My Dad and I

Today I want to unpack the “Nothing Bad Between Us” part of my book title. In earlier posts, I’ve described the scene with my father, when we both said those words to each other in our native Low German for the first time in 1988.

And here’s a scene taken from the end of my book, describing the last time we said the words to one another in 2003, a few months before my dad died:

*

It was time to say goodbye. My oldest brother John was to take me to the bus stop. My parents and I had already hugged goodbye.

They stood side by side in front of a brushy hedge as I stepped up into my brother’s dusty old pickup, both of them gripping their walkers. Mom was bent over. Dad’s back was as straight as it had ever been. He wore an old blue stretched out Kansas wheat farmer cap. The mid-day Chaco sun beat down on them, bathing them in blinding brightness and suffocating heat. Mom’s lips quivered ever so slightly. I couldn’t tell if there were tears since they both wore flip-down dark glasses.

Tears running down my cheeks, I rolled down the window, turned to Dad and said, “Doa ess nuscht…”

Before I could finish Dad stumbled forward against his walker, grasped it even more firmly with both hands to keep from falling, and roughly whispered, “Doa ess nuscht tweschen ons.”

“There’s nothing bad between us.”

*

Those of you who understand Low German know that the phrase “doa ess nuscht tweschen ons,” literally translated, means “there is nothing between us.” Nothing at all – good or bad.

I’ve always loved playing with words across languages. The commonly held rule of translation is to find a group of words in one language that correspond to the words in another language, and then form the sentence using these words. This is how we all begin learning how to translate.

But it turns out that it’s often not that simple. In fact, linguists tell us that perfect and faithful translation is nearly always impossible. Any form of translation leads to some level of distortion and/or loss of information. The fundamental challenge lies in finding the corresponding words, and if they are at all ambiguous, to find words that are ambiguous in the same way.

There is nothing between us is one of those ambiguous phrases that can mean very different things. At one extreme, it might suggest that we are so removed from one another that there is complete indifference – we feel nothing for one another. But this is completely inconsistent with the intrinsic Low German meaning of these words.

At the other extreme, the phrase describes a union so complete that nothing can come between us. My teacher, Fr. Richard Rohr, has called it “conscious quantum entanglement.” That was our experience; my father and I were, and always had been, completely entangled with one another. And our healing depended on us becoming increasingly conscious of that entanglement, as we repeated the words to each other over and over again.

We were one.