There is no way out of it. Sooner or later, life comes along to collect what it has given us.
At best we are graced with extra time or perspective enough to take it in before we miss it. In this case, the gifts of extra time and perspective were both granted and graciously received. Yet the collector has come, and a hole has been left that will have no means of being refilled. Not ever.
Make no doubt about it, the joys of this world are only temporary. Hope in this world is a transitory devise at best. Not even the survivors get out of this place alive.
I'm afraid, though, that I am starting at the end of the story. Or at least at the end of a scene. So I will need to back up, and let the full significance of my statements be considered in fuller context. Because in spite of these harsh realities, and maybe on account of them, my resolve in life and appreciation for it's abundance has never been firmer. I remain, after all, seated on the shoulders of a giant.
We were the lucky ones. My father was- and is- one of those great stabilizing forces in life. An even-tempered type who's unflappable disposition and pragmatic resolve knew almost no bounds or limits. Throughout life in our father's shadow, his humor, character, and sensibility were daily commodities that set the tone for the family. For that matter, these very traits also served a role in shaping our appreciation for the world beyond the family, also.
Through his open-mindedness, we would be given a world of diversity. His respect for others meant that we lived in a world populated by people worthy of our respect. His predictability imbued order upon the world itself. For some people, being able to the love the world that we live in can seem to be a tall order. For us and for myself, it was natural byproduct of loving our father, who so loved us.
It is also easy to see now how the impact of his dependable presence and good nature had upon the lives of those around us and in our periphery. In these past days I have been reminded in numerous ways of how large my father's life loomed upon the lives of just about everyone I know.
Dan Rader was one of those instantly knowable and known individuals. Devoid of pretense. Warm. Welcoming. Assured and assuring. It wasn't so much that others were drawn to him, as they were drawn out by him. People felt valued in his presence. Understood and accepted without condition.
His immutable personality would influence the people in his world in a variety of ways. He was many things to many people. A model father. A trusted neighbor. A treasured uncle. In his unassuming way, my father assumed all of these identities. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that these were some of the many roles that were subsumed under his unique, invariable, Dan Rader-ness. However, roles never convey the heart of a person so well as their actions do.
Dan Rader was a man engaged in his world and with everyone he came in contact with. He addressed servers and cashiers by name and would make fleeting quips and comments to complete strangers, who would commonly respond as if they new him already. He was familiar with strangers and generous to the people he knew. If you were to experience going out to dinner with my father, it was not uncommon for him to stealthily arrange to pay a dinner bill without anyone else at the table knowing it.
Dan guffawed at pretension, danced at every opportunity, and provided commentary not expressly requested but generally warranted on the things that most of us chose to simply overlook. More often though, he said nothing when his views and beliefs or values were not shared by others. Although an outspoken advocate for his values, he valued above almost anything else, respect and regard for the people he shared this earth crust with.
As reasonable as he typically was, this was certainly not without exception. He had a pension for balancing one-year olds on the palm of his hand (much to chagrin or delight of who ever may have the fortune to be "entertained" by the spectacle). He also would occasionally enter into lapses in judgment from time so remarkable that the stories coming from them now require careful categorization and study for the benefit of family posterity.
Whereas some function as community pillars, Dan Rader was something less provincial. He was more like the heart and the hands of the community. He was the parent that other parents took assurance in. He cared for other peoples children instinctively, welcomed guests openly, and would lend help when friends or family required like an impulse that would have taken more effort to suppress.
To meet him only once was to be granted a glimmer of his generosity, nurturance, and integrity as a person. People remembered meeting my father. Even under the most incidental circumstances, people would recall something my father did or said with friendly regard and warmth.
Then there were the innumerable things he just knew how to do. From carpentry to car work, finances to furnaces, home electrics and tool work, his mastery over life included physical things and applied skills. It was almost nerve wracking to have him come visit one or our new places, to have him wander off in seeming search for things to fix or improve.
Now all of these things are traits, characteristics, and aptitudes that just about anybody who knew my father could tell you about. But what is harder to convey is exactly how he shaped us as his children.
Almost anybody who might have had the chance to meet my father at some point in life could easily hold him up to be some manner of role model. Seeing him as such would offer a compelling example of how to go about life, viewing him as a living embodiment of how one could treat others, provide for his family, or how to be in the world. Anybody who would come to know my father at any capacity, had an example in him in a unique, alternate, and particular way of being. This is true to be said of any of us, for that matter. However, in the case of my father, I was privileged to see how he affected others.
I saw this directly when it came to my father's influence on other fathers, for instance. On multiple occasions, fathers of people I know would make a point to tell me how they "respected" my father. As if to say that in my father, they found an inspiring example of how to father.
However, for myself and my siblings, my father's influence would be somewhat different than from the type of influence he would have on others. This is because for my siblings and I my father (along with my mother) provided to us not so much an example of how to be, but offered THE example of how to be.
The theory of Individual Psychology includes the concept of a gender guiding line, which is distinguished from the idea of a role model. Gender guiding line refers to the influence that an individual's parents play in shaping their conscious as well as unconscious expectations and standards of what it means to be a "man" or a "woman".
Whereas someone can look upon the behavior of a given role model and decide more or less for themselves whether they would choose to emulate this individual, the influence of a parent's role is much more pronounced and insidious and does not occur as a matter of choice. In fact parent's influence is often experienced as being inevitable.
As such, all of those things that made my father so unique as and admirable as an individual, his pragmatism, confidence, humor, nurturance, character, and numerous abilities, were taken for granted by my siblings and I as expectations for ourselves to live up to and as models of how men are or how they ought to be. Although they may have "broke the mold" when making my father, for us, he is the mold!
At times this would serve as clear blessing, as this gentle, considerate, reasonable entity would shape who we are and how we would be in the world. But on the other hand, Dan Rader would also offer some very big shoes to fill and set a standard for the family that would not be easily achieved. In this way, the four of us who adore and strive to emulate our father, have also needed to come to awareness of where his legacy butts up against our personal reality.
In adult life, we eventually can claim for ourselves the aspects of our parents that we will hold on to for ourselves, and what we chose to honor as being distinctive in them. But none of this fully absolves us from how our parents continue to shape us in terms of our private feelings and thinking.
Since a parent's influence often shapes us beyond our full comprehension, memories can hold the key to how we have come to make sense of ourselves in relation to the world around us and in this case, our parents.
One memory that I have treasured lately, is the recollection of sitting on my father's shoulders one bright and clear day, and the sense that I had above the world and close to my father. I recall to this day, the coarseness of his hair, the thrill of being up high, and the secure serenity he provided me. It's a memory that I have been reminded of numerous times throughout life, and in particular when I have seen my own children along with my nieces and nephews up on his shoulders.
Although personally comforting recollection to me, as a trained psychologist certain key aspects of the memory stand out that provide a snapshot of how omnipresent my father's influence would be upon me. It is clear in this memory how my relationship with my father was and is very loving and favorable. However, the memory also highlights just how "high above" things he seemed to be, and how necessary his support would be for me to gain the perspective I would so appreciate in life.
Dan Rader was literally there, through the better and worse, to do for us what would have seemed impossible on our own. Although this would constitute a comfort as a child, to now realize that my father will no longer be with us in the same way will require us as Dan's protege to find the ground beneath our feet and stand in his place. To truly live up to the standard of a man who carried so many of us upon his shoulders, requires us to get down from the secure perch of perspective and to test the strength of my own knees, in world in need of responsible people.
There are already so ways in my life that I have found his deep and unshakable presence. As a therapist it is my internalized relationship with my father that has allowed me to facilitate the healing necessary for rectifying the consequences of parental abuse, neglect, abandonment, and loss. This is something that cannot really be taught through formal education or training, as we can only provide for others what we ourselves have been already given to begin with.
So in the clinical setting, where privacy and confidentiality are prized above just about any thing else, there is my father, Dan Rader, regional sales director for the tool and die industry. In these moments, my father does through me what he had instinctively done for as long as I have known him. He welcomes in other people's children and provides the assurance, predictability, and warm regard of a community father.
I experience him in more common settings, also. In the grocery store, at a restaurant, in the terminal in an airport, whenever I am surrounded by the ebb and flow of other people, I remain influenced by his friendly and engaging example, ever invested in a world of other people. I experience him in my relationships with my neighbors, my friends, and with my friend's children. In fact, everywhere that I will go, and in everything that I do, I will find my father with me now.
However, none of this truly absolves the loss that I mentioned at the beginning of my reflections. My father, the person, is gone. No longer will we hear his laugh or experience his whit. No longer will we be able to share with him our joys and struggles, no longer will we be able to be provided the example in him of that person that we have so loved and emulated. There will be an empty spot whenever we come together, and an empty sport whenever we go apart.
If we are not careful, we may mistake our current disposition for an injustice. In the pain of our loss we may turn to anguish and feel that we have in some way been wronged. We may feel that our time with my father was robbed from us. We may become angered by the awful, inescapable suffering of this kind and selfless man, as he moved finally into retirement and to the promise of vacation and beginning a new chapter to life. In so doing, we may delude ourselves into believing that the order of things is fair or just. That somehow we deserved my father to begin with, or that suffering has anything at all to do with justice. Because the fact is, there is no reason that our family was blessed for all of these years with a man like my father. Nor is there any reason that we have enjoyed health, material comforts, or the access to shared social benefits and resources that we have had.
The world is not fair. It's rigged. The decks are stacked against many. And it's for this reason, that the things that my father taught us, that he modeled for us and lived up to need to be taken seriously. The great collector will return. Our time is limited. The hour of the arrival is not known for any of us. These two things remain our gifts: time and perspective. We can take nothing else for granted.
Now is the time to accept with thanks and humility what has been made, however temporary, available to us. The things that we have been given, we have time enough to share them. To make them known.
Friends and neighbors! Open your selves up! Relinquish your fears. Balance those children on your hands, shoulders, and in your hearts! The world remains unfair and unpredictable, so we strive for these things forever more. Our time on this earth is ours.
Today, Dan Rader is dead. But we need not lay him to rest. Dan Rader - like all good persons- remains active in us, between us, and through us. Today now, he also goes beyond us. Once again, one step ahead of us, guiding and showing us the way. Passing from the things that we can see and feel and measure, on to the realm that measures all things. Goodbye father. We shall remain with you, now, without you.
 |
| Dan Rader, St. Mary's School, Mayville WI @1960 |
Make no doubt about it, the joys of this world are only temporary. Hope in this world is a transitory devise at best. Not even the survivors get out of this place alive.
I'm afraid, though, that I am starting at the end of the story. Or at least at the end of a scene. So I will need to back up, and let the full significance of my statements be considered in fuller context. Because in spite of these harsh realities, and maybe on account of them, my resolve in life and appreciation for it's abundance has never been firmer. I remain, after all, seated on the shoulders of a giant.
We were the lucky ones. My father was- and is- one of those great stabilizing forces in life. An even-tempered type who's unflappable disposition and pragmatic resolve knew almost no bounds or limits. Throughout life in our father's shadow, his humor, character, and sensibility were daily commodities that set the tone for the family. For that matter, these very traits also served a role in shaping our appreciation for the world beyond the family, also.
Through his open-mindedness, we would be given a world of diversity. His respect for others meant that we lived in a world populated by people worthy of our respect. His predictability imbued order upon the world itself. For some people, being able to the love the world that we live in can seem to be a tall order. For us and for myself, it was natural byproduct of loving our father, who so loved us.
It is also easy to see now how the impact of his dependable presence and good nature had upon the lives of those around us and in our periphery. In these past days I have been reminded in numerous ways of how large my father's life loomed upon the lives of just about everyone I know.
Dan Rader was one of those instantly knowable and known individuals. Devoid of pretense. Warm. Welcoming. Assured and assuring. It wasn't so much that others were drawn to him, as they were drawn out by him. People felt valued in his presence. Understood and accepted without condition.
His immutable personality would influence the people in his world in a variety of ways. He was many things to many people. A model father. A trusted neighbor. A treasured uncle. In his unassuming way, my father assumed all of these identities. Or perhaps it would be more appropriate to say that these were some of the many roles that were subsumed under his unique, invariable, Dan Rader-ness. However, roles never convey the heart of a person so well as their actions do.
Dan Rader was a man engaged in his world and with everyone he came in contact with. He addressed servers and cashiers by name and would make fleeting quips and comments to complete strangers, who would commonly respond as if they new him already. He was familiar with strangers and generous to the people he knew. If you were to experience going out to dinner with my father, it was not uncommon for him to stealthily arrange to pay a dinner bill without anyone else at the table knowing it.
Dan guffawed at pretension, danced at every opportunity, and provided commentary not expressly requested but generally warranted on the things that most of us chose to simply overlook. More often though, he said nothing when his views and beliefs or values were not shared by others. Although an outspoken advocate for his values, he valued above almost anything else, respect and regard for the people he shared this earth crust with.
As reasonable as he typically was, this was certainly not without exception. He had a pension for balancing one-year olds on the palm of his hand (much to chagrin or delight of who ever may have the fortune to be "entertained" by the spectacle). He also would occasionally enter into lapses in judgment from time so remarkable that the stories coming from them now require careful categorization and study for the benefit of family posterity.
Whereas some function as community pillars, Dan Rader was something less provincial. He was more like the heart and the hands of the community. He was the parent that other parents took assurance in. He cared for other peoples children instinctively, welcomed guests openly, and would lend help when friends or family required like an impulse that would have taken more effort to suppress.
To meet him only once was to be granted a glimmer of his generosity, nurturance, and integrity as a person. People remembered meeting my father. Even under the most incidental circumstances, people would recall something my father did or said with friendly regard and warmth.
Then there were the innumerable things he just knew how to do. From carpentry to car work, finances to furnaces, home electrics and tool work, his mastery over life included physical things and applied skills. It was almost nerve wracking to have him come visit one or our new places, to have him wander off in seeming search for things to fix or improve.
Now all of these things are traits, characteristics, and aptitudes that just about anybody who knew my father could tell you about. But what is harder to convey is exactly how he shaped us as his children.
Almost anybody who might have had the chance to meet my father at some point in life could easily hold him up to be some manner of role model. Seeing him as such would offer a compelling example of how to go about life, viewing him as a living embodiment of how one could treat others, provide for his family, or how to be in the world. Anybody who would come to know my father at any capacity, had an example in him in a unique, alternate, and particular way of being. This is true to be said of any of us, for that matter. However, in the case of my father, I was privileged to see how he affected others.
I saw this directly when it came to my father's influence on other fathers, for instance. On multiple occasions, fathers of people I know would make a point to tell me how they "respected" my father. As if to say that in my father, they found an inspiring example of how to father.
However, for myself and my siblings, my father's influence would be somewhat different than from the type of influence he would have on others. This is because for my siblings and I my father (along with my mother) provided to us not so much an example of how to be, but offered THE example of how to be.
The theory of Individual Psychology includes the concept of a gender guiding line, which is distinguished from the idea of a role model. Gender guiding line refers to the influence that an individual's parents play in shaping their conscious as well as unconscious expectations and standards of what it means to be a "man" or a "woman".
Whereas someone can look upon the behavior of a given role model and decide more or less for themselves whether they would choose to emulate this individual, the influence of a parent's role is much more pronounced and insidious and does not occur as a matter of choice. In fact parent's influence is often experienced as being inevitable.
As such, all of those things that made my father so unique as and admirable as an individual, his pragmatism, confidence, humor, nurturance, character, and numerous abilities, were taken for granted by my siblings and I as expectations for ourselves to live up to and as models of how men are or how they ought to be. Although they may have "broke the mold" when making my father, for us, he is the mold!
At times this would serve as clear blessing, as this gentle, considerate, reasonable entity would shape who we are and how we would be in the world. But on the other hand, Dan Rader would also offer some very big shoes to fill and set a standard for the family that would not be easily achieved. In this way, the four of us who adore and strive to emulate our father, have also needed to come to awareness of where his legacy butts up against our personal reality.
In adult life, we eventually can claim for ourselves the aspects of our parents that we will hold on to for ourselves, and what we chose to honor as being distinctive in them. But none of this fully absolves us from how our parents continue to shape us in terms of our private feelings and thinking.
Since a parent's influence often shapes us beyond our full comprehension, memories can hold the key to how we have come to make sense of ourselves in relation to the world around us and in this case, our parents.
 |
| My Son Solomon, on the shoulders of my father |
Although personally comforting recollection to me, as a trained psychologist certain key aspects of the memory stand out that provide a snapshot of how omnipresent my father's influence would be upon me. It is clear in this memory how my relationship with my father was and is very loving and favorable. However, the memory also highlights just how "high above" things he seemed to be, and how necessary his support would be for me to gain the perspective I would so appreciate in life.
Dan Rader was literally there, through the better and worse, to do for us what would have seemed impossible on our own. Although this would constitute a comfort as a child, to now realize that my father will no longer be with us in the same way will require us as Dan's protege to find the ground beneath our feet and stand in his place. To truly live up to the standard of a man who carried so many of us upon his shoulders, requires us to get down from the secure perch of perspective and to test the strength of my own knees, in world in need of responsible people.
There are already so ways in my life that I have found his deep and unshakable presence. As a therapist it is my internalized relationship with my father that has allowed me to facilitate the healing necessary for rectifying the consequences of parental abuse, neglect, abandonment, and loss. This is something that cannot really be taught through formal education or training, as we can only provide for others what we ourselves have been already given to begin with.
So in the clinical setting, where privacy and confidentiality are prized above just about any thing else, there is my father, Dan Rader, regional sales director for the tool and die industry. In these moments, my father does through me what he had instinctively done for as long as I have known him. He welcomes in other people's children and provides the assurance, predictability, and warm regard of a community father.
I experience him in more common settings, also. In the grocery store, at a restaurant, in the terminal in an airport, whenever I am surrounded by the ebb and flow of other people, I remain influenced by his friendly and engaging example, ever invested in a world of other people. I experience him in my relationships with my neighbors, my friends, and with my friend's children. In fact, everywhere that I will go, and in everything that I do, I will find my father with me now.
However, none of this truly absolves the loss that I mentioned at the beginning of my reflections. My father, the person, is gone. No longer will we hear his laugh or experience his whit. No longer will we be able to share with him our joys and struggles, no longer will we be able to be provided the example in him of that person that we have so loved and emulated. There will be an empty spot whenever we come together, and an empty sport whenever we go apart.
If we are not careful, we may mistake our current disposition for an injustice. In the pain of our loss we may turn to anguish and feel that we have in some way been wronged. We may feel that our time with my father was robbed from us. We may become angered by the awful, inescapable suffering of this kind and selfless man, as he moved finally into retirement and to the promise of vacation and beginning a new chapter to life. In so doing, we may delude ourselves into believing that the order of things is fair or just. That somehow we deserved my father to begin with, or that suffering has anything at all to do with justice. Because the fact is, there is no reason that our family was blessed for all of these years with a man like my father. Nor is there any reason that we have enjoyed health, material comforts, or the access to shared social benefits and resources that we have had.
The world is not fair. It's rigged. The decks are stacked against many. And it's for this reason, that the things that my father taught us, that he modeled for us and lived up to need to be taken seriously. The great collector will return. Our time is limited. The hour of the arrival is not known for any of us. These two things remain our gifts: time and perspective. We can take nothing else for granted.
Now is the time to accept with thanks and humility what has been made, however temporary, available to us. The things that we have been given, we have time enough to share them. To make them known.
Friends and neighbors! Open your selves up! Relinquish your fears. Balance those children on your hands, shoulders, and in your hearts! The world remains unfair and unpredictable, so we strive for these things forever more. Our time on this earth is ours.
Today, Dan Rader is dead. But we need not lay him to rest. Dan Rader - like all good persons- remains active in us, between us, and through us. Today now, he also goes beyond us. Once again, one step ahead of us, guiding and showing us the way. Passing from the things that we can see and feel and measure, on to the realm that measures all things. Goodbye father. We shall remain with you, now, without you.
 |
| Mom and dad, welcoming my wife and I to our own home. |
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