My father Martin was born on January 26, 1953, in Bremen. He died on July 14, 2012, in Freiburg. He was 59 years old.
The cause was an aortic aneurysm — a rupture of the main artery, sudden and almost always fatal. He was dead within hours of the symptoms beginning. There was no warning, no goodbye, no final conversation.
He was a writer, a social worker, an entrepreneur, a Catholic bohemian who somehow held all of those identities together in a single complicated life. He published his first novel, Das Haus der Brüder, in 1983. He loved his children with a fierceness that sometimes came out as pressure and sometimes as warmth, and occasionally as both simultaneously. He was not easy. Neither am I.
Today would have been his 73rd birthday.
The Things Nobody Tells You About Losing a Father
The first thing nobody tells you is that grief does not follow a schedule. You think you have processed it — a year out, two years out — and then something entirely unrelated breaks it open again. A smell. A certain quality of winter light. A moment with your own children that you wish he could have seen.
The second thing is that the relationship does not end at death. It changes. But it does not end. I find myself, still, measuring things against what I think he would have thought. Wondering whether he would have been proud, or disappointed, or characteristically complicated. He is present in my thinking in a way that is hard to describe to someone who has not experienced it.
The third thing is that you become him in ways you did not expect and could not prevent. I hear him in my voice sometimes when I am talking to my children. I see him in the way I approach a problem — from too many angles at once, with too much reading and not enough sleep, with an intensity that can exhaust the people around me.
What I Know About His Death That I Could Not Accept Then
My father died younger than he should have because of how he lived. He was brilliant and undisciplined. He ate badly. He smoked, though he stopped at some point. He slept irregularly. He carried the weight of a large family, multiple businesses, and an enormous inner life without ever learning to set any of it down.
An aortic aneurysm does not come from nowhere. It is often associated with chronic high blood pressure, with atherosclerosis, with the accumulated physiological cost of sustained stress over decades. He built up that cost over years, and he paid it all at once.
I could not accept this for a long time. It felt like blaming him for dying. And he was my father — I did not want to see him clearly, I wanted to miss him uncritically.
But clarity is a form of love too. And the honest acknowledgment that he contributed to his own early death is not a diminishment of him. It is a fact that I have had to make peace with, and that has changed how I live.
I think about my body. I think about sleep. I think about the difference between intensity and destruction. He could not always make that distinction. I try to.
What He Gave Me
He gave me books. He gave me Karl May — the adventure stories of the American West that made me dream of Texas before I had ever seen a map of it. He gave me Ronald Reagan, improbably, as a political hero. He gave me a hunger for America that I eventually fed by actually going there.
He gave me the Pfadfinder — the scouts — where I learned at fifteen that I could lead, that I could think ahead, that I could bring a weaker team to victory if I planned carefully and moved at the right moment.
He gave me the conviction that a man's life is his own work. That you are not the sum of what happened to you but of what you chose to do about it.
He gave me ten grandchildren he never met. I wish he had.
On Fathers and Sons
The relationship between a father and a son is one of the most complex and consequential relationships a man will have. It shapes things that cannot be easily named — the quality of your ambition, your relationship to authority, your capacity for both stubbornness and tenderness.
My father and I had unfinished business when he died. Not hostility — we were not estranged. But things unsaid, conversations not completed, an understanding that I think we would eventually have reached, given time.
Time was not given.
If your father is alive and you have things unsaid, say them. Not dramatically. Not with ceremony. Just say them. Over dinner, on a walk, in the car. Say them in the ordinary moments that are the actual texture of relationship.
The conversations you keep postponing are the ones you will wish, most bitterly, that you had not.
Happy birthday, Papa. I think about you more than I let myself say.
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