In My Dad's Memory

Paying tribute to the man who made me who I am

It’s been exactly one week since I lost my father. Although, I guess, in a sense I’d been losing him longer than that. That’s the thing with progressive disease. You lose them piecemeal, a little bit at a time, and when it’s all over you have to grieve not just for their death but for the time that was stolen from you along the way.

I’ve been wanting to write about my feelings all week. The words have been knocking around in my head this whole time, but committing them to the page felt impossible. I haven’t been able to focus. A dear friend who last his own father a few years ago described it perfectly: life feels exactly normal, except with 30% of your brain scooped out.

But I think tonight is the night. This will be messy and imperfect, which I suppose is fitting because we are all of us messy and imperfect people.

I’ve always been someone who needs the full context of something before I can really understand it. I need to understand how a thing works. What the component pieces do, how it all fits together, what its purpose is. I was never any good at memorizing formulas and processes and blind repetition.

My Dad got that. He was always so good at explaining things to me in a way I’d understand. He explained a great many things that way. He had this way of lacing his fingers and peering over the rim of his aviator glasses when he was gearing up to tell you something. He taught me how nuclear fusion worked, once, while we were waiting on our breakfast order to arrive at a Perkins diner. He taught me how a steam-powered turbine worked, the entire life cycle of coal to electricity. When I was learning how to drive and kept struggling with understanding when to shift, he had me pull onto the shoulder and patiently explained the clutch mechanism, the fly-wheel, the gears, what mechanical process flowed from the pressure of my foot on the pedal — why I stalled out on an incline, why I couldn’t start in third gear, why I had to match each gear to a window of speed.

It’s only occurred to me recently that maybe my brain works this way because it’s the only way he knew how to teach.

***

Some facts about my dad:

He got his pilot’s license before his driver’s license

He worked as a union boilermaker, a music store sales manager, a pharmaceutical salesman, a college recruiter

He tried to go fight in Vietnam and couldn’t pass the physical because of a knee injury

He met my mom when they were sixteen, married at twenty, and they were each other’s first and only for fifty-three years

He was a nature photographer and had his own dark room setup, when we lived places with the space for it

He owned twelve dogs over the course of his life and I grew up knowing all their names, like they were celebrities

***

My dad was full of stories.

I was born later in my parent’s life, as they were nearing their 40s and most of the wild adventures were in the rearview. But I grew up with the stories, built up an understanding of the familial mythology so robust it felt like I was there.

Like how he spent the night in the woods after a rafting accident on the John Day river. His near-death experience after crashing a hang glider into the side of a mountain. The time he sold a guitar to Jimi Hendrix. Landing a small plane on the top of a moving train. Being the only white kid in a newly de-segregated Chicago elementary school.

I’ll never hear him tell any of these stories again. I should have paid better attention. Asked for clarification, before his memory became too spotty in the end to recount them. I should have memorized them, knowing some day they’d have to live inside me, that I would have to be the one to carry them forward.

***

I wrote my first short story and earnestly showed it to him when I was eight. It was derivative, a melodramatic retelling of something I read in a Highlights of Children magazine, but he read it with utmost seriousness and complimented me on the details I included, commended me for having an ear for language. I learned to weave poetry into my sentences thanks to him. When I finished my first attempt at a novel (written between ages 8 and 11), I was so disappointed with how it turned out that I stuffed half of it in the fireplace. When he figured out he was so upset about it that I rewrote the whole book and gave him a copy for Father’s Day. It was his favorite thing I ever wrote, no matter how many real books I published.

It would have been easy to dismiss my childhood ambitions and interests, but he never did. He always encouraged them when he could. He always played along. Once as a child I staged an elaborate wedding for some toys in the back seat of our car. I forget where we were driving to. But I knelt down in the floor board, tiny toy dogs lined up in a crowd on the bench seat, and I told Dad which songs to play on the cassette player. He dutifully complied and asked polite questions about the canine bride and groom.

We didn’t have electricity at one of my childhood homes. Eventually we installed solar panels, but one summer we mostly read by candle light and kerosene lantern. I remember sitting in the living room one night and being transfixed by the way the light from a candle cast shadows on some pottery on the nearby shelf. I tried to sketch it in a way that would capture the color and shape and shadow, but I couldn’t get it right. When he asked what I was doing, I explained, and he went to the closet and dug out his 35mm Nikon and a tripod and we shot long-exposure photos while he taught me how cameras worked.

We used to go shoot pictures together, too. We’d go to an event and shoot a roll of 35mm film each. Then, after they were developed, I’d climb up next to him in bed and we’d spread out all the pictures on the bed spread and pore over them one by one, and he’d compliment and critique and ask questions.

***

We’re making a playlist for the memorial service. The six songs I selected, because I have strong sensory memories of Dad associated with each one.

• “The Unclouded Day” - Don Henley

• “Coal Miner’s Daughter” - Loretta Lynn

• “Tears in Heaven” - Eric Clapton

• “Red-Headed Stranger” - Willie Nelson

• “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” - Nitty Gritty Dirt Band

• “Uptown Girl” - Billy Joel

It’s actually incidental that most of these songs happen to be about death. If you’re wonder about that last one, it’s the ring tone he always had set for me on his phone after I went off to college. He’d tease me for being a high-falutin’ city girl.

He loved me so, so much. And I took it for granted for so, so long.

The last three years, I barely got to see him face-to-face. His disease had long since obliterated his immune system, so we couldn’t take any chances with Covid. My parents learned to embrace grocery delivery and Zoom calls and I’d go visit and sit on the porch and talk to them through the sliding glass door, speaker phone in my lap. I joked that they were my favorite zoo exhibit.

I’m glad we had the time we did. I’m mad that so much of it was robbed from us — by chronic illness, by pandemic, by life just getting in the way. But there’s some comfort, in a weird way, in knowing that it probably wouldn’t have mattered. That no matter how long, it’s never quite long enough, but that everyone at some point or another has to go through this.

Death is the price of admission for life, and grief is the collateral damage of love. And there’s some power in bearing witness, in announcing to strangers: There was a life lived here, it was long and messy and beautiful, and though our names probably won’t be in any history books, it mattered all the same.

Thank you for reading. Be good to each other.