If I Could Speak at My Father’s Funeral
Today marks 25 years since my father left us, a fact that amazes me to think about.
My mother Angie was sick for a long period of time. She telegraphed her departure for at least five years (and numerous surgeries) before passing away, quietly in the night, under the care of hospice when I was ten. Her body’s betrayal meant that her death from brain cancer felt, to some of us, like a tiny mercy. She was unrecognizable by the end. Passing on was a liberation from the prison cancer made, in more ways than I like to imagine.
Her relatives nearly unanimously travelled to Anchorage that last winter to say their goodbyes. She was 32.
But my father died as he lived, doing us no such favors.
On April 3, 1999 he got into his pickup truck to run an errand and was pulling out of his dirt driveway when he was hit by a tractor trailer. The two lane highway that he lived off of was a treacherous launching point and I suppose he saw the truck, but either misjudged the speed of the approaching vehicle, or that his tires spun in the dirt.
Either way, he was gone.
I should mention here that my father was an alcoholic. If my mother was taken by an illness called cancer, then you can draw a straight line to my father’s demise from an illness called addiction. I’m not sure when his sickness metastasized into morbidity, but I will just say that the rare stretches of sobriety came with an unease of certainty that they were impermanent. Have you ever read the list of symptoms that accompany withdrawal? Those are frightening sights to a child.
Years before he had moved to Montana with a new wife and the distance made no admonition on how little effort I made to stay in touch with him. I suppose that the lie that I was telling myself then is universal: There is plenty of time.
At his funeral I had no words. I felt robbed; of second chances; of explanations; of contrition; of time.
The scars we made for one another would not be any less ponderous had I picked up a phone and made concessions towards small talk — sports, progress reports on my classes, my girlfriend, my hopes and fears. I did not consider him worthy of sharing those. A fact that cuts us both ways. See you don’t get to discard your father and still wish that you had one .
Those few phone conversations made were taxing enough for the both of us. Even without the oceans of guilt and regret that lay between us, the truth is that we were just too different to ever subscribe to a belief that we’d be…what’s the word? Close?
My mind is racing with tangential observations and queries, and his was trying to keep the subject and the verb in some rapport to form a sentence. I’d finish his sentences for him. Not because we had some deeper understanding that went beyond language, but because they were broadcast in their simplicity.
Please understand that he wasn’t always this way. Long-term heavy drinking can cause alterations in the brain’s neurons including: reductions in their size, memory loss, problems with learning, dementia, and impaired mental functioning. No, he wasn’t always this way.
He was a physical person — a gifted three sport athlete who taught himself to surf in his teens, and to play hockey in his twenties. He was a fireman whose courage to run into danger manifested itself years after he had left the department. He once rescued a trapped driver from an upended car and the photo made the front page of the Ventura Star.
He was a practical joker. He was a cook. He was a carpenter and a model maker. He could play guitar, and though he could not sing, it did not dissuade him from trying. I have profound memories of him teaching himself how to play Dan Fogelberg’s “ Leader of the Band “ — a song paying tribute to Fogelberg’s own father that aches an inability to speak meaningfully directly to him. I imagine him playing it for his own father in a devotional; using another man’s words to try to fill in the blanks between them. I wonder if he ever did.
He loved science fiction and the schlock B-movie horror films of his childhood.
He was a generous soul who would give you his last dollar if you needed it more than he did. He harbored a strong skepticism for authority, and a repugnance for self-promotion. He left California for opportunity and obscurity in Alaska. With my mother he helped design and build their dream house in a cul-de-sac that they would struggle to finish once her illness eclipsed things like wood staining and plaster.
The unfinished basement where my brother and I lived became symbolic of a crumbling facade amongst our neighbors. The exterior of the house looked picturesque, and you could even step in to find a resplendent first floor that featured a recessed living room and stone fireplace; a prodigious kitchen lit naturally by a skylight and posterior windows that overlooked a raised patio deck with a view of the woods.
But if you went down the staircase you would only find one finished bedroom. The rest of the lower floor was concrete slab and studs. They had purchased the drywall, but it lay stacked against a cinder block foundation under the stairs where it went untouched for all the years I lived there — as though the user’s manual was written in Korean.
With its wiring exposed and no insulation in between the framed walls the skeleton house became a place absent of supervision. The far away island that the character Max sails to in Where the Wild Things Are (Maurice Sendak, 1963) where young boys have no bedtime, and often have to scrounge for their own supper.
Why couldn’t my father recruit a few firemen to hang drywall on an off-day? Was his generation so embarrassed by asking for help? I would hang it myself in a weekend now if I only could. Did anyone other than us and a handful of neighborhood children know how picture imperfect our lives were buried beneath the facade?
I think about what my life would be like if I were widowed with two sons at the age of 36. Would I have the strength to reinvent myself; to build another off ramp of possibilities for the three of us? Or would I succumb to my own demons and shame? Would solace be as fleeting as daylight in a long Alaskan December?
For obvious reasons I likened my parents to the sun and the moon. One brightened a room without effort. The other, for so much of the time that I knew him, darkened it. Though both suffered immeasurably, one is remembered for her dignity, strength, and resolve, while the other is mere shade. How little compassion we have for those who embarrass us by suffering in plain sight.
Fitting then that the absurdist seasons in Alaska swing overzealously from dark to light. In January the sun will rise after 10AM and set again after 3PM. But in July the sun never sets. Nineteen hours of daylight can be hell on an adult’s circadian rhythms.
Even moonlight can illuminate some corners though.
I have to remember that he gifted me values I’ve spent my life honing as well. He cultivated another dissident with a curious mind and a willingness to defer from judgement. His wry sense of humor, which I’ve inherited, has lightened my own burdens on countless occasions. As much as he practiced a conspicuous sense of masculinity, he was also willing to deflate it and examine it for vanity — which he found contemptible.
He taught my brother and me about loyalty and sacrifice. He coached us in soccer and came away chastened because his two sons seemed to have missed being bit by the sporting bug. (The gene was just dormant and would arrive later.) All of the trashy genre films, comics, and pulpy novels that I love are the result of him showing us that how much fun can be had celebrating bad art. Failure, like taste, is subjective. Failure teaches us lessons that victories never could.
I am not ashamed of that history we held together anymore. It never did us any good to be in the first place. I can choose to love my father with the full heart that he loved me with once upon a time.
There was a time when my father put out fires — even in the Alaskan winter! It’s a comic irony because Dad must have felt like he was living in a house perpetually on fire. Though oral history will allege that he lit his share of those, the revisionist in me is always asking for atonement.
More precisely, in direct relation to my life, I have to ask ‘How long do I need to burn for him?’ And, ‘How much should I raze around me in a controlled burn, to protect the trees that matter?’
I suppose that question will be addressed in time, or fire. Though that relationship was truncated by time and tragedy, tamping out the ashes of your past cannot erase it.
I no longer loathe how much I look like him— the last of my axes left to grind with the man. I am proud of how I look. I am proud of the parts of me that he helped forge.
My regret is that I can’t tell him that to his face, unless I squint sometimes in my mirror.
