My Father at 100, as Seen From the Age He Died – The New York Times

My father turned 100 last week. Not in a nursing home or at an awkward family gathering with 1-0-0 candles on a cake. Not in his physical form at all he died in 1976. But I marked his centennial because, to the few people left on earth who still grieve for him after nearly 44 years, it had to matter for just one day, as just a fleeting number in this life of constant additions and subtractions.

But alongside this is another gnawing number: I am now 56, the age that my father was when he died. I have always known that my father lived a short life every parents life is short if they die when youre a child but now Im consumed with an even greater understanding of just how fast it all must have seemed to him. And how even a century can be fleeting from a certain vantage point.

Born in a migrant coal mining camp in West Virginia in late February 1920, Okey Belcher arrived into a world short on opportunity. My grandparents dragged their nine children constantly around the coal-rich hills of southwestern West Virginia in search of work. My father began mining at 14 and was seemingly on track for a life of hardship and black lung. But World War II took him from that bleakness to a submarine in the South Pacific, and then the Korean War took him back to Asia for a second time, then a stint in San Francisco in the early 1950s before marrying my mother in 1955. It must have all seemed like such a whirlwind in his first 35 years.

But it was in the postwar suburban bliss of Dayton, Ohio, where it all went wrong: an inoperable brain tumor at the top of his spine at age 46. He was basically handed a recurring prescription of phenobarbital and sent off to play out whatever years were left. What ensued was 10 years of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde evolution into uncertainty, years of high-functioning fear, depression and self-medicating with alcohol. Divorce, car wrecks and a series of grim jobs at a Dickensian factory and a solo life in an equally grim trailer park ultimately led him home to his older sister in Kentucky, who kept him, as she had her parents and a brother before, until he too left his hard-knock life.

Ive never deluded myself into thinking that hes in what Ive always considered that mythological place called heaven, looking down on my sister and me and the smattering of nieces, nephews and other kinfolk who still remember him. His death, 10 days before I turned 13, was so brutally final for me. I have never harbored the Christian promise of eternal life that has comforted so many in my family. I envy them for envisioning some eternal family potluck where well all be happy again.

But the realm he does exist in for me is in dreams, consistently about every five years or so, where he is alive and has simply been taking time away from us a pause of 15, 30, 40 years, just because he needed to sort things out. Its as if in my dreamland of grief where I always seem to be childlike and confused even though Im aware of the years and decades that have passed its simply standard behavior for people to slip away but return in an instant. And sometimes we are going to visit him in his new, faraway home. And its in those moments that I know everything will be OK and that I will touch him and hear his war stories that I was too young to care about when he was alive.

Like my father, Ive traveled extensively in my life and career, much of it for work but mostly, admittedly, to run. Perhaps to run as my father did. Im not fleeing coal mines and Appalachian poverty, though that legacy haunts me. I think I am fleeing what my father must have been: the fear of an unfulfilled life, driven by the urgency that it could all be ripped away from me at any moment. Ill never know what motivated him to re-up for the military twice. It was no doubt to escape poverty, even after World War II when he returned to coal mining and a failed first marriage before the Korean War broke out. But he did decide, like millions of others, to settle down and have children as the Eisenhower-era boom created a middle-class bubble for those scarred by the Great Depression and perhaps their own great depression.

My aloneness in my travels and my fear, at this semi-ripe age, that it could all go haywire for me too is, I suspect, common among grown children whose parents died young. Ive sought and still seek, in the age of 24-hour work cycles, hookup apps and boundless TV and escapism in every corner of the planet emotional refuge in all the places that feel safe and immediate. There is not much comfort in the future when its ripped away from you at a young age.

Im always drawn back to the thought of that young man who dropped out of school in eighth grade to work in the coal mines, only to be wrenched from that dark hole and flung far across the planet, strapping and with a head full of curly hair. Im certain he found refuge in the same anonymity and instant gratification that I have discovered in far-off lands and exotic people. And I find solace in that a camaraderie with a man whom I rarely got to bond with as the brain cancer morphed him into a different man as I was just becoming one.

And now, at 56, pondering what my father must have been facing in knowing for a decade that he might live only a few more years, or months or even days, I know that Ill most likely not live to see 100, and I wont have a child to grieve whatever vacancy my death will leave. But when I called my sister, Debra, this week from a beach in Zanzibar and we honored our fathers 100th, I was aware of distances across miles, continents, decades and now a century that seemed to narrow and to heal, and to connect all of us in this life of numbers long gone and still to come.

David Belcher is an Op-Ed staff editor who writes frequently about culture and the arts.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. Wed like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And heres our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

More here:
My Father at 100, as Seen From the Age He Died - The New York Times