When my father died, I cried a deep cleansing sob. It was not sadness that I felt but rather a sense of being overwhelmed by the immensity of his life. He was 87 years old but his reach was beyond just the number of years of his life. Even as he lay lifeless before us all, his hands and forearms still looked powerful to me. Everything about him seemed immense, nothing more so than the 14 offspring he fathered and parented.
Born Edward Anthony Reno (Renaud) on May 27, 1915, a mere 7 months after his parents were married. His father, Joseph Théophile Renaud, descended from a long line of French-Canadian mothers and fathers from the River Canard area near Amherstburg Canada and before that, Charlesbourg Quebec. His mother, Josephine Juszkowski, was born in the United States of Polish immigrants from what was then West Prussia.
Born before the U.S. entered World War I, he would see an immense amount of change. He experienced all the 20th Century had to offer to the opening moments of the 21st Century. He lived the rise and fall of the American auto industry through his long employment with the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company.
Two months before World War II broke out in September 1939, he married Jane Yakes (Yakse). They had known each other for many years and had gone to school together, graduating from Our Lady of Lourdes in River Rouge, Michigan. They had their first three children during the War. While the War ended and the world began to put itself back together, his war was just beginning as Jane would die on April 8, 1948. By then they had added a fourth child. In the home movies from that time, we would watch for entertainment as children, they depicted a man I never knew as he smiled and played with his children. Clearly, when Jane died, a part of himself went with her. Their love was a love deeply felt.
The next 2 and a half years could be the script for a Hollywood movie as a young socially awkward widower with four kids, the oldest no more than 7 when their mother passed away, tries to put his life back together. As my father admitted to me on more than one occasion, he never let himself grieve. He had to put his children in the Sarah Fisher Center located on the northwest corner of 12 Mile and Inkster roads and he wrote in his unpublished autobiography that his one desire was to be able to bring his children home. In 1950, that meant he needed a wife.
His sister-in-law Mary solved that problem when she introduced him to Jo Ann “Jennie” Bilak. Married on 7 October 1950, they brought 10 more children into the world in 17 years and the family of 4 became a family of 14. It was a union of a different kind, a love constructed over the next 50 years.
I arrived 15 years into their journey together. My younger memories of my father are of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde character. He could be kind and playful at times. He would make me laugh by rubbing his stubble into my young face when I was still small and young enough to sit on his lap. I remember him holding me at the dinner table in the evenings while he drank a beer and read the newspaper. He gave me a sip once and of course I thought it was the nastiest thing I had ever tasted. He would make things for me, once crafting a putter for me by attaching a block of wood to an old golf club shaft. Another time, he produced a hockey goalie stick out of plywood for me to use.
But my father was also a fearsome presence and he would go into a rage some nights when he could not sleep and he felt we were making too much noise. He could sprint up those stairs impressively fast for a man with arthritic knees. In later years he could not remember doing it but at other times admitted that what he did would be considered child abuse by more current standards. I do not pass judgment on him, to do so would be to miss the opportunity to understand him. But those moments of rage happened and left their mark. It was not the physical pain I remember, but the psychological and emotional effects of those episodes.
In reviewing my memories of him, or perhaps projecting backwards from my own experience as a father, I perceive he found himself faced with an endless series of sub optimal decisions. He had not set out to create a family of 14 or to plumb the depths of his capacity to meet the needs of so many. He would quip whenever he was asked why he had so many kids, “I kept trying to get it right.” I ask myself, how many times did he want to quit and walk away? How many times did he quit on the moment, only to realize this was not an option he could allow himself. How many times was he knocked down but got up to face the grind again? He tried to quit. He had his moments in his Garden of Gethsemane. After his bypass surgery, he told me he had only 5 more years to live at best. He would end up living more than 20 years beyond that boundary. His greatness came through not in his achievements or through talent but in his endurance and in his faith. His life was an enduring conversation with his creator that hounded him to continue his life long journey to learn how to love.
For me, he was ever present, rarely in the foreground except in those darker moments but always there which is why I think his death brought forth such emotion from me in the moment. Even after I had moved away and my communication with him was not frequent, I still knew he was there and that mental omnipresence was foundational and it shaped my experience and my identity. His death on December 13, 2002, disrupted that foundation. Yet, I have always viewed it as his final gift to his family. He endured long enough that all his progeny could arrive from our far-flung homes to be there to witness his departure. He created time and space for us to reflect and be together as a family in his living presence.
The absence I felt upon his death was only momentary. Having just brought my first son into the world 9 months prior, I was now the father, the “Daddy.” That was when I realized that with his death the illusion that he and I were separate beings had given way to the realization that we were one. I could not escape it. There were moments where I would notice my words or behavior and I would not just see my father, I was him. I would see my hands on the steering wheel driving my son to school and they were his hands as he drove us to school. I realized we shared the same emotional, psychological, or spiritual space. The separation illusion created by the discreteness of our physicality was removed.
Even though my father could be verbose and in my younger years, act out in anger, he was an oddly taciturn presence in my life emotionally. As my two sons have grown up, I find myself intimidated by their presences as if their success or failures in life are a judgment on me. We expect too much from our fathers and mothers these days. There is a poem by the poet Li-Young Li entitled “A Story” that I shared with Daddy that he appreciated. It is the story of the relationship between fathers and sons. It is a poem I come back to as I remember my relationship with my father and imagine how my sons will remember their relationship with me. The poem concludes:
But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story?
It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one,
which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.
Drawing by Adam Stanford