority.

Just gratitude.

It was a gift not to feel tugged by some currents that pull hard at others.

And he helped form that.

Even while grieving.

There was another sadness in those years that I only half understood then.

Watching him try to date.

Women his age.

Kind women, probably.

Suitable women, people hoped.

But I could sense—even young—that he was not really in it.

He was going through motions.

Trying because one is supposed to try.

Trying because others encourage the widower to move on.

Trying perhaps because loneliness frightened him.

But his heart seemed absent.

There was a terrible tenderness in that.

As if everyone around him was nudging life forward while part of him remained sitting beside an empty chair.

It was hard to watch, though I may not have known why.

And then, unexpectedly, came the VHS tapes.

He began collecting movies.

Stacks of them.

This became its own strange era in our relationship.

The VHS years.

There was comfort in the ritual.

Selecting one.

Sliding the tape into the machine.

The mechanical whir.

Lights dimming.

Two men, father and son, watching stories unfold in a darkened room.

And not just watching.

Rewatching.

Again and again.

As if repetition itself were soothing.

Schindler’s List.

Das Boot.

The Bridge on the River Kwai.

Braveheart.

So many others.

War films. Historical epics. Moral dramas.

Looking back, they almost seem curated by grief.

Films of endurance, sacrifice, impossible choices, men under pressure.

Though perhaps I’m reading backward.

Maybe we just liked them.

But I suspect something deeper was happening.

Movies became a place where emotion could be shared sideways.

My father was not inclined toward long heart-to-hearts.

Neither was I.

But we could sit beside each other and absorb tragedy through other people’s stories.

Sometimes that is how men of a certain generation grieved together.

Not through confession.

Through cinema.

Through quoting scenes.

Through watching Das Boot for the fourth time.

I have come to treasure those evenings.

Because in the years when both of us were carrying the rawness of my mother’s death differently and imperfectly, those films became a bridge.

Something to do together.

Something to feel together without naming it.

And I see now that the man collecting VHS tapes was not retreating into distraction.

He may have been building a shelter.

A small one.

But real.

A room where memory hurt a little less for two hours.

What touches me most is how ordinary all this was.

No dramatic father-son reckoning.

No big speeches about loss.

Just rides offered if needed.

Awkward dates endured.

VHS boxes stacked by the television.

Shared favorites replayed until scenes became almost familial.

And somehow that ordinary companionship carried us.

I sometimes think grief literature overemphasizes breakthroughs.

Often what saves people is much quieter.

Watching Bridge on the River Kwai together on a Tuesday night.

Eating popcorn.

Saying almost nothing.

Staying near.

And perhaps that links back to something older in him.

The father who once said, in effect, stay near me.

Now we were doing that again in another form.

After loss.

In the flicker of a cathode-ray screen.

Two survivors, in a dim room, letting movies help hold what neither quite knew how to say.