Verified by 
My father died last month at the age of 88—not a tragedy, as it was a life well-lived, and one that was blessedly free of significant health concerns for almost all of those 88 years, right up until his passing. But it is a profound loss for me, nonetheless.
As I stumble over the topography of grief and attempt to make sense of his departure, I have found myself thinking about many things. But one theme in particular continues to insist on my consideration—freedom, the entity that all children desperately yearn for and that all parents steadfastly stand in the way of.
My father was a formidable man, made all the more formidable by the complicated conglomerate of contradictions that comprised him. As a child, it seemed to me that he was the strongest, most capable man that I could imagine. As I grew up, he at times appeared to be the most anxious, insecure man I had ever met. Like most of us, of course, he resided somewhere in between the extremes conceived of by the people who knew and loved him.
Nevertheless, he dealt with his vulnerabilities in the way that most of us who inhabit the male gender seem to deal with our vulnerabilities—by making believe that he didn’t have any vulnerabilities.
Like many children in the years prior to adolescence, I did not experience any significant inconsistency between realizing that I needed my family and realizing that I would also one day need to be free of them. But when adolescence arrived on its chariot of smoldering discontent and stormy defiance, and the time came to liberate myself and become my own person, I was stymied in the way that many young men are—who, exactly, was I attempting to liberate myself from? And what did it mean to be free? We often believe that freedom will be found in the successful struggle to be the opposite of our parents—particularly our same-sex parents—and yet development is unavoidably circuitous, and we will all at times find ourselves back where we began, behaving exactly like the forebears whom we vowed to differentiate so completely from. As composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein once observed, "Every son, at one point or other, defies his father, fights him, departs from him, only to return to him."
With this in mind, it is no wonder that one of my most vivid memories as a teenager harks back to another musician. Countless adolescent hours were spent sitting in my room and listening to the song “Like a Rolling Stone” over and over again. The question that Bob Dylan asked—“How does it feel? How does it feel? To be on your own…” was the question that defined my own young adult years, and of course the young adult years of countless others. How does it feel to be on your own? Bob Dylan is our Nobel Laureate for many reasons, but one is because he knew enough not to try to answer that question, only to ask it. How does it feel? It feels like everything…
As a teenager, freedom is delicious—we long for it, hunger for it, thirst for it, fight for it. But freedom is not only delicious, it is dangerous, too. Because with freedom comes responsibility. As political historians constantly remind us, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
And you can’t achieve freedom without leaving something behind, and without, in some ways, being left behind. Liberation does not occur without pain, without loss. While it is surely better to be free than to be enslaved, freedom unavoidably creates its own challenges and, sometimes, its own prisons.
The reality is that I am now freed of my father, just as my children will one day be freed of me. But the problem with this reality is that I don’t want to be free of my father—I want him back. And I cannot have him back. I don’t know where his soul went, but I do know that my heart is emptier without him here, even though it is still full with all that he gave me.
Sons sometimes delude themselves into believing that they will finally be free—that they will only be free—once their father has died. And there is a certain emancipation embedded in the death of a parent—indeed, in the death of anyone who has influenced us, in ways that may be good, bad or (as is usually the case) mixed. But at other times a dead parent can exert a hold on a child—even an adult child—that is far stronger than the chains that bound them when both were alive.
The maturing young adult rightfully needs to pursue freedom when it comes to his relationship with his parents, but, perhaps just as importantly, he also needs to pursue understanding, because the enterprise of understanding our parents ultimately leads us to understand ourselves. And it is understanding ourselves that most effectively frees us, that liberates us to explore the mysterious nature of our own being, where its true depth, character, and essence reside.
Freedom is not a simple matter of releasing ourselves from the shackles of restrictive relationships, but of gazing with clarity and compassion upon the nature of those shackles, and allowing them to soften over time under our firm, gentle, interested gaze. Ultimately, we find freedom inside of us, or not at all.
Whether my father would agree with all of this, I do not know…and now, of course, I will never know. But I am going to choose to assume that he approves from afar. Because while I may never find the full truth that explains exactly who my father was, I know that I am free to try. And perhaps that is the greatest, most enduring gift that he imparted, the freedom to pursue freedom, and, through so doing, to return home to who I am, and to simultaneously and ceaselessly depart from that home in search of who I still may be able to become.
In loving memory of Herbert Sachs, z"l, 1929-2017
