Yoga Far Off the Mat: I am... my father's daughter

I am alive now longer than I had a father living on earth: I was 21 when he told me he was ill and I was 27 when I lost him. He has now been gone for 29 years.

I spent most of my first 20 years not knowing much about who he was but when I learned that he was sick (and about the greater depths and shock of his illness) I knew I was at a crossroads.

I was accustomed to my biological father’s many expressions of leaving. But this time, he could leave the world forever and die, with me never knowing him and I knew that would be on me.

Or, I figured something else could happen: we could do some really challenging things and maybe, quite possibly, we could spend the rest of our lives loving each other and at peace knowing we had fought for each other.

It was a truly hard won battle -

Oftentimes a battle of wills, misunderstandings, heartbreaks,

difficult personalities (including my own), and a brutal illness that kept taking more and more of a life away from a man I was just beginning the process of knowing, holding close, and finding the courage to love even closer.

His long illness gave us the chance to say everything: the very worst of things. A chance to hear them, hold them, stay with them, heal them.

To say hello, humble human to humble human.

And most significantly, a chance to say goodbye without regret.

I suppose now that I look back and through and waaaaaay in, his illness gave me a relationship. An adult relationship. Not a nagging inequitable relationship. A relationship filled with ruthless respect that blew away the borders of others who had no right to infringe. A relationship that required so much of us, of each other and all we were unable to give when we chose intolerance and willfulness and anger and pride but were finally able to continuously choose to be brave and uncover what was beneath those things and choose better.

I love him now without insistence. Without expectation. Without longing. Without sorrow. Without regret. It is a hopeful and regenerative love.

In the end, mercy met grace. That has been the legacy that lived through him and us in ways that opened in me these 29 last years.

And I when I close my eyes, I feel that meeting ruthlessly, softly, warmly, compassionately continuing on.

Dr. John H. Bacharach 1.31.1931- 7.1.1995