For Father's Day: A Tale of Love &Reconciliation

Few of the stories I share about my father in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir are flattering. Physically and emotionally absent in my early childhood and dead before my 14th birthday, Sydney Gerson was not the kind of parental figure one thinks of as, well, much of a parental figure. 

On top of that, it turns out that he was probably not my natural father, something I learned long after all the principals in that drama – him, my mother and my natural father – had passed away (another story I tell in Acts of Surrender). 

And yet I carry his name, and of the three fathers I have experienced in my life, he is the only one I ever think of as "Daddy." 

So on this Father's Day, nearly a half-century after his death, I share this tale of love and reconciliation, adapted from Acts of Surrender... 

It's August 11, 1997. After nearly two months of full-time road travel, Roxy (my cocker spaniel) and I check into the Shilo Inn in Boise, Idaho. Once I get Roxy situated, I change into my bathing suit and settle into the white-tiled steam room that is a fixture in many of the chain’s properties.

I have no plans, other than to shut my eyes and relax into the steam. But after a few minutes, I feel another presence in the room. I open my eyes and peer through the clouds of steam. I see no one.

“Hello?”

No answer.

I close my eyes again. Immediately, I sense a white-robed man staring at me from across the room. He is tall, dark-haired, with a trim beard and mustache and a muscular build. A gold coronet rests on his head.

“Who are you?” I ask silently.

“My name is Arctur,” I sense rather than hear.

“Right,” I think dismissively. My mind is playing tricks on me.

“This is no trick. I am Arctur,” he repeats.

A silent conversation ensues, but for how long I cannot say. Time has no meaning among the mystical swirls of steam.

“There is someone here who wants to speak with you,” Arctur says after a while.

I wait.

“Because this is so close to the anniversary of your father’s death...”

Suddenly I sense my father’s presence. My heart starts to race.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be the father you wanted me to be,” I hear my father say. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you in all the ways you deserved.”

I begin to sob.

“But I loved you and still love you,” he continues. “And I’m so proud of what you are doing and who you are becoming. I couldn’t be a role model for you, but you are now a role model for me. I’m watching you. I’m with you. I’m learning from you. Thank you.”

Moments later, still crying, I sense that Arctur and my father have left. I open my eyes. The steam room is empty. I wipe my face, collect myself and return to my room.

How close to the anniversary is it? I fire up my laptop and open my file of significant dates.

As close as it can be. My father died 29 years today — August 11, 1968.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir

© Mark David Gerson

• • • Get your copy of Acts of Surrender today – on most Amazon sites, from select other online booksellers, from my website (signed to you, while supplies last) or from your favorite ebook store

• • I share a different kind of Father's Day story – this time I'm the father – in this Acts of Surrender excerpt on video: "Guinevere, My Daughter" – https://youtu.be/M-1vgCCj_04.

• Photos (long before I was born) – My parents, around 1940 or 1941, and a family gathering in the later 1940s

Specters in the Steam Room

An improbable, otherworldly experience in a hotel steam room heals the emotional abandonment I have felt from my father for as far back as I can remember. I tell the story in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir, from which the following is excerpted... 

It's August 11, 1997. After nearly two months of full-time road travel, Roxy (my cocker spaniel) and I check into the Shilo Inn in Boise, Idaho. Once I get Roxy situated, I change into my bathing suit and settle into the white-tiled steam room that is a fixture in many of the chain’s properties.

I have no plans, other than to shut my eyes and relax into the steam. But after a few minutes, I feel another presence in the room. I open my eyes and peer through the clouds of steam. I see no one.

“Hello?”

No answer.

I close my eyes again. Immediately, I sense a white-robed man staring at me from across the room. He is tall, dark-haired, with a trim beard and mustache and a muscular build. A gold coronet rests on his head.

“Who are you?” I ask silently.

“My name is Arctur,” I sense rather than hear.

“Right,” I think dismissively. My mind is playing tricks on me.

“This is no trick. I am Arctur,” he repeats.

A silent conversation ensues, but for how long I cannot say. Time has no meaning among the mystical swirls of steam.

“There is someone here who wants to speak with you,” Arctur says after a while.

I wait.

“Because this is so close to the anniversary of your father’s death...”

Suddenly I sense my father’s presence. My heart starts to race.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be the father you wanted me to be,” I hear my father say. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there for you in all the ways you deserved.”

I begin to sob.

“But I loved you and still love you,” he continues. “And I’m so proud of what you are doing and who you are becoming. I couldn’t be a role model for you, but you are now a role model for me. I’m watching you. I’m with you. I’m learning from you. Thank you.”

Moments later, still crying, I sense that Arctur and my father have left. I open my eyes. The steam room is empty. I wipe my face, collect myself and return to my room.

How close to the anniversary is it? I fire up my laptop and open my file of significant dates.

As close as it can be. My father died 29 years ago — on this day.


Adapted from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir

© Mark David Gerson

Get Acts of Surrender today

– along with my other books – 

on most Amazon sites, from select other online booksellers, from my website
 or from your favorite ebook store



Photo: A Gerson family gathering long before I was born. My father is in the left foreground. Today, August 11, 2014, is the 46th anniversary of his death and the 17th anniversary of our Shilo Inn reconciliation.

"Oh, My God! It's a Girl!" -- A Happier 9/11 Story

While much of America will mark September 11 with sadness, I carry a happier memory of that date, as I share in this excerpt from Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir...

"It was just past 11pm on September 10, 1999. My wife and I were asleep. The night outside our rainforest home in Captain Cook was still. Inside, too. Even the giant flying cockroaches, ubiquitous on the Big Island and seemingly unextinguishable, were, unusually, not rattling around our front room, itself now dominated by a large, circular birthing tank. In our bedroom, jammed between our bed and the window was a crib outfitted with baby-boy blue fittings — blue because, with no evidence to the contrary, we were convinced that we were having a boy.

"Suddenly, Q’nta jostled me awake. 'I think my water just broke.'

"I leapt out of bed, called our midwife, Roxanne, began to fill the birthing tank and banged on our neighbor Kathy Sue's door. Q’nta went into labor, while Kathy Sue fussed and attended to both of us. She mopped the sweat from Q’nta’s forehead and poured over-sweetened black coffee into me. Initially out of reach on another birth, Roxanne and her assistant showed up near dawn and, soon after, directed us both into the birthing tank. Q’nta leaned back against me, breathing and pushing according to Roxanne’s direction, and I held her, too high on caffeine, sugar, adrenalin and wonder to do anything else. Fortunately, there was nothing else for me to do. As much as we always did most things together, only Q’nta could do this one.

"When the final push came and Roxanne held up the new baby for us to see, I was astounded, and not only by the miracle of birth. 'Oh, my God!' I exclaimed. 'It’s a girl!'

"The baby boy of all our intuitive sensings was not a boy after all.

"I quickly glanced up at the clock. It was 9:11am on September 11. Our daughter had arrived with Virgo-like punctuality, right on her due date. A tsunami of emotion washed through me, a supercharged blend of awe, humility and love. I had never expected to be a father, never thought I wanted to be a father. And now... Now this tiny creature was my child. Forever."

• Find out why “forever did not play out as expected" for me in my Acts of Surrender memoir. Get your copy today in the Kindle, iBook, Nook or Kobo store for your e-reader, tablet, computer and smartphone.

Photo: Father and daughter in 2005




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Father's Day

"I wept when I reread his shaky scrawl, not for the father I missed, but for the father I missed having."

~ Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir

In this excerpt from my Acts of Surrender memoir, I recall the day my father died: 45 years ago today...

By August 1968, my father had been a full-time resident of Montreal’s Grace Dart Convalescent Hospital for several years. Just about every Sunday through that time, my mother, my sister and I would make the 90-minute, three-bus trek out to the city's east end to visit him. The Sunday that would turn out to be his last, August 11, I stubbornly refused to accompany them, a surprising stance, given my generally compliant nature.

There was a rare argument, but I would not be moved. Eventually, my mother and sister left, and I walked the two blocks to my best friend Gary's house.

A few hours later, a mysterious phone call had me shuttled up the street from Gary's house to my cousin's. A few hours after that, my mother and sister pulled up in a car, one of my uncles’, their eyes puffy and red.

"Daddy died," my mother said and took me in her arms, grateful that I hadn’t been present for his fatal heart attack.

For a long time, I felt guilty that I hadn’t been there for my father. It never occurred to me to question why I would need to be present for a man who had never been present for me.

Many years later, when I was preparing to move to Nova Scotia, I found a letter that my father had written to me when I had been at summer camp. I would have been 11 or 12 at the time. The letter wasn’t signed with "love." Rather, it ended with, “Kind regards, Daddy.” I wept when I reread his shaky scrawl, not for the father I missed, but for the father I missed having.

Read more about my relationship with my father, including a 1997 "ghostly" reconciliation on another anniversary of his death, in Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir. Get your copy today in the Kindle, Nook, Kobo and iBook stores for your e-reader, tablet, computer and smartphone. And watch me read "Fatherhood," an Acts of Surrender excerpt about both my fathers at http://youtu.be/MENeMJldzgA.

Photos: #1 ~ A Gerson family gathering before I was born. My father is in the lower left foreground; my mother, in the right foreground. #2 ~ The Grace Dart Hospital. #3 ~ Another Gerson family gathering, with my father on the far side of the table in the center.

Please "like" these Facebook pages...

• Acts of Surrender book
• The Q'ntana Trilogy Books

• The Q'ntana Trilogy Movies

• The Voice of the Muse book + Writing Inspiration

• Mark David Gerson

Please follow Mark David on Pinterest and Google+