My Father Passed Away Two Years Ago

The resolution of Language

Me and Dad

My father died exactly two years ago today, on June 2^nd, 2023. I was forty years old. My mother and I spent 23 months caring for my dad as the Melanoma slowly, very slowly, peeled the layers of the onion back one gossamer layer at a time. He was perhaps given in some ways the softest shift into death of anyone. A crab put into cold water with the flame on very low.

I miss him. Of course I do. Not as much as my mother, who was married to the man for almost half a century. This transition has not been easy for her. I know that.

It’s still hard to believe, that my mother is husbandless, that I am fatherless. Even if in some ways when my dad was alive I felt fatherless. What I mean by that is just that he and I were so violently different from one another—we so completely spoke different spiritual languages—that it sometimes seemed as if I’d actually been adopted and was not his actual, biological son.

But of course I was, and of course I’ve always simultaneously felt and seen my father within me. How could I not? My love of political debate. My intellect. The tendency I have to “lecture.” My penchant for spilling things on myself, food and drink, mainly. My simultaneous mix of laziness and hard work ethic. My desire to try to be honest as often and as much as I can be. My drive to be moral, to be good, to do right. All these things I get from my old man, who was, no doubt about it, a very good man if not a stellar father.

And yet we had two horrifying, beautiful years together at the end there. He was privileged enough to be able to die in he and my mother’s house in Santa Barbara, where they’d moved (from Ojai, where I grew up) in 2020, during the pandemic. (Right around the time I was finally fleeing East Harlem where all hell had broken loose.) The house is up on a hill in the Riviera and has spectacular views. That’s not to say my father didn’t spend a lot of time in hospitals. He did. The final time was for three weeks, before his terminal six weeks being bedbound and then the end. (We were shocked he survived that hospital stay with stage four Melanoma, Pneumonia and Sepsis.)

What could it have been like for my dad, being 77 and, besides the cancer, all his life perfectly healthy, needing fulltime help from his devoted wife and complex, formerly rebellious son? Knowing he was likely going to die. The cancer spreading to his brain. Doing chemo, radiation, blood transfusions, long stays in the hospital and in physical rehab, needing constant help and care? Staring at mortality with bravery, boldness and, sometimes, even his classic Boomer stoicism. (But he did cry. He did get vulnerable. He did get emotional.)

As a child my father and I were very close. Dad played games with me—throwing a baseball around, HORSE basketball games—he taught me to love backpacking, he even once tried to go surfing with me! (It ended badly: The fin of his longboard cut his knee open and that was that.) We went fishing in “Lake No Fish,” aka Lake Casitas near Ojai, sometimes rarely catching Cat Fish but usually coming home empty-handed. I remember Dad on a road trip to Montana when I was a kid, and of course on the couple Baja trips we took as a family, me with a best friend or two, in the late 1990s. I remember my father driving myself and my friends to school, to the beach, etc. My dad was always kind, agreeable, thoughtful, intelligent and reasonable.

But we were different.

Where he was practical, conventional, safe, risk-averse, conflict-averse and fine with just working a whole lot, not needing a ton of travel or movement or action, good with his general routines, I was the opposite. I had my dad in me, for sure, but even more so I had my mom. I was intense. Emotional. Angry. Demanding. I spoke the language of depth, emotional connection, reaching into someone’s soul and shaking hands. I eschewed the ordinary, the conventional, the average, the normal, the cliché. Safety had never been a concern of mine; in fact, ever since my early teens I’d done my best to dynamite all safety from my life.

As time went on and I graduated high school (barely), Dad and I became ever more estranged. He didn’t understand me and, looking back, I don’t blame him. I was—still am—hard to understand. I often don’t fully understand myself, even now. From the gate I had been a force to be reckoned with. As Dad himself once quipped about me to one of my friends, “Michael marches to the beat of his own drum.” This is the truth. I do. Always have.

We argued whenever we saw each other, which was infrequently, at Christmas, sometimes New Years Eve (aka my birthday). Usually it was about politics, or “capitalism,” things which, in my twenties, I realize now I didn’t know a whole lot about. (The heavy research and reading and studying on these topics wouldn’t come until my thirties.) I felt resentful towards my father: I felt like he didn’t know me; worse, I felt like he didn’t WANT to know me.

This turned out to be false, an inaccurate belief on my part.

The truth was this: I had always wanted him to love me, speak to me and be there for me in my way and on my terms. But he didn’t speak my language. Therefore, I had to become curious and learn my father’s language which I could do because I was younger and I possessed more ability and energy in this area.

Over the years, as I stayed sober longer and got older and matured and calmed down in general, my dad and I developed our mature, adult bond. We still weren’t close. We still didn’t talk often. Yet the friction was less tight and hot between us. We debated politics but it was more between two rational, learned, educated adults now instead of an older wizened father and an angry, derelict son.

COVID happened and we saw each other on Zoom every week or so for a while. I was in New York City, surviving East Harlem. Dad had a noticeable cough. I never saw his full body, only his face. But that cough…

When I finally did see him for the first time in the flesh in 18 months—the longest to date that I’d ever been away from California in one swoop—I knew immediately that something was very wrong with him. He looked skeletal. His cough was atrocious. Evidently he’d had the cough for over a year. He had stubbornly refused to see a doctor despite my mom’s desperate pleas. (She was formerly a nurse.)

Long story short: Dad did finally go in while I was in California. Stage 4 Melanoma. We were both shocked and not shocked. It was completely shocking…but yet of course, what else could it have been. A yearlong cough, a skeletal body, unusual fatigue.

Thus began the 23-month process of his transitioning from life to death. I never returned to NYC. Some friends cleared out my place and shipped my things (not much). The landlord took mercy and let me escape the lease without having to pay. He was a good man. I was lucky. From there it was slow, inevitable decline: Hospital trips; oncology appointments; chemo, radiation, blood transfusions; Dad getting thinner and thinner, weaker and weaker as time went by.

But during this time my father and I were also, for the first time, getting closer. The unspoken but imminent reality of approaching death opened an aperture and allowed us, incredibly, for the very first time—or, since my innocent, unconscious boyhood at least—to at last speak the same language. We spoke the language of father and son, of mutual love and respect, of life and death. He didn’t need to thank me; my being there—leaving behind my dream of Manhattan after only 2.3 years—and doing what needed to be done said it all. My father didn’t need to say he loved me—though he said that often in these times—because it was obvious. And it was equally obvious that my being there for him was how I was showing and offering him my love.

A man who’d almost never showed emotion in my life—a man who often shook hands with me instead of hugging me—cried. He said he hoped he was a better father than his dad had been to him. (He was.) Without verbalizing it, he asked me for forgiveness and I asked him for the same. And, without speaking the words, we forgave each other.

During his sickness I met Britney and fell in love. Thankfully she got to spend a decent amount of time with him. She gave him his best gift: A digital “frameo” which showed thousands of uploaded pictures on a screen of his life from boyhood to recently. We all watched that thing endlessly. It seemed to give him comfort. His life in freeze-frame, showing the passing of time. (Time: A wicked bastard and also man’s best friend.) He knew we were in love. We got engaged while he was still ok enough to eat out with us. He knew we were going to get married, and it comforts me knowing he knew that, even if he didn’t make it to our wedding.

Dad had seen me through my innocent boyhood, my gloomy pre-teens, my angry, anarchic teens, my raging, alcoholic, out-of-control twenties, my sober, productive, mature thirties, all the way to the age (impossible, it seemed) of 40. He’d been there through it all. Financially, he’d always been a bedrock, a pillar, a foundation which I could run around and feel safe in. He protected our family, always had, even if he’d let me down emotionally when I was younger. That had been more about my own “needs” than him as not good enough. I know that now.

Anyway, he went peacefully, at 4pm on a gorgeous, sunny, clear-blue-sky day on June 2^nd, 2023. I was writing downstairs at a table outside. My mom gingerly called me. I walked upstairs and went into the room. Dad lay there like before, except his head had fallen a little and his mouth was ajar a little. His eyes were wide open. I took a deep breath and walked up to him. I felt his skin—cold, and already morphing blue—and then his wrists. No pulse. I stared at his face. He was gone. There was nothing there. Only a corpse getting cold.

I wept, my mom did, too, and we hugged. The look in my mother’s eyes was a look of total shock, even though we knew this was coming. (You can’t ever really be fully prepared for this.) I had an out-of-body experience, as if I were high on LSD. My dad—my precious father—dead, his cooling body lying on the bed like a fake plastic life-sized doll of a man.

We waited and sat in silence a while and then called Hospice. They came and things went from there. Later that night the morgue folks came and removed the body.

I stayed with my mother for several days after that. She cried a lot. We sat in silence often. We talked about the uncertainty of the future. I’d left New York for this job and the job had been completed and Dad was gone and now what? I’d get married, we’d leave town, we’d maybe even really move to Spain, an idea we’d been half-seriously discussing. (We also contemplated Chicago, NYC and Boston.)

But what would happen to my mom? She’d lost her best friend after nearly 50 years. Lord, the memories. Fifty years! Ten years longer than I’d then been alive. While I was shifting into a duopoly, a “we” with Britney, my mom had just lost hers and was now alone. This is the nature of life, is it not: One door opens and another one closes. We make choices. The people we love make choices. Time passes. A becomes B becomes C becomes D.

My father taught me many lessons, both good and bad. He gave me the gift of intelligence and the love of nature. He gave me the propensity to be full of myself and the ability to isolate myself. Like my dad (and my mom), I’ve never needed a ton of friends or wanted to be around a big family. Dad was always “self-sustaining,” as my mother called it. Self-sufficient. I followed in their footsteps. He also gave me a moral code, a sense of knowing right from wrong. Even when I was out there drinking myself to death I knew some lines couldn’t be crossed. I credit my father for that gene.

I’m proud of my dad, for dying with grace, for being courageous, for staying true to his nature to the end, and doing things on his terms. He could have kept fighting—the oncologist partially wanted him to, as did my mother and I—but in the end he decided not to. It’s a quality of life thing. You know when you know. This gave him integrity, dignity, and the ability to say he made his own choice.

I love him. I’ll never forget him. He lives within me still and always.

Rest in Peace, Dad. Thank you for all the times.

Michael