"What does and what doesn’t it mean to be my father’s son? Six months after his death, I struggle with the haunting sense that I am fated to live his life over again rather than my own."

 

These lines by Mark Schafer, a literary translator and visual artist, got me thinking about how his words apply to me and my late father.

 

In breaking off all correspondence with my father more than a decade ago, I did something very characteristic of the folks who bear his last name. I cut myself off from my kin.

 

The Mby family has broken off family relationships for at least 50 years. I didn’t learn this until one summer in Maine on a boatyard dock.  "This is my cousin," said my father gesturing toward a man wearing boat sneakers like the rest of us. The whole encounter lasted no more than five minutes.

 

I later heard from my father’s sister that the relationships soured over the division of a family business after bankruptcy in the Great Depression of the 1930s. They visited with one another during the 1940s. That’s how my father and mother met.