The Power and Pain of a Father's Love
By Kerry J. Bickford, VOICES Editor
Rick Bickford recently retired from almost half a century of practicing as a licensed clinical social worker focused primarily on trauma and grief. He still maintains a private practice in an office on Cape Cod, where he has worked and raised his family for over 35 years. He has also experienced some of the saddest moments of his life there.
Rick, who also happens to be my husband, continues to go out into the community and do his best to help others, despite how life unraveled in his own family. I used to ask him if he thought people he worked with knew what was happening with his kids (as they began to get into trouble with drugs), and he would say, “I hope not -- but I don’t care.” He was wise enough to know that he had no power over what people thought and confident enough not to let it define him. I wanted to be more like him.
Rick has always been committed to his job and his patients, and he is also deeply committed to his family. He coached many of his sons’ sports, including ice hockey at 6 a.m. on Saturdays and baseball in the spring. He hiked, fished, swam, and practiced sports with them, spending long hours in the backyard with Nathan, the youngest, who loved baseball and was a talented pitcher. To this day, many of those boys Rick coached, now men, approach him in the grocery store with a handshake or bear hug, pushing carts filled with the next generation of athletes. Rick made a difference in the lives of many of these kids and hoped he was making a difference in the lives of his own.
Despite the missteps of his older brothers as they continued to veer off track, Nathan seemed to be on a different path. He was an Honors Society student and Presidential Scholar, happily adjusted and devoted to his family. He did his senior year in the dual enrollment program at the local college, satisfying requirements for graduation and his freshman year of college, but this turned out to be a critical turning point. Nathan, an introvert, became deeply isolated and depressed. The story goes downhill from there, despite several years in between when he was in recovery, living at home, working, and taking classes at the college. Each time he relapsed, he seemed to sink deeper and deeper into a hole. We found a page of his college psych book that described depression as like being at the bottom of a deep, dark hole and looking up each morning toward the faraway light with no energy to climb out. Nathan had highlighted it.
It broke Rick’s heart to see Nathan suffer, and he watched helplessly as he drifted further and further away. Despite all of Rick’s education, tools and experience, he could not change the trajectory of his son’s demise -- and this weighed on him heavily.
A month before Nathan’s death, an emergency room physician suggested a Section 35 (involuntary admission to treatment) for his protection. He was on medication for addiction treatment but using other substances and had already undergone one emergency surgery for endocarditis. Rick reluctantly complied with the doctor’s request and filed the appeal, despite his reservations. Nathan was, of course, furious and said as much in the courtroom. He didn’t recall being angry with his father weeks later, but the experience still haunted Rick, especially when Nathan died within days of discharge. Rick was left wondering if he had done the right thing. We all have those moments we can’t let go of; but how do you tell someone that they did what they had to do? How do you remind them they did it out of love? Fear? Desperation?
To make matters worse, Rick’s job was to listen to other people as they mourned their loved ones while he was dying inside, yet his work turned out to be the very thing that began to heal him. Witnessing the suffering and shame of others clarified what was not as clear to him in his own sorrow.
It goes something like this: Love doesn’t keep people alive. It comes from the deepest place in our hearts and souls, but only they can internalize it to the point that it becomes more powerful than the lure of a drug. If Nathan could have done this, he would have, but time had run out, and his heart was broken, physically and metaphorically. So Rick’s last act of love as Nathan’s father was to try to keep him alive. He didn’t fail. The disease won.
Rick is the kind of person who goes the extra mile for his patients. He meets one who is socially isolated for coffee. He talks to another with paralyzing anxiety long after office hours are over, and it isn’t unusual for him to stop and pick up a prescription for an elderly widow or shovel a walkway to do a wellness check on his way home at the end of an already long day. His compassion is endless, so his self-care is critical.
Rick walks through the woods and bogs to debrief and release as much of his sadness as possible while watching the seasons change. He goes off to the golf course to hit some balls or play a round or two a week, and he leaves it all behind. He is up at dawn doing an hour and a half of exercises, and he is planning to climb Mt. Katahdin this summer (again) with his sons and grandsons.
His oldest son, Richard, who has been enthusiastically planning this trip, recently wrote the following on the occasion of his father’s retirement:
“I have been extremely fortunate to go to all the places I’ve been and see all that I have seen, but the appreciation for them, the excitement of an adventure, the desire to climb that mountain or the need to drive down that dirt road just because it’s there started because of you. Every venture into the woods is accompanied by the thought of how much you would enjoy wherever I was ...”
If Nathan were here, he would agree with this, and he would tell Rick he forgave him long ago for doing what he did out of love. He would say thanks for being there and never giving up on him, even when he gave up on himself. I think most of our loved ones would say that if they could.