‘Running Towards My Father’
— Andrew Sargus Klein
We’re only a few days removed from Father’s Day—a day that runs the full spectrum of sappy and sweet to deeply affirming and generous to painful and hollow. How could it not.
I don’t remember where I heard that parents aren’t like normal people, that the emotional matrix that exists between parent and child is such that whatever transpires between them is wholly separate from any other relationship. That’s not true as an absolute, but it makes a sort of sense to me.
That sense is somewhat paradoxical, in that the intimacy that exists between my parents and me is unexplainable because it’s unlike any other relationship in my life. Its uniqueness defies definition. It’s too foundational.
Devin Kelly is one of my favorite writers, and his essay in LitHub, ‘Running Towards My Father,’ does just about as good a job as any at approaching the unexplainable. The piece is about running, fatherhood, pain, tenderness, and intimacy, and through its mostly plain approach to the topic, it’s able to traverse the edge of this impossible-to-define dynamic. Here, fatherhood is too big for definitions, so we look for the small moments, the small realizations that reflect off the tip of the iceberg.
I used to be upset that my father would bring me to the track while he ran his laps. But there was not much else he could do. My brother and I were just becoming kids when our mother left, and in those early years of being a single father, he didn’t want to leave us alone. I guess, like so much else, I only realized this later.
In this essay there’s a balancing act between the mundane and the spiritual, how one can be a doorway to the other.
What I mean is that, though I have said the opposite before, pain, like time, can’t be overcome, or conquered, or defeated. It’s not there for that. It takes on different forms, becoming chronic or not, self-inflicted or not, tragic or not. But you learn to live with it, to run with it if you can, to breathe into it. And maybe, too, you come to love the ones who carry you, those first teachers of life—a father around a track, a brother accompanying you through the motions of childhood.
It’s a powerful read, and well worth your time.