When My Dad Died Over New Year’s Eve January 2022

January 9, 2022

At one time, I suspected losing my Dad wouldn't be overwhelming. I wrote and recorded songs the last 12 years of his life and played them in a band and recorded them in a studio, and I used to mention it when we talked but decided to talk about Cleveland professional sports teams when we weren’t talking about family, with his habit of gossiping about those he was disappointed with. “Did you hear the latest stunt your brother pulled?”  He didn't ever comment on any of the music I sent him. Who knows why not. Maybe it had to do as much with his relationship to the arts (he was a proud philistine with no interest in any form of visual, musical or literary art, like many Dads of his generation.) He almost never expressed interest or curiosity about who I was except in conditional ways like was I making money, was everyone healthy?—checkboxing being ok so he could be proud and not have to worry. (Maybe that's not how he really was, just how I experienced it--I only recently learned the expression: "Don't always believe your thoughts”). 

 

But because that's not who he always was, part of my grieving now is for the mistaken notion that that is all he was. The great things he was have reasserted their prominence, which really makes me miss him, and the missed opportunities. 

I will say that a few things are now clear to me.

My Dad has become every age he ever was at once, and he is now mythical and devine, like a deity. The God of my particular Dad.

Also I'm aware of how the divine that was always there is uncovered after a death. Lost times when I idealized him, seem as present as anything, and I realize they always were there.

And one final note, as a griever, I can feel how music and music making passes through us to discharge the energies that otherwise hurt to get stuck and unshared, even with ourselves. Songwriting is a friend, friends are a friend, purpose is a friend, doing things that offer help to others are a friend. Everything that nourishes us and nourishes people and expresses kindness and care are a friend.
And a post script, nearly a year later. The last encounters we have shape the impressions we have disproportionately. It’s why endings and ceremonies are so important. My Dad died without much thought to his end. I washed his last loads of laundry and bagged the clothes and medicines in his bedroom. No will, no provision for the future. His life was like a cheaply produced movie that ends when the crew ran out of film—as if they couldn’t afford planning out an actual ending. His adult kids and their spouses each chipped in $1000 bucks and we got to see him in a cardboard box in the funeral home before his remains were transported to Parma or to Euclid to be cremated. He didn’t leave us anything, even though he had lived in a mansion with a fabulous view of Lake Erie. I had my pick of his many sweaters, coats, sweatshirts and shoes that were going to charity, and I took a few. His shoes basically fit me, and I wear some of them even though they don’t feel 100 percent right on my feet, just close enough that I'm used to them and wear them occasionally anyway out of utility. 

He had given up on a lot of things, but the few pleasures he had meant a lot to him.  But I had a moment in his cluttered and dishevled personal office with two desks and several curious desktop framed childhood photos of his parents and siblings, with two computers running, and always a money making scheme underway after his legal licence was taken away. He also drove an Uber. His moneymaking determination and his ability to experience pain (arthritis, degenerated knees hips, elbows and spine) without being defeated by seemed incredible to me then and now.
Post script: My last memory of my Dad’s presence was of being in that office with computers still running, and seeing the afternoon winter sun through the trees in the yard and the vast Great Lakes shore beyond it extending beyond the horizon to Canada. And in that moment I was heartbroken with the loneliness for my Dad, the sadness and self-blame of not being able to share with him, of him holding out for me to be interested in being a part of his second marriage life of skiing, drinking and boat racing, and parties with wealthy friends, and me not wanting to have any part of that, me always thinking that my Dad not being part of my life was on me—that my sense of aversion with all the ways he spent his time socially were because of my inability to get over myself and was my fault. 

My chest actually hurt as we got ready to look for the last time at the things this room which was full of my Dad's personality and presence. It was like he was still there. The computer was still running because he hadn't left anyone the password. room in the afternoon January sunset. In the beauty of the view out the wood framed window I knew then what had kept him here, and that he had lived the way he wanted, and was on some level content with where he got to spend his days. J. who came to accompany me to this last trip to my Dad’s house, said to my absent Dad, who like Citizen Kane, was actually always a wounded boy, “You did good.” She said it like he was absolutely right there and they were words intended to close the books to release his spirit. I could feel the kindness with which she said this as a last respect, as a paying of last respects. But I felt it too. It was for us both. He did do the best he could given the rough roads that were his karma to travel, and I felt the love you’d feel for a child toward him as if I were his father and not his son. But when you lose a parent as a fully mature adult, you are both things.
One last post script:  My Dad's widow Donna just sent me an email asking for my address (no heading, not much of a note) letting me know that she was sending something to me that my Dad wanted me to have. I kept thinking of the scene from the movie Pulp Fiction, where Christopher Walken in a military dress uniform does this demented monologue to the teenaged Bruce Willis character in flashback, telling him that he had something for him that his father, who had been a prisoner of war, wanted him to have (a watch) which he had hidden "in his ass". That reference went so far into caricature that you were free to laugh, but its the sort of thing that seemed like a parody of the actual thing this situation was based on--satire of the sentimentality of the emotions of the absent father. I also half-expected that my father might have left me a life changing sum of money—despite the reality that he had been was short on money and overextended, and underwater or defaulting on taxes and mortgages for at least 25 years. Brother Steve and I used to joke mordantly that even if there was any money left over once Dad and or Donna were gone that it would certainly go to the Animal Protective League before there was even a question of it going to his children or grandchildren. My brother said, "Don't get your hopes up. It's probably a yarmulke that she thinks he wanted you to have." 

While that seemed like a reasonable albeit cynical expectation, I wasn't ready to laugh at my brother's wisecrack. When the manila envelope arrived, I didn't open it right away. I speculated that it was a legal document, or maybe an autobiographical essay Dad wanted to share so that we would at last know what his life had been, and why he made the choices he did, and how he always regarded us with love and wrote this to bestow an eternal blessing. It was good solid 1/4 inch thick envelope. I thought maybe I should imagine what it would be if it was a wonderful gift. It would be a letter, a self-reflective essay was probably asking a little too much given that he had never to my knowledge rarely written anything expressive, not even emails of more than three sentences, never read a poem, or talked about a movie he'd seen or an idea he had, didn't care for art and hadn't intentionally listened to music at least since 1974.
I got a message from Donna that said, (no subject). Mike I apologize, it was 20 years ago, typo. That would have made it from 2001. What could that have been? That was about the time when my Dad gave up his law license. What would he have wanted me to know from that time?

I didn't have the patience to imagine and create the testament for the Gregory Peck-like dream-father who would have sent me a miraculously healing and redemptive document undoing the quotidian disappointing stuff that actually happened. I tore open the envelope impatiently. It wasn’t what I expected, but it was immediately a familiar object. I’d seen it on his bookshelf once. It was a program for the 1976 World Series. It was the first one the Yankees won under George Steinbrenner. My Dad was one of the team of Cleveland attorneys who were invited to sit in the owners suite during the World Series.

This was probably the last proud moment of my Dad's career and it was being a bit part in a moment in Steinbrenner’s life when he wanted to be looked up to as having made it. He was a Clevelander who played a recording of Frank Sinatra singing, "If I can make it there, I'd make it anywhere, it's up to you. . .New York, New York" obnoxiously after every Yankee victory for decades. It's fair to say he like my Dad was someone who lived with oversized ambitions to make up for some early feeling of not being respected. You can feel it the myriad ways he had of forcing things to go his way.  He'd been suspended as Yankee owner for violating federal campaign laws donating money to Nixon around the time of Watergate, and he was always firing managers for the offense of getting to the World Series but not winning it, and bullying whoever worked for him. I remember my brother going with my Dad to that World Series Game. I was in my first semester of college, and only heard about it later.  I don't think I was asked. I wouldn't have wanted to go. I loathed the Yankees because of Steinbrenner and the fact that he would acquire the best players money could buy, and make them shave any facial hair and cut their hair if it got anywhere near their collars.

And this was my Dad's final legacy to me in the absence of any other. I’m not sure he would have wanted it sent, but no matter. I thanked Donna for sending it, and said,  I thought it might actually have been a memory my Dad shared with Steve because it was in fact they, who had gone to that game together.
Not only was it something that possibly meant less to me than a yarmulke, but it was not even meant for me. Even in this final gesture, his vulnerable need to be seen and admired as sucessful and his simultaneous inability to see me was undiminished. I don't fault him for that. It wasn't his job to see me. It was his job to not see me so I could make my way to where it wasn't a problem that he couldn't. I won't say I'm glad that's how it was, but it was having the Dad I did made me have to learn, and I'm glad for that.