More than a year after Dad’s death, I’m learning to recognize him in my relatives and me

This is a First Person column by Bob Babinski, a talent and performance coach who lives in Montreal. For more information about CBC’s First Person stories, please see the FAQ.

Where do you look for someone after they have died?

Can I find my dad in the old pair of rain boots he’d wear while cutting his lawn? Or the red and black lumberjack coat he’d put on during the colder months of yard work? Those weren’t exactly his style, but they were what he chose to wear when doing his chores.

There’s also his wedding ring, which I removed from his finger in the moments after he took his last gasping breath at the hospital. It’s a modest gold band, and surprisingly it resisted more than I expected when I pulled it off. Even the ring was lamenting the final goodbye.

Can I find him in that faded photo from the early 1970s, wearing dark sunglasses and a European-style blue cap and hamming it up for the camera with my three brothers and me? He sure did love us.

Or is it the one with my mother on their wedding day? He was a handsome, dark-haired man but looked heavy-set in a way that I never knew him.

There’s also the one taken in his adolescence — a black-and-white photo in Montreal, standing astride his father. They both look despondent, projecting an unspeakable pain. The war and the exile had taken their toll.

My father was born in Warsaw in 1934, the second of four children. The family was displaced at the start of the Second World War, first to France and then to the U.K., before returning to France. They arrived in Montreal in 1948.

One of our last photos together hides a different kind of pain. My mother took it in the hallway of their home after we’d come back from getting our hair cut together. We are looking at each other with big, heartfelt smiles, but my father was in the late stages of dementia and I didn’t recognize in him the tower of strength I once knew.

In fact, I didn’t recognize much about him except the sound of his voice and the very few phrases he was still using. Sayings like “jolly good” and “haven’t seen you in ages” were playing on repeat in the audio control centre of his brain. And that was when he wasn’t mumbling incoherently.

It was particularly hard because he had been a man of words who made his career in communications, and the earliest symptom of his disease was aphasia.

Behind my smile in that picture, I was suffering, but I have learned from him and my mother not to linger in my hurt.

But where do I go now when I feel the need to to be guided by his wisdom or reassured by his love?

Slowly, I am learning to seek and recognize him in my immediate family. My daughter Melanie, now 27, is imbued with many of her dziadzio‘s strengths, from immeasurable discipline to profound judgment. My three brothers, each in their own way, are increasingly displaying his traits — from playfulness to orderliness and family devotion. I see him in my mother, who is different in so many ways from him, but carries on with a life marked by values and tradition the two of them embraced and held so closely together.

I have been fortunate to have him appear in my dreams on two occasions, but I quickly forgot or suppressed the details. Still, I recall the dreams left me with a tremendous sense of comfort and calm — as if my dad was showing me the way forward.

But you can’t order up those types of dreams on command — or at least I can’t.

Every once in a while, I see him in the mirror. Sometimes it’s in the movement of the lines of my face, and sometimes it’s in how I think or respond to situations.

On a recent trip to Toronto, I caught sight of my reflection while riding a hotel elevator. It was a bit of an out-of-body-experience, as if I was looking at someone else, yet knowing it was me. For a moment, I thought, “Hey, that’s me inside that body there.” And then, for a flash, I saw my dad.

That’s when the elevator door opened, and I snapped out of that altered state.

So where do I look for Tom Babinski now that he’s dead? I suppose there’s something to those rain boots and the lumberjack coat. It’s not so much in the objects themselves, but in his decision to wear them. He may have chosen to pursue a conservative, family-first lifestyle, but he was an original in so many ways — a man who took comfort in being alone and wasn’t in need of outside approval.

Maybe the best place to look is indeed in the mirror, and to think about how and why I make decisions. If I’m making good ones, that’s where I’ll find him.

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