It’s the Fourth of July, and it feels like the nagging edge of grief has begun to settle into every part of my body. My wrists are floppy, my hair feels dry, and my tongue is raw from rubbing against the back of my teeth. My torso keeps wanting to curl up on itself, my eyelids strain to stay open and strain to stay closed. The muscles in my face and throat are sore from crying.
To be mobile, I have to lean into my anger.
I guess the adrenaline of those first 48 hours is gone. Writing is harder. I keep re-reading stories about my dad — trying to wrap myself in the affirmation that so many other people thought he was as great as I did. My sister is still not eating enough. My mom persists on the distractions of laughter and care, only to be jolted back to reality when she stills.
There is nothing to do that seems like it matters. And I have been filling the nihilism of grief with as many thoughts as I can.
I only ever saw my dad cry three times.
The first time I saw him cry I was 7 years old. It was 2005, and his father had just died. His dad, Michael John O’Malley, was born in Galway, Ireland in 1924. We don’t know his birthday — that wasn’t the sort of thing that the Irish peasant class necessarily knew much about — but we knew he was born in August. He grew up riding donkeys and digging through soggy peat before starting work as a manual laborer in Ireland, Scotland, and England. In Scotland, he would go a mile deep in the ground to mine coal. In England, he was a Golden Glove heavyweight fighter. And just two weeks ago, my dad told me a story about when his father had done work for a wealthy family in Ireland that didn’t pay up — so my grandfather and a friend found some dynamite and blew up her stables. (To be clear: My dad and I both thought this story was awesome.)
My grandfather came to America in the early 1950s. Because of Irish power (aka Green Power) in Boston at the time, he was basically offered one of two careers when he got off the boat: He could be a cop, or he could be a construction worker. He joined the Local 223 and worked construction in Boston for the next 50 years.
As is the case with most labor, the work he did — the work he loved, the work he was great at — ultimately killed him. He died of asbestosis in 2005 (in other words, asbestos — the toxic material used in construction for a long time — scarred his lungs to the point where he could no longer breathe). At the time, it seemed like an injustice. It still does. But maybe it stings a bit less knowing that he lived to be 81 years old. That’s a lot older than 63.
My grandfather died slowly and then all at once. I remember those months pretty well, and we were back and forth to Boston frequently. One time, as my father was gearing up to leave, he started to cry. I remember feeling surprised, and feeling that I wanted to cry, too.
My dad’s mom, Bridget Costello O’Malley, was born in Galway, Ireland in 1932. She did not have her first pair of shoes until she was 12, and so many of her older siblings died at a young age that her schoolmates would say, “You’re next.” She came to the United States at the age of 17 with nothing but a suitcase. A native Gaelic speaker, she did not speak English when she arrived.
After a few years in America, she latched onto a job cleaning houses on Beacon Hill — an affluent part of Boston where white “cleaning ladies” were a status symbol. In my father’s words, “My mother picked up the pubic hairs of rich people.” She hated Oreos, in particular, because they crumbled into carpets, and their dark cookies intermingled with the cream — a nightmare for an immigrant with a washcloth. To this day, I’ve never seen anyone fold clothes as expertly.
My grandmother had vascular dementia for the better part of two decades. It was severe by the time her husband died. The day after his funeral, she came downstairs and asked my dad how he was doing. He said, “Not well, Ma. Yesterday was tough.” She said, “What happened yesterday?” She lived for another decade after this moment in the fall of 2005.
But her demeanor hardly ever wavered, and she loved my dad (and me!) unconditionally until she took her final breath. My dad still called her every single day, and every time, she was pleasantly surprised that he did. Alzheimers has been called “the long goodbye” plenty of times, and my dad managed a two-decade long goodbye the only way he knew how: With a daily commitment to doing absolutely the most. At her funeral, when he knelt before her open casket for a final time, he cried. That was the third time I saw him cry.
The only time I saw my father cry that was not in response to the death of a parent was at a dinner in August of 2012. This is a picture from that dinner at Bay Pointe Restaurant in Quincy:
That’s me, and that’s my grandmother. To me and my sister, she was Nana. And the Gaelic term for what we were doing there at the Bay Pointe Restaurant that night is “having the craic.” Nana loved having the craic — she loved laughing with loved ones, enjoying the warmth of good company and good food.
As my grandmother and I were giggling, my dad started crying. Pretty intensely, I might add. (Theme: my dad didn’t do much of anything subtly.) If I remember correctly, my mom put her hand delicately on his shoulder. She asked why he was crying. And he said something to the effect of, “I just love seeing them like this.”
He loved seeing his mother enjoy the company of his son. In my mind’s eye, I guess it was a marker of success for him — there I was, heading to prep school in Western Massachusetts, a dutiful meritocrat with the edge of someone with a much rougher background, holding the hand and of an Irish peasant-turned-cleaning-lady. She had worked her ass off raising a hellion of a son, and decades later, that hellion of a son got to give her the experience of his good company and the good company of his offspring. And for that, he was overwhelmed; saddened, I’m sure, by the fact that she wasn’t as present as she once was in those moments, but also overjoyed by the existential accomplishment of bridging generations.
If I could ask him, I am confident he would have said he was crying for his good fortune.
So it’s no wonder that I find the future the most heartbreaking thing about my father’s death. And in the three days since he died, it is the future that my pain fixates on. It rips me apart. He’ll never get to meet my kids; he’ll never get to giggle with his grandson; I’ll never get to experience the tear-jerking joy he experienced in Bay Pointe Restaurant that night.
And my crying these past three days has been so fucking violent. It’s not cathartic — it doesn’t feel like a release. It’s an expression of so much turmoil. Every bead running down my face feels like something from my body that I wanted to hang on to. (I’m trying to decide if my dad would find this description dramatic. Maybe a little bit. Things can be dramatic and true.)
I spoke with my dad’s oldest friend for an hour this evening. For most of the hour, we talked about the way my dad played basketball. For another part of the hour, we talked about my dad’s physical recklessness — picking fights with a broken arm while using his cast as a club, for example. My dad’s oldest friend described him as a “doctor’s worst nightmare” — constantly busting the casts he was put into because he couldn’t sit still for a day, couldn’t stop playing street hockey, couldn’t stop living life to the fullest.
My dad was the smartest person I ever knew (and I know some pretty smart people!). It’s not because he read as much as he did — and holy shit, did he read a lot — it’s because he got to reading by way of experience. Perhaps this is a central piece of the man — he did not commit to reading to try and fill the void of the lives he hadn’t lived, he turned to reading to explain the complexity of his own lived experience.
And one thing that’s become painfully clear these last 24 hours is that he didn’t want me to know about all of his experiences. I talked to this man every single day of my life, and there is so much I didn’t know. He wanted to be the perfect role model, so he left out the pieces of himself that made him imperfect: The moments in which his upbringing, his circumstance, or his recklessness led him to decisions in his youth that were not the sort of decisions that a father was supposed to say were okay for his son. And as beautiful as it is that I can find out even more about him in his absence — learn even more lessons from him — it also pains me for our friendship. He was grappling with being a mentor and a friend at all times.
When I feel lighter, I get to talk to the people that loved him about what it was like to play basketball with him, what it was like to ditch school to go to a Red Sox game, what it was like to stand next to him in a fight. But right now I feel heavy. And when I feel heavy, all I can think about is what he was able to build into me that makes his absence so fucking gutting. How could a man know me so well that when he died I wasn't able to walk without bending over, wasn’t able to talk without crying, wasn’t able to laugh without clenching my fist?
And perhaps this last thing points to something central about my relationship with my dad: We both used anger to drive us.
I don’t know if my father knew he was going to die in those last few weeks of his life, but I think he was feeling scared enough that he was having thoughts he wouldn’t have otherwise. And at the risk of shattering someone’s delusion that my father did not use language he shouldn’t have, one of the last things he told me was that he was proud of me for “not being a pussy” (not in the sexist way, he clarified). He told me that his great fear as he raised me was that I’d be soft — that I’d go to prestigious schools, become infatuated with their airs, and lose the edge that he took so much pride in.
And that’s the one piece of advice he would drive home in me throughout my life: That I had to stand up for myself, regardless of the circumstance. When I ran away from a fight in third grade, he taught me how to box; when I got suspended in fifth grade for punching a kid, he patted me on the back; when I flipped off an opposing team’s bench in a high school baseball game, he told me that they probably deserved it; when I told him I shoved my high school basketball coach for saying I’d never had to fight for anything, he asked me why I didn’t do more; when I got rolled by a bad breakup, he told me it was good to get a chip back on my shoulder; and when I grappled with my boss about the possibilities of finishing a book we’d been working on, he told me that the second I backed down from a fight, I’d lose who I was.
If you give up on who you are, you aren’t shit. That’s the flip-side philosophy of what it took for my dad to be so fully himself in every single interaction — you couldn’t knock him off the pedestal you put him on. He was unmovable, unshakable, and unflappable. Even if it meant that being movable, shakable, and flappable might save his life.
And when I talked to his oldest friend — a man whose exact bench-press numbers I know — he told me that’s just how they had to be. Even if it killed them.
Now, I finally feel like I’m in a fight that matters. And it’s the one fight I don’t have him to talk to me about — the one fight I don’t have him to talk me through.
And I don’t even know what it means to fight in grief. If it means trying to brawl in an airport, I did that. If it means managing the pain of losing the person you loved most in the world, then I’m failing miserably.
But that’s not what he would have said here. Not because I know what he would have said, but because I know it wouldn’t have been that. This is all far too fucking painful to have taken the binary approach, of: You either fight, or you’re soft.
He was the first person I wanted to talk to whenever something bad happened. And now the worst thing has happened, and he isn’t there for me to call, to hug, to laugh with, to be motivated by. And he never will be again.
Fuck.
Today was a terrible day.
Emmitt
I did not know Mike like others in his life, more casually, but I definitely considered him a friend. Particularly, two encounters that stick out for me.
About 2 months ago, Mike and Nellie were taking a walk in the neighborhood. It was during ‘physical distancing restrictions’ due to the pandemic. So I joined their walk, keeping my distance. His favorite subject came up, his son. After asking how you were and what you were up to, he filled me in that you had come to visit from the east coast in early March 2020 only to get stranded here, unable to fly home. He said you were living at home and made some comment, expected by our society from a parent whose 20-something child is now living at home. I could tell and feel the joy in his pretend off-handed remark that you were at home. I could feel the pride and joy that he has in you. It so struck me that the conversation still brings a feeling of love between the two of you and quite frankly, a little jealousy that my own daughter lives so far away. He knew of his great fortune that you were “stuck” here in Corvallis due to the stupid pandemic.
The second encounter that I will never forget is from many years ago, maybe around 2012ish. You and I played basketball together, on the same team. As was common, your mom and dad came to watch. It must have been halftime because there was a break in the game. Many of the players stepped out of the gym to the water fountain. He got off of the “bench” and was walking out of the gym. He was watching me shooting around, continually trying to perfect my 3-point shot, to no avail. I glanced over at him and could tell he wanted so badly to ‘take a shot’. I threw him the ball, talked a little smack, “let’s see what you got”. Dead cold from sitting and watching the first half of the game, took one dribble and drained a 3. Not only did he make it but the net barely move. You know the shot; when it makes that noise when it’s a perfect shot. He got a smile on his face. I was blown away that he could hit a shot as that and I have never forgotten it.
Mike O’Malley will be sorely missed. I am grateful he left a remnant of himself in you.
Frank Heresco, DC
Your dad was the realest professor I had the privilege of knowing. You are right, he was extremely smart. He was also on my graduate committee and always made time to meet with me to ensure my graduate success. To show my appreciation I let him drive my 1967 Cadillac Coupe de Ville around campus and his infectious smile is ever etched in my memories. You know your father well and it was refreshing to get your insight of the wonderful person and father he was. My thoughts and prayers are with you and your family - Zandro L.