Grief

The Chair

About a minute or two before my dad died, I was sat at my parents’ dining table, eating some leftover chicken parm that we’d brought home from an off-brand Olive Garden a few minutes from their house the night before. I wasn’t even hungry, but I had nothing else to do, so I heated it up in the microwave, put on my headphones, and clicked on one of the first YouTube videos that appeared on the homepage.

I don’t even remember what the video was, but I remember at the time thinking it was incredibly stupid. Maybe some DIY tutorial with no voiceover? The music – which I almost certainly wouldn’t be able to identify if you played it for me right now – was some sort of overly upbeat chiptune, and I remember thinking that was cosmically funny. Or at least odd.

“This is what I’m doing as my father dies,” I’d thought.

My dad was on a chair in the living room, and from where I sat at the dining table, I had a clear view of him. Even though the sun had set hours ago, every light in the living room was off and the blinds were drawn, but the overhead chandelier in the dining room was oppressively bright, so the shadows it was casting in his direction were appropriately sharp and dramatic. He was lying down in the chair, completely flat, except for his head and neck, which looked to be craned uncomfortably forward against the back of the chair, his chin almost touching the top of his chest. His feet were protruding over the edge of the chair, so we’d propped them on a small ottoman.

Beneath him was a protective (IE, waterproof) fitted sheet for a queen-sized mattress I’d bought from Target the day before. Across him was one of the many throw blankets my parents kept in their living room. Aside from that, he was completely naked, and there was a small medical bag hanging beside him (I’m not sure of the right word? Colostomy? Maybe?) to catch his urine.

The chair is a white leather, expensive, electronic Lay-Z-Boy-esque number. I’m not sure of the brand, but it’s a nice chair. It looks contemporary and classy and reclines with the push of a button. My dad was so proud of this chair.

He died in April 2023, on Easter Sunday, and my parents had only picked up the chair a few months prior; the end of a months-long quest for the perfect chair. I spoke with my mom about it a few days ago. Apparently, this was the very first chair they’d spied in their hunt, and after looking at so many other duds, they’d come back to it. But back then, sat at the dining table as my father lay dying, all I knew about the chair’s progeny was that it hadn’t been there at Thanksgiving but had materialized by Christmas.

My dad’s particular pride in the chair stemmed from the fact that each of his three children had visited him and my mom – at separate times and on separate weekends – and each of us in turn had fallen asleep in the chair. He loved that. It was so comfortable in the chair, and we felt so comfortable in his home, that we’d all had ourselves a little nap. That was important to him.

“We’ve all fallen asleep in that chair!” he told me after I woke up from my nap in it sometime in late December or mid-January, I honestly can’t remember which visit it had been. “One of us never woke up,” my brother quipped after I’d recounted the story to him a few days after our dad’s passing.

After the undertakers took my dad out of the house – he was wrapped up in the white, fitted sheet from Target – I put the chair back to its seated position, adjusted the throw pillows, and immediately sat down in it. I wanted to destigmatize the chair as soon as possible. This wasn’t going to be The Spot my dad died, it was going to stay the chair that was so comfortable his kids had all fallen asleep in it.

It kind of worked. I’ve sat in the chair every time I’ve been back to visit, which has only been twice since his death, but nobody else has.

“It definitely has a weird energy,” my brother told me after a recent visit of his. My mom apparently looks at the chair most evenings and talks to it while she watches tv and drinks tea and maybe a whiskey or two – something she and my dad did together more or less every night for more or less forty years. “I look at it and I see him smiling at me. I tell him about my day,” she tells me often.

In a few days I’m flying to Maryland to spend the weekend with my mom and my siblings in recognition of the anniversary of his death. The actual anniversary is today – a Tuesday – but the weekend works just as well, we all agree. I will be sitting in the chair. I think he’d like that.

My Liminal Year

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve aways framed my adult life in terms of seasons of a television show, of which I am the titular star. Implications of Main Character Syndrome aside, the divisions are strikingly clear in my head:

Season 1: High School

Season 2: College & Baltimore

Season 3: DC: Part 1

Season 4: DC: Part 2

Season 5: Seattle

This past year since his death has felt outside of that, though. It doesn’t fit neatly into any one of those, but it doesn’t feel like it sits in a new one either. It’s a liminal year. The time that happens in between one season’s finale and the next season’s premiere.

Bones went to Nicaragua to study a huge anthropological find and Booth went to Iraq to train troops! There’s been a five-year time jump and now Leslie and Ben have a family, but she and Ron had a falling out! Jake and Captain Holt are in Florida in the witness protection program! All happened off-camera. Unimportant setup for the season that follows, quickly exposited in a scene or two. Jonathan’s dad died and he’s felt listless and feckless and a little numb for about a year. You’re all caught up. Now watch.

I don’t want to pin it all on my dad’s death, for a lot of reasons. For starters, I’m aware there are other factors at play, ranging from my history with depression to my business having a down year to maybe just a lot of things that will go unnamed catching up to me at once. Plus, he really didn’t want to die. He really, really didn’t want to die. So, making this all his fault is, at a minimum, unfair.

But, also, I think it’s because I just don’t know when the next season’s going to start. Aesthetically I’m still in Season 5: Seattle. It’s the same house, the same routine, the same cast of characters. I wake up, I work on my laptop, I film my dogs, I post a video or two of them being cute or funny or weird, I take them for a walk, I come home and hang out with my wife, maybe people come over and we play board games, rinse and repeat. Filler episodes. Classic Season 5.

I was doing all of this when my dad was here. Exactly as I’m doing right now, save for one perceptible difference.

In my sophomore year of college, I moved off-campus, and I started the habit of calling my dad whenever I would travel from Point A to Point B. He has always been what could be generously described as, “a little clingy,” and this was an easy way to both kill time and check the box of making sure he got enough attention. This continued over the years. If I was ever in-between places or activities or errands or events, I would call my dad.

Driving to campus? Call my dad. Commuting from Baltimore to DC? Call my dad. Walking past the White House on my way to work? Call my dad. Taking the huskies for a walk? Call my dad. It occupied the same space that a podcast or a really good playlist does.

To be fair, I’d always viewed it as calling my parents rather than calling my dad, but he is the one who reliably picked up his phone. Any time you call my mom’s phone, there’s at least a 70% chance that it will ring loudly at the bottom of her purse while she is blissfully unaware, mere inches away from it.

Still, I’d called him clingy, and I meant it.

I told this story in his eulogy: One time he’d come to Baltimore for work on a Monday. He’d stayed with me in my apartment until Friday afternoon. 5 days, 4 nights. During the four-and-a-half-hour drive back from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, he’d called me twice, and we spoke for at least 10 minutes each time. On Saturday, we did not speak with each other. On Sunday, he called me.

“Hi, Dad! How are you?” I’d answered, quite cheerily, I’ll note.

“Well, Jonathan. I’d just assumed you’d stopped loving me.” I knew him well enough to know he was – conservatively – 82% serious. He didn’t think I’d stopped loving him, sure, but he’d felt neglected. By his son. Who was probably like 21 or 22 years old at this time and very much living the life of a young man in his early 20s. Who he’d just spent 5 whole days with, in close proximity, in a studio apartment. A. Studio. Apartment.

“What?” I’d asked.

“I haven’t heard from you all weekend.” He said, incredulous.

“Yesterday? You mean you haven’t heard from me yesterday?” I asked, matching his tone.

“I’m only joking!” he said, before changing the subject. Dear reader, he was not “only joking.”

Every one of us – my mom, my brother, my sister, me – have about a dozen or two stories just like this. There were parts of my dad – very large parts – that were so deeply, incurably insecure.

To his credit, he did try to hide that from us. His children, at least. I mean, he didn’t try very hard, but I think intellectually he was aware of them and desperate to keep them a secret from the broader world, whether he ever acknowledged that to himself or not. But we knew him the best out of anyone in that broader world, and we knew him – objectively – much better than he’d ever known himself, so it was like trying to hide an elephant underneath a Kleenex in a strong breeze. Good luck with that.

Anyway. I still take my huskies for long walks every day. I call my mom on many or most of those walks, but whether she picks up or not is a coin flip. That’s when I feel his absence the most. That’s when I know I’m no longer in Season 5.

I am He and He is Me.

I think there’s a certain truth in the adage that we’re all doomed to become our parents. At least I see the outline of him around me, like I was colored in from a line-drawing of his silhouette. Equal parts him, my mom, and a Secret Third Thing. Like most people are with their parents, I guess. But he was my dad, and I am his son, and I see that in a bunch of ways that are big and small and stupid and profound.

A few years ago, while walking my huskies, I’d worked out the exact date when I would be the exact age that each of my parents were when I was born. I called my mom on her day and told her. She got a kick out of it but seemed confused. It took a bit of explaining.

“As of today, it’s been the exact same number of days from my birth to now as it had been from your birth to my birth. Ipso facto, today, I am the exact age you were when I was born!”

“Neat!” she said with absolutely zero sarcasm.

My dad is older than my mom, so we’d not hit his date yet – still two years away – so I marked it in my calendar so I wouldn’t forget when the day came around.

It was dumb, but seemed significant for reasons I don’t know how to articulate. It’s like their lives could be divided neatly into two discrete segments: Before Jonathan and After Jonathan. And as of that date, they would be living more of their lives with me than they had without me.

I explained this to my dad, and he’d said something to the effect of, “What about Leap Days?” I’d already taken that into account. Of course I had. This type of dumb, stupid, meaningless math that for some reason has a formless weight to me and me alone is something I got from him directly. This is a bit of me that was broken off from him. A spot crayoned in with his color.

It was only after he died that I started thinking about the bits of him that came from my grandad. Grandad died when I was just 7 years old, so I never got to know him as an adult. The only grandparent who lived long enough to get to know me as an adult was my dad’s mom, and I’m so grateful for that. There’s something wonderful about knowing the person rather than just the role they are in your life.

I didn’t just know my grandma, I knew Joyce. I’m sorry I didn’t get that for the other three.

It hurts a little bit to think that there’s probably a lot about my dad that I think of as Uniquely Keith but is actually Classic Ron. The works cited is incomplete, and I can only trace the origin of some things back so far. He died when I was so young. My research hadn’t even really begun. The only thing I know without a doubt my dad got from my grandad is his temper. And boy, did my dad have a temper.

I have never once in my life been afraid of my dad. Let’s be clear about that. He was never physically violent with me or my mom or my siblings, and his outbursts were aways something that we had to deal with and ride out. Like the rain rolling in on a day you’d wanted to play outside. An inconvenience. An annoying fact of life that was ultimately completely out of our control. But he had such a volatile hair-trigger, that living with him was often a tense experience. Really anything could set him off into a blind rage.

The most egregious example I can think of is the time he lost his mind because a throw blanket had fallen from its perch on the back of the couch, and nobody had bothered to put it back. There’s not much to the story; that’s pretty much it. Blanket on the ground, kicking, screaming, grown man melting down. That was a formative blow-up for me because it’s maybe the first time I can remember thinking something along the lines of, “This isn’t about the blanket, is it?”

My grandma and my uncle would talk about my grandad and my dad in such similar terms. It’s pretty clear how the generational trauma shaped the men they became, and how it was passed from one to the other, and – to an admittedly lesser extent, but that’s a low bar – to me and my siblings.

My brother and I share our dad’s temper. It doesn’t come out often. Not anywhere approaching the frequency of his explosions, but it’s still there. I think our blow-ups are so rare for us because they were so common for my dad. We know intimately what it looks like when an adult toddler has a public meltdown. It’s not a good look.

But, still, it happens, and I’m not proud of it whenever it does. The shame and self-loathing set in with the same immediacy as the unhinged yelling. It’s a bad Batman impression. “You think you’re the aggrieved party? You don’t know how aggrieved I am!” we seem to say each time it happens. Ian and I call it “Going Keith.”

“I went Keith on a guy,” we’ll say to each other, knowing exactly what that means.

The only time my wife has ever seen me Go Keith was a few years ago when my brother and I were having an argument on the phone. I kept my cool for what is – in my estimation – a heroic amount of time, but Ian knows exactly where all my buttons are and he’s very aware of the order in which they need to be pressed. “Do not cite the deep magic to me, Witch; I was there when it was written.” Etc.

Anyway, he punched in the correct combination, and I snapped at him, screaming as loudly at the phone’s mic as possible, with as much depth and gravel as I could muster, watching outside of myself as saliva and rage flew out of my mouth in equal measure. Ian hung up.

We quickly apologized to one another that afternoon; we both know the shame of giving in to that part of us that is the part of him that we never liked. But still, it scared Rachel a bit, I think.

“I’ve never seen you act like that.” she said, helping to calm me down. “Please don’t ever yell at me like that.” I never have and I never could. There are only two people in this world capable of making me that angry, and now one of them is dead. So. You know. No worries there.

There are other things I got from my dad aside from his temper and possibly autistic math appreciation. Things I really like!

He was good with a quip. He was quite quick, particularly at other peoples’ expense. That might sound like a negative quality, but I firmly believe that making fun of someone in a way that makes everyone laugh is equal parts art, science, and natural-born talent.

He could be quite charming. Some of that was because he had a British accent, and that genuinely is a super power in the States, but a lot of it was just because he was specced high in charisma. I joked with my in-laws once that my dad’s biggest problem is that he’s not nearly as charming as he thinks he is, and my biggest problem is that I am exactly as charming as I think I am. They laughed and said, “I dunno. He’s pretty charming.”

He had a great sense of humor too. A few days before he died, I realized that he was getting a bunch of texts from business associates and the like, so I opened his phone to see if there had been anything important that I might need to address on his behalf. One of the last texts he’d received before losing lucidity was from one of those robot spam numbers from China that are trying to catfish you. It read:

Hi, long time no see, how are you doing? We can get together some time some day.

His response:

Dying of cancer very soon – you?

There’s other stuff that’s smaller and so specific it won’t make any sense to anyone else, but they’ve cropped up the most this past year, and they make me feel his loss so acutely. Just little things that I care about that he would care about that *literally* nobody else in my life would care about.

An example: I went to New Zealand this past December on a vacation with my wife and her family, and I found an app that allows you to buy virtual SIM cards for your phone so you can use your number and data when you’re abroad, and – critically – it’s really cheap. My dad would have been obsessed with this. I can hear all the questions he would ask me about it after I’d tell him on one of our dog-walk phone calls.

“How much does it cost?”

“What was the name of it again?”

“What about the day you’ll be in Australia? What then?” He would ask.

He traveled a lot for work, and with his family being in the UK – by the end of his life, just my uncle – he went abroad five or six times a year. He always detailed the process for me of staying in communication. It was agonizingly boring to listen to, but I think he got something out of recounting the steps in his process. 20 years ago, it was purchasing a burner and then emailing friends and family that new number. Later, it was getting a local SIM card for his phone as soon as he’d land and performing the necessary surgery to install it in his phone. After that it was WhatsApp and a WiFi hotspot.

It would have been easier if he’d just paid for the plan that let him use his phone abroad, but he was very cheap in weird and specific ways, and this was one of them. He had decided on an arbitrary amount he was willing to pay to stay in communication while traveling overseas, and he was going to stay below that number no matter what.

He would have been so thrilled I’d found this app. Now I have no one to share that discovery with. It’s an app. Who cares? Nobody cares. Why should they? It’s an app. Moments like that have been really hard for me.

This past August, I was sat on the couch chatting with Rachel when my phone buzzed. It was the calendar alert I’d set years ago, letting me know that I was now – at this very moment – the exact age my dad had been when I was born. She must have seen the look on my face as I read the alert, because she asked me what was wrong. I explained it to her.

My dad died before we hit this date that would have been important to him and me and nobody else. He’d lived most of his life without me. I cried.

There is No There There

The final weeks of my dad’s life were weird. I’d kept saying for the preceding year that I don’t know how worried I needed to be. We went from two years of remission and undetectable levels of cancer, to just barely perceptible, to we’ve got three phases of treatment plans that we’re executing in turn, to “holy shit he’s going to die this week” in what, at the time, seemed like blazing speed.

I remember being annoyed with him the weekend of my wedding. He was being needy, and he was making his problems my problems on maybe the most important weekend of my life, and I just didn’t have time for it. “I need there to be a second Jonathan to deal with him for me, because Ian and Olivia won’t do it.” I told Rachel at the time.

Hindsight is 20/20, and he would be dead in less than 10 months, so I have retroactively forgiven him for being high maintenance that weekend. He gets a pass, I guess. But at the time? I just didn’t know how worried to be, so I wasn’t worried. I was annoyed.

The last phone conversation I had with my dad wasn’t great. He hated the idea of his own death. Hated it. He just really loved his life and his family and hated the thought of leaving it and them. I also think he was utterly terrified of not knowing what was coming next, if anything at all.

He talked about death a lot. It clearly weighed on him his entire adult life. Because of that, he never really went through the stages of grief – I think he hit denial and just kind of lived there. He sure as shit never hit acceptance.

Thanksgiving 2022 was, at the time and in retrospect, a fucking nightmare. Rachel and I were driving up from BWI, where we’d flown in, and I called my parents to let them know we were almost at their door. It was only at this moment, minutes away from the house, that my mom finally warned me, “Your dad’s not been doing great.” Understatement of the fucking century.

My dad was in so much pain in the small of his back that all he could do was sit in a chair looking disgustingly uncomfortable and pained, sweat pouring out of him, wearing nothing but a bath robe, and scream – literal screaming – at the top of his lungs every time he initiated even the slightest movement. For the first time since his cancer diagnosis, it looked like he was dying.

Now. I’ve hinted at it here and there in this… essay? I guess this is an essay? Let’s call it an essay. Anyway, I’ve hinted at how difficult and strange my dad was, but there isn’t enough time and I’m not articulate enough to show you the full of it. If I were to write a screenplay about my life, he would be the most unrealistic character. “Nobody talks like this,” my agent would say, “You should tone him down.”

My father was the most aggrieved man ever to live. For someone who’d lived such a relatively charmed life – his deeply difficult and traumatic childhood notwithstanding – he loved to complain. Worse, he loved to martyr himself. Always taking the worst cut of meat, the worst seat, the worst travel itinerary, and always making it known he was sacrificing his happiness and wellbeing for his family.

There are two things that were infuriating about this:

1)    If you want to martyr yourself, you’re kind of undercutting the whole martyrdom thing if you are constantly (and loudly!) complaining about THE CHOICES YOU MADE that – and I can’t emphasize this enough – NOBODY ASKED YOU TO MAKE.

2)    Every single member of my family unanimously agrees in perpetuity that it would be better if he had just taken the best cut of meat, the best seat, and the first-class ticket for himself. He only ever had to deal with the bad thing. We all had to deal with him dealing with the bad thing, which was several orders of magnitude worse.

I say all of this to contextualize Thanksgiving. Yes, it’s obvious now, a year after his death, that he was very much dying in that moment. But in that moment, with his lifelong history of histrionics, it was really hard to tell.

Still, you can only eyeroll at writhing agony for so long before you address it, so my brother and I jumped into action pretty quickly. We started researching what we had to do to get him a medical marijuana license in the state of Maryland. We called doctors and dispensaries, downloaded forms, scanned his driver’s license and passport, and filled out and submitted everything. It all crescendoed in a phone call with his doctor on Black Friday, during which my dad insisted he was just extremely constipated and downplayed his level of pain and lack of mobility.

He hung up the phone. We asked how it had gone. We had wanted to be in the room with him to listen in on the call, to speak with the doctor ourselves, but Dad had angrily waved us away. He said he’d been prescribed a stool softener and a higher dosage of ibuprofen.

To my brother’s credit, he’d had enough in that moment. “Enough of this shit!” he’d shouted, declaring that he and I were going to drive to DC and buy our dad some weed gummies and bring them back. Right. Now. To this day I’m embarrassed and angry I didn’t think of that, but credit where it’s due. So, we did.

Now, Ian and I are cherubs. We are each, in our own unique ways, our mother’s special boy. As such, neither of us have ever done drugs. No weed, no molly, no pills, no fun. Clean and boring. So, this was the first time for either of us buying drugs. I knew I was out of my element. “How do you do, fellow kids!?” I called friends and asked them to walk me through it. They heard the stress in my voice, I think, because they gave detailed advice and very little judgment, for which I’ll be forever grateful.

My dad, who hadn’t done any drugs since the 70s, LOVED his gummies. Saturday morning, we all left, and he was feeling a little better. By the time I called my mom that evening, she’d said that my dad – who had spent the entire holiday up to that point immobile on the couch, screaming in pain, looking like death – casually suggested to her that they go out to the local diner. They’d had a really nice little date together.

It was only later did I find out that he’d had an opiate prescription that he just wasn’t taking. He didn’t want to. At no point during my Hellish, nightmare of a weekend – exclusively because of his agony – did he think to himself, “I must be stressing my family out. Maybe I should try one of those Oxys.”

On the last phone call I ever had with him, I asked him what possible reason he could have for not taking his prescribed pain medicine. “My reasons are my reasons,” he’d told me. Stubborn. Obstinate. Needlessly suffering. He decided to white-knuckle cancer, and we all had to deal with him dealing with it. I’d never been so furious at him.

Some of those reasons, I’m sure, are because he grew up a very working-class boy in a very rough part of England and he believed there was weakness in taking anything stronger than aspirin (though I don’t think he’d ever admit that), but mostly I think it was the denial. You don’t need medicine that strong if you’re not dying.

About a month or two before he died, he told me about a scan that had been done of him and his meeting with the doctor about it. The doctor made my dad look at the scan. “I’m never doing that again, Jonathan. There was so much black. I’m never doing that again.” I think the doctor knew the depths of his denial, but even at this point, six to eight weeks away from his death, I thought we still had several other treatment options we needed to cycle through. I thought, “Absolute worst-case scenario, I’ve got a year with him left.”

I just never really knew how worried I needed to be.

Denial

I was supposed to fly out to see my parents on Thursday, March 30^th, but one of my flights got canceled, and I’d lost my first-class upgrade on the rebooked flight. I spent years flying back-and-forth between the coasts. First, because Rachel and I were long-distance for a year before I moved out to Seattle to be with her, and then because of work, so I’ve racked up a bunch of frequent flyer miles, Platinum Status with Delta, and working knowledge of how to game my flight-booking so that I have a 75% success rate at getting the free first-class upgrade.

Let me tell you, it makes a difference. First-class domestic isn’t like the greatest thing on the planet or anything, but they are the only seats on the flight that don’t actively suck, so I rebooked my rebooked flights to the next day. System gamed. Upgrade secured.

“You can use my card if you want to book an earlier flight,” my dad told me, wanting to see me sooner. “No, that’s okay. It’s not a big deal,” I said, thinking it wasn’t.

I landed in DC late Friday night and crashed on my brother’s couch. We talked about dad and whether he was dying or not and how much time he had left. I was coming in because he’d clearly taken a turn, but we thought it was just a bend in the road that was his cancer fight. Ostensibly I was coming in to help get him to the hospital for his radiation treatments. Because I own my business and just need my laptop and an internet connection to do my job, it’s as easy for me to do it from their kitchen table as it is from mine, so I had the flexibility to be able to ferry him to-and-fro the hospital. None of us thought I was coming in to say goodbye.

In the morning, my brother and I drove up. “Are you going to stay the night?” Ian asked me. “I’ll make that decision when I see him. If he looks really bad, I probably will. If not, I’ll come back to DC with you tonight so we can hang out and then I’ll take the train up again tomorrow.”

We got there and he looked ok. My mom had warned us that he was loopy and confused, and that’s a really good way to put it. It wasn’t like dealing with someone with dementia, something I had experience with from my grandma’s decline, but more akin to dealing with someone who’s a little drunk or still groggy. He just seemed a bit slower, and not quite sure what we were talking about until a sentence or two into the conversation.

I told everyone that I’d be going back to DC that night and up again on the train the next day. My mom, my brother, and I went out to lunch and Dad texted us his order to bring back to him. A ham sandwich. The text was legible but peppered with odd punctuation and a spelling mistake. It read like he was drunk, but not dying. Who’s dying and thinks, “Yeah, a ham sandwich sounds good right about now?”

When I came back the very next day. Things had gone so precipitously downhill it’s hard to compare. I honestly wish I had more details, but I don’t remember much from that Sunday. It was quiet and dour and terrifying and horrible and mundane and boring. I had some of the last conversations I ever had with my dad that day, and I don’t remember what any of them were about.

On Monday, we had to go to the hospital for his treatment. I’d not been before, so I didn’t know what to expect. After waking him up in the morning, it took about 30 minutes before his mind would also stir and you could communicate with him. He started off drunk, but gradually sobered up and became himself. He was lucid enough to give me directions to the hospital and through its labyrinthian corridors.

This is where my mom really needed the help, and a large part of the reason I flew across the country. The physical logistics of getting him in and out of the wheelchair and through the hospital was difficult for her. She’s not a very big woman and she really struggled with that. It was easy for me, though. No trouble at all. He told me he needed to pee while we were waiting in the hallway for his turn with the radiation, so I wheeled him right up to a stall and he stood and peed and sat back down. Flawless execution. We were a good team.

I thought Tuesday would be easier because I’d learned the way and knew now what the process was like. Just rinse and repeat. But it was harder to get him up and get him moving; took longer for his brain to wake, for him to resemble himself. Eventually, though, we got him there and he got his treatment. I brought my dad back from the bathroom and my mom was talking with the hospital’s hospice representative. She was walking my mom through the option. “We’re not there yet,” I’d thought.

Wednesday was the worst. My dad started needing to be naked all the time. We’d leave the room and come back to him groggily stripping down, but we’d gotten clothes back on him, and after a while, he came back to us. I got him out to the car, and we stood there in the driveway waiting for my mom to secure the dogs and lock up the house, and I think it was in this exact moment that I knew he would be dead soon. Not conceptually dead. Dead, dead. Not soon as in sometime, but this week. The car door was open, and he was stood, quite wobbly, but stood, supported by leaning on a combination of me and the door. I looked at him and I was struck by the urge – the need – to hug him. “This will be the very last chance I ever get to hug him,” I correctly thought in the moment.

I didn’t hug him.

My dad was extremely affectionate with me and my siblings and my mom and his dogs. This wasn’t a “boys don’t cry” and “we don’t talk about our feelings with our dad” thing, or even a “he’s told me he loves me with his actions not his words” thing. There wasn’t a conversation we had that didn’t end with “I love you,” or “I’m proud of you.” To us it was “Goodbye,” or “Talk soon.” Hell, the only reason why my dad stopped kissing me directly on the lips is because I learned to read when it was going to happen and duck out of the way. This was not that. This wasn’t toxic masculinity or inability to confront my feelings or whatever. For as complicated a man as my dad was, our relationship was remarkably simple: he was my dad, I was his son, and we loved each other openly.

But I knew how scared he was of dying. I knew how badly he wanted to live; to stay with me and Ian and Olivia. To stay with my mom. But this was the moment when I knew he was done. Time’s up. Game over. And, in that moment, I worried that if I hugged him, he would know too. And I don’t know much, but I know he didn’t want to know. So, I didn’t hug him.

I regret it and I don’t.

I think my analysis was correct, but I still feel that moment. The need to hold him and be held by him, one more time. The last chance for me to allow myself to be a boy. It hurts that I didn’t take it, but I have a million of those moments. Two million. Ten. So, it’s ok. But the moment felt significant then, and still feels it now, so I just want to say that.

Going to the Movies

His last week is a blur. At some point I started writing down our interactions in my Notes app. I wanted to keep them as verbatim as they could be. Were these the most important conversations I’d ever had with my dad? No, probably not. But they were some of the last. And no matter how mundane, that gives them a weight, I think.

Some of them make sense. Some of them don’t.

THINGS MY DAD HAS SAID THIS WEEK:

“Do you know how to remember this place?”
“How?”
“Liverpool.”

“I love you, Dad.”
“Not as much as I love you.”

“I love you a lot, Dad.”
“Thank you for everything that you’re doing, but I don’t think it’s going to help with my condition.”
“That’s not going to stop me from trying.”
(Can’t remember this exchange verbatim but this was at least 90% it, if not 100%)

“I just want to help you as much as possible.”
“I know you do, Love.”

One thing I found really endearing is how he says, “Cheers” every time after we give him water.

We told him that we were all with him (Me, Mom, Olivia) while on the bed with him and that Ian was on his way, and he said, “It feels right.” He told us that we were going to “Our special place” and I asked where that is and he said, “It’s right behind the three of you.”

On Thursday, as I was going to bed, I stopped over his shoulder and said, “I love you, Dad.” He said, “I love you.” Then I kissed his cheek and said “Goodnight” and he said “Goodnight.” I’ve done that on both Friday and Saturday (tonight), but didn’t get any response from him. I’m pretty sure he can still hear me though.

Olivia didn’t get there until Wednesday night. On Thursday morning, we were all supposed to take Dad to the hospital for his treatment, but only if he was up for it. He said he wanted to go, but he was naked, so my mom got him dressed and woke me up. I got ready, but by the time I was all set to go, he was already taking his clothes off again. “He’s changed his mind,” my mom said. He was supposed to have two more treatments of radiation, but those three that I took him to on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday were his last. He entered hospice on Thursday.

There’s not a lot to do at my parents’ house. It’s in Aberdeen, Maryland, a city (Town? Municipality?) in which I have no history and no friends. My parents moved there largely because it is roughly halfway between Philly (where Olivia lives) and DC (where Ian lives and I lived at the time they moved). So, I did two things.

First, I went to Target and I bought a bunch of small LEGO sets and I built them – one or two a day. It just seemed appropriate somehow. Here I am in my parents’ house for the last time with both of them, so I’m just going to do what I loved to do as a kid and disassociate.

Second, I didn’t go to the movies. I say “didn’t go” because more or less every night that week I would look up movie times, get in the car, drive to the theater parking lot, think about going in, then turn around and drive back to their house. My anxiety was just shot. “What if he dies when I’m in there and my phone is put away?” I couldn’t handle it.

A few days after he died, while we were waiting for the funeral, my brother and I went to see John Wick 4. The theater was incredible. Brand new, great seats, tremendous food menu. It was an experience.

I was shocked. Why does Aberdeen, Maryland, of all places, have such a nice, independent theater?

This was the first time I missed my dad. I had been sad he was gone, sure, but this is the first time I wanted to talk with him about something, and really felt how that would never be possible again. He would have loved that we loved it. We found something in his unremarkable town where we have no ties that we liked. He would have brought it up with each subsequent visit. “Why don’t you go see a movie?” he would have asked. He would have been proud of the theater in exactly the same way he was proud of the chair.

Year of Loss

There was a lot about this past year that was kind of crappy, but I need to emphasize first and foremost how lucky I am. I have a wonderful home, an amazing partner, and famous dogs. That last one shouldn’t be important, but I love them a lot and they help me in ways that are hard to quantify, and it’s (narcissistically!) incredibly validating that they have such a large social media following, so it’s worth mentioning.

On December 29^th, 2022, Rachel and I left my parents’ house after being there for only two days to celebrate Christmas after the fact. We’d gotten snowed in Seattle on Christmas Day itself and that quickly upended our holiday plans, so it was just me and her and my mom and dad, but we had fun, and it meant a lot to them, and it turned out to be the last holiday I’d get to spend with my dad.

It was about a 6-hour drive from my parents’ house to Rachel’s mom’s place, and right at the journey’s start, we got a call from our cat sitter letting us know that Spartacus, my 18-year-old calico, was not doing well. She’d had health issues for years and was on 5 or 6 different medications, so it wasn’t exactly entirely out of the blue, but she had been perfect when we’d left only a few days earlier, and totally fine that very morning according to the sitter. Luckily, our sitter is also a vet tech, so she brought Spartacus in to see the vet right away.

Literally as we were pulling into the driveway at Rachel’s mom’s place, the vet called us. Spartacus is at the end of her life, we are told. The vet recommended I give her permission to put Spartacus down right there. This cat and I had been together for so long and she meant so much to me. “I can’t,” I told her. I needed to see her. I needed to be there with her at the end. So, I booked a flight for 5 AM out of Raleigh, went inside to have a Christmas dinner with Rachel’s family, got 2 and a half hours of sleep, and then drove two hours to the airport.

The whole time I was traveling that day, I was texting with my dad. He was worried for Spartacus and was mad he couldn’t be there with me. When I got home and saw her on the couch, she started purring for me, but she couldn’t do anything else. It was clear this was it for her. I talked to my dad a few times that afternoon as I was spending time with her and waiting for the vet to come that evening to send Spartacus on her way.

My father was always capable of feeling the full gamut of human emotions, but he only ever expressed two. If he was happy, he would express happy. If he felt literally any other emotion, ranging from boredom to sleepy to hungry, he would express blind rage.

So, while we talked that day, he would get angry with me. Not angry at me, but angry alongside me. Angry in solidarity. He remembered when we brought Spartacus home and she would play her “chase me” games, not letting anyone pet her but so clearly desperate for affection. He talked about how she would attack his feet under the covers at night. He recalled how she would swat at the tails of Puck and Chessa, our two Husky-mixes, as they walked past the chair upon which she was hiding.

I remember being surprised in the moment that my dad was comforting me. Not that he was being comforting. He hated seeing his children upset or hurting and his immediate response was to always go into an “I NEED TO FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY” mode; sometimes helpful, sometimes not. But rather, I was surprised that it was working. Here I was, a grown man, well into my 30s, sobbing on the phone to my dad about my cat, and he was helping me through it.

Almost exactly a year later, I went through the same exact thing with Spartacus’ littermate, Roxy. I won’t go into all the details of Roxy’s passing here, but the short version is that I knew she was not doing well when we were supposed to go to New Zealand. It killed me to leave her, because to me, my animals have never been just animals – they’re the part of me I wish I was all the time. So, I decided that I wasn’t going to go unless I knew Roxy would be ok.

She had an X-Ray the day before we left, as well as two blood panels in the week leading up to the trip. I spoke with the vets and Rachel and a few other trusted parties, and we all rationalized and agreed that she might pass while I was gone, but probably not, so I went. She died about 28 hours later.

Again, I won’t go into the details because that’s its own essay and this is supposed to be about me and my grief from losing my dad and everything, but this came after landing in New Zealand to a bunch of calls and texts from the boarding facility where the huskies were staying to the news that Archer had to be rushed to the hospital. Suffice it to say, I was in a Bad Place.

While I was feeling completely useless on the other side of the world, grieving my cat, terrified for my dog, trying to keep on a happy face for my in-laws who were very generously giving me an all-expenses-paid world-class once-in-a-lifetime vacation, I looked through my texts with my dad from when I was traveling back to see Spartacus less than a year prior.

“I wish I were with you.”

In the moment, it felt like a message from him. Partly because it was literally a message from him, albeit from a year ago, but also because I know how badly he’d want to be there for me, doing what he thought he could to comfort me and lift some of the pain from me. Like he always did.

I don’t want to equate two senior cats dying of old age to losing my father to cancer, but it all feels connected to this liminal year of mine somehow. The exposition that needs to happen to pave the way for Season 6. Or maybe that’s just me rationalizing it? I don’t know. Humans are conditioned look for patterns, and we see them everywhere, even where they’re not.

The Funeral

My dad didn’t have a funeral so much in the traditional sense. It was important to him and my mom that they spend as little money as possible, so we found a crematorium that would do it cheaper than anyone else, and they give us a little room where we could meet and say a few words with someone who kind of lead the “ceremony.”

The crematorium used to just do animals, but they branched out to people. I think my dad would have liked that. Maybe. I don’t know.

I didn’t prepare a eulogy. I winged it.

Here’s the thing. I think I would have done a good job, were it not for the guy who was leading the ceremony. The MC? I don’t know what you’d call him – he wasn’t a priest, and he wasn’t a pastor, but he was Some Guy and he said, “Thank you everyone for being here” to the room at the start. Anyway. I don’t know how to explain to you in words the geography of the room, or a forensic reconstruction of how all people and podiums and flower arrangements and urns were situated within it, but the long and short of it is that when I was giving my speech, This Guy was stood directly in front of me, two and half feet from my face, looking right at me, and saying affirmations like, “Yes, sir” or “That’s right,” in a very preacherly way after every sentence I spoke that I found incredibly off-putting.

Suffice it to say, I was off my game, and I flubbed my dad’s eulogy. It was a little stumbly, but passable. Not my worst, but not my best. But I am capable of great, so I think this essay is my mulligan. The eulogy that wasn’t, if you will.

Olivia and Ian said some things as well. Olivia’s was brief but incredibly moving. Ian’s was furious.

He couldn’t be there when my dad was dying. He showed up on Thursday night, and by Saturday, he had to leave. He just couldn’t handle it. He’d tell you as much himself. He’s not good with death like that. Just like my dad.

In the lead up to my dad’s death, it was one of my jobs to keep my uncle in England apprised. On one of these update calls, a few days before my dad passed, my uncle told me the story of my grandad’s death. I’d heard a version of it from my dad over the years; always short and sweet.

My dad’s version is this: It became clear to him that his dad wasn’t going to make it. So, he sat down beside him in his hospital bed, spoke to my grandad (who was unconscious), and let him know it was ok to let go. He died that evening.

That was it.

My uncle’s version didn’t contradict that in any way but expanded on it.

My uncle told me that both he and my grandma had wanted to go back to the hospital that evening, but that my dad refused to go. “I’m not going back there. I’ve already said goodbye,” he said.

This lines up with what I know of my dad. When the family dog, Gretta, had to be put down, my dad and my mom and I got her to the vet where she took her final steps and collapsed. The vet immediately agreed that it was her time, and my dad, who absolutely worshipped this dog, said flatly, “Goodbye, Gretta,” scratched her behind the ears, and left the room.

This dog was a part of him, and that was the best goodbye he could muster. He couldn’t be there. He couldn’t confront it. He never could. Not directly, at least. Not in the same room as it. And neither could Ian.

This isn’t a judgment thing. Sincerely. I don’t view it as a weakness, and you really shouldn’t either. I get it. Death is depressing and unavoidable. If it’s so inevitable, why waste any time at all thinking about it, confronting it, looking it in the eye? It’s unpleasant, and whether you put in that kind of effort or not, the outcome is always the same. I won’t speak for my brother, but I know him pretty well, and I think if you asked him about it, he’d say something like, “Yeah, it’s terrifying and gross. Why would I want to be there for it?”

When my brother was leaving, he passed me on the way to his car, he reiterated that he just can’t be present for this, so I relayed both stories to him: what my uncle had said, and about the time of Gretta’s passing over 12 years prior. He stopped in his tracks and there was a dawning of realization in his eyes, as if he’d just understood that a bit of Dad had broken off decades ago and had been a part of Ian this whole time and he was only just now – right at the very end – made aware of it.

“Yeah, you guys respond to death in exactly the same way!” I’d said, in characteristic deadpan.
“Seems that way!” Ian replied.
“Welp, it gives you something new to talk about with your therapist!” I’d said.
“Seems that way!” Ian replied.

In his defense, Ian had always said that he would suck at the dying bit but be good after he was gone. All the after-death stuff that doesn’t involve bodies or cremation – any of the mechanics of death. And Ian was right! He wrote a really good and funny obituary for my dad, in which he called his death on Easter Sunday a “Reverse Resurrection,” and when he stepped up to the podium at the funeral to give his eulogy, he produced a whole stack of papers. Clearly, he’d spent a lot more time on this than I had.

He talked about my dad’s life and legacy, how angry he was about the state of healthcare in America (I haven’t really touched on the fun horrors that were our experience with hospice care, but it wasn’t great! My father’s final days were undignified and painful, and insurance companies and hospitals made a bucket of money billing Medicare for it.), how angry he was that his dad was dead, and, finally, he touched on my dad’s spirituality.

Ian made the point that it wasn’t something my dad ever really talked about in explicit detail, but that it was still very present and very important to him. He believed in things like karma, the afterlife, and one time, when we were children playing with a Ouija board, he got very concerned because we were tempting fate or spirits or something along those lines.

And that’s all true. My dad was definitely a believer, but not necessarily one with a doctrine. There’s something more there, and he could see it in the margins, but he could never describe the shape of it, and didn’t like people (mostly evangelical Christians) who felt like they could.

I play a lot of video games, so I – stupidly – think of it like equipment slots in an RPG. Your helmet is equipped to the head slot. Your armor is equipped to your chest slot. Etc. I think for my dad, in the slot where many or most people equip religion, he put his family. We occupied that space for him. He had a reverence for us – his wife, children, dogs, and his life with them – that I think most people reserve for God. It sounds dumb to say, but in a real sense, we were his religion. We were his faith.

There’s a downside to that too. Mostly in how he felt his kids could do no wrong and how we were extensions of himself. It was tangibly narcissistic in ways that are hard to transcribe. But for all my dad’s failings and shortcomings, of which there were many, he always, always, always tried to put us first.

In many ways, I feel the same about religion as him. There’s something more, I’ve felt it, but I’ve never felt the hole inside me that I needed to fill with Jesus or yoga or drugs. Never a deep enough curiosity that I needed to seek out or hunt down The Truth for myself. It’s enough for me that I can see it in the margins, the periphery. A blurry form.

It’s like getting directions to a place from a guy at the gas station. “Keep going down that street and turn left at the gnarled oak tree and then it’ll be on your left. You can’t miss it.”

I have a vague idea of which street I need to head down, and which way to head down it. I should know it when I get there; it’ll be on my left after the gnarled oak tree. Who needs the exact GPS coordinates? I think it kind of robs the journey of its purpose, anyway. You miss the chance to look out the window if you’re fumbling with the map.

I’ve had enough experiences in my life that had a depth of inexplicable meaning to me to support that but saying them out loud – typing them out here – would almost sap them of their power, so I won’t bother. I felt it, and that’s enough for me.

My Life a Movie FR

There are three moments I will talk about, though. Three that had a significance beyond their sequence of events. Expository scenes.

The first, was a few hours before my dad died. My entire life, I have never once seen my dad cry. Not once. Like I said earlier, if he ever felt sorrow or despair, he expressed it as rage. No tears in a rampage. But there was a moment, probably four or five hours before he passed, where we were alone in the living room together. He was in the chair, and I was on the couch beside him. He spent the entirety of his final day catatonic and unresponsive, but I looked over at him, and there was a single tear streaming down his face. He didn’t want to leave. I know he didn’t. And I like to think that he knew he didn’t have a choice, and that was what finally broke through whatever brokenness or masculine resolve that had held back his tears for at least the entirety of my life, and almost certainly for most of his.

I picked up a tissue and wiped it away from his cheek.

The second, was about a month or two after he’d died. I was walking the huskies at night and feeling particularly sad about the whole Dead Dad Thing, and on an isolated road in North Seattle, I looked up at the sky and I said, “I miss you a lot, Dad. I hope you’re doing okay.” And in that moment a shooting star streaked across the sky. I immediately broke down and sobbed; blubbering in the middle of the street holding on to two leashes connected to two huskies blissfully ignorant to my breakdown.

I looked it up afterwards. If you stare at any patch of sky, on average, you should see at least one shooting star every 20 minutes. They’re ridiculously common. Still. I’d never clocked one in the 6 preceding years I’d been living in Seattle, and the human brain looks for patterns and connections, even where there aren’t any.

The final moment was when my dad finally passed.

As I said, I was sitting there at the dining table, eating a mid, reheated chicken parm, watching the world’s dumbest YouTube video, and then suddenly and quietly I knew. This was it. He was about to die.

I took my headphones off and listened. His breathing and been deep and loud and regular all day, but now the time between breaths was so long. I got up from the table and started crying. I was alone with him – my mom and Olivia were in the bedroom watching season one of Love Is Blind. My mom had never seen it, so I put it on for her and (as I suspected) she loved it. I walked over to my dad and stood over him and gave him a hug as best I could in his position. I had already missed my chance for a final hug, but this was the closest approximation I could orchestrate.

I thanked him for being my dad. I told him I was going to miss him a lot and it was going to be really hard not having him to talk to. I told him that the hardest part was that there weren’t going to be any new memories of him. I asked him to visit me in my dreams as often as he could. He spoke a lot about how his dad would visit him in his dreams. How it was nice to see him again. How he missed him. I kissed his cheek and I asked him to hang on for just a minute. I told him that Mom and Olivia would want to be here for this and that I would go get them.

I walked into the bedroom and leaned against the wall, looking at my mom. She said, “What is it?” My voice, breaking, answered, “His breathing has really slowed.” My mom and my sister shot up and left the room. I grabbed the remote and turned off the tv. My mom’s hearing isn’t great and the volume was really loud and I know my dad well enough to know he would be incredibly annoyed at passing from the mortal plane to the Great Beyond while Love is Blind: Season One is blasting in the background.

We gathered around him, and I took his right hand, and at that exact moment, he took his last breath. He’d waited just long enough for my mom and my sister. Just like I’d asked.

About two beats – not even two seconds – passed by before both dogs, Karla and Mina, from the other room, started going ballistic. Barking their heads off, they ran to the back door from the other side of the house.

I didn’t hear anything, inside or outside, that could have caused them to react that way.

None of us did.

There’s so much more I want to say. So many more moments and details and insights that feel just as important but were left undivulged and unexplored here.

Like the absolute shattering of my heart as my dad, unconscious, choked and gagged when I gave him what would be his final dose of morphine. Or one of the undertakers tripping over his body as they struggled to get him on the gurney. Or the “Oh shit, why did I just say that?” look in the eyes of the guy at the crematorium as he tapped my father’s urn and told me that, with the rest of the staff on vacation, he had to handle the cremation all by himself. Or the many tiny, imperceptible moments of grief and sorrow and triumph and joy I’ve had this year. But all of that can be quickly exposited in just a few scenes. Jonathan’s dad died and he’s felt listless and feckless and a little numb for about a year. You’re all caught up. Now watch.

But, also, I don’t want to lose the shape of it by trying to describe it too much. I see it, right there in the periphery. I see its meaning. I see its importance. And for me, that’s enough.

I miss you, Dad. I hope you’re doing okay.

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