Day Of - July 1st, 2021

Edit: We have decided to establish a scholarship in my dad’s memory for OSU College of Education students. Please consider a gift to my dad’s scholarship fund. Gifts can be made to the OSU Foundation at osufoundation.org or mailed to OSU Foundation, 4238 SW Research Way, Corvallis, OR 97333. Please indicate that the gift is in memory of Mike O'Malley. Thanks to the many of you who have already donated.

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My father died today. He was 63 years old. At about 8:20 AM PST I got on a treadmill at The Garland Hotel in Los Angeles, California. At 8:22 my mom called me — I texted her back, “In gym. You okay?” She texted back, “No. Call.”

At 8:23 I was just outside of the gym when my mom told me that her partner of 34 years had died earlier that morning.

What I didn’t know then that I do know now is that my father had been dead for about two hours by the time I received that call. At about 6 AM he had gotten into the shower — presumably to “clear his head,” like he did whenever he wasn’t feeling well. My mom heard panting and grunting from a room over, and went in to urge him to try to calm his breathing. He couldn’t, and she realized that something more was happening. In the minutes that followed — a blur for my mother and my sister, who were awake and panicking as I was fast asleep 1000 miles away — my father began to realize that he was, in his words, “going.” He leaned his head into my mother’s chest, and repeated: “I’m going. I’m going.” She watched as the terror on his face — an expression I cannot imagine — consumed him, and his eyes grew larger and larger. Finally, in her words, they “popped.” He was dead.

By that point, my sister had run outside to try and wave down the emergency response team that was pulling up. My father didn’t want my sister in the room — he’d been only recently clothed by my mother as they tried to prepare him for the hospital, and he did not want his daughter to witness him in what he surely saw as his least dignified moments.

By the time the medics were in the room, my father was dead. They worked on him for thirty minutes to no avail. He lay there, lifeless, for almost two hours. Finally, he was taken to McHenry Funeral Home. He is still there now, as I write these words.

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Of course, as I re-read the details of this day, my stomach turns knowing that the first-hand trauma that my mother and sister experienced was so starkly different than the single-blow assault I received at 8:23 AM: “He didn’t make it.” From this remove, I was almost immediately able to spend the day conceptualizing the defining relationship of my life.

Indeed, what I have said over and over again today is that the pervasiveness of hyperbole makes it almost impossible to describe my relationship with my father. Lots of people say that they were best friends with their father, but I was best friends with my father. (He would fucking hate this previous sentence. A pathetic attempt at the use of English.) Lots of people say that their father is their role model and idol, but my father is my sole role model and idol. (He would hate this previous sentence, too.) I’ve constructed an entire human from his image and with his guidance. And I sit typing these words with that grandiose understanding of our relationship bolstering me to the chair.

On the long ride home, where I tried desperately to cycle through as many rounds of trauma-processing as I could before walking into my childhood home to see my still-shaken mother and sister, my best friend Hussein said to me, “You lived your life the way someone who lost their dad would’ve wished they had.” I have never felt more proud.

And my dad made it so fucking easy. From hundreds of people, I heard some version of, “there are no words.” But there are only words, too. And that’s what I can try to find: The words that are incorrect, but something. Because with my dad gone, that is what I have left of him. And he gave me so many to play with.

Every single part of my life was in conversation with my father. He was my interlocutor — whether he was in the room or not, everything I saw, I saw through eyes that he’d trained. From today, I have to find something new — something that can tether me to a reality I can already feel myself trying to pull from. 

I want to be strong, though. And strength means being present, regardless of circumstance. Part of that present-ness is grappling with the immense pain I feel right now and putting it on the page. If I can peel back as much of myself as possible and tell as much of my dad’s story as is readable and accessible, then that is the service I can carry forth in his legacy. I do not know the words to say to my mother and my sister after they watched my father die. But I may know the words that are possible to bring his image back to life.

Every parent wants their children to be their legacy. That, I guess, is the very purpose of fostering a “next generation.” For my dad, this truth was additionally informed by the fact that he believed in young people, and he was desperate to advocate for them in any and all settings. Sure, he had me and my sister, but my dad gave a piece of himself to every single student who stepped foot into his classroom. (For some evidence, check out the hundreds of comments on this post in “Things Overheard at OSU.”)

And at the risk of sounding entirely new-agey, this idea of “giving pieces away” has been ringing in my head all day. My dad gave and gave and gave. He gave every bit of himself. He described his teaching philosophy to me and many others over and over again: “Get up there and cut a vein.” And he did.

Today, perhaps, he was out of pieces to give. Because every time he gave some out, he got fewer back. And to me, he gave chunks of himself. And I always thought I’d be able to give those chunks back further down the road — but that road got cut off before I ever really got the chance. 

And yet at the same time, I know that I gave him life. He loved nothing more than being a parent. He made me his spitting fucking image, for christ’s sake. But he cut a vein. I guess he tried painting his masterpiece — his children — in blood.

I’ve spent my entire life scared that I’d lose him. Perhaps this is just a reflection of how much I loved him, because I know he was scared, too, of what would happen to me if anything happened to him. This is love’s distillation: A connection so deep and so life-giving that its only counterweight is the prospect of losing it.

I think my dad knew something was coming. He’d never been in less touch with me than this last week. (Of course, we still communicated every day, but it wasn’t as voluminous as we’d made usual over a decade of episodic geographic distance.) And instead of overcompensating, forcing my check-ins, I acquiesced. I was leaving home after 15 months in quarantine with my parents. We knew we needed a little more space — we knew I needed to develop a bit more of myself, at a slight remove from him.

When my sister and I were growing up, we could never fully understand why Dad wasn’t on Jeopardy, in the White House, or filling books with his seemingly bottomless wisdom and charm. Perhaps it was a stifling, white, middle-class belief in meritocracy (something he likely said at the time that went right over my head), but I still don’t think we were wrong to think that if the American Dream was fame and fortune built from merit, my dad deserved fame and fortune. (Man, did he hate that idea of the American Dream.)

But I think, ultimately, my dad had exactly what he wanted. And perhaps he knew, in the end, how he would be remembered: A legacy of students the size of a small city carrying his work and curiosity about the world into eternity. (I’m going to count exactly at some point, but it’s somewhere between 30,000 and 50,000 O’Malley-ites wandering around.) Maybe, in this way, his obsession with provoking consideration and camaraderie in the next generation was an acknowledgment of his own mortality. Maybe, on July 1st, 2021, his dreams came true: A wise Boston accent knitted into eternity by the many people he mentored.

But here is where I break as I write these words — where my shoulders sink and my eyelids begin to burn at the edges. There was so much left to do. He had so much left of life to enjoy — and man, could my old man enjoy life. There should have been so many more laughs, stories, road trips, basketball games, and drive-through windows in our future.

This was a man fully attuned to the world around him. And appreciative of it. To experience something with him was to experience it like with no one else. A lecture, a laugh, a great meal, or a life lesson. It was always just one question away.

I think his never-ending complexity and insight came from his immense duality. He was a man caught in between worlds, living on both ends of the spectrum on almost every principle and trait simultaneously: He was a perfectionist and an empath, a force of nature and a gentle giant, a fierce intellectual and a man of the people, the funniest man I ever knew and the most considerate listener you could possibly speak to. He walked the tightrope of his multitudinous identities like a 250-pound ballerina — and he did it, always, as his full self. This, I think, is why he was able to connect with every single person he ever came in contact with. Because we could all see the best parts of ourselves in him.

The weight I now carry is the weight of a man strong enough to carry a thousand dualities. I carry it with my mother and my sister. And we all carry it alone.

I loved him so fucking much.