Between Them: Remembering My Parents - Richard Ford

 

"From almost the first moment in the room where he had died, I felt my father's death surrendering back to me nearly as much as it took away. His sudden departure, the great, unjust loss of his life, handed me a life to live by my own designs, freed me to my own decisions. A boy could do worse than to lose a father - even a good father - just when the world begins to array itself all around him."   Richard Ford

Richard Ford's father died of heart failure in 1960, four days after Richard's sixteenth birthday. Fifty-five years later Ford wrote a short memoir focusing on what he could remember about the man and their relationship. His mother died in 1981 from cancer, and this time Ford almost immediately produced a memoir about her and the two decades he shared with her following his father's sudden death. Between Them: Remembering My Parents pulls together both memoirs, beginning with the memoir focusing on Ford's father and ending with the piece on his mother. 

Ford was an only child. He believes that his parents "all along" wanted children but that it simply had never happened for them after fifteen years of marriage. And by the time it did happen, Parker Ford was an unhealthy 38-year old traveling salesman, and Edna, 33, was enjoying riding along with her husband on most of his extended sales trips throughout the South. The couple rented permanent quarters for weekends, but much preferred the more exciting lifestyle of living together in the hotels Parker frequented on his trips. 

Suddenly, though, that lifestyle was at an end because the family's new addition had literally come "between them." Now Edna had to stay home. After Parker left on his regular Monday-Friday road trips, she and her son had to create a new lifestyle for themselves in his absence. As it would turn out, Richard's father would not be around a whole lot during the sixteen short years following his son's birth, leading to Ford's regret that he never had the opportunity of having an "adult conversation" with his father.

After Parker Ford's death, Edna stoically went on with her own, now more independent, life. She was a self-contained woman who did not demand much from life or from her son, and after Richard left home for the first time to attend Michigan State, he never lived with his mother again. Their relationship for the rest of Edna's life was a loving one, but it was one always maintained from a distance, something that does not seem to have particularly bothered either of them. 

Richard Ford, childless himself, and now approaching 80 years of age, is very much the son of Parker and Edna Ford. Between Them: Remembering My Parents is an unusual approach to memoir writing, but it proves to be a very effective way of explaining the somewhat unusual upbringing Ford had and the influences that shaped him into who he would ultimately become. 

"Had my father lived beyond his appointed time, I would likely never have written anything, so extensive would his influence over me have soon become."   Richard Ford

Parker, Richard, and Edna Ford