One day (hopefully really soon) when all this is over, we’ll be compelled to go over, with friends and neighbors, lists of people we lost. Names and stories, fond remembrences. In fact, having to add these conversational stat sheets to our usually mundane observations about the weather or sports scores will become a permanent part of the culture. Well, maybe permanent until it wears away, as it inevitably will. But that’ll take a few years at least. Until then, though, there will finally be breathing space, time to reminisce and come out from behind our figurative masks long after the fabric ones have been dropped into landfills.
People will just assume that someone gone in 2020 will be for that one reason, the all encompassing pandemic. They can’t help but think it, it’s too much of our surface life. Everyone needs a shorthand. My mind goes there even now, I just assume. It’s easier.
My dad died in 2020, but don’t entertain those assumptions. For he died in stages starting around 2017 of Alzheimers and its myriad complications, a fall, partial paralysis, ending with an operation, fury and hospice.
Thanks for the condolences as you read this (really) but don’t assume I’m all torn up over this, not yet anyway. Maybe one day when all this is over there’ll be a reckoning. It’s already been 8 months though, and there’s no reckoning in sight.
I tend to say, “yeah, he’s gone, but we weren’t that close,” or, “he was kind of a dick, so, no worries, I’m good.” You might say that in some ways he died to me in little stages starting in the 1970’s. I knew I always wanted more, I knew I tended to hold out hope over the years, maybe he did too. I’ll never know. Occasionally these last few years I found myself fretting, wondering about my reaction upon hearing the news that he had died. Where would I be? What would I say? Would it fuck me up in some unsuspected way? It turned out I reacted pretty much the way I thought I would, with the big “wow”, perhaps, but after that pretty closed up.
I know though, there’s got to be more to it than this, I know it now because I’m a dad. I know it because of the way I look at my son in this kind of universal way. I suppose, I hope, that every father looks at his son with the same mix of pride, concern, wonder and hope that he is, deep down, just like himself (maybe with a few reservations). I know this, about how much I love my son, and what that look looks like to him. It’s easy to visualize, for some of my only memories of my own father growing up was about that look, but with me, his son, on the receiving end.
So there’s that. Seems it should be pretty easy now. I know my dad loved me because I remembered something that I now show my own son. Cut and dried, right? However, I remember a lot of other things too, I’ll call them contradictions. In memory the bad stuff, the contradictions, tend to accumulate more than the good stuff, the loving looks, but maybe that just depends on how you want to see things. It sure seems so, though, and in that way I’m probably like my own dad. I find myself increasingly wondering, what were some of his last memories regarding this?
Maybe in a few months or years, when we all start summating the stories of those we lost this year, I’ll simply add my own dad as a statistic. Just to make it easier, you know, and to discourage further discussion. “Yeah, he died in 2020 too, man.” Just leave it at that. But then this makes me think about my son, his expectations, and it leaves me a little embarrassed.
There’s always a reason to not deal with your shit, and this year has provided dozens of them across multiple levels. In a weird way, I’m kind of thankful for that. But I suspect it can’t go on forever, the undealt with issues just become complications down the road. The reckoning, as such, has to be reckoned with. Who knows, maybe I’ll surprise myself and try to tell dad’s story the best I know it, the good and bad together. This way maybe I can weed out and prevent the kind of complicated memories my own son could have about me, years down the road. And even further down his proverbial road, long after I’m gone and his own memories of me are tinged with nostalgia; I hope he can hold for himself a primary recollection, of a warm look of wonder, love and pride that dads give their sons.
