Great Men and the Fortresses They Build

There is one life-altering event that visits almost every human being sooner or later: the death of one’s father. It arrives like a tectonic shift, even when expected, even when “prepared” for. As someone who has borne the loss of both parents, I still find my father’s passing an unfinished grief. I cannot give a neat, psychological chart explaining why the grief of my mother has found a place to rest while his still wanders in me, but suffice it to say that the difference is, at least in my case, very real and very vast.

I look around the world and one of the things that appalls me exceedingly is the depth to which the masculine is considered to be dispensable. Many people who have lost a father might be able to relate to this feeling. The mother’s role, radiant and undeniable, is celebrated, rightly so. When juxtaposed with this, a father’s appears lesser, because a lot of his contribution is implicit and only understood much later. Perhaps that is why, when he is gone, we are startled by how much of the architecture of our lives was, in fact, his doing.

Somehow, in the vocabulary of modern parenting, being a good parent has been shrunk down to mean being physically present at all times, constantly affirming the child’s feelings, and providing an uninterrupted stream of emotional support. If a father is out in the world, providing and protecting, he is too easily slotted into the category of “absent father.” It is a term thrown around with such carelessness, as though absence from the breakfast table were proof of absence from the child’s life.

In such narratives, the wife of such a man is sometimes compared to a “single mother”—raising the children “singlehandedly” while the father is allegedly off enjoying the freedom to “pursue his career” unencumbered by domestic duties. The man who spends his days ensuring there is a roof over their heads, food on the table, and the fees paid for the child’s education is somehow less of a parent. 

What is left unsaid is that to miss your child’s first steps, to not hear their first words, to come home after bedtime night after night—these are not privileges. These are sacrifices, often made quietly and without complaint, because someone must build the walls that keep the family safe and give those first steps a floor to land on. That the sacrifice lies in surrendering irreplaceable family moments in order to secure the family’s future is a truth that fashionable opinion prefers to overlook. It is a strange blindness that confuses the absence caused by neglect with the absence necessitated by duty, and one that many women who ascend to demanding careers often come to recognise when they discover that every hour spent securing a future is an hour taken from the present, and that to miss a child’s milestones in the name of providing for that child is not a dereliction, but an inevitable cost of the very security they strive to maintain.

I recently had an epiphany in terms of my conceptualisation of what a father is. A father is a wall. A wall between you and every conceivable danger in the world—which is to say, the whole world. He stands between you and poverty, between you and hunger, between you and those who would do you harm. Sometimes he builds the walls of your home with his own calloused hands. Other times he hires others to build them, but still ensures they stand. Without him, the first years of life would be an unbroken battlefield. A father is the reason one survives from the day one is born to the day one learns to be able to build walls for oneself.

When we were small, we ran to our fathers when we were afraid—afraid of a funny looking stranger, of the dark hallway, of the monster under the bed, of the schoolyard bully. We no longer remember the specifics—what the bully’s name was, which hallway felt so frightening—but we remember the association: father equals safety. That equation was written into us in moments too numerous and too small to catalogue.

It is remarkable how, in certain quarters, people take the presence of walls for granted. Such people speak lightly of dismantling what their forebears bled to erect, only to discover, too late, that danger has not yet lost its appetite. The very notion of civilisation rests upon walls—of cities, of laws, of moral boundaries. In this sense, the father is the private citizen’s Great Wall, his first line of defence against the disordered forces that have, in most of history, been the default human condition. To dismantle such a wall and pretend nothing will enter is an act of astonishing naivety. 

Most people lose their fathers late, perhaps when they are in their 50s or 60s or even later—by then, they have become walls themselves, often for their own children. A man is able to build walls for oneself by then. Perhaps he is a wall for his own kids by then. By then, their fathers may have shrunk into soft-spoken, weathered men whose walls are now metaphorical rather than literal. Even so, the day they go feels like the day the last fortification of childhood crumbles. It is enough to make a person question everything. 

But when the loss comes early—before you have learnt to build your own walls—the exposure is merciless. You feel the wind from every direction, the cold seeping in through the cracks, the rain pooling under your feet. The weak point of a human life, I believe, is to be without a wall and without the knowledge to build one.

In times like these, the dismantling of walls is carried out deliberately, triumphantly, until one day a generation is raised without knowing what it is to feel safe in the shadow of a man whose strength is entirely at their disposal. May we all have walls built for us, by our fathers and by our husbands. May we all know what it means, to feel comfort in the strength of great men, once again.