Honouring My Dad

Sharad Ramanbhai Patel passed away yesterday morning, at the age of 86. His memorial page is here.

Usually memoriams are filled with niceties, they’re predictable that way. But my Dad wouldn’t have liked that. “Same ol, same ol” he would have said. So I want to tell you honestly about him, partly because I believe the truth is so beautiful in its complexity, and coming to understand the truth of my dad over my life has been so nourishing for me.

In his last days, he saw my kids for the last time, and I asked him if he had life advice for them. His speech was slurring and limited, but his mind was sharp as ever, and he thought for a moment and said “Be happy, don’t blame others for your mistakes, and think ahead”. My dad was old school. He only preached what he practiced.

And he was an intensely practical man. In my idealistic youth and intellectual college years, I saw this almost as a handicap, a limitation. As I grew older and became responsible for a family, a business, a home, I began to understand it as a superpower. For any real life challenge he had advice, and it was good. He was especially good at seeing pitfalls and downsides. He was cautious, careful, self protective, with money and with love. Earlier in my life I saw this as being ‘fearful’, another kind of limitation. But I also came, through painful experience, to understand the value of my dad’s worst case scenario caution.

In long hours working with him on our acreage as a child, he’d constantly stress the value of hard work, and doing any job you take on well. “Be conscientious” is something he said to me many times, long before psychology studies identified this trait as correlated with almost all types of life success, personal and professional.

He once said to me that he was not a particularly compassionate man. But he helped others a great deal, within his family, and outside it. I think he helped often because he felt a duty. Duty is one of those old words you don’t hear much anymore, but it’s absolutely central to the Hindu faith and culture that dad was raised in. I once walked into a laundromat, and when the owner discovered who my father was, he raved about how my dad had changed his life enabling him to start that business as an immigrant. I would discover many more stories like that.

But Dad never told me those stories. Not only did he not brag about such things, but, astonishingly, he almost never defended himself when people formed negative perceptions about him and spread them to others. He was a strong, powerful personality, warmly gregarious, and harshly critical. Our current naively puritan fashion separates people into good and evil. It seems not to understand humans at all. Testosterone correlates with aggression, AND with positive attitude and friendliness, depending on circumstances. Dad was often critical partly because he was incredibly genuine - he spoke his mind, and this enabled him to be pretty clear of a lot of festering frustrations that limit so many people’s happiness. It also made many people - family, friends and colleagues - like him and love him dearly.

But strong people who speak their minds and don’t defend themselves when others form negative perceptions of them tend to have a lot of mistaken perceptions about them, even among those closest to them. I think that was dad. But it’s somehow refreshing, even noble, that he didn’t care much what others thought of him. He did him. Every breath he took. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to see that as part of growing up.

But he was no gruff John Wayne stereotype. He was highly emotional. When I got to know my parents as an adult I began to see this - I said to him one day “Dad, I realize now, you’re the chick, and mom is the dude”. He laughed, but also nodded. Where my mom was steady and level headed, my Dad had strong emotions, both negative and positive. He hated waste and losing money and “labats” (Gujarati for ‘unreliable person’) but he absolutely revelled in his granchildren, had many strong friendships, and literally sucked the marrow out of life when it came to pleasures like food.

This combination of traits made him very successful. He grew up in Nairobi, Kenya, one of 8  brothers and sisters, the son of two immigrants from India who had married as teenagers and arrived in Africa with almost nothing. My grandfather earned enough to send my Dad to school in England, where he graduated at the top of his university for Optometry. This earned him an invitation to the Queen’s garden party, and a key to the city of London. He’d eventually move to Canada and for decades be managing partner in one of the most successful Optometry clinics of its time.

He met my mom in London at a dance, where my 17 year old mom looked at him and told her friend “that’s the man I’m going to marry”. They kissed that night, and my mom married the first man she had ever kissed. They would spend 60 years together. My mom said their marriage unfolded in waves and cycles of falling in and out love, until their golden years when they found a more steady bliss together. But there was something deeper and rock solid underneath those undulations, that they never questioned their togetherness. In my own marriage, I revel in the joys of love and affection, but my deepest faith and joy comes from something other than sentiment, something rock solid that is more akin to truth. I think I learned to look for this from my parents.

Dad was honest, often harshly so, especially with himself. In an age when comforting delusions seem to be all the rage, Dad called it like he saw it. He often expressed regret about the way he raised us kids. “I never understood the joy of raising children” he said to me once. When his first grandchild was born, I asked him if he’d travel to be present for the birth. “Ah it just shits and eats for the first year Ricken” he said. But each grandchild softened him, and by his third grandson, he was almost like a mother/father figure to him. In his old age he absolutely loved babies. Dad kept growing in connection to his heart right to the end of his days. When my brother and sister and I sat with him in those final days, and we asked for his guidance in our lives going forward, he said “Give it all away. Give away love, give away money.”

I used to see my Dad as a flawed parent. He certainly saw himself that way. But as I’ve grown older I’ve truly come to realize how essential ALL of his traits were to me being able to be the man I want to be. Especially the gruff, tough ones that pushed us hard to be better. Now that I have my own children, I absolutely see how love alone does not raise a healthy child. Kids need discipline, structure, challenge, adversity, as well as the sweetnesses of love and affection and support.

As he lay in hospital last week, I told him how I’d come to realize this, how I’d come to a full appreciation of ALL that my dad was, how grateful I was for ALL of it. I’d never seen my Dad cry before, but the tears streamed down his face in that moment, and mine as I write this.

He went home from the hospital to die, and I stayed with him day and night for a powerfully intimate week as his body failed and he needed help with the simplest of things. He didn’t seem to fear death at all, but welcomed it as he felt his time had come. He cracked jokes and expressed love to us with his final breaths. It was the end of a man who had lived a good life, and was dying happy, and profoundly satisfied.

His last words were “I love you too”.