dear dad,
1947 - 2022
It was 10:00pm on a Saturday night in June. I was sitting at our dinner table with my husband. Our daughter was asleep in her room. And an ICU doctor in Florida just explained “comfort measures” for my dad because things had taken a turn for the worse. (…the worse??)
But I just talked to him a few hours ago. He wasn’t in the ICU. I’m in Italy.
You know that feeling when the TV is on, and the oven timer goes off at the same time that your phone rings while your kid is trying to get your attention? Like your brain shuts down, everything blurs, unable to comprehend all the noise at once. You try to pull it all apart into smaller threads so you can understand each piece. But this still didn’t add up.
Afterwards my husband hung up the phone for me. He gently asked me if I understood what all of that, what the doctor had said, meant? All I could think about was how for the first time living here I felt every mile between us and there. I felt so far away, so out of control. I felt like I hadn’t mended my broken relationship with him enough yet. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Like I had cinder blocks tied to my wrists.
I just talked to him. He was fine. He was fine a few hours ago.
I was at the airport hours later early Sunday morning. No one explicitly said to me, “You’re flying back to Florida to say goodbye to your Dad. Your dad is going to die.” In fact, his long time partner, she kept insisting he was going to be okay. It made me feel like I was being dramatic for being scared, for getting on a plane and flying across the ocean, leaving my one-year old and my husband behind.
Just a few weeks ago he told me he was cancer free. He told me they got it all. He still had to meet his granddaughter.
There was a time in my life when I would have said that no one understood me more than my dad and that no one could relate to me more than my dad. Because whether I liked it or not, I was a lot like him. Considering how much he loved to write, especially about himself, I guess I am proving that point pretty directly right now.
My dad was born in 1947 in Indiana. A midwestern boy raised by a tough-love Lebanese woman and hard-working German man (of the Depression era). He grew up, as it was told to me, knowing that his mother didn’t want to have him and that she only did because his dad wanted “a little Marilyn” (Monroe, of course, a.k.a. a little blonde baby girl). Lo and behold, my dad was born and his childhood unfolded as you may imagine it would in that environment. There were highs, mostly with his dad and mostly due to auto racing and the nearness of Indianapolis. But also many lows of a child not sure how to get the love and attention they needed to thrive, especially from their mother.
I always knew the details (every. single. detail.) of my dad’s life because he told me. He told all of us. Every memory, every Indy 500, every music industry tale, every bad drug trip during the ‘70s. The cabin, Toronto, the draft, Nixon’s hate list, the Jag. Have you ever seen the movie Big Fish? That’s my dad. So many stories, so many tales. Many of them totally accurate, many of them overly embellished from the years of retelling. Growing up, the home phone could ring in the kitchen and thirty minutes later, I swear, the person on the other line hadn’t gotten a single word in. My dad loved to talk, to anyone, about anything. Pros and cons, highs and lows, came with this.
You see, after being so close for years, our connection grew complicated. In a way I felt like Frankenstein to him, a monster of his own creation. He always encouraged me to be independent, to speak up and make my voice heard. To be a star on stage. He saw my future and it was bright and successful and I was the woman at the airport always traveling for work. But what if that meant that eventually I might be strong enough to disagree with him? To not always share the same opinion as him?
We lost touch after my parents divorced when I was in my twenties. Our relationship deteriorated to years of minimal, sometimes hurtful and flippant, exchanges directed at me via e-mail. Only e-mail. Never on the phone, never in person. I knew I was the center of his world. I knew he was proud of my life. But years could go by without seeing each other even once.
Maybe it was my fault, but my dad let go of me somewhere along the way. He stopped being my parent at a time when I think I needed him the most, and I didn’t know how to ask for him back. And then just like that he was gone.
I’m not here to air out the things he did wrong along the way. What I will say is I didn’t fully appreciate the sum of his parts, what made him the way he was with all of his flaws, until I had a child of my own. Something about becoming a parent opened up this unlimited forgiveness in my heart. We’re all just trying to do the best we can as parents with the example that was given to us. And considering the example he had, the love and the place in this world that he was missing, I have to give him an A.
That last year of his life, and the first year of my daughter’s life, we began rebuilding our relationship slowly. Brick by brick the lines of communication opened up again. We rediscovered our connection, or at least we had started to. Little did I know our time was going to be cut so short, but I guess that is the point in life, no amount of time is guaranteed. The grief of losing a parent no matter how close or how complicated the relationship is weighs heavy on a child’s soul. It transcends age, it lingers. Years from now I’ll still be asking myself questions about what he did or did not know about his diagnosis. He’ll still be visiting me in my dreams, leaving gaps in what happened in the end. And I have to be okay with that.
My dad never met his granddaughter in person, but that doesn’t mean that she won’t know him. Hopefully my last words to him made that clear.
I’ll be okay, Shaun’s got me. Rylee Lou will know who her grandad was.
She’ll know all the stories, big and small, because he told me. All the memories. She’ll learn from the lessons, the good and the bad habits generations hand down to the next. She’ll hopefully get more of the good like how to perform for the back row, how to enjoy a good Bruce Willis movie.
I didn’t fly back thinking it would be goodbye. I packed a new outfit for every day of the week. Pinks and greens, silk and chiffon. White and cream linen. I wanted to wear my new Italian summer dresses. I wanted to look my best, to be a bright light in a sterile hospital room. I wanted my dad to see me for who I am now as a mother. But he only saw me in a grey hoodie from the flight. My hair was a mess, my face was splotchy from crying. But at least he saw me. He opened his eyes one last time and saw that I made it.
The next morning he left us. He died with his head in my hand and Earth Wind & Fire’s greatest hits playing in the background. I wish there was more time to continue rebuilding our relationship just as much as I wish there was time for me to open up about the questions and the moments that hurt me as a daughter. I wish there was time for me to express frustrations I’ve never shared with him. I wish there was time for him to hold hands with his granddaughter. I wish, I wish…
In his death, our relationship didn’t get more or less complicated. The absence of him being here has left me with so many questions unanswered, and it always will. I find the finale of this calendar year with me finally getting a little closer to accepting that. It’s a heavy wave to ride bringing one life into your family only to lose another life within the same year, and my heart and shoulders go out to anyone else who has felt that weight. I hope you feel peace when they greet you in your dreams. I hope you accept the unknowns that are left behind when they leave you.
- Squirrel