June 17, 2001|By Todd Richissin
AND SO, Father's Day rolls around again, a day that has always held a special significance for me and, until a few years ago, for Tom Francis Richissin, my dad.
My father died a bit more than six years ago, when I was 31. He was a pretty good father. He coached his sons in baseball, football and basketball. He was a police officer, an honest one, a man of integrity. He put food on the table and kept enough order in a chaotic house that my four brothers and I were expected to be home to eat supper together, as a family. He was an Irish braggart about his boys, and he inflated our accomplishments to anybody who wanted to listen to him and to many people who did not. He was, as they say, a good and decent man, and I loved him and I still do.
But here is some brutal honesty: For the longest time, I felt my father and I shared precious little with each other. I shared none of my fears with him, none of my soul. It may sound harsh, but my father and I were not friends. After Little League sports, we did not do much of anything together.
Our conversations resembled those found on airplanes when two strangers are forced to sit next to each other. They push themselves into the banality of pleasant small talk or they do not talk at all. Our conversations were sparse and uncomfortable, and for that the blame is mine. I have always worked much more diligently on my friendships than I ever did on my relationship with my father, and that is to my great regret.
I never told my father I loved him; that is to my great shame.
There is, though, nothing that can be done about that now, and I think such regrets are typical: Fathers and sons, the vast majority of them, love each other, clearly, but they do not do a very good job of showing it. Not until my father left me did I even try.
A few years ago, I embarked on a project, a book called "Fathers & Sons." It's filled with accounts from everyday fathers and sons and, for marketing purposes as much as anything, there are plenty of celebrities profiled. The book - here's more honesty - was an attempt to make some money. But it turned out to be more valuable to me than any royalty check. It put me face to face with the reality of my relationship with my father.
Here is a reality that I think explains why an honest accounting of fatherhood - and son-hood, for that matter - is so important. It is the one glimpse of my father's soul that he shared with me. When I was 12 years old, my three older brothers were 14, 15 and 17.
My father called me into the kitchen and told me to put on a coat, that he and I were going to the store. We drove down the snowy streets of Brook Park, Ohio, in silence. Finally, as we crossed some railroad tracks a mile from our home, my father spoke. I know now that he had been building up his courage. We were going to the store so he could buy me darts, he told me. He was proud of me, he said, and he knew this was a clumsy way of showing it, but from the day I was born he loved me, and he thought I should know that. My brothers, he told me, had gotten old on him, and he feared I would, too. They had reached something called "that age," and they no longer kissed him hello and goodbye, and he missed that.
Like many men of his generation, my father was not a sentimental man. He had never said anything like that to me before and he never would again. I made no promise to him, never blurted out that of course I would always kiss him. But I never forgot what he told me, and I think he always remembered it, too. Through high school, into college, before I left to travel overseas and when I returned, I always made a point to kiss my father hello and to kiss my father goodbye. It meant the world to him, I know.
My father, 59 years old and strong as an ox, collapsed on March 1, 1995. I was living outside of Ohio, and I jumped on the first flight to see him. When I arrived at the hospital, he was hooked up to machines, only alive technically. My family waited a couple of days, and then we accepted what the doctors had told us, that my father would not be coming back. We decided to take him off the machines, to let him go in peace.
A stubborn fighter as always, he refused to go gently. He lingered for days. Then, with my mother, my brothers and me at his bedside, he finally let go. His last breath came like a long, sad, exhausted sigh. I will never forget it, ever. I wanted to say something then, but there was nothing to say, and so I just stood there, hugging my mother. Everybody was crying. Then a nurse called in a doctor, the doctor pronounced my father dead, and we were left alone with him. Somebody broke the silence by remarking how peaceful his face looked, and everybody agreed, yes, yes, his face sure looked peaceful all right.
I thought so too, I said, but in reality I saw only sadness in my father's face, and - I swear to you - I felt as though he had one last request.
