The Feelings When Your Father Passes
When a mother passes it feels like the heart of the family is gone. When a father passes it feels like the strength of the family has passed.
Strange and unexpected feelings arose in me when my father passed. There is currently a movement underfoot to level men and women and tell us they are the same. They are not. How do I know this? It is because of my undeniable feelings when my father passed.
When my father passed, it felt like the pillar of the family was gone.
A father is the strong one that you come up against and he refuses to move, like a pillar. I found this greatly aggravating in my youth but I see things differently now. We need these pillars. We need them desperately.
As women, we scuttle around like busy little mice, going from one thing to the next, looking after numerous details in a day. Men are more ‘one project at a time’ persons. Their focus is narrowed, compared to women. I think this is why so many more books are written by men. They have a way of eliminating the unnecessary, delegating the necessary and remaining focused on the task at hand.
Men shoulder a very heavy responsibility for which they need to be given credit. I wish I had seen this earlier. Men feel responsible for the protection and provision of women and children. A man cannot prevent himself from putting himself in harm’s way in war and combat to save a woman. When the Titanic sank, men put women and children in the lifeboats first.
This is not cultural conditioning.
A man may not hear the whining of a child and respond to its every whim. This does not make him inferior and it is not a sign of weakness. It is his nature to focus on the big task of providing and protecting and this, necessarily, requires ignoring certain distractions. Compare this to the function of the major arteries in the body, in contrast to the capillaries. We need both.
Anticipating and attending to multiple immediate needs is what woman are better suited to do and that is why they make good caregivers. This is where a woman’s instincts and strengths come to the forefront. Mysteriously, a man will long for the gentle ministries of a woman which actually help ease his burden. She in turn needs his immovable strength to give her comfort.
I know some want me to say here that men and women are alike and that these qualities I attribute to men are found in women as well. I admit I am speaking in generalities. Generalities matter. Generalities and categorizations are how we organize and make sense out of our lives.
I am not writing about erasing differences between men and women. I am writing to draw attention to these differences and not to minimize them.
I want to encourage men to see that they are unique in this world and cannot be replaced. When my father died, I felt like the earth moved beneath my feet. Trust me. You will feel a very particular loss when your father dies.