Part I: She's starting to give me knowing and intelligent looks
The gift of evidence that my Dad had a human side
“It pains me to leave you.”
Those were the last words my father spoke as his three daughters sat around his hospital bed just days before he died. Emotionally paralyzed and unable to say anything more profound, oh, I don’t know, like something that would indicate to him just how much he meant to me, I replied, “It pains me too.”
He was 100 years old on the way to 101 and many would say that this was a long life. True, it was, but even more truthfully, we believed he would live on for at least another ten. I would muse that it was because he was not a very demonstrative father and he needed time to make it up to us. And yes, the last ten or fifteen years of his life he did just that.
“Ails,” he would say as he reached out for a hug while sitting in his favourite green (yes, green) leather chair, making it so that I had to lean way, waaaaay down to receive his smothering embrace. He would tell me that I was a “great kid” (even as I entered my 50s), something he almost never did when I was younger and I would always feel slightly awkward because of that - it wasn’t our natural way of being with each other.
There were always lessons to be learned from life, it seems, but not necessarily from him. Case in point: he took me to the British Museum when I was 18 and our family (minus my older sister, who had married and just begun to start a life of her own) was visiting Britain. As I stood mesmerized by monumental sculptures, busts, sarcophagi and other iconic statues of which I was familiar (not knowing that many were replicas), my father stopped in front of a glass case that held a massive stone fragment on which there was unfamiliar script. I sidled up to him and asked, “What’s that?” to which he replied, “The Rosetta Stone.” Without hesitation I said, “What’s the Rosetta Stone?”
I have gone over this again and again in my head for probably my entire life, wondering if there was something else I could have said that would have made his response more accepting, more loving, less painful.
“You don’t know what the Rosetta Stone is???!!” and then he walked away. I felt shamed and abandoned.
As I age, I recognize several things. My father had long since given up trying to guide or teach or nurture us in this way. I understand that his parents ran a corner grocery store and were not educated and that his impulse from when he was young was to soar intellectually in order to achieve success as their oldest son and provide for the family he would one day have to support.
Recently, as I have been going through family papers, most of which were kept by my father, of course, an inveterate historian and archivist, I gleaned evidence that he was not the stellar student we all imagined him to be.
My father, J.P. Francis, had received less than perfect grades in his three years at the University of Toronto: largely Bs and Cs.
Suffice it to say, this was a revelation and led me to wonder…
…could it be, on that day long ago, when he was 59 and I was 18, in those hallowed museum halls, that perhaps he realized he couldn’t fully explain to a teenager’s satisfaction the relevance of the Rosetta Stone? That the whole idea of nurturing me in this way was too difficult, too impossible, because his parents had never done so with him? Or that he was uncomfortable having such a weighty conversation with his enquiring daughter? He was awkward talking about anything of any intellectual weight or significance with his family and believed that knowledge must be sought and not meted out. He came from a time when women weren’t seen as intellectually equal - indeed, one of the university professors (F.H. Underhill; he served as Chair of the Department of History at Carleton University in Ottawa and a reading room was named after him) who had been inspirational to him believed that women couldn’t be historians - that it was a man’s domain. Whatever the reason, it shook me to my core. I recognized then and there that in order to win my father’s love and yes, even admiration, I’d have to excel scholastically, ironically.
Sadly, I didn’t have enough confidence to think that was going to happen. So I continued to try to be funny.
I’ve been going through the copious plastic tubs and cardboard file boxes of family papers and have made two huge discoveries: one was a daily diary from 1960 in which Dad wrote religiously until something made him stop after November 16th. He was not a diary kind of guy, so this find was so illuminating.
Throughout our childhoods and later years, Dad was often elusive to us. His work was a mystery - we knew he worked at a high level in the government and after a rare visit to his office, we saw that he had an original Jack Shadbolt (he announced this proudly and with a certain amount of flummox I thought, as if he wasn’t sure he was important enough to warrant having one in *his* office) and a fully stocked bar - these two things reinforced his status. In this diary his entries could be like this one from January 25th:
Learned today that my re-classification to senior economist had been turned down by CSC (Civil Service Commission) but the DM (Deputy Minister) had written a strong letter of protest and followed it up with talks with commission. We shall see! Pat rented middle cottage to Ellie Green for the season for $300. This makes total of $500 in rents from cottages for the summer now confirmed. Pat made 56 butter tarts, a mighty feat. Margot full of fun again.
The other find was an audio CD of him talking about his life, from his childhood through his professional life. He did this at the age of 92, and in a self effacing way he kept telling his recorder that he should interview so-and-so because they had much more interesting stories. But honestly, his stories were pretty amusing.
Funny how, if we are lucky enough to find a window into our mother’s and father’s lives when they were young parents through a diary or letters, we see ourselves through their eyes for the very first time.
I was only 6 months old when my Dad started his diary (the only one I’ve ever found) and beyond the fact that he made an entry every.single.day, upon first reading I was struck by the richness of his life. He had a new, beautiful wife, two young daughters, a challenging and upwardly mobile job, a fulfilling hobby combined with work around the house and renovating their cluster of three cottages, a commitment to his faith, a full social life and an intellectual curiosity that fostered relationships with equally inquisitive friends.
Six days before my first birthday he wrote:
Ailsa is starting to play hide & seek and can now move around the floor on her hands & knees, but mostly backwards. She’s starting to give me knowing & intelligent looks.
And so it goes. I continue to transcribe this diary and as I do so, it is bringing me closer to this man who is still a mystery to me. But it does give me solace to know how much he loved his family.