PIKE here: My father recently died. For the last few years he’d struggled with Alzheimer’s; he’d gotten to the point where he didn’t recognize me. For that matter, he couldn’t even talk. So his death should have been a relief -- right? And in many ways it was. It had become painful to visit him. To see this once proud man having to wear diapers and be attended to by nurses around the clock. A great weight lifted when I heard he’d died. No more suffering for Dad was all I could think. No more… But grief, loss -- they’re unreasonable emotions. You can walk around all day and do whatever it is you have to do and not even know they’re choking your soul. Then there’ll be a simple memory -- my Dad taking my brothers and sisters and I to the beach every Sunday during the summer. We’d go to either Seal Beach or Huntington Beach, usually Seal. It was a few miles closer but the main thing is my Dad knew he could keep an eye on us at Seal. Huntington often had strong riptides. I remember once how my Dad had to swim out and save my life there. He acted like it was nothing. When he caught up with me, he told me to relax and just swim down the coast with him. I was tired; I wanted to swim toward the shore. But he said he wanted to show me how neat the coast looked from far out at sea. Of course I was just a kid and didn’t realize the riptide we were stuck in could kill us easier than a great white. He didn’t say anything scary; he made a game out of it. A half an hour later when we got to shore I was worn out beyond belief. But I was alive and even more important I never knew until fifteen years later that I’d been in danger. Growing up, if my Dad was around, danger was an alien idea. He grew up in Ireland, on a poor farm beside the beach in Donegal. Ireland was neutral during the war with Hitler, but plenty of German mines used to wash up on the shore. My Dad and his pals would throw rocks at them until they exploded. The Irish were not too friendly with the English back then. A lot of the tension was due to the Catholic versus Protestant issue. But my Dad -- he had been born without a prejudice bone in his body. He never lectured us about treating everyone the same; he just did it himself and we followed his example. Much later, when we moved from Brooklyn to LA, when I was two years old, we rented a tiny yellow metal house on Budlong Avenue, near Manchester Avenue -- what would later be called South Central or Gangland. Back then it was a mostly white area but our next door neighbors were black and, as it turned out, our best friends. Again, my Dad never had to teach us anything about treating everyone as equals; he was color blind and as a result so were we. There was no work in Ireland right after the war so my Dad traveled to Scotland, where he worked on a major hydroelectric project way up north near Inverness. He spent his days in the dark, digging giant tunnels beneath a massive dam; a normal shift was 24 hours. He told me a lot of men died in those tunnels but never made a big deal about it. That was the great thing about my Dad; he grew up in a world where survival was not guaranteed. It made him strong; and so he helped make us strong. He met my Mom in Glasgow at a dance. My Dad was quiet; he was pretty shy. He never told me much about their courtship until one day we had to re-roof an old house we were trying to sell. It was a hundred degrees that day and my Dad and I were up on the roof from dawn until dusk. The shared suffering got him to open up and he told me that the instant he met my Mom he knew he had to marry her. Frankly, she was pretty foxy back then; all the guys were hitting on her. But I think she was attracted to my Dad’s innate goodness. I could write a book about all the life lessons he taught me but I’d keep coming back to the same point. He was a good man and because I’ve found goodness to be such an elusive quality in life -- it makes me feel my Dad was the greatest man I ever knew. Maybe I’m biased but I don’t think so. So, yeah, I felt relief when he died, a reprieve that slowly and steadily transformed into a near constant grief -- riddled with sharp stabs of anguish. But now, with the perspective of time, and a vast library of sweet memories I can forever check out and share and reread at leisure, my emotions have finally settled and I feel mostly gratitude. I mean, of all the fathers in the world I could have got, I was lucky; I got my Dad. KEVIN/PIKE
Posted on: Sun, 20 Jul 2014 19:08:36 +0000
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