Ask Me
The theme for SFR’s 2021 Writing Contest nonfiction category came from one staffer’s recent reading of What We Owe to Each Other, by philosopher T M Scanlon. We envisioned entries that might opine on how to rebuild the fractured society in which we find ourselves, and though the responses struck our guest judge as unconventional, she also found them “deep.”
Second place Joe Cooke presents the questions of Japanese Naikan, and sentences ending in question marks are even pervasive as Jackson Buckley deconstructs selfhood.
Anson Stevens-Bollen
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“Ask Me”
By Joe Cooke
My father simply spills out of my mouth from time to time, causing me great embarrassment.
I hadn’t seen Dan in twenty years, and he had barely changed in all that time, while I have gone from a robust forty-something to a bald old version of Joe Sr., who, in fact, died just a few years ago with a full head of wavy white hair.
I said to Dan, “You haven’t changed a bit!”
And then the ghost of my father piped in, “Because you were an old guy when I met you!”
I could have crawled under the table and died.
Dan was speaking to us about this idea he’s been researching called Naikan, which is a Japanese form of guided introspection based on pondering three questions about the effects a person has had on your life:
What did I receive from this person?
What did I return to this person?
What troubles, worries, unhappiness did I cause this person?
And purposefully avoiding any consideration of the troubles and difficulties that person caused to you. It’s much like the twelve-step program and many others that take this even one step further to making amends.
Dan graciously avoided my blurt. As a leadership coach, even after twenty years, he still knows me and the demons I struggle with. He has walked with me and guided me in the dark recesses of my psyche, and even though it was only for a few days, they were revealing days.
I owe Dan a debt of gratitude I can never repay. His work with me changed my life, and it wasn’t overnight change, or hyped-up-Tony-Robbins superficial change, it was deep, lasting, slow, sometimes tedious transition that began with awareness and has never ended. Asking questions about what I believe and how I might be a better person has become ingrained into my soul.
As for my father, he was my world when I was younger, despite the physical and verbal abuse. I had nothing to compare that to. I got my college degrees, three of them, to please him, mostly. I sacrificed my own dreams and aspirations to please my mom and to assuage her fears, to provide for my family and to not take visible risks, to be respectable and ordinary. When she died, I felt a great sense of relief for both of us. She suffered in her last years, more than she did being married to my misogynistic, overbearing, disrespectful father, and I can hardly compare my mental anguish with the physical abuse that many children experience, but still, my upbringing did not engender me with a success mindset. My family was poor and first-generation college graduates. My uncle used to say to me, “Hey there, Joey, I see you’re still taking those ugly pills, ha ha ha!” He passed away recently and his widow posted something about how she would miss his witty comments. I have only recently begun to see myself as a handsome man, a competent man, and a loving, empathetic partner.
I felt no sense of relief when my father died. A year before COVID, he came down with a respiratory virus that was going around the assisted living facility. He was 89 years old. I was recovering from a bone marrow transplant and should never have gone into that hospital, but it was my last chance to see him. He didn’t even know I was there. I came down with pneumonia and was not able to attend the memorial service or funeral. I was one of the four siblings that recommended he be placed in a care facility. He wanted to stay in the farmhouse he built with his own hands.
He wrote me out of his will before he died.
I miss the idea of a father more than I do the old man. When I was younger, we would golf together, sometimes fish, less often hunt. He bragged to his golfing buddies about my law degree and my CPA, but shut up as soon as someone asked him what kind of law I practiced. Mom was a teacher. I am a college professor. I built a charter school in rural Washington. He opposed that. Opposed my lifestyle. Opposed my divorce, even though he had cheated on mom many times, and she knew it. Children of the depression, they did not discuss such things. Ever. With anyone.
So, today my father bubbled out of me, and I am ashamed. Like a small child hiding behind the couch, cowering, and Dan asks us three questions:
What did I receive from this person?
What did I return to this person?
What troubles, worries, unhappiness did I cause this person?
I am not yet ready to answer these. I know from past experience though, that I must in order to move on and to receive the gift that has been presented to me. I still hold it here, in my hands, unopened.
Naikan. Introspection. And a few lines from William Stafford:
Some time when the river is ice ask me…
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