I’m not sure what kinds of feelings are felt after a parents’ death and I can’t ever try and pretend to channel what those feelings might entail. When thinking about Bechdel and her recollection of her father’s life, and the life that they shared, I am still left with the idea that Bechdel has, like me, many questions that are still unanswered. Questions pertaining to her father’s sexual orientation, whether or not the allegations of sexual abuse to a minor were true, and if he was, even to say, happy. However I am making the claim that it is within those unanswered questions that Bechdel was able to navigate her own identity, while still struggling with that fact that she never honestly knew his identity. It is his death that brings about this complexity, this speculative persona that she didn’t think to expect from herself. Bechdel does not know how to interpret her father’s death, “What’s lost in translation is the complexity of loss itself” (Bechdel, 120). In this scene that Bechdel says this, she is looking through a box filled with old pictures and in that box she sees a picture that stands out: a photo of her father in a woman’s bathing suit. Bechdel had the question of why, but ends with her statement that “he’s lissome, elegant” (Bechdel, 120). It is as though Bechdel is letting her father exist as himself without feeling the need to identify him. The idea of being “lost in translation” is Bechdel’s outcry to deconstruct her feelings of grief toward her father’s death. The “complexity of loss itself” is the grief. How is Bechdel supposed to interpret her father’s death, when she knew almost nothing about him, as he was barely nurturing and only took interest in Bechdel once she was in college. What does it mean to lose someone who barely revealed a persona of themselves that had encapsulated most of his adult life? “Lost,” meaning “no longer to be found,” (Dictionary.com) is Betchdel’s inadequacy to find her place on the spectrum of grief, as she is no longer able to see herself as being a griever but sees herself “lost in translation.” “Lost in the translation” over her father’s identity, “lost in the translation” over her father’s absence of emotion, and “lost in the translation” over her inability to fully accept that her father was gone. To see someone as tangible, is the idea that their physical presence exists among you. In the scenes that we see leading up to her father’s death, there is a connection starting to form, although slow, and the tangibility of them being together gave the father a sort of contentment. The tangibility is then lost with his death, and it is in that loss that Bechdel begins to find herself.
Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Lost [Def. 2]. (n.d) in Dictionary.com, Retrived: April 26, 2016,
from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/lost?s=t
I found your analysis of Bechdel’s existence in an undefined space to be extremely insightful. I feel that in addition to being “lost in translation” over her father’s death, she is trying to grasp her own reality through understanding more about her father’s life. By discovering parallels between her father’s past fluctuation in gender identity and her own non-conforming character, Bechdel is able to feel more comfortable expressing who she really is.
Your analysis of “lost in the translation” is really beautiful and I would like to know more about how Bechdel’s understanding of her identity might have been changed due to her father’s death. Although she was exploring her identity and came out before his death, the death became a chance to acknowledge something “lost in the translation”.
The death of a family member is the most devastated experience anyone can experience. I agree with you when you state that Bechdel still has questions she wished her dad would have answered. Nonetheless, she knew his sufferment was due to his resistance on coming out and being able to finally clarify his true identity. She was “happy” that he finally gave up on his fake life and understood that suicide was the only method to escape his current identity.