William Damon - A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present

TEMPLETON PRESS
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2021 by William Damon

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ISBN: 978-1-59947-563-9 (cloth)
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932150

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CONTENTS

To Jesse, Maria, Caroline, Sarah, and Isak

PROLOGUE

A Call of Consequence

DAD, I DONT know if I should be telling you about this.

The call came from my daughter Maria one afternoon while I was sitting in my office in California. There was uncharacteristic hesitation in her voice.

A spirited, world-traveling young economist, Maria was in Cape Town, South Africa, on a teaching assignment. Jet lag had kept her up late that night. Shed used her sleepless time to dig into some family stuff onlinestuff that might interest me or might upset me, she didnt know which. But her findings were so fascinating she really wanted to share them with me. Finally, she decided that I probably could handle it.

In that consequential call, my daughter introduced me to my father.

During her sleepless night in Cape Town, Maria had become curious about a grandfather she never knew. That man was also the father I never knew. Oddly, I had never shared Marias curiosity, a lack of interest that Id never questioned before but which now seemed mysterious to me. As it turned out, Marias call uncovered many mysteries that had long been buried in the conspiracy of family silence that had surrounded me as a child. I listened intently as she opened the doors to the long-locked vault of my family history.

She was right: I did handle it without getting upset. In fact, Marias online discoveries intrigued and thrilled me in a way that took both of us by surprise. What she revealed set me off on my own ten-year discovery quest. It led me to a new understanding of myself and the course my life had taken. It triggered a process of reflection that helped me gain perspective on the choices Ive made and helped me think more clearly about the choices in front of me.

The introduction to my father did not take place in person, nor could it. By the time Maria found him, he had been dead for twenty years. I didnt know this, or much of anything else about him at that time. But as a result of Marias call, I was introduced to my father as a persona person with physical features I could gaze at in old black-and-white photos, a life story I could investigate, living friends and relatives whom I could meet, and character traits I could uncover, analyze, and compare with my own.

I had lived for more than six decades without seeing a picture of him. As a fatherless boy, I had found father figures to guide me through the uncertain and aspirational phases of growing up. Yet the man himself had been entirely missing from my life. Now, after all these years, I was offered a glimpse of the actual man. What was he like? What happened to him? What did he do with his life?

Until college, all I knew about my father was that he was missing in World War II. I assumed he had died in action on some nameless European battlefield. Then, in the midst of my college years, I heard otherwise, in cryptic information that my mother revealed to me in a brief remark. But at that time I had no interest in following up on anything I may have heard about my missing father. I was absorbed in my studies, and then in my career, and then in my own growing family. I was not at all eager to get distracted by emotionally loaded information concerning a man who apparently had abandoned my mother and me as soon as I was born.

As a result, I knew virtually nothing about what became of my father after he had left the one mark on the world that was obvious to me: the act of inseminating my mother. The context of that act, all-important as it was for me and my children, remained as cloaked in mystery as the rest of my fathers story.

When I answered Marias call, little did I know that it was to take me on a journey that would make a trip from California to Cape Town feel like walking down the block. It turned out to be a journey that brought me back to my childhood years, and then back even deeper into the twentieth century and some of its great dramas. My fathers disappearance, in addition to its profound effect on my life, was bound up in historic stories of World War II, the Cold War, the 1960s civil rights movement, and the postwar American diplomatic mission of promoting democracy throughout the world. Like all lives, my own has been shaped by the historic periods Ive lived through. Now I had a further insight to consider: the way my fathers life reflected the era he lived through and to which, in small but significant ways, he contributed.

All this shook my sense of my own lifes trajectory to its foundations. I felt drawn into a reconsideration of where I came from, how I got to where I am now, and why I made the choices that have made me the person I am. I had an intimation that such reconsideration might guide me in directions yet to come. By gaining an understanding of my roots, I gained a clearer hold on my future. By filling in long-standing elements of my identity that had been concealed from me, I was offered a new chance to develop in ways that would advance purposes I have long held dear.

I could do none of this without some method of self-examination. I was embarking on a serious quest, and I knew that I would not get very far if I approached it casually or haphazardly. Part of the questthe reconstruction of my fathers lifewas historical, which required digging through old archives and interviewing his still-living friends and relatives. I am not a historian by training, so my efforts on this were dedicated but amateurish. The other part of the quest, which I saw as essential, was psychological: using what I found to construct a transformed view of my own life, one that could provide me with renewed purpose and direction. In this endeavor, I was able to draw on my professional knowledge as a life-span developmental psychologist who has explored purpose and identity in his research and writings.

But my own previous work in psychology was not in itself sufficient for the quest I was now embarking on. For the self-examination I was undertaking, I found a promising approach that has been emerging in clinical and autobiographical studies over the past two decades, called the life review. A life review is a deliberate procedure for reconstructing our pasts in a manner that can provide three personal benefits that many of us desire as we grow older:

1.acceptance of the events and choices that have shaped our lives, reflecting gratitude for the life weve been given rather than self-doubt and regret

2.a more authentic (and thus more robust) understanding of who we are and how we got to be that way, reflecting the well-grounded, reassuring sense of self that the great psychologist Erik Erikson called ego integrity