Archive for the 'Father' Category

On “O Du Fröhliche”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 19, 2008
in Family, Father, Holidays and Music
. 14 Comments

Though I may have a stray post up now and again, I’ll be away from blogging until at least December 29. A Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all.

I thought about making my last pre-Christmas post a “top ten favorite carols” list. Perhaps next year. Rather, I’m thinking this morning of the one which has been in my head all week: “O Du Fröhliche.” (Here’s an old Youtube clip of the Vienna Boys Choir singing a rather stately version.) Along with “The Holly and the Ivy”, “O du Fröhliche” would certainly make the upper end of any top ten list I compiled.

But I write this morning thinking of my father, for this was indisputably his favorite carol, and his memory of hearing it sung as a small boy is especially poignant. My father was born in Austria in 1935 to a Catholic mother and a Jewish father who had converted to Rome. After Hitler’s takeover of Austria in 1938, my grandparents took their children and fled successfully to England, living a refugee life in London, then Ellesmere Port, and finally rural Berkshire. (Most of the rest of my grandfather’s family perished.) When World War Two broke out, however, the British government interned my grandfather. A citizen of an enemy nation, it didn’t seem to matter — at least at first — that he was an ethnically Jewish refugee from Hitler. He was released after about a year, but spent the first Christmas of the war — 1939 — in what my father says was a reasonably comfortable camp in Scotland. (He was not interned with actual prisoners of war.) Women and children were not interned; England’s policy was apparently more lenient than that shown by the Americans to the Japanese.

That Christmas, when my father was four and a half or so, my grandmother took him and his older sister on a long train trip up to the north to visit my grandfather in his camp. My father remembers very little of the visit, but he does remember that the assembled internees (all of whom were either German or Austrian men) sang some Christmas songs. The last one they sang was “O Du Fröhliche”, and my father remembers that his mother and many other grownups wept. For the rest of his life, he was very fond of the carol.

I’ve sung “O du Fröhliche” all my life. And I’ve heard many recordings. But the version I love best is one I’ve never heard. I often like to imagine the one which was sung in December, 1939 by dozens of German-speaking men, ranging from adolescence to late middle age, internees in spartan barracks in Scotland. I imagine their mostly unprofessional voices, and their faces as they gazed at their families who had come to spend a few Christmas moments with them. I think of my grandfather, a then 37 year-old physician, himself descended from a line of Moravian rabbis, but now a loyal son of Holy Mother Church; I imagine his mixed feelings at being safe from Hitler only to be shut away from his family in this strange northern country. And I imagine my father, not quite five, missing his daddy as I, a man of 41, miss mine this Christmas.

It’s a fine carol.

Merry Christmas.

Modes of grieving: my father, Matilde, and disenfranchisement

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 12, 2008
in Chinchillas, Family, Father and Grief
. 8 Comments

I just came across this nice discussion of “disenfranchised grief” and masculinity in the Feministing community.

Disenfranchised grief is grief over a loss that is not conventionally acknowledged or socially acceptable in your culture. Couples who experience infertility, terminate pregnancy due to some genetic disorder that the fetus had, or have a miscarriage often experience disenfranchised grief. Other examples include grief over the incarceration of a loved one, the death of a pet, the breakup of an unacknowledged relationship (i.e. gay couples who haven’t come out yet or have been rejected by their families) or the death of a partner in an unacknowledged relationship, the “loss” of one’s parent due to Alzheimer’s, the death of an ex-spouse or lover, the recurring grief of a birth mother who gave up a child for adoption, and the grief of an adopted child for the relationship they might have had with their birth parent(s). In many of these cases the people who surround the grieving individual may not understand the depth of the grief involved, or may think it’s something the individual should be able to get over already. In other cases, such as in the case of unacknowledged relationships, the individual may not be able to share their grief at all.

So as I’ve been thinking about this it occurs to me that men may often experience disenfranchised grief more often than women, because it’s more socially acceptable for women to express their grief, and because men are often expected not to have the same depth of feeling. I’ve known several men who really wanted children, and were deeply emotionally invested in having a family. When they (and their partner) encountered infertility or miscarriage, their grief was barely even acknowledged, while their partner received a lot of support. When men do express their grief over infertility or a miscarriage, or don’t “get over it” quickly enough, they’re viewed with a mixture of confusion and disapproval. So I think this is one example of the damage a patriarchal culture inflicts on men. What do you think of this? Are there other examples of disenfranchised grief I haven’t thought of? Are there cases where a woman’s grief is more disenfranchised than a man’s?

Check out the comments below the original post (made by Rachel in WY).

Without knowing the term, I’ve written several times about “disenfranchised grief.” I’ve written about my strong and enduring reaction to my high school girlfriend’s abortion. My most instant connection to that sense dates from June 2006, when I lost my father and our beloved first chinchilla, Matilde, only eleven days apart. I wrote about both deaths, but when I announced Matilde’s death, I shut off comments. I knew that news of my father’s death would elicit tremendous sympathy, but I feared that posting about my devastation at the passing of a 600 gram rodent (albeit one who had captured our hearts and given rise to our rescue charity) would also elicit ridicule. And at that point, if even one idiot had made fun of our grief over the death of Matilde, I would have been crushed. I got so many sincere notes from kind folks who read the post and were unable to comment that I opened up a later post. My own fear of being teased led me to be more mistrustful than might have been necessary. Continue reading ‘Modes of grieving: my father, Matilde, and disenfranchisement’

Of dreams and fathers: Barack Obama, growing up abroad, baseball, cricket, and daddies

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on December 2, 2008
in Father, Foreign Policy, Memories, Politics, Race and Traveling
. 0 Comments

Among the various books I read on our trip to New Zealand was Barack Obama’s Dreams from my Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. I’d put it off for some time, but started it on the long flight down to Auckland and finished it in a Sydney hotel room. It’s the best book I’ve read by a president (or president-elect), and I’ve at least glanced at most of what our recent office-holders have produced. (I tried to read Bill Clinton’s massive autobiography, but ended up getting overwhelmed by detail, and skipped about.)

It’s not original to note that Barack Obama is an extraordinary figure, absolutely unlike anyone we’ve ever seen in American politics — at least, absolutely unlike anyone who has risen so far, so fast. Dreams from my Father, which is all the more powerful because it seems to be written by a man without any conscious sense that his words might be used against him someday, reveals Obama to be more exceptional than I had previously imagined.

It would be a bit ridiculous to say that I identify with our president-elect. I not only have not achieved what he has achieved, I have not had to overcome the obstacles he has had to overcome. (Though addiction and mental illness posed challenges that my socio-economic and ethnic circumstances did not.) But all good autobiography contains universal themes; we all have parents, after all, about whom we have often mixed feelings. Many of us struggle to discern a purpose and direction for our lives, and go through a quarter-life crisis of confidence. Barack Obama’s journey, in a broad sense, is a common one, though in its specifics it is both unique and jaw-droppingly impressive.

One of the things that I like best about Obama is that he has lived abroad; indeed, more than any other president in recent memory, he spent a significant portion of his childhood outside America (in Indonesia). Obama doesn’t hold dual citizenship as I do, and despite the slurs of a handful of ignoramuses, his devotion to the United States is unquestioned by any serious person. But he has tasted living abroad, and not only doing so, but doing so in comparative poverty. Not all international experience is the same. It’s one thing for the scion of a wealthy family to do a junior year at the Sorbonne, living off parent’s money; it’s another thing altogether to live as Obama did as a child, playing with street children in rural Indonesia. Anyone who is going to make claims for American exceptionalism ought to have had some first-hand experiences of living in — and not just visiting — other parts of the world. Though the child is not always the father of the man, reading Obama’s biography makes me hope that it will be so, particularly in regards to how he thinks about America’s place in the world. Continue reading ‘Of dreams and fathers: Barack Obama, growing up abroad, baseball, cricket, and daddies’

Wimmerata and the Hubert Schwyzer Quartet

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on September 6, 2008
in Father and Music
. 1 Comment

If you’re going to be in the Santa Barbara area tomorrow, there’s a concert honoring my father and raising money for the Westmont College quartet that will bear Dad’s name. Actually, two concerts: “fiddling” Americana from 4-6PM and a classical concert from 7:00PM on. $25 dollars at the door; the concert is at Santa Barbara’s Trinity Episcopal Church.

Hubert Schwyzer Quartet Update

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 11, 2008
in Father and Music
. 0 Comments

Scott Craig at Westmont College kindly sent me a link to this press release: Newly-Crafted Instruments Resonate Well. It begins:

The Hubert Schwyzer Quartet, a unique ensemble of instruments commissioned by Westmont, is taking shape under the hands of master violin maker James Wimmer at his workshop in Santa Barbara. Named for a former UC Santa Barbara philosophy professor and cellist, the quartet will be used by Westmont faculty and students during the school year and loaned to the Music Academy of the West in the summer months.

You can see pictures here.

The whole family is very eager to hear the first music produced by the quartet that will bear my father’s name in perpetuity. When you think about what lasts and endures, few human-made things are still useable centuries after they were made. Good instruments, however, can remain playable for three or four hundred years if well cared for. Dedicating a string quartet in someone’s memory, in a sense, is more lasting than getting their name up on a building.

We are still fund-raising for Westmont and its music program. You can, if you choose, give here; note Schwyzer Quartet in the gift designation area.

Dad’s DVD

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 23, 2008
in Father
. 0 Comments

Another busy day. My wife and I were up in Santa Barbara yesterday; my sisters and step-mother hosted an intimate garden gathering at their home to mark the second anniversary of my father’s death. It’s hard to believe that two years have passed; we got to see the “final cut” of a DVD based on interviews done with Dad in the final weeks of his life. When he received his final prognosis, giving him only weeks to live, he consented to be filmed with his wife and children answering questions and talking about his life. We’re very fortunate to have his voice and his face preserved for us forever.

Interview the living, people, and preserve those interviews as best you can.

I’ll see if I can get another post up later today.

Missing Dad

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 14, 2008
in Father
. 7 Comments

Tomorrow is Father’s Day, the second such since my father died two years ago next Sunday. I find myself missing him more this year than last; my experience with death is that the second and third anniversaries of the passing of a loved one are often harder than the first. With the first anniversary — or birthday, or other holiday — there’s a sense that one needs to be prepared for a significant emotional hit. But we live in a culture that puts a time limit on grief, and there’s an expectation that things will “get easier” each passing year. That’s true in general but not in specifics; while the overall trend of sadness is downward, pain can “suddenly spike” when least expected.

There’s also in me, I think, a kind of embarrassment about acknowledging that grief endures. No one told me that there would be a time limit on how long I would be allowed to weep for my father, but I’ve imposed one on myself. And it doesn’t seem that I am doing a good job of adhering to this self-created limit.

My father is gone, and I am not yet a father — I feel stuck in a gap between what has passed on and what has not yet come. May there not be many more such third Sundays in June.

“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 23, 2008
in Books, Eating disorders, Father and Youth
. 11 Comments

When I was in grad school, I started doing quite a bit of reading about eating disorders. Some of that interest was personal, as I developed (relatively late) a rather serious obsession with food and exercise in college. Some of it was intellectual, as it intersected nicely with my interest in women’s studies. At one point, back in 1992-93, I got involved in an outpatient treatment program for folks with disordered eating at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. It was a mixed-sex group, and I was one of only two guys in a group of about fifteen students who met weekly with a clinician.

I remember that no topic came up as often as did parents. And the clinician, at least, generally asked questions about mothers. Indeed, I heard her once say something like “The first question I ask most women who have eating disorders is: ‘what is your relationship like with your mother’?” Most of the research done on anorexics and bulimics has been done on women; indeed, it’s only been relatively recently that we see a formal acknowledgement that eating disorders are becoming more prevalent among men. And for over a century, the assumption of therapists and doctors has been that a young woman’s disordered eating is almost always tied up in the invariably complex and entangled relationship she has with her mother. As Joan Brumberg illustrates in her essential monograph, Fasting Girls: A History of Anorexia Nervosa, as early as the 1870s doctors suggested that food refusal in middle-class girls was a form of quiet rebellion against the strictures and limitations for women modelled by their mothers.

There’s a lot to be said for that analysis, but it often has the unfortunate tendency to let dads off the hook. In her wonderful Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, Courtney Martin offers a chapter called “The Male Mirror: Her Father’s Eyes”. Some of what she says is new, some of it has been said before, but her analysis of the role of the father-daughter relationship and its role in the development of eating disorders is very good, and it offers a special challenge to those of us eager to help adult men transform the ways in which they relate to young people, particularly their own teenage children. Continue reading ‘“Fun Dads”, “Strict Moms”, the myth of male weakness and female anorexia: some further thoughts on Courtney Martin’s book’

Waxing poetic at the Sandpiper Lodge

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 3, 2008
in Age and Father
. 2 Comments

I’m blogging from the Sandpiper Lodge in Santa Barbara, a place I’ve stayed quite a few times on previous visits to this, the town of my birth. This afternoon, I rented a large Ford E350 van from the Avis franchise in Pasadena, drove to LAX, and picked up my brother, sister-in-law, and their three children who had just flown in from England. We loaded all their gear into the gas-guzzling monstrosity that is the E350, and drove up here to Santa Barbara. My brother’s family is staying at my stepmother’s. I considered driving back down to Pasadena tonight (it’s 92 miles, door to door), but I’m beat from a hard week of traveling and teaching. The Sandpiper has free wireless and decent coffee in the morning, so this works for me. I’ll drive back down to the ‘Dena tomorrow morning, and my wife and I will be back up on Sunday for a more extended family visit.

I have a lot of serious things I want to blog about, mostly in the usual categories. (And you may notice, I’m rapidly adding more categories on the sidebar, trying for greater precision). Tonight, I’m too tired for anything serious. Tonight, I’m by myself in a cheerful two-star motel in the city where I was born, and where I watched my father die, and I’m feeling both deeply exhausted and deeply content. I’m wearing polka-dot boxers, a half-buttoned dress shirt, a wedding ring and not a damn thing more; I’ve been here less than an hour and somehow have already managed to make a mess. (I’ll leave the room tidy in the morning — I am very good about not making more work for the maids.)

A moment ago, I stood in the harsh fluorescent light of the bathroom, struck by how old my face looks — and how much like my Dad I am becoming. Both in my ageing and in my growing resemblance to my father, I feel blessed. A month shy of 41, I am living out what Donald Justice wrote in the second part of his most perfect and famous poem:

…And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father’s tie there in secret,

And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something

That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope
Behind their mortgaged houses.

Something is filling me, deep and enormous and ancient and good. And there is still so much more to come.

Men, mortality, stewardship, love

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on January 2, 2008
in Age, Body, Family, Father, Favorite Posts 2008, Men and Masculinity and Veganism
. 9 Comments

It’s not a conducive time for posting ’round these parts. We leave for the Philippines on Saturday night; we’ll be back on Friday, January 11. I have lectures to prep and packing to do.

My father-in-law died early Sunday morning, and we have been busy with taking care of family and with funeral arrangements. Sunday afternoon, my wife and I spent several hours dealing with the cemetary, the mortuary, and all the minutiae that come with death. I’ve gotten too familiar lately with all the details that survivors cope with in the aftermath of a loved one’s passing.

My Dad died eighteen months ago, at 71. My father-in-law died three days ago at 63. Over and over again, the words “much too young” echo in my head. My father’s father died at only 44 (in a car accident); my mother’s father died at 62. Both of my wife’s grandfathers died relatively young as well. Though the causes were all different, we both come from families where there are plenty of older women — and too few older men. The statisticians tell me that men in America and Europe should live to see at least 72, but for my wife and for me, neither our fathers nor any one of our four grandfathers made it to that age. Meanwhile, all four of our grandmothers made it to at least 80, and most well beyond.

So in addition to the grief over losing a loved one, I’m feeling this week an acute sense of fragility. Some of that is just the reminder — of the sort we always get when we’re confronted with death — of our own mortality. But in my personal experience (and the experience of my family), dying “too young” is a largely male phenomenon. Though some of these deaths were due to poor lifestyle choices, the emotional impression I am left with is that men are somehow more vulnerable than women. Continue reading ‘Men, mortality, stewardship, love’

Hubert Schwyzer Quartet

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on July 12, 2007
in Father and Music
. 2 Comments

There’s a nice little notice in the Montecito Journal about Westmont College and the Hubert Schwyzer Quartet. I am quoted.

My younger siblings be smarter than me is!

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 22, 2007
in Family and Father
. 3 Comments

It feels like the first full day of summer. It’s hot, and soon I’ll be hitting the trails of the Arroyo for a morning run. I’ve switched sunscreens — I’m trying to get rid of all the parabens in my grooming products, and am trying to make sure everything I put on my body is vegan, never tested on animals, and without suspected carcinogens. So far, I really like Alba Botanica.

No doubt you’ve seen the story about the statistical probability that first-born sons will turn out a wee bit smarter than their younger siblings. Though I don’t consider myself feeble-minded, I can say with absolute certainty that this did not prove to be the case in my family.

Both my younger brother and I were tested in the mid-1970s with the old Stanford-Binet IQ test. I did very well, but my brother was off the charts, quite a few points above me. I was twelve when, pilfering my mother’s desk, I found the two papers with our relative results — it was a memorable but hardly crushing moment in my youth. (I was an incorrigible snoop from about age 8 to 13). Luckily (because sometimes it seems to be more attributable to grace or luck than to virtue), I’ve never been jealous of my brother’s first-rate mind, or of his accomplishments. I will note that he and my two younger sisters followed me to Berkeley; each sibling had a higher GPA than his or her predecessor. The Schwyzer family defies the results of this little study.

It was a blessing to grow up with parents who made each of their children feel special, unique, talented, bright, and loved. We all ended up at the same university, but we never - I can say this with certainty - felt competitive with one another. On this, the first anniversary of my father’s death, I am grateful for many things, not least for his unconditional acceptance of the paths his two sons and two daughters chose. He loved us radically equally, and we knew it, and our closeness today is in many ways a consequence of that.

A note on a father’s day run

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 17, 2007
in Athletics and Fitness and Father
. 2 Comments

It’s just after 12 noon on Father’s Day, my first Father’s Day since my Dad died nearly a year ago.

Last Father’s Day was the last time my father and I were able to speak. He was in the very late stages of dying of cancer, and we knew he had only a few days left. He was still coherent most of the time, and — blessedly — in virtually no pain. My wife and I spent the day with him, my stepmom, and my two sisters in Santa Barbara. He dozed most of the day in his easy chair, periodically waking up to chat with us or smile at us while we held his hand. He died four days later.

I woke up this morning very early, even before my alarm went off at 5:00. I went downstairs, meditated for a bit, and thought about the fact that this would be the first Father’s Day of my life without my Dad. I remembered the little gifts and cards I made him in elementary school; I remembered the lunches I took him out to in more recent years. I thought about last Father’s Day when, in the evening, we put Dad into bed and I heard him say — for the last time — the same words he had been saying to me for nearly four decades: “Good night, Huggle.”

I’m in the heart of my marathon training now; today’s run was a hard twenty-miler from the Aquatic Center parking lot south of the Rose Bowl to the top of Brown Mountain in the Angeles Forest. I was looking forward to the run today of all days because it would be something joyous, liberating, peaceful, exhilarating.

I ran with two of my buddies, Caz and Mark; both are fathers. Both knew my Dad. I didn’t talk much about missing my father, but I was soothed by the presence of these old companions of mine; their gentle maleness is reminiscent of my papa’s, and I needed some gentle masculinity today.

The last stage of the run was grueling. We had added in an extra section that gave us another mile, so I was doing a solid 21 this morning. I ran the last four miles alone, in the blazing sun, down through Devil’s Gate dam and along the east side of the Bowl. I felt my father with me as I ran; it was he, after all, who taught me to run thirty years ago, back when he was briefly caught up in the “jogging craze” of the mid-to-late 1970s. And when I came to a stop near my car, soaked in sweat, my skin coated in dust and salt, I felt the tears well up. Running, for me, isn’t really an escape from emotional pain; it is in my running that I draw closer to my own woundedness, my own grief — it is in endurance athletics that I find a kind of catharsis and healing that I find nowhere else, not even on my knees at the communion rail.

And doing 21 miles of long, slow, painful distance on this Father’s Day brought me very close to the pain of losing my father a year ago. But it also brought home for me the Great Hope that I hold in my heart, that I will be with him again in another country. Perhaps when I join him there, they will have hills and fire roads, and we will run a very long time together.

That’s not just my hope, that’s my certainty this Father’s Day.

The chinchillas got their dad a dozen yellow roses and a gift certificate to the movies. Their papa is grateful.

Various charity-related items: chinchillas, mangosteen, and the Hubert Schwyzer Quartet

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on June 12, 2007
in Chinchillas, Family and Father
. 3 Comments

1. We are fostering a seventh chinchilla, a sweet little boy who comes with the name “Chili.” (Just about the most popular name ever for chinchillas. If we keep him, we’re changing his name.) We rescued him from a very bad home situation where he was being abused; pictures to follow soon.

2. You can read more about the latest adventures of our chinchilla charity, the Matilde Mission, here. Check out a bunch of cute little ones who were saved from pelting by the kind donations of folks just like you. You can donate here. Continue reading ‘Various charity-related items: chinchillas, mangosteen, and the Hubert Schwyzer Quartet’

Viva Ireland

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2007
in Father and Sports
. 4 Comments

Not a lot of basketball upsets here in the States, but a St. Paddy’s day miracle at the cricket world cup has me stunned.

My late father played on a club team when he was in grad school at Berkeley. They toured California playing teams made up of folks from every corner of the Commonwealth. He was a bowler, and a fairly decent one. He gave it up when he came to Santa Barbara to teach and had no one to play with.

Though I understand the game better than 90% of Americans, that’s not saying much. I still watch cricket on TV when I’m in the UK and am forced to whisper urgently to someone nearby, “Uh, what just happened?”

UPDATE: Pakistan’s English-born coach died this morning, hours after the match, of apparently natural causes. The loss to Ireland can’t have helped.