Mourning a Father Who Rejected Me Even in His Death

I find I can feel rejection in so many different scenarios — with friends or family members. I don’t mean to; it’s just an underlying sheet of my core. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t sit there and stew in it and sit cross-legged like a child. I take the time to talk myself through it and reknit the scene. I know where it’s born from. It always comes from my dad.

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I discovered just over a week ago that he’d passed away. My twin had messaged me to tell me that a friend of his had seen our father’s elegy of some sort posted on an Italian Facebook group post, one that was created for the natives of the village he grew up in — in Naples, Italy.

I felt shocked and numb for quite some time after taking in my brother’s words, followed by sadness pouring into my heart. It was strange because he’d been on my mind throughout November, as I knew he’d reached a milestone birthday. I’d also dreamt of him and his family, which was rare, and then, as I tried to get back to sleep, the most uncomfortable and painful vision of him, well, not him, but a melon-sized apparition that hovered above my stomach area. It was so emotionally painful to look at that I had to eventually stop gaping at its peculiar and surreal presence.

My twin reached out to our father’s wife via her Facebook, hoping she would see the message. The following day, she replied, with just the formalities, to confirm Dad’s death. Dad had died seven days before and not the day before her message, when we’d got to learn of the Facebook elegy post.

Are you kidding me!

Where was your message?

What about us!

These thoughts passed angrily through my mind.

I then realised that my vision had occurred two mornings before his passing. Everything started to make sense; he, or something divine, must have known, because I kept wondering about him, and worrying that if he died, how would I know.

She’d mentioned that Dad had been unwell for a few years, suffering from bile duct cancer.

I couldn’t believe it. I had been rejected not only while he was alive, but even in his dying days, he hadn’t wanted to include me in his new family life or even to have time to connect again and say ‘goodbye’.

Every day since finding out he’s gone has brought me to face kaleidoscopic emotions, although my first thoughts that washed across my mind were, ‘Where is he now? Where has his soul gone to?’

I couldn’t help but fret after watching countless Near-Death YouTube videos and having some indoctrination of Hell and Heaven. My mother would tell me as a child, ‘God told me your dad’s going to hell!’ I reflect on her words now, and even before I knew he had died. Yet, I forgave him there and then for everything. For his cold, uncaring heart and words, and only saw the good things he was capable of doing; his funny laugh, the way he was a little more protective when I was a child, and the last time I saw him, how he’d stuffed £100 in notes in my hand for my daughter and me. It had just been before Christmas. But I thought of everything good for him to be okay now.

Over the following days, tears erupt suddenly, and from out of nowhere, and waking up, I’d sense that void he has left, and the vast expanse of knowing I’ll never have another chance to make things right.

Each day has brought up new memories, new epiphanies, and fresh layers of divided and complex emotions.

Another day, as I read through the tributes left on the Contursi, Naples Facebook group. I suddenly think, ‘Do they know about my twin and me? Do they remember us when we lived there for a short time when we were little? I see the photos of the community and remember the embarrassment and shame my father carried for us. We had been born out of wedlock, and in the late 1960s, with his Catholic upbringing, it would have been harsh, morally. Doesn’t matter what people did behind closed doors, though.

Missing him turns to anger. I realise my whole identity has been built from the wounds of my father; yes, my ‘father wound’, and what I had originally assumed my vision symbolised, but it was the conclusion. My entire identity is built on the darker side of humanity, religiosity, and shame. With some sprinkles of love.

When I had contemplated his friends in Contursi, who more than likely don’t know I exist, and my thoughts of wishing I had been accepted into his life and community, if only for that moment, I suddenly heard my father say to me, “It’s nothing to do with you, Chantal.”

And lo and behold, someone then posted a wedding photo of him and his new wife, dated around the early 1980s. As I remembered back, I felt my stomach ache; I had been about thirteen, excited, and I had imagined I would be dressed in a pretty bridesmaid outfit or perhaps come along as a guest. And the very thing he said to me was his line, ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Chantal!’

The sadness that descended upon me as I realised he was edging me out of his life and had been warning me that I was only a temporary commitment until I reached the tender age of sixteen.

To him, maybe this was normal? He’d grown up in hardship in post-war Italy. His father died when he was a child, and his mother had to work all the time. He and his brother were latchkey kids.

Yet that gaping wound never left me, and I‘ve been swimming through its murky waters all my life, and now the thick layers of grief have surfaced these past nine days.

His rejection didn’t just come from him; it came from his new family, his community, his roots and Catholicism. His rejection was encased with his tribe.

As I walked home on a dark, rainy night, again I burst out in tears; another layer of grief, another release as the contemplations and memories emerged and swept across my mind: my car crash life, drinking and partying and the mindless intimate mistakes I had made for a big part of my life. It came to me, an epiphany, the answer to what had been going on in my life:

I had just wanted him to notice me; just an innate, natural need. I just needed him to know me, to have meant something to him. That’s all my soul had needed to thrive in life — was to be loved and noticed by my father.

I’m not blaming my current calamities on him, but I know I have fucked up my life for too many decades, and here in my fifties, I am financially naked with no true security, and my belongings — still in storage. Did I do this? Yes, I did. I made a crazy number of bad choices, too many to mention. I wasted a lot of time. But I was able to witness my father at the core, the repressed wound he’d created by his emotional detachments.

I have been allowing myself to honour this unknown space and acknowledge my complicated journey. I still forgive Dad, no matter what. I know he must have been numbing his own wounds with how much he drank when I used to see him. It’s okay to carry a blend of sadness, anger and regret. Why hadn’t I tried to find a way to contact him? But could he have tried to contact me? We have to live with our decisions.

Facing the death of an estranged parent can be one of life’s most complicated emotional experiences. The unresolved wounds and missed opportunities to say what I needed to say, and being able to do that after undergoing so much healing. If I weren’t so desperate to find work and income, maybe it would be harder. But I have to get on with living and let self-compassion and self-care walk beside me.

I am working at accepting my past and coming to terms with what cannot be undone and what cannot be said — nothing from the other side of that line can be changed. I can only change how I see myself and how I see how my father was able to love in the capacity he had. Accepting myself in a sad story in which I didn’t ask to join, but God put me there, for a reason.

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