I was five years old when my 45-year-old father took an overdose of sleeping pills. According to his journal, which I found many years later, he had become increasingly withdrawn and depressed because he couldn’t make a living to support his family. There are millions of men today who are feeling the same pain. Do not give up. There is hope. Reach out. You aren’t alone.
The last entry in my father’s journal, written six days before he overdosed, still brings me to tears:
“A hundred failures, an endless number of failures, until now, my confidence, my hope, my belief in myself, has run completely out. Middle-aged, I stand and gaze ahead, numb, confused, and desperately worried. All around me I see the young in spirit, the young in heart, with ten times my confidence, twice my youth, ten times my fervor, twice my education.”
“I see them all, a whole army of them, battering at the same doors I’m battering, trying in the same field I’m trying. Yes, on a Sunday morning in early November, my hope and my life stream are both running desperately low, so low, so stagnant, that I hold my breath in fear, believing that the dark, blank, curtain is about to descend.”
Although he didn’t die, our lives were never the same.
I wrote about our twin journeys in my book My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. The epigraph at the beginning of the book captures the experience of millions of children like me. “Kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their dad. And if a father is unwilling or unable to fill that role, it can leave a wound that is not easily healed.” – Roland Warren.
Read the rest of this article on Jed’s blog.
Photo by Rahabi Khan on Unsplash
