Opinion | My Father, Out to Sea

And so, I started asking my father why he left with less anger and resentment, and more curiosity. I no longer wished to settle a score or get revenge; I wanted only to understand what had happened. One evening, in a rare instance when I was free enough from work and family to get dinner with him alone, I asked him “why” for maybe the hundredth time.

He looked down, looked up, shook his head. “I have no idea why I left,” he said. “I think I just went out to sea.”

For a moment, I could feel the anger and violence rising up in me again. But then those old feelings passed, and I saw the man sitting across from me not as my father, but as a confused figure, trapped inside a very complicated story, shaped by currents of history and circumstance far beyond his control. And it occurred to me then that my father, like so many men, had mythologized the act of going “out to sea” not to justify his failures but to valorize them, so that, in seeing them as virtues, he’d never have to face the parts of himself he didn’t understand. In other words, in that moment, I began to see my father for who he really was: a human being.

Last winter, not long after I turned 39 — the age, exactly, when my father left — I experienced what I can only explain as a very powerful distance from the life I was living. It was a raw and icy winter in Maine, and I had grown snappy with the tedious details of daily life. What was required of me as a father — attending to the needs of my kids, being a good husband, going to work, fixing stuff around the house — all began to feel so arbitrary and bland.

One afternoon, when my wife and I were bickering, and my daughters were fighting in the other room, and something very uninteresting at work was demanding my attention, I felt that powerful distance growing. And, rather than do what I usually do as a father — take a deep breath, try to fix the problem by owning up to my side of the blame — I allowed myself to drift a little bit further than usual, into the taboo waters of what I was actually feeling.

And when I was way out there, I had something like a revelation: that maybe this was what it felt like to be my father on the day he left. And when some inner navigational device malfunctioned, he just kept drifting, into the life of another woman, another family, until he was gone. And it occurred to me then, as I made my way back to the shore, that the difference between my father and me wasn’t all that much. In the tradition of our male ancestors — the whale killers of Nantucket — going “out to sea” was in my blood, too. But, as my mother’s son, I’m also pretty good at reading the tides.

Jaed Coffin is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Roughhouse Friday.” He teaches writing at the University of New Hampshire’s creative writing program.

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