My father died when I was 20. I was asleep in my dorm room and a priest knocked on my door to tell me. He was very gentle and drove me to the hospital where my mother and sisters were waiting. I remember them asking me to go in to say goodbye. I walked in to see my father’s corpse.
I don’t think many of us picture our parent’s death. We think they will live forever just like we will. When Jacqueline Kennedy died there was an interview with her son where he said that you don’t really become an adult until your parents die. Over the years I have thought a lot about that. I don’t think that’s true. You become and adult when you become responsible for your life’s choices and the consequences that ensue.
I think before my father’s death my life was pretty well scripted out. I was in the seminary and it was my destiny to become the priest that my entire Irish extended family wanted. I don’t think I really thought much about it. I would see friends of mine leave the seminary and I felt sad at their loss. I didn’t think I would ever leave. I remember one of the chaplain priests that we had telling me that he thought I was just drifting without any real thought about the future.
After the funeral I went back and drifted some more. I finally decided to leave when I was a deacon, the last step before the priesthood. I was assigned to a parish that had three priests and was the bishop’s primary residence. It was a very busy place, but all thru the summer I was there, all I could think of was the incredible loneliness of the life. I remember telling my mother that I was going to leave. She was very supportive. It really wasn’t until recently that I found out how much she had cried when I left.
I moved back home for about eight months and then moved out with some friends. My decision to leave still haunted me. I really didn’t know what the future would hold. I began to date a very nice girl, but part of me felt guilty for doing that. I was not supposed to date. I even broke up with her because of this confusion that I felt.
I had let down not just my family, but also all my friends from the seminary and the entire Catholic Church. Thinking back on this time I don’t know how much of it was because of my self-centeredness, my immaturity, my naïveté about life, or the really limited and focused culture of the seminary. One day we were helping some friends move and I saw the girl I had been dating. We hadn’t seen each other for about four months. We began to talk and we went out to get a coke at a fast food restaurant and I proposed. I don’t think I had any real plans to do that, it really just happened. She said yes and we have been married for 46 years. After I asked her I couldn’t believe the words came out of my mouth, but they may have been the first real adult words I had ever spoken.
When do you become an adult? What does that really mean? I know that over the years I still at times wonder if I ever really grew up. Virginia Satir, one of the early pioneers of family therapy, wrote about this. She said that often when dealing with a difficult case she wondered when the real adult, the real therapist would come in the room.
This is not all negative. The importance of laughter, making jokes, and just playing is still part of my life. Adulthood is not always somber responsibility, but it is being responsible for the choices you make. I think there is always some event that triggers this. The event can be a death or something that no one else would even think important. It can be something tragic or something really trivial, but whatever it is, it is life changing. It might not even be recognizable until years later.
For many years after my father’s death I would have dreams that he was still alive. The dreams would be rather bizarre in that he came back and made everything right again. The dreams stopped after we got married. I don’t know if they were really encouraging me all along to take responsibility and make a life for myself. The past was over and couldn’t be redone. It was time to shape my own life.