My memories of my father are divided into parts and shares.
Alive, and then dead. Healthy, and then helpless. And further back in time, the first and most damning split: Present and then absent; loving, and then aloof.
Now, two months after he died, my memory bank has been sliced down the middle yet again. The memory of him before I read his travel journals, and the realizations that came afterward.
My father, Ben Kamin, was a brilliant enigma. He was a rabbi and an author, an occasional journalist, and a late-life social justice warrior whose narcissism choked his full potential. He was stymied, both as parent and professional, by a desperate need for adulation that sent him tilting at windmills when confronted with even a whiff of criticism. Safe in the shell of his ego, my father was gregarious, and generous. He was my confidante and steadfast cheerleader. But if that shell took a blow, he retaliated with searing cruelty. Like skin on the body, my memories of him are mottled with these scars.
Though my dad lifted up thousands—he led congregations, and wrote a dozen books and countless sermons—he let me and my family down. When I was 16, he was fired from his rabbinical pulpit, a public, gossip-fodder ejection that he would spend decades refusing accountability for. This was the first crack that divided my relationship with him into poles of before and after.
To escape his shame, he pushed away those who reminded him of it, first divorcing my mother, then alienating my sister and I. As an adult, my relationship with my father was one of low expectations and high boundaries. With those guardrails in place, we found a way to stay connected. After a childhood of closeness, I could only allow him in my life by keeping him at an arm’s length.
When he died of heart failure in August, I was knocked off balance by the weight of the blow. I thought, after years of erecting delicate fences around our relationship, that I had already begun letting go. His death delivered a realization: despite years of analyzing his complicated love for me, there were pieces of my father I never understood.
But grief is a sifting process. You push memories into categories and organize life’s artifacts into boxes. Some go to Goodwill. Some are tucked into a drawer or a garage. And some, like the weathered, ink-stained notebooks I extracted from a trunk in my father’s closet a few days after he died, become an air hole in the suffocating sadness, and an opportunity to see a complicated person in a new light.
The first notebook I found was bound in soft leather, its pages thick with theater tickets, clipped restaurant menus, and even the odd hotel key carefully glued inside. I had been wading through piles of my dad’s jeans and forgotten neckties—death, in all its finality, kicks off an endless to-do list of quotidian donkey work—when it called to me.
Inside, the first time-stamped entry read: “Sunday evening, Jan. 18, 1998,” and then, like a dateline for one of his early pieces in The New York Times, “NEW YORK CITY.”
He compiled a stream-of-consciousness below, listing the accoutrements of this family vacation from our suburban Cleveland life. “An MLK weekend getaway,” was his headline, “not just to New York, but to my ‘second neighborhood.’”
I remember this trip. It was one of dozens we took to New York City, always trekking the same pathway through Broadway shows, crowded delis, and yellow cabs that he loved to hail with a flourish and a whistle.
On this trip, I was 14 and growing tired of his antics. My father, play-acting a New Yorker, was endearing but embarrassing. Beneath his enchantment with New York’s crowded streets was a poorly-concealed hunger to blend into them and slip away. What was a family trip for us was an experimentation for him. Could he have had this glamorous, imaginary life? His journal entry vibrated with desire for it.
“The luminous lights of Broadway,” he wrote. “How at home I feel in these few blocks of 7th Avenue, in between Carnegie Deli and Shubert Alley.”
Six months later, on board an El Al flight returning from Tel Aviv, he was more somber. “Israel is not as poetic as it once was,” he wrote. “It’s still sacred, dear, brave, if conventional.”
A few more pages in, and he was in Toronto, manic and dreaming yet again beneath a scotch-taped room key bearing the letterhead of Toronto’s Delta Chelsea Inn.
“A good break away from Cleveland,” he described the trip, “from my work, and our charming but narrow house.”
That narrow house, of course, was my childhood home. The appeal of travel, he revealed, was the escape it offered from his life inside it. The solo trips he took when I was a child, I realize now, were test drives for the more permanent break he made from us later on.
He often quoted himself, with big bold letters, and collected documentation: metro tickets from Rome; a photograph of San Francisco’s Prescott Hotel; plane tickets to Philadelphia. It was as if he was leaving bread crumbs for a future biographer.
But what he was also doing was offering fatherly guidance, the kind I could only receive after he died. His life, in which what he had was never quite enough, eventually unraveled. In his final decade, my father found himself twice-divorced and professionally unsatisfied. When his heart began to fail and he was forced to reach out for help, he realized he had built a castle for himself upon a pile of rubble and regret.
Now in his entries, I hear his voice. “Debaleh,” I hear him say, using his Yiddishified pet name for me. “Learn from my mistakes.”
I read these pages among my dad’s orphaned clothes, and wept. I hadn’t known that my father, too, lived with that familiar ache for new horizons in his gut, the one that can only be soothed by traveling. On the road, he role-played the existence he craved, one more urban and eclectic than his own. Who among us has not done the same?
“I’m not rushing, because life will catch me anyway,” he wrote once from a hotel room in Danville, Pennsylvania. Life did catch him, at only 68. And now his memory is both a blessing, and a lesson. If he had truly slowed down, I think he would have learned to treasure not just leaving, but also the return.