There is an adage: “Figure out what is holding you back, let it go, and move on.” Something like this happened to me recently. There was a painting of my father in his ministerial vestments that he gave to my mother on our last Christmas together. My mother died from kidney carcinoma the following May after a one and a half year battle with the disease. I received this painting from my father’s estate twenty years later and very promptly stored it in the basement for another twenty years. It was a reminder of the estranged relationship I had with my father. I was the “apple of my father’s eyes” until my mother passed. Thereafter, I felt imprisoned by having to take care of the parsonage and for not being able to have a normal social life that teenagers crave. Although I regret that I rebelled in my freshman year of college away from my father, I realize now that the rebellion was exactly what I needed to feel normal. It may have even caused me to seek a marriage to someone my father did not approve of after four years of college.
Having a change of heart and wanting to understand things about my family, I found a master framer in Appleton, Wisconsin, who beautifully restored the painting and re-framed it. When I got it home and placed it above one of my bookcases, I suddenly was filled with “a long-lost admiration” for my father. It was as though a weight was lifted from my heart and soul; I was looking at a young man of forty-two years old, whose foundations were Jesus Christ and my mother. The man he became after my mother’s passing was not recognizable in the painting. Her loss traumatized the entire family and made my father doubt his faith in God. It was a long time before he recovered from her loss, and I remember feeling like walking on egg shells at home so that he would not get upset. His parishioners never knew the turmoil that went on in our home, nor how lost my brother David and I felt doing anything on our own. This painting has even seemed to bring back the joy and love into my own home now that it is Christmas once again.
The “newly framed” painting has allowed me to see the man I loved as my daddy, to let go of the pain that has followed me for sixty-one years, and finally to accept that we are all human. Sometimes, it just takes a longer time to realize how important parents and children are to a loving family. I can now say with tears in my eyes, “I love you, dad, even with all our problems. I am sorry that I did not get to say that to you before you died, alone, in a senior citizen rental apartment in Bethlehem. It has been a long time since I could look into your eyes and see the love that has always been there. I hope you know that my music is still playing, and I know we will meet again when God calls me home. Until then, Thank you for being my daddy.”
Anna Hartt
