~A song got me thinking….

When someone leaves us at the end of their life, it’s hard to regret not getting the chance to let them know what they meant to you before they went. Though it’s mostly for my own benefit, I wanted to remind my father of what I used to call him when I was a young child: my Daddy-Friend. I don’t remember this myself, of course, as I was a very young boy when I referred to him by that nickname; it clearly tickled my mother, though. She would smile as she told me about it. They had many nicknames for me, and I have been told that a child with many names is loved; I only had one for my dad, though I loved him very much. His loss was hard to take, especially in light of the fact that I wasn’t there when it happened. I’ve missed a lot over the years living so far from everyone else; I worry that my brothers and sisters have grown used to my absence, or have assumed that I didn’t care because I wasn’t here for big events. Births. Weddings.

Deaths.

The Day My Daddy Died

The death of my father took place on October 13, 1997, a day after my first wedding anniversary, and I was far away at an audition in Wilmington, North Carolina. I listened to the song “The Living Years” by Mike & the Mechanics about 20 times on the way home. It’s funny how a few notes of a song can send you reeling back through your memory, isn’t it? If you play Frank Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” I’m back lying in my bed, the one I shared with my big brother John, and my mother is singing me to sleep with her own version of the song; sometimes, in my imagination, there is a thunderstorm taking place, and we are watching the lightning with the lights off and the curtains drawn. Every time I hear any reference to “Buffalo Gals”–but especially if I hear that chorus in music–I am immediately reminded of being a child at Christmas, and sitting down to watch “It’s a Wonderful Life” with my mother, my favorite movie. There are pieces of classical music that remind me of my eldest brother, the one who first taught me to love that particular genre of music, and any piece off the “Songs of Scotland” LP we had when I was a kid instantly reminds me of my dad whistling along to the tune, his arm draped around me as we sat on the couch, listening together. My dad wasn’t a singer, as far as I remember, but he did like to whistle; he was pretty good, too. (He liked to hear singers that whistled, too, as evidenced by the albums we owned by Roger Whittaker. Did Boxcar Willie whistle? I don’t know. But I digress.)

My dad’s whistling days were long over by the time we got to the end for him; he’d suffered from respiratory issues for a long while, having struggled with asthma all his life. It’s pretty hard getting enough breath to whistle when you’re trying hard just to take a breath every few seconds. Of course, I missed most of that, too, and phone calls or letters just aren’t the same as being there. I’m told that the last couple of years were not great at all, and my mother worked very hard to nurse him along as his health deteriorated. While he’d been a prolific letter writer most of the time I’d lived away from home, it didn’t seem he had the energy for such pursuits as he approached the end of his life. He managed to make it down to North Carolina for my wedding in ’96, but it was not the easiest of trips for him. I think it was pretty much his last one, and he was not in great shape when we went back for Christmas only two months later. I recall he complained the first morning we were in Michigan that he’d had trouble sleeping because my wife had coughed all night long; this was ironic, as his constant getting up and down to use the bathroom or whatever had kept us awake.

This was the beginning of the end for Dad, I think; he would leave us ten months later, narrowly missing dying on my anniversary. (He had pretty good timing, and I appreciated his having the good grace not to die on the actual anniversary.) I don’t recall whether I knew it was imminent or not; I had an audition for a movie several hours from my home in Charlotte, however, and I either did not know we were so close to the end or thought I could attend the audition before flying home. (I’d ask my brothers and sisters, but things are already strained as it is, I think, and I hesitate to bring up yet another instance in which I was not present.) My friend David and I finished our reading for the film and had just left the audition, when I saw that I had a missed call from one of my siblings. I called to find out what was going on, and someone told me that my father was dead. It was just too much effort to breathe anymore, and he kept pushing the button to administer more painkiller to himself, even though he’d reached the limit and no more would be fed through the IV, regardless of how many times he pressed for relief. My sister was in tears, of course, and we tried to comfort each other over the phone. My eldest brother, the rock of the family, stayed strong for us, and he talked me briefly through the end, since I had missed the event.

After I got off the phone with my brother, I pulled over and gave the wheel to David; he graciously drove us the nearly four hours home, stopping partway so that I could buy a bottle of bourbon. As we motored home toward Charlotte, I put the “Living Years” disc in the player, and played the title track over and over again; somehow, it was the only thing that got me through that horrible day. David drove on without complaint, though I’m certain that listening to that song over and over again had to be a little tiring. It was what I needed at the time, however, and David was good enough to let me have what I needed to ease the pain. As a result of that day, any time I hear “The Living Years” by Mike & the Mechanics, I am instantly thrown back more than 20 years to that day, and the deeply felt loss of my father. Perhaps if my relationship with my dad had been less strained over the years, or if I had not been quite so absent from everyday life, the pain of my memory might not be so triggered by the opening notes of that song; then again, music has power, and I might be just as prone to the overwhelming sense of the loss of my father brought on by that song if I had lived next door to him my whole life.

The Deeps of Depression

Regardless of where I lived, the chasm that the loss of my father opened up in me was wide and deep. Though I’ve written of my depression before, I’m not sure how clearly I understood until many years later how deeply the death of my dad affected me. My ex-wife told me that she believed my depression started then, and she tried to push me to get counseling for years before I finally went. Once I did seek out professional help, I was able to finally begin my recovery, both from my depression and the death of my father. Looking back, it seems likely that this event did not bring about my mental issues, but merely became a more visible sign that they were there. I think I was depressed long before 1997, just as I believe my dad was for much of his life in the time before it was considered acceptable to talk to a mental health professional. He’d wanted to seek a psychiatrist’s services at one point in his life, but apparently had been laughed at by his family when he shared the thought with them. As a result, I don’t believe he ever got the help he needed.

Dad was a good man, and served with the Wayne County Sheriffs for much of his life, once he left the U.S. Army. There wasn’t a lot of call for plasterers at that time, but he had a growing family to feed; I don’t think being a cop was his first choice, and he retired as soon as he was able to. He had lots of stories, though of course we were too young for most of them. Dad had to carry them around with him, and I can’t imagine the weight of his burden. He was an entertaining guy, as many of us are who carry the load of a depression that is invisible, and he dealt with an alcohol abuse problem all of my life, in those days after my mom left him. (She didn’t stay away; she got to her sister’s house near Pittsburgh, knocked on the door, got no answer, and then she got in the car to drive back home. This is Robertson legend.) I wasn’t privy to those conversations, but I gather that Dad agreed to start taking a prescription of Antabuse, which would make him sick if he drank alcohol while taking it. That’s how my dad was treated for his own depression.

There was no way I could know any of this, of course, so I thought it odd that my dad would drink himself sick once a year, an annual beer-fest in which he drank a case until he was blotto. I sat with him on the front porch once, and I never realized what was going on; I thought we had a pretty good life growing up. The fact that he was on the front porch of our house, in front of everyone in the neighborhood, drinking his ass off, didn’t really connect for me; my mother must have been mortified. But me? I was oblivious. All I knew was that it was getting harder and harder for my dad and me to get through a day without getting into some sort of argument. (Part of the problem was that we both tended to be instigators; I would try and draw him into an argument by stating something as fact that I knew he would disagree with, whether I actually believed it or not. He taught me how to do this.) By the time I moved to California in August of 1983, I kind of couldn’t wait to get out of the house, which is natural, I guess; I left before we had totally found solid footing for our relationship, however, and didn’t really have as much opportunity to straighten it out until nearly ten years later. We got there, but the distance didn’t help much. I had many dark days, and some would say that there was relief if I could just learn from what my dad had gone through himself. For my part, I’d like to have been more of a comfort to him.

What I Learned from My Dad

It’s my hope that I was more of a comfort than I realize, that he saw me get married, saw me more at ease with him, and felt happy knowing that I had finally grown up and that we could get along at last. I don’t know if that’s just wishful thinking or not, but I hope it is true. Marriage wasn’t all that easy–I guess it never is–but we had a child only a few years after we got married. My son looked like her father, but he acted more like my father. He was easy to laugh and had a very good sense of humor right from the beginning. We named him Alex after my dad and my big brother (and his middle name was an ancient form of my other brother’s name as well); he was born right around the same day as my father’s birthday, though they missed each other by a year and a half, and I imagined that the fact that his birthday was a few days later than Dad’s might give me a second chance at that relationship. It went very well for a long while, though the marriage did not, for which I will totally take a lot of blame.

With the amount of blame I was assigned for the breakup with my wife, it’s been very hard to maintain a strong relationship with my son. We were apparently already having issues as he entered his teenage years, though I didn’t realize it until it was too late; I didn’t help him with his homework the right way, I guess, and the parenting style I learned from my own mother and father were not the same as those learned by my ex. As a result, I found that more and more I was having to deal with my wife as a buffer between my son and me, and I have also been told that I was abusive to him and his mom. I don’t say all this to air out dirty laundry in public; while it would be nice to have an opportunity to talk about things from my point of view, a blog is not the place for that. A blog is a place where I should tell you what I learned from Dad.

What I learned from my father (and Bonnie Raitt) is that I can’t make you love me. He couldn’t make me love him. He tried and tried to do the best he could for me, to teach me how best to approach life; for my dad, this often meant proper scheduling of vehicle maintenance, as in an oil change for the car every 3000 miles without fail. He taught me because he loved me, and I thought he was merely picking on me. But like they say in The Curious Savage, a play from the 50s,

SAVAGE: People say “I love you” all the time–when they say, “take an umbrella, it’s raining,” or “hurry back,” or even, “watch out, you’ll break your neck.” There are hundreds of ways of wording it–you just have to listen for it, my dear.

“Did you get the oil changed?” was just my dad telling me that he loved me. But, try as he might, there was no way to make me understand that; I wasn’t listening. He might have done better could he have articulated that to me, but honestly, teenagers are sometimes just not listening. Even if they hear you, they are not always listening to what is actually being said, and they tune you out. He couldn’t make me love him, even if he was doing his level best to show me his love for me.

The same has been true for me and my son. Alex blames me completely for the divorce, whether I deserve it or not. I’ve been told not to pester him about his grades, though not recently because I haven’t spoken to him in a year and a half. His cousins know what’s going on with him, as do some of his aunts and uncles, but I have only had a couple of responses to emails in the past year. He has blocked my number, and has only recently unblocked me from seeing his Twitter account, virtually the only way I have of knowing what is going on with him at all. Under normal circumstances this is sad and hurtful; with the spread of this killer virus, it’s excruciating. I have no idea how he’s doing, or if he is practicing safe social discipline, or if he’s even still taking classes at his college in Florida. He won’t talk to me, and my ex still blames me for the past. I’m totally out of the loop, and I realize that I’m just like my dad: I can’t reach him, and I can’t make him love me.

Someone very close to me once told me that, “It is our job to love them, but it is not their job to love us,” so maybe this is how it has to be. I don’t know what to do anymore; should I reach out and ask him if he’s changed the oil on his car recently? Just as my father struggled to connect with me, I am finding it more and more difficult to connect with my own son, and it’s very painful. I can only hope that someday we can rediscover our love for each other, as Mike says, “…in the living years.” That’s where this piece of music has taken me: the reminder of the day of my father’s death so many years ago, the recollection of my Daddy-Friend from childhood long in the past, and finally to my own relationship with my child in the present. I don’t have to be his Daddy-Friend. I’d just like to be his daddy…or his friend.