I’m 70.
I’ve lived long enough to bury my Father and my young man resentments toward him. Losing him after six years of care-giving him in my home and working out the issues of my youth and his working out his own young-man stuff while trying to raise me is still too recent for me to miss him. But I’m not glad he’s gone anymore. He did well.
My youngest child is 30 now. Over the past few years my children, adopted, step, and biological who lived through my youthful selfishness, confidence, ambitions, stupidity, and unconscious reactions to my own father have somehow reconciled some of me and “us” within themselves.
I am grateful they regard our relationship as important enough to work through and include me in their peace. I pray that, at my death, there will be more sadness than relief and a sense that our mutual lives were more blessed than ruined because of who I was and what I did.
It seems an odd thing to hope for, but I think it comes with being old.
Sometimes it is a long, difficult accomplishment... .
May it be so for all you Fathers doing the best you can with what you've got, and all you children knowing you have what you have and are trying to honor the best in spite of the worst.