If you missed yesterday’s – “Day Of,” which I’m surprisingly proud of – you can read it here.
I woke up this morning at 7 AM — almost exactly 24 hours since my dad dropped dead — to my mom crying in the room across the hallway. I didn’t jolt up, and I didn’t call out. I don’t know what that says about me. But I heard my sister go from her room to my mom’s and I lay there a bit longer, surprised I had been asleep.
I’d received a few more messages over the course of the night, and passed out listening to the first book about grief that I could find — It’s Ok that You’re Not Ok by Megan Devine. I don’t remember hearing anything useful in it, just more of the same about how intense and unknown it is for anyone to lose someone close in a quick and tragic way.
After a few minutes, I went into my mom’s bedroom and she began talking about — among other things — the fact that her relationship with my dad was bookended by this sort of tragedy. They started dating when my mom was in her late 20s and her father, at the age of 63, had died suddenly on a plane. At the time, my father had just “let her cry.” He held her hand, and he said it was okay to let it all out. My dad did not do moroseness, but he did do citation — and I’m sure that in his engagement with whatever books he’d read about death (here he’d say, “Isn’t every book about death?”), he’d learned that the uncertainty that it produces is not fit for any lecture; you don’t get over it, you just get through it...and other cliches.
In these early moments since he died, my mom, my sister, and I have oscillated between an examination of how we’re handling it — “Is this grief?” (Yes.) “Did he know how much I loved him?” (Yes.) “Could/should I have done anything differently?” (Probably, but also probably not.) “Did he sense this was coming?” (Yes.) — and cycling through our memory banks with him.
I was thinking last night about “Cenchas” (a little-kid’s version of “stories about Central Junior High School”). These were stories he would tell me and my sister every night as we went to sleep about his “misspent youth” in Quincy, gallivanting about with his motley crew of Boston degenerates who would only later be glorified in movies like Good Will Hunting, The Town, and Mystic River. He loved those guys, and he loved telling us tall tales about them. In his words, “You can take the boy out of Quincy, but you can’t take the Quincy out of the boy.” It was a fitting excuse for whenever he exploded at someone for saying they were from Boston when, in fact, they were from a wealthier suburb. I hadn’t made it 36 hours since he died before someone said they were from Boston — err, Lexington — and I heard my dad’s interjection bolt into the room.
Every night, before we fell asleep next to him, he told me and my sister stories of a rough, working-class crew always ready to giggle and get into shenanigans. Soon before I went to boarding school, someone asked me what my favorite thing about life was. My answer: Talking to my dad before going to sleep. After I was asleep, he would go back into my mom’s bedroom and they, from different perspectives, would break down the entire world — bringing it into our pleasant home on Princess Street. Then he’d start snoring. And so would she.
When my dad’s “Cenchas” inevitably veered into the absurd — a kid named Pugga who was so skinny he could slide under doors, or another kid named Barew who was so fat that when he fell out of an airplane on a field trip he used his t-shirt as a parachute — even six-year-old me would say, “What? Come on, Dad, there’s no way that happened!” My dad would reply convincingly, without batting an eye, “Son, when I tell a story, it’s not about how things happened, but how they should have happened.”
I wish I could be writing now about what should have happened.
Today, as my mom looked at me and my sister — two 20-something kids, staring back at a 60-something widow – she said, “This is not the story that your father and I wanted to tell.” This is not how the story should have happened. And that would break his heart.
I don’t know which stories he would want to tell if he was still with us. And when I try to think of them, I feel like they slip through the cracks that are developing in my brain as a means of coping with the fact that the man I was best friends with, the man tied up in every part of my body and personality, is gone.
Maybe before I get to those stories, I have to process what advice I wish he’d give me now. One of the last things he said to me — when he was watching me get worn down by my job, and expressed rare admiration for my doggedness — was that when he dropped out of law school at the University of Texas, his guiding song was “Watching The Wheels” by John Lennon. Here’s a portion of it:
“People say I'm lazy
Dreaming my life away
Well they give me all kinds of advice
Designed to enlighten me
When I tell them that I'm doing fine watching shadows on the wall
‘Don't you miss the big time boy, you're no longer on the ball?’
I'm just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round
I really love to watch them roll
No longer riding on the merry-go-round
I just had to let it go”
Here again I am forced to return to my father’s persistent duality. This was a man who grabbed life by the horns, a man who took up every student and every interaction with a zeal and intensity that enraptured the person he was engaging with in a warm blanket for erudition and humor, a man who grunted with passion as he peeled through 450 essays in one weekend. Yet his guiding philosophy, at some point in life, was that he just wanted to...watch the wheels go round and round?
But for my dad, watching the wheels was an incredibly engaging project. It was his passion — to watch those wheels, theorize about their movement, and then share what he watched those wheels doing with an entire generation of students. He read the news voraciously — every morning, afternoon, and evening — recapping what he learned and what struck him most. He loved Charles P. Pierce. But even amidst some of the most tragic news cycles of the past few years, his consistency was remarkable — never too high, never too low, and yet somehow both at all times.
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As I wrote that last sentence, I was snapped back to reality. My mom watched the life go out of his eyes. I’m now listening to her tell her friend Andrea — who taught at Tumwater Middle School with my parents many years ago — that as my father was “going,” he was rocking back and forth, growing colder and colder. He put his head against my mom’s chest: “I’m going. I’m dying.” Those were his last words. He was watching the wheels of his own life grind to a halt.
He was a man of duality. One day he was alive, the next day he was dead.
My dad did nothing in moderation. One day he was alive, the next day he was dead.
My mom was worried about him for the past few weeks. She thought he just needed a vacation — he just needed to slow down. As Andrea just said on the phone, “He was not good at taking care of himself.”
Just before I left for Los Angeles two weeks ago, I was on the couch in the living room reading. I heard him coughing violently outside on his stationary bike – a bike that my sister and I had purchased for him for Father’s Day 2020. When I bolted to the back patio and said something like, “Are you good, Pops?” He said, “Oh calm down. I’m just out of shape! This is the fat coming off!” I didn’t shrug it off, but I did just sort of let him be – I think I said one more thing. Maybe, “So you’re okay?” And he said he was. Just out of shape, he said.
He wasn’t feeling well, but he was going to handle it the way he’d handled everything forever: A force of nature, pushing his way through whatever natural development had occurred from a life of living vigorously. That vigor — a vigor he coupled with an incredible introspection and circumspection — was always going to kill him, one way or another.
Maybe that’s why people loved him so much — they knew he was killing himself for them. Here’s where he would say, “Emmett, don’t turn me into a goddamn Christ Figure.”
Is that what we always do with our parents? Is that what everyone who knew my dad is doing?
In the hours since he died, I’ve heard from his former students going back 30 years, his colleagues from public schools around the Pacific Northwest, his childhood friends. I’ve heard from my Little League teammates, my friends from high school and college who only met him once, and people now located in a couple dozen different states. This multi-generational, multi-racial, cross-gender spectrum that felt my dad’s warmth and vivacity perhaps once again speaks to his overwhelming charisma: A charisma grown from authenticity, learnedness, and sacrifice.
I don’t want to get too comfortable with any particular theme, but the duality of a man dying suddenly who had so many stories to tell — and who had so many stories told about him — is another moment in which, even in his absence, he can find a way to engage everyone.
But man, would he have loved to live longer. Because he was a man who loved to live.
Today, I’m going to try and write about my parents’ relationship.
I am one of the many O’Malley-ites. I met your father when I was in college at OSU and unsurprisingly his class was not only my favorite- but it had a life changing affect on me. He helped me redefine my purpose and my plan for going into education. In the years that followed me taking his class he was instrumental to my actions- I would check in with him once or twice a term. I knew he would ask me how things had panned out and how I had handled the tough decisions I would be making. So as I made the decisions I had the thought “am I gunna feel proud when I have to explain this to O’Malley?”
Now it may seem odd that I put so much stock into the opinion of one of my professors that I had been in one class with; but Mike truly was instrumental to my growth. One of the main reasons foe this is that when I met him I was in the midst of grief after losing my mother when I was 17 and she was 47. At the time your dad was working through his own grief at the loss of a family member( his own mom if I remember right) My grief caused me to second guess my actions a lot- to wonder if my mom would be proud of how I was handling the world. Mike became a guiding post and someone I could talk to about those fears and about the weight of that crushing grief.
All of that was very long winded but what it really boils down to is that I wanted to give you some of the same advice he gave me. I wrote it in my planner after meeting with him that day.
“Grief sucks kid. You may always battle with the feeling of am I doing this right or making them proud. It’s gunna be important to think that but it’s also gunna be important to start asking if you are doing things that will make you proud. “
I know it isn’t a lot and in the midst of storm you are currently in it may mean nothing. But I wanted to pass the words he gave me along to you.
My sincerest condolences at the loss of your dad.
-Andrea Stein
Thank you so much for sharing these posts. I was in a few of his classes my senior year of high school in 2004 and there are really no words to describe how much those classes meant to me. I had always struggled in school as a highly intelligent but troubled child of abuse with a lot of behavioral problems. I was awful to be around and angry, mean, sad, and lonely. Mr. O'Malley was the first teacher to treat me like a human being who deserved attention and respect. He was the first teacher that made me want to do better than the bare minimum. The way he treated me (and all of his students) with respect and interest even took some heat off of the teasing I got from students and teachers. Admittedly, I'm crying and rambling and I wish this was a private message rather than a public comment but I just wanted to say that your father is such an important figure in my life and learning more about him has been very meaningful to me and I really appreciate it and am so sorry for your loss. Thank you for sharing these stories.