Chapter 16 Who Do I Think I Am? #2
I watch the documentary now and I see how flummoxed my father was, so knocked sideways by what we learned about his mother.
It was as if we were describing someone else’s life, as though the coordinates of his existence had been written down wrong from the very start.
He believed these imagined narratives so fully that I’m sure he would have passed a lie detector test. How does one person get so unbridled from a basic truth?
We are all the products of stories we tell about ourselves, stories pieced together from what we know is true and often from stories we wish were true, and of course the ones we wish weren’t.
Merely in the writing of this book, I have had to assess which parts of my life are factual and which are accretions of stories that have fossilized in my life to create something cogent, when in fact each moment we live does not necessarily cohere with the next.
We are so used to believing that our life story is a narrative penned by a cosmic screenwriter who has storyboarded out an entire set of episodes, seven perfect seasons culminating in an incredible finale, when in fact our lives are often just a scatter of scenes that barely hold together.
Sometimes when I read back through my diaries I feel a concussion when contemporary facts, jotted down years ago with no agenda back then other than to put them to paper, barely line up with the stories I share with friends in my day-to-day recounting of my history.
It’s not just a change in perspective; it’s actual facts that simply don’t resemble the arc of the story I tell myself.
It’s as if halfway through the pilot a new character shows up who is forgotten by episode 2.
I’m not sure anyone has a lock on their past; no one has an ironclad memory, let alone a willingness to always face the full truth of who they are and what they did.
So why should my father be any different?
If he was still alive, I might have sat with him, reading these pages.
It wouldn’t have surprised me to hear him say that what I wrote bore no resemblance to his truth whatsoever.
But this is my truth, or what I’ve meticulously mapped from a lesion-ridden brain and a much more reliable written historical record.
Our discontinuity might have been a problem I would have had to deal with; alas, that problem is no longer mine, nor his.
What I’m trying to say is, everything’s a story, everyone a tale told.
My father is no different: he had taken what Wallace Stevens calls the “flickings from finikin to fine finikin” of his life, the little hints and half-truths and bald lies and everything in between, and created an entire world out of what were, essentially, whispers.
And then, when I came along, those small truths and half-truths and lies had somehow coalesced into a justification for him to flee his family and move to Big Sur and raise a completely different family with an entirely new wife.
But somehow, working with him on that documentary, and hearing the entire sordid tale of Paul and Lavina, only served to deepen the love and understanding I had for my father.
I may have wanted him to be someone else, my mother may have wanted the same, and I may have felt great pain and frustration that he constantly seemed to want to tell the various tales he’d created about himself as I grew up.
But given what he’d been through at such a young age, and putting aside as hard as I can the abandonment that I’d always felt lay at the heart of our relationship, it was nevertheless an extraordinary and beautiful effort of love for him to come back fully into my life when my daughter was born.
He was the best possible grandfather to Sadie, even if he had been at times a distant figure to me.
We can only make ourselves better than where we came from.
When given the chance, we can only upgrade our love until it resembles something magical and beautiful.
No one can really ask any more than that of anyone.
And that’s what my father was able to do with Sadie.
For all the pain my relationship with my father has caused me, the love and the need for him is undeniable.
There, in my diary, right after my double mastectomy in 2008, thirty-six years after he left me, an innocent entry jumps out at me like a bright, loving light: “Went to the hospital, snuck in through the emergency room. I could feel the anxiety from everyone except me… Begged for something to calm me… then asked for the drugs again, and my dad.”
In the documentary, my father not unreasonably asked me if there was any good news about his background, given that I’d just informed him of the sordid back-and-forth of his parents as documented in the deepest recesses of a New Jersey records office.
And I found that I was able to say this, and mean every word:
“The beauty of this is that you can be incredibly proud that you broke the pattern and that you raised all of us to have strength and intelligence and talent and fight in us. And you did that with no help from anyone, Dad. And that’s pretty amazing.”
“That’s good enough for me,” he said, choking back tears. I had dropped all this information on him, a camera crew pointing their lenses directly at him. And he’d had the good grace to bear it all, and to respond with compassion to his own life after years of mythmaking.
Working on the documentary had brought back memories of wonderful times with my dad, too. We’d go camping in his white VW bus with the pop-top. Whenever he could pull over at a beach we’d do so, barbecuing and sleeping under the stars. And I loved the way he was always so proud of me.
We all might hope for some great coming to terms with those who’ve wronged us, in which the things we say and do heal forever the wounds we’ve inflicted, or the wounds we’ve endured.
But in the end, it might just be recognizing that someone did something righteous and loving in spite of having scant modeling to draw upon that is enough.
Perhaps after everything, that is the legacy and epitaph my father deserves.
Born into a country coming out of a terrible war, to two people in a highly tempestuous relationship; born into poverty and anger, accusations and alcohol…
given all that, the fact that I grieve him so deeply means something.
I sit on my bed and watch TV, or a friend comes over to visit, or my daughter comes home from school, or I get a text or see a funny Instagram reel, or I sit on my porch and hear the trilling house finches frantic in their attempts to raise a brood of their own, or I’m simply lighting a cigarette, and as the flame of the lighter erupts, there it is: the loss of him, as bright as the orange flame in my hand.
It strikes like an earthquake, the building shaking, the flame held still, as though I can’t remember what to do with it, the cigarette slowly dropping to the floor, me holding on for dear life, unable for a second to breathe or think or cry or shout or do anything approaching a normal response, in agony at the loss of a man who shares my last name, who gave me the name the world knows me by, whose twinkling eyes I can see when I close my own.
At Riverview Cemetery we discovered that Lavina didn’t even have a headstone, but she had left something so much more tangible, so powerful it took my breath away: she had asked that her son be buried with her.
A few months later, my father and I were able to erect a stone. It reads:
DELILAH SHAW
LAVINA SHAW
OVID SHAW
NOV. 25, 1925
OCT. 9, 1921
SEPT. 26, 1878
SEPT. 29, 1953
MAR. 31, 1955
FEB. 13, 1950
Mom, I found you
Despite everything Lavina had been through, she had thought to keep a space for her son for eternity, a fact that moved my dad immensely. In the end, even though my father had been given so little to work with, he still managed to create so much.
My dad was nothing short of a miracle.
The key to life is forgiveness. My father had to learn to forgive his parents, just as I had learned to forgive mine, just as I pray Sadie will one day forgive me for my failings.
It’s all we’ve got.
After my father’s death in 2025, I had to come to terms with the fact that he didn’t leave me.
He didn’t even leave my mom. He left a business—the music business, which might’ve been killing him—for something simpler, something in nature, something beautiful, and focused instead on simplicity and gardening and mountains and beaches.
That’s what Big Sur, and eventually up in the north of California, was for him.
This I can understand. So, I love you, Dad, and I’m glad I got to have you for as long as I did.