Fatherhood – Dying for honour

Jun 17, 2018 Countryman, Features / Columnists

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By Dennis Nichols

Today’s piece is not meant to be a spoiler on this good day reserved to honour fathers and fatherhood; it’s simply honest commentary.
Honour is justly bestowed on those men privileged to be called fathers. Children, wives, and relatives will today laud their ‘Mr. Wonderfuls’, recalling and relating their virtues, and no doubt either their laudable or calamitous efforts at mothering, including diaper-changing. Our country has many such good men. But fathers run the whole spectrum– from the loving and responsible to the neglectful or abusive, and worse.
Fathers and fatherhood should be a bulwark against domestic trauma, with the attributes of a good dad being the same as those of a good human being. They include love, compassion, tolerance, temperance, and discipline cushioned with understanding. With just one of these attributes genuinely expressed by parents, the child is set on the road to the kind of stability that is almost certainly already a feature of his/her family life. Each additional attribute strengthens and enhances the process, especially when a man can assume the family’s headship without being the family’s headache.
Obviously father types merge or overlap, and occasionally a caring, mild-mannered man, for reasons often beyond comprehension, becomes a domestic terrorist and a killer, sometimes taking out his entire family. Alternately he may kill himself and/or spouse, leaving his children motherless or orphaned.
Women also commit similar acts; in fact filicide, (the murder of one’s children) is reportedly committed by more women than men, but the coldness and viciousness factors seem to weigh more heavily on the male side. In any instance families are shattered, communities weakened, and for the bereaved, the world becomes a colder, crueler place.
Just recently this newspaper carried a brief story reminding readers that (out of our tiny population) ten women had been killed by their husbands or lovers so far this year. Then as if to give added morbidity to that statistic, a few days later a husband and father took a hammer to his wife and daughter, killing both, before hanging himself.
There are equally horrendous precedents, with a man named Melville, who shot and killed his wife and two daughters in Charlotte Street Bourda in 1969, being the first that I can recall.
And there were others. In addition to Melville, the names Devakaparsaud Haripaul, Oral Hendricks, ‘Baby Arthur’ Headly, Raul Herod, Imtiaz Rahaman, John Blanchard, and unnamed killer of No. 65 Village, Corentyne, and lately Jainarine Seetaram, will go down in infamy as some of this country’s most heinous murderers, with a combined victim count of 36, including 24 children.
The killers were husbands, fathers, and father figures. The details of these murders are too gruesome for this article, but of course you can find them on the internet. And lest you feel that such acts are confined to countries like Guyana, here’s just one example from the United States, with circumstances far removed from those above.
John List was a wealthy accountant and ‘devoutly religious’ Sunday School teacher who lived with his wife, mother, and three children in a New Jersey mansion. In November 1971, he calmly shot and killed his wife and mother at home, then waited for his daughter and youngest son to arrive before shooting each in the back of the head.
He then made himself lunch, after which he went to a bank and closed his accounts before going to his other son’s school to watch him play in a soccer game. Then he drove the boy home and shot him repeatedly. He later claimed that he saw too much evil in the world and had killed his family to save their souls. He became a fugitive but was caught 18 years later, tried, and sentenced to five consecutive terms of life imprisonment. He died in 2008.
As the foregoing implies, we don’t live in a perfect black and white world. List’s marriage and family – the traditional nuclear/extended type, with a father at the head – appeared picture perfect. But sadly that image has faded, you could say, almost to a grey blur. Absent fathers, (‘missing’, incarcerated, deadbeat, or just dead) is a reality in many parts of the world today. And even some of those who are still with their children could eventually end up in one of the bracketed categories or become an abuser or murderer. That’s the truth; the traditional father/family combo, like the dodo, is under threat of extinction.
Who or what’s to blame? The Illuminati, general societal breakdown, a mental health pandemic, feminism, humanistic individualism, and the redefinition of marriage, gender, gender roles, and sexual orientation, are the usual suspects.
It’s the same here in Guyana, but to which is added the stress of struggling in a depressed economy while the ‘good life’ is dangled tantalizingly in front of thousands of jobless youths and family providers with little means to provide for their families. Many men, (including fathers) escape into alcoholic stupor or release pent-up frustration in violence and death – often theirs and family members.
Research, and my own experiences, have shown me how scarily easy it is for a so-called good person to turn bad, and a bad person to become homicidal. For some of us, it takes only a provocative spark for adoration to become abuse, and misunderstanding murder.
Sometimes the process is more gradual; more insidious, and like seething magma, builds to a volcanic explosion. In some instances this may happen in a family which, to those on the outside looking in, appears a model of stability, but far too often the signs of dysfunction are there, like an open book whose pages we are afraid to turn.
Fatherhood is an awesome experience, but it could be awful too, particularly if one is unprepared for the responsibility of the long run, married or not. The ‘be there’ commitment, the patience, the mental and physical energy to be expended, and the role-model behaviour needed for emulation to help shape the malleable mind of a child, will tax the most dedicated amongst us. Having fathered five sons in the first seven years of marriage, and done everything except breastfeed them, I know what I’m talking about.
I’ll try to end on a more hopeful note. Most men, husbands and fathers, desire honour, and crave respect from their families. We tend to measure our worth as strong men and family leaders by the ability to provide for our spouses and children, and by their ‘appreciation’ for our efforts.
Women do the same. The problem is that things like honour, respect, and appreciation don’t always appear the same to everyone, and in the arena of domestic affairs and practical considerations, such intangibles may be among the first casualties.
The gist of the preceding paragraph should be the preamble to all human relationships, with marriage and parenthood at the head. Maybe this will help prospective parents, especially fathers, understand that the responses they want most from family members may not be the most important for their preservation.
Our children’s needs carry the highest premium. Sigmund Freud who knew a thing or two about parents and children said, “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection.” That’s about it dads; enjoy your day!

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