Some business:
1) 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. If you have any technical or otherwise issues, contact me.
2) At 4 PM on September 30th, the College of Education at Oregon State University will host a gathering to celebrate my dad’s work and life at OSU. The event will take place at Joyce Collin Furman Hall. For more, click here: https://events.oregonstate.edu/event/mike_omalleys_fall_community_gathering?utm_campaign=widget&utm_medium=widget&utm_source=Oregon+State+University#.YTttdS1h1DV
3) This essay is about 6,500 words – that means, at a normal clip, it’ll take you about 40 minutes to read.
4) Thanks
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
I was not quite eight years old in early August of 2004, and the previous night my dad and I had attended a baseball game in San Francisco. The post-game plan was for us to get in our beige 1999 Toyota Sienna Minivan, drive a few hours up I-5, sleep in the car at a rest area, wake up, and drive the remaining hours back to Corvallis.
As we crossed the Oakland Bay Bridge at around 11 PM, I asked my dad if I could go to sleep – I didn’t want to relinquish my responsibilities as his copilot without asking. He, of course, said yes.
I was asleep before we got across the bridge. And at some point that night, my dad decided he didn’t want to sleep in the car at a rest area. So he just kept driving. For a little more than nine hours, he kept his eyes locked on the dark I-5 corridor. And then, as we were passing Zion Lutheran Christian School on Harrison Boulevard, I woke up and said,
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
My dad told this story often — and how he wanted to kill me when I said,
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
He told the story with a wry smile about the fact that he’d driven nine hours up I-5 to get his six-year-old son home from a baseball game in a different part of a different state. It was a memory indicative of my entire childhood — so saturated with silliness and love that to tell it earnestly was to seem oversentimental. It had to be told such that its closing moments were about his anger at me for saying,
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
There are little details about that trip that I love: That my dad and I debated whether he should buy me a Willie Mays shirt (size: L) or a J.T. Snow shirt (a much-more-realistic size: S); that I hit a home run at the little wiffle-ball field in SBC Park, ran with my legs kicking up to the sides around the bases, and when my dad asked why I did that, said, “Because I want to run like Willie Mays;” that we missed Greg Maddux’s 300th win by one game; that my dad set up a miniature TV for me in the backseat of the car so that I could watch Who Framed Roger Rabbit as many times as I could; that I brought my baseball glove and almost caught a batting-practice home run; that my dad asked every person wearing a Red Sox hat at the game, “Are you actually from Boston?;” that I dropped jam into the driver-side seat-belt buckle socket at a rest area on the way there, and that the socket is still sticky.
There are too many memories from this trip to fully recount. And what I’ve had to confront more fully since sinking deeper into the intake phase of my grief (maybe that’s actually part of mourning?) is that I am not able to sort out and sort through the depth and breadth of the memories I shared with my dad. Some of them died with him, many of them feel dead in me. But I trust that they’ll come alive over the course of the rest of my life — every time I spill a little jam, or fall asleep in the car, or see a Red Sox hat, or feel a baseball glove, or see a Toyota Sienna.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
The snapshot essays I spent so much time on in those early weeks were, more than perhaps, the location of my fear that my dad would slip away from me, that people would not understand his greatness if I did not convey it to them, and that I couldn’t support people in any way other than cutting a vein and letting myself bleed onto a piece of paper. Those snapshot essays were a product of those early weeks. I was reacting.
What am I reacting to now?
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
More tangibly than anything else, my dad taught me how to write. So when I write, it is the one place where I can comfortably acknowledge the cliche that he lives on in me. He doesn’t live, of course (he is dead), but his influence is traceable.
Until sophomore year of college, my dad would sit down and go line by line through every essay I drafted — re-writing and re-wording just about every phrase, sentence, paragraph, and page. To characterize it as anything other than some sort of semi-vicarious parental oversight would be to admit to an elaborate and time-consuming form of cheating: I didn’t have access to the most expensive tutors, but I had my AP-English-teaching father combing through my every word like it was a book proposal that would dictate the next fifty years of his son’s life.
The way my dad edited papers was the way that someone who sees their son as an extension of themself edits papers. (And he would correct this sentence so that it wasn’t is too wordy and uncreative.)
When I applied to college, my dad made manila folders for every school I was applying to, printed out every question I had to answer, and drove me into his office every day for all of my Thanksgiving and winter breaks. He’d do his work, I’d do mine, and then he’d come in and edit everything I’d done down to the punctuation mark.
Over the decades, he’d read everything he could find about each school I applied to, and with that knowledge in-tow, he’d rev up his rhetorical engines to try and show whatever school I was applying to that I was ready to “shake it up.” As unknowing thanks, I wrote my college essay about his mother. Maybe I wrote that essay because I knew, at some level, that we were both applying.
My dad’s perfectionism was unbridled, and to challenge it would be to challenge the temporal, emotional, and financial sacrifices he was making for me at every turn. I made it my goal to send him an essay that he wouldn’t edit. I wanted him to read something I wrote, and simply say, “I love it! Want to go to lunch?”
After years of handwringing tutelage, writing finally became the one thing I could do better than he could. All I had to do was mimic everything he taught me, and then add the personality and vulnerability he was nary willing to put to paper.
Everything I ever wrote, I wrote for him. The night before he died I was working on an essay for my boss (but really, for him). The day he died I wrote an essay for him. Every day during the two weeks between his death and his funeral, I wrote an essay for him (or the people that he loved).
I knew that my writing could be evidence to him of a job well done. And until I could write something about him that he would approve of, he wasn’t really going to be gone. Maybe I thought I could keep him around a bit longer.
Now, it’s like I’m shoveling the raw material of my soul into the nothing-ness of where he was. And hoping, praying, that the nothing-ness spits something back out at me. Not something, actually – just him.
And it’s why I react so viscerally to unheeded advice – even when it’s kind and/or smart and/or useful. Because anyone who is reacting to my any thought or situation, no matter their motive...isn’t my dad. Anyone who reads something I write and has something to say...isn’t my dad. Anyone who tells me “nice job!”...isn’t my dad. And in not being my dad, they are taking up the space he is supposed to fill. If they’d just get out of the way, maybe he’d be able to come back.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
A few days after my dad died, I spoke to a college friend whose father died of cancer last year. On the call, with a forced grin and a bouncing right leg, I said something like, “It sort of feels like my only remotely healthy options for the next year are writing a book or becoming a total gym-rat.”
Gently, but steadily, she said, “You need to get away from that idea that something more needs to happen every single day or else you’re fucking up. Really, what’s harder to manage is the likely scenario that nothing really happens; that things are just worse. That’s the scariest thing.”
Indeed, how could anything great come from the death of my dad? How could I be more productive than I’ve ever been in the midst of so much pain? Why would the loss of my best friend inspire me to do more, not less? If the meaningless that one is forced to confront when a loved one dies is so all-consuming, how could I be consumed with my own productivity? And how hubristic of me to think I could just sit down and write before “going to the literature?”
And “going to the literature” – as I’ve discovered in recent weeks – brings its own challenges. Curiosity, after all, is not always good for creativity.
Writing (my creative outlet) means you’re turning inward – you’re trying to do something with the information you already have. And there is, and should be, a natural self-consciousness to turning inward: Isn’t there something I’m not reading that already says the same things I’m trying to say? Isn’t there something out there that would make sense of it all? Who am I to act as if my thoughts matter, when so many other thoughts already exist...and I haven’t read them?
My dad’s curiosity was boundless. And boundless curiosity means that you never believe your wisdom is all that special. Writing was too special, too sacred, to my dad. He would tell me that his goal was to live a life of the mind, and he thought there was nothing cooler than the fact that when someone asked Michel Foucault what he did, Foucault simply remarked, “I’m a reader.”
My dad was a reader, but he was also an incredible performer. He lived a life of the mind, but he also gave every bit of himself away – body and all. Both my dad and Aristotle thought that subscribing to a general philosophy of “everything in moderation” was a practical and good way to live. Yet my dad died, in large part, because he did not practice the sort of Arisotelian ideal that he advocated.
Still, my dad lived the life that he did – impacting as many people as he did, sticking to his principles so forthrightly – precisely because he did not do everything in moderation: he did not work in moderation, he did not think in moderation, he did not parent in moderation, and he did not care in moderation.
If there is one thing I’ve settled on these past two+ months, it’s the impossibility of moderation in the face of grief and mourning. The modifier for my life since my dad died is “too.” There is too much for my brain to comprehend, there was too much love, there are too many questions, there are too few answers, the world seems too normal in the wake of his death, there are too many emotions, there is too much time left for me in my life without my dad, there is too much pain to face up to, etc.
Everything is “too.”
There are too many questions, there are too few answers.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
In the wake of my dad’s immoderate absence, every person in my family (and many more than that) has run into the same question: What would Mike think I should do?
But my dad did not really care about doing, unless it involved being. This is the central thought that my mom helped me probe in recent weeks: In a culture that demands that we define our being by what we do, my dad refused. He was all about being. And only being could lead you to doing. To do without to be was inauthentic, disingenuous, and a surefire way of losing your self in the maelstrom of the invidious, hierarchical status quo.
I think my dad’s social identity (first-generation, working-class), coupled with his never-ending questioning of the way things were, led him to this clarified emphasis on being. He was far too curious to ever believe that there was something to be done in the midst of every tragedy. Instead, one had to be, and work from there. “Pursue your passions,” he would say. Let your being guide you.
When I’m able to think about my dad in terms of being rather than doing is when I feel I can finally think towards some telos. Would my dad be proud of me for doing ____? I know the answer, before I even have to fill in the blank: Only if I was doing it for the right reasons.
Thus, the question I have to ask myself every minute, every hour, and every day is not: What should I do? It’s: How should I be?
Such a question leads me away from a more comfortable – and deeply careerist – conception of the self. What matters is what lies in the reflection of whatever actions I’m undertaking (or not undertaking). What matters is the person that I am if everything else is stripped away.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
My dad loved to exercise. And over the course of his life, he transitioned from playing basketball, to lifting, to running, to going to the gym to workout on “old people machines.” He’d often intermingle these activities, but being physically active was a central part of his identity: “I’ve run two marathons,” “I can bench press 300 pounds five times,” “I just rode the bike for two hours.”
Every term – whether he was teaching high school or college – he’d get in worse shape as things went along. He never got back down to his fighting weight after he and my mom had kids – he exercised maniacally, but in spurts, and coped with his workaholic tendencies and martyrdom by eating aplenty.
Almost every day – particularly in this post-grading, get-back-in-shape phases – he’d ask my mom, me, and my sister, “How do I look?” If he was feeling confident, he’d just flex his muscles and say, “No one is going to mess with this Irishman!”
In the last several years of his life, prior to the pandemic-induced lockdown that grounded much of his physical fitness to a halt, my dad’s favorite place to exercise was Timberhill Athletic Club. He did a combination of three things every time he went: run on “the killer machine” (technically, an Adaptive Motion Trainer), take a spin class, and/or do three sets on every nautilus weight-lifting machine in the “old person’s room.”
I spent many of my formative years in Timberhill, and some of my lifelong friendships started while my dad was exercising upstairs. When I was done playing basketball or goofing around, I’d wander up and visit my dad while he heaved away on “the killer machine” or made his rounds in the “old person’s room.” As was his nature, he did not exercise lightly. He would max-out the resistance on the machine and throw his whole body into each stride or rep. for an hour at a time. As he did, he would grunt, close his eyes, and talk to himself.
On one memorably comic occasion, I went upstairs to visit him at about 10:30 PM. There was only one other person near him in the gym, and I leaned on the machine next to my dad chattering about whatever had happened that day. As my dad plowed into the machine, he let off a tectonic-plate-shifting fart. I looked over my shoulder and saw the other guy in the area glance our way, “Dad, what the hell are you doing? There’s a guy right there!” Between heavy breaths, my dad said, “He has those stupid headphones in that everyone wears. He can’t hear me,” before letting loose some more poly-decibel gas. The headphoned fellow almost immediately got off his machine and left. To my dad, this was just a marker of how much harder he was working than the guy next to him.
The evening of August 12th, 2016, my dad went to Timberhill to perform something like this routine on “the killer machine” (hopefully, he was a bit less flatulent this time). I’m sure he was intent on going particularly hard that evening – the next morning, we were leaving at the crack of dawn to drive to Utah. I’m sure he leaned into the killer machine a little harder than usual, grunted a little louder, and muttered self-deprecating notes of motivation to himself a little more frequently.
We would drive 14 hours the next day – my mom in the passenger seat, my dad in the driver’s seat, and me in the back. Over the course of those 14 hours, we would stop almost every hour (my mom – and yes, I – have small bladders). And each time we stopped, my dad said something to the effect of “I’m not getting out of the car, I’m built like a camel!” While my mom and I walked to the bathroom, he would stay seated and check his email, or the New York Times, or Charles Pierce’s blog, or ESPN. Then he would keep driving.
This trip through Utah and back up into Chicago was one of my favorites. For this, pictures are better than words:
Much like the roadtrip to and from San Francisco 12 years earlier, this tour of the south- and mid-western United States was in part made possible by my dad’s commitment to live life at the extremes – work out as hard as he could one day, drive 14 hours the next, and be the life of the party the entire time. My mom planned each moment of the trip, my dad just leaned in as hard as he could.
What I didn’t know then, that I do now, is that my dad had injured his left leg on “the killer machine” the evening before we left; that as he sat stubbornly in the driver-side seat of our 1999 Toyota Sienna Minivan on August 13th, a clot was developing in his leg; that that clot would be misdiagnosed and lead to permanent damage; and that that permanent damage would play the central role in his sudden death just five years later.
In 2004, the only evidence that we hadn’t considered the comforts of something other than a full-bore road trip was a sticky driver-side seat-belt buckle. In 2016, it was a sticky blood clot in my dad’s leg.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
In the two+ months since my dad died, there have emerged two central approaches to engage his sudden passing – two ways that the brain can process trauma, two ways that life can be made meaningful. I think one of those ways is really quite easy, and I think the other is really quite hard. I’ll start with the easy way. And I’ve already been trying to show you the hard way – I’ll be sure it gets clearer, though.
The easy way is to say that my dad was self-destructive, and that I – and my mom, and my sister – didn’t do enough to insulate him from his own recklessness. The easy way leads to ifs. If he had just taken better care of himself…if he had not channeled his masculinity into martyrdom…if he had not tried to “tough out” everything he did…if he had not worked so psychotically hard all the time…
The easy way is to say that if my dad could have done differently in a few very particular ways, then he’d still be alive. And when we take that easier approach to processing his death – or anyone’s – we can more easily put ourselves at the center of it. We can more easily lay out the “but for” conditions of his death:
But for our not paying closer attention to his slightly uncharacteristic symptoms, my dad would be alive.
But for our not calling the ambulances in time on the morning of July 1st, my dad would be alive.
But for my commuting to and from Los Angeles for the month before his death, my dad would be alive.
However, just as easily as we can say all of those things we should have done differently, we can say:
But for his going to Timberhill on August 12th, 2016, my dad would be alive.
But for the legroom on the driver’s side of a 1999 Toyota Sienna Minivan, my dad would be alive.
But for his love of teasing my mom and me about our bladders, my dad would be alive.
See how stupid it all starts to sound when you take the easy way? It sounds stupid because we’re talking about things that could have been done differently. And we’re talking about those things that could have been done differently as if the rest of the things that we – and he – did would just stay the same.
We’re talking about those things that could have been done differently as if they would have made any sense given my dad’s being.
The same reason my dad exercised so hard, and in spurts, was the same reason that he was such a great teacher. The same reason he thought he could just tough out any ailment was the same reason that he was able to give so much of himself to the people he cared about. The same reason he loved to tease and giggle about even the most serious things was the same reason he had a heart big enough to connect with seemingly every single person he ever met.
To take up any one “but for” condition of my dad’s life as causal is to challenge the very characteristics that made him so great. You couldn’t have his protectiveness without his anger; you couldn’t have his perfectionism without his insecurity; you couldn’t have his curiosity without his paranoia.
What I’m basically saying, is: You couldn’t have his life without his death.
I’m not saying you have to take the bad with the good — I don’t really think that anything about my dad was bad (flawed, obviously. But flaws aren’t bad.). It was all just part of a oneness, a wholeness, that my dad was able to achieve. You have to take the person at their whole.
I loved my dad, I loved the way he lived.
I loved my dad, does that mean I have to love the way he died?
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
In 2015, my dad wrote the obituary for his mother’s funeral. Here are its closing paragraphs:
“Now it’s time to say goodbye to Bridie O’Malley. She will not be written about in the history books. She was a small person from a medieval theocracy living in a bustling global world. However, her spunk, spirit, and infectious laughter will echo through the ages. My father once said that Willie Shakespeare must have been Irish because of his ability to throw what my father called ‘rocks of English.’ Thus, I’d like to quote Shakespeare regarding my mother’s passing:
‘When she shall die,
Take her and cut her out in
Little stars,
And she will make the face of
Heaven so fine
That all the world will be in
Love with night
And pay no worship to the
Garish sun.’
However, I leave the last word to an even greater wordsmith – my grandmother Mary Walsh Costello. She would often say to my mother: ‘God speed and bring you safe home, Bridie.’ Yes, and I echo the same sentiment: God speed, and bring you safe home, Bridie Theresa Costello O’Malley. We will always love you.”
This excerpt is the best record I have of my dad’s thoughts on death. But there is enough contained in these few paragraphs to help illuminate some of his understanding of death – because it was his understanding of life.
Indeed, the grandiosity that so many tout as the marker of goodness was not something my dad took seriously. To him, having material status in an oft-unjust world usually meant that you focused on doing at the cost of being: It wasn’t just that my grandmother would “not be written about in history books,” it was that part of the reason she wouldn’t be written about was because of her “spunk, spirit, and infectious laughter.”
It’s only obvious, then, that my dad would choose a poem from “Willie” Shakespeare that mocks the importance of the “Garish sun.” It’s only obvious, then, that my dad would follow this famous poem with the words of my great-grandmother Mary Walsh – an Irish peasant whose wisdom ran antithetical to the very idea of garishness.
My dad had quite a fraught relationship with the “Garish sun” – marked, perhaps, by the five times he dropped out of law school, the satisfaction he took in being a doorman and a public-school teacher, the pride he took in helping out the “little” people, and the self-consciousness he forever felt that he was not the laborer or fighter that his father was. For my dad, being one of the “little” people was in itself a virtue – it meant that you were skirting the oppressor’s role in America's vicious and demanding hierarchy; it meant that you were having to focus on the being-ness of life. It was the big people – the garish – who he could not stand.
In searching out materials that might be useful in confronting my dad’s death, I have tried to trace some of my dad’s thinking through his friend “Willie.” Unsurprisingly, I’ve found some guidance and understanding in Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy, and my dad’s favorite play, Hamlet. Perhaps it’s obvious why:
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.
There have been entire schools of study dedicated to unpacking this most-famous soliloquy. But in re-reading it myself in the context of these past few weeks, a few things jump out. First, the values placed on the definitive binary – of life and of death – are inverted from our accepted ways of discussing mortality: For Hamlet, the possibility of death is freeing – it is the counterweight to the pains of life. And since there is no satisfactory end to any stage of life other than death, it is the only “consummation” – the only way to assure that the suffering of existence will not rear its head again, and again, and again. Or so we think.
The first turning point in the soliloquy is in the line, “To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub” (as those who knew him know, my dad loved to say “here’s the rub…” when he was about to say something smart). The scholar Jonathan Bate calls Hamlet “The great play of questions” – and from that turning point in the soliloquy through its end, Hamlet takes up, but does not answer, the central questions of the play: “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil”... “For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, / When he himself might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin?” (Bodkin is a funny word for knife, by the way.)
Hamlet cannot answer the questions that he asks in this soliloquy. So he becomes frozen – “Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, / And enterprises of great pith and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry /And lose the name of action.” (Emphasis added).
It should be no surprise to you, reader, what prompts this most-iconic soliloquy. It should be no surprise to you, reader, what triggers these questions without answers, these overwhelming feelings of ignorance, cowardice, and anger that stifle and confuse the story’s protagonist.
It is the sudden death of Hamlet’s father.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
After my paternal grandfather died in 2005, my dad went on a bit of a Freud binge. (Disclaimer: My dad was always interested in Freud’s frameworks – the power of the subconscious, the building of identity from relation to your parents – not his conclusions. Haha.) And as I noted in previous essays, my dad would occasionally make comments about the freedom that can come with the death of a loved one.
In the above picture, aside from a bad haircut, an incredibly skinny frame, and my not being in an adequate triple-threat position, you may notice some ink on the flesh between my index finger and thumb. That ink composed the initials of my dad and grandfather. For the first few years of high school – and periodically through my early college years – I would jot “MJO” on that spot on my left hand. It was my way of memorializing my dad from 3,000 miles away; my way of reckoning with his even-geographic absence; my way of noting that two generations of MJOs had grinded in varying degrees of material poverty so that I could pursue the best education possible.
Even at the time, it felt corny.
But whenever I needed motivation, or to feel steadier in my movement through boarding school, college, and early-professional life, I would just think of my dad. I knew that if I could just maintain a select few principles while working hard, I’d do okay. If the ship ever needed steering, I’d just ask him. The way he lived his life was a rudder, and what I could glean from his brain was a co-captain.
But at the same time, the fact that I wrote my dad’s initials on my left hand was an acknowledgment of the fact that I needed to break away – a signal that I needed to build my own self with the traces of my dad that I wanted to hold so dear. Visible on my hand, if not obvious from my location, I could move through things that he’d never experienced and keep him with me.
And those initials were also a marker of the fact that I knew my dad was going to die.
I always knew that to forget about my dad for even a second while he was alive would be something I’d regret once he was actually dead. And for so long I made it my purpose to figure out what he wanted me to do. But what I know better now, is that what my dad wanted me to do is be. And to him, the ultimate way to be was to live a life of the mind while caring for others.
How do I transfer that intent of being into the invidious hierarchy that my dad taught me to be so skeptical of? He would surely tell me that that’s not a question I’m supposed to be able to answer at 24. In my dad’s words, “You don’t know your ass from a hole in the wall until you’re 30.” In my dad’s words, “Jesus didn’t really do shit until he was in his 30s, either.” But the timeline of my life is so much more complicated and confusing now than it was at 8:20 AM on July 1st.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
My dad used to talk about “launching” me and my sister. And to launch something, you have to be able and willing to send it away. In Neil Chethik’s FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms With The Deaths of Their Dads, Chethik breaks up the temporal categories of FatherLoss into four age groups. My category, it turns out, is young adulthood – or, as the sociologist Daniel Levinson calls it, the “novice stage:”
“The death of a father during a son’s young adulthood...tends to sever a vital relationship before it’s reached fruition, before the son has completed the key task of Levinson’s novice stage: to shift his center of gravity from his family of origin to his own home base.” (48, emphasis added).
As part of this process – this novice stage – “a father often turns his focus from material support to ‘admiring and appreciating,’ [Dr. Calvin] Colarusso said, and ‘putting a major stamp of approval’ on the son’s decisions and accomplishments.” (64). Over the course of several hundred interviews with the sons of dead fathers, Chethik made note of the fact that “Many sons...said that a defining moment in young adulthood occurred when they felt a sense of equality in relationship to their fathers.” (64).
I worked and waited my entire life for the moments I had with my dad where I really felt a glimmer of pride in his eyes – where I felt that I could talk to him not just as a pupil, but as an admiring friend. I had many of these moments. But I’ll never have them again. I’ll never know what I could do to make him proud. I only will know how I could be.
But that’s the hard way.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
When I left for boarding school at almost 14, I developed a paranoid habit that now holds a different weight: Every time I left home, I spent much of the first few days after I left thinking about what would happen if one of my parents died suddenly while I was gone. It was the only way I could leave – if I thought enough about the tragic scenario, I could convince myself that I was just a paranoid weirdo.
I remember listening to the song “Yesterday” by Atmosphere constantly my freshman year of high school – a song about losing your dad, and thinking you saw him walking about town. I was coping with the distance, even though it was hardly there:
“I thought I saw you yesterday / But I know it wasn't you 'cause you passed away, Dad / Looked just like you / Strange things my imagination might do / Take a breath, reflect on what we've been through / Or am I just goin' crazy 'cause I miss you?”
Sounds a lot like Hamlet, funny enough.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
When describing a girl I had a particularly intense crush on in high school, I remember saying to someone as we drove up Princess Street, “She’s been through my worst nightmare, and she’s still so thoughtful and composed.” Her dad had died a few months earlier.
“My worst nightmare.”
About a month before my dad died, I was talking to an older friend (62) about the death of her father during her adolescence, and the death of her mother in 2008. When I started trying to talk through what it would mean to me if one of my parents died, I talked about Viktor Frankl’s idea of Logotherapy.
As I noted in an earlier essay, the central question of Logotherapy is “Why don’t you kill yourself?” (To be clear: this question is a psychotherapeutic approach intended to point you towards the things you cherish about life.) I told my older friend, just a month before my dad dropped dead, that I would not know how to answer that question without pointing to my parents and saying, “I have to live for them.”
To be, or not to be, that is the question:
What you just read is an attempt to try to answer that question. It is the hard question. It is the only question.
“We’re already here? That was quick!”
What a ride – that one that killed him.