When I was a younger man, filled with a young man’s anger and angst, I heard my father cry for only the second time in my life.
He was 48 and unemployed, a laid-off vice president at a major bank. Week after week, month after month, my father struggled to regain his status as a proud bread-winner for our family. But, at his age, in an economic recession, he found that a country in a recession is not a place for jobless middle-aged men.
One day, as I made my way down the stairs toward the kitchen, I overheard an anxious exchange between my mother and father.
“Jack, Jack, I don’t want to hear that talk. Knock it off!” I heard my mother say.
“I can’t take it anymore!” my father responded in a low tone, his voice cracking.
He went down into the basement, gently closing the door behind him, and began to weep. He did not wail, but I heard his tears.
The only other time I heard my father cry I was much younger, at my first funeral: My grandfather lay in an open casket, my father sobbing openly at the first sight of his dead dad. My father made a quick exit to a side door so as not to make a scene. I remember standing there, in shock, seeing for the first time a dead man and my father crying.
My tough, larger-than-life, fearless father had openly sobbed. It was awkward — not because I was ashamed of him, but because I knew he did not want his family to have witnessed his breakdown.
So, when I heard my father sob in the basement that day, alone, away from his wife, hidden from his kids, over the suffocating stress of joblessness and its humiliating consequences, I understood how serious my father took his role as provider. Uncomfortable, I headed back to my room. Later, I found him back in the kitchen in his usual spot, casually smoking a Marlboro, eating corn flakes, glancing up at me, and asking, “Hey, how’s school?”
My father, a man who worked his way up a corporate ladder with no college degree, armed only with his high intellect and an unrelenting drive to provide a decent life for his family, soon became a taxi driver, driving men who held a position equal to what he once had to and from the airport, to and from a home.
He refused to park the taxi in our driveway. He would call me to come pick him up with my car, a Camaro, a young man’s car. I would drive to our local supermarket parking lot to find him waiting in his crumpled suit by his work car, his tired face now a daily reflection in my own mirror.
A year later, my father finally found a job that restored his sense of pride. It was for a major bank, at the level he had worked so hard to attain. I would pick him up at the bus station in my Camaro; we would talk about my college classes and my job. But the stress of his former unemployment placed a severe toll on him. Not three months into his new job, my father died of a heart attack.
I wept, unashamed, at his funeral. • • •
In February, a 58-year-old Chicago man, father, and Wal-Mart employee set himself on fire in the store’s parking lot. Several onlookers attempted to swat out the flames, but the man pushed them away, saying he did not want help. When police arrived, the man said he “couldn’t take it anymore.”
He later died in a hospital.
The man’s son had no idea why his father burned himself to death. They had a happy life in the suburbs, and were getting ready to “redo” their front lawn.
What stress did my own father endure those many years ago? I knew he had pride in being a provider. I knew he wanted to be a role model for his kids. I knew he had worked hard to educate himself in order to compete in a world full of college graduates. But, had I not heard him cry in the basement that day, I don’t know that I would have ever truly understood how much his unemployment affected him.
And I wonder, when my mother told my father many years ago, “Jack, Jack, I don’t want to hear that talk. Knock it off!”, what was my father talking about? What might he have done?
• • •
We now live in dire times. Young men’s minds are being shaped by visions of their silently struggling fathers. Our government has quickly seized control of our livelihoods.
Many fathers will die in the process; many sons will remember.
John Knight lives in Parker.
