Dad I love you.

Camia Young
Nov 6 · 15 min read

My Love,
I’m currently sitting in a Pousada in Canoa Quebrada, Brazil overlooking the ocean. My father passed away four days ago on November 2nd in Fortaleza, a city a few hours north from here. The memories of these last few weeks are scorched into my mind, and I don’t want them to displace the other memories I have of him. I don’t want to forget the details, and I know in years to come I will have wished for something to look back on from this time. So this is a letter to my future self, to his family/friends and to those of you that never met my father and want to understand why I am the person I am.

A friend of mine, Hilary, was the one who gave me the idea to write about him, ‘your Dad was such an amazing man, he could have been a character out of a novel’ she said. She is right, he was so totally different from anyone of my friend’s fathers. And yet at times I’d think ‘we all have unique fathers’, this was my attempt to normalise my otherwise extraordinary father.

I have three parts of a story to share, Dad’s background, his world view and what I learned from him as a way to paint the picture of his life and who he was to me. I’m certain that anyone of his family or friends would write a different story, as he was an eccentric, hermit, misfit, provocateur and curmudgeon who left a strong impression on the people who took the time to know him. He was not one to speak about the past often, so this is a piecing together of stories from our many conversations, there may well be gaps.

Background
Donald Arthur Young was born in January 1940 in Waterloo Iowa, the oldest of 6 children to Immelda (Immy) and Richard (Dick) Young. He comes from a patriarchal family of entrepreneurs and was expected to be part of the family business from an early age. His summers were spent working in the various ‘Young’ enterprises. I suspect this is where he developed his knack for building, as he was exposed to many of the trades at Young Plumbing and Heating.

In the 1950’s he went to the University of Colorado on his father’s command to study medicine, that did not last long and he was found traveling around Europe. The story goes that Dick went over to Europe to bring him home. I can’t imagine how that conversation went. My memory of Dick is one of strict German dissent, he commanded the family. I think this is largely the origin of my father’s ‘resistance’ — I believe he was forever resisting something his entire life as a result of that relationship, but that is not something we would have discussed. Dad later went to Stanford and studied film, not something Dick would have approved of either.

He met Fairy there, she was the only woman I ever heard Dad speak of fondly. They married and lived in Greece for a few years before moving to Aspen. Their divorce broke my Dad’s heart, he never recovered from that and would not talk about the details. When he spoke of her, which was not often, he had a tone of longing in him. Love is such a curious thing, it can scar us deeply when it ends poorly.

Farley

He stayed in Aspen after their separation and led a life of revelry. The stories from this time are abundant, incriminating and outrageous. It was the late 60’s early 70’s, a time of testing boundaries and my Dad led the pack often. To give you a hint of the era, he had a pet wolf named Farley. As for the rest of the stories, I’ll leave it up to your imagination but suffice to say that some of his friends from that time did not make it through, the edges are edges for a reason. Dad would say ‘I never thought I’d make it to 40’, which was largely a result of this period of his life when living wildly was preferable to living long.

If there was one chapter that stood out above the rest, it was this one. I’m sure his friends would agree, this was a special time and special people came together in Aspen at that time. Dad would often say that there was never anywhere like it before or since. He had many friends that are all still in touch with one another, well those that lived through the revelry.

When he was not revelling, Dad worked in restaurants and as a builder. He ended up becoming a contractor and built several homes, some of which are still in Aspen today. He was a meticulous builder, he had an eye for detail and a great understanding of space and materials (says his architect daugheter). He was also a wonderful cook, I’m guessing because of his time working in Aspen’s restaurants.

It was during this time that he met my mom, Leslie, and my sister, Nattana, and I were born in 1974, we are twins. They divorced shortly after we were born. They disagreed about how to raise children, so the story goes. Dad wanted to home school us and Mom wanted to raise us around other kids and send us to public school.

Not long after we were born Dad moved to Gould, a remote place in the Rocky Mountains and bought a group of hunting cabins. He was setting out to create a cooperatively owned ski area. Those of you who know me well will see the parallels here. Short story is it did not work out. His version of the story goes that the county councillors that requested the various environmental studies, quit their jobs, took the now ‘public’ research Dad had paid to have done over several years, set up a private corporation and opened their own ski area. Basically, it was stolen out from under him and privatised. Dad was already angry with the government for Vietnam and its ‘warmongering’ — but this pushed him to another level. His dislike for government and anyone that works for it (and that was the world over) was next level. It was not the usual distrust, it was a vehement, passionate, often aggressive anger riddled hate.

After his ideas for a cooperative ski area collapsed, he left Colorado and went sailing, Nattana and I were 7 years old at the time. He based himself out of St Thomas and started another life chapter. He was a cook and later a captain on sailboats, he preferred anything without a motor. He loved being out at sea, he would say that one learned how to live through sailing and working on boats. He sailed all over the world, supposedly transporting teak wood, but I’m going to guess there might have been a bit more than that going on. I don’t know. He sailed throughout my childhood, I never saw him then. We were pen pals and wrote old fashioned letters that I still have.

Just before he turned 50 years old he bought a piece of land sight unseen for $2000 USD in northern Brazil. He had seen a photo from someone with a coconut tree and a small pond in the rolling sand dunes outside of a poor beach town called Canoa Quebrada. It was 1990ish. He wanted to live a self-sustaining life away from ‘control’ (ie. laws), and this is where he thought that might be possible. So he started building himself a home, and ended up living in Brazil the rest of his life. For most of his time in Brazil, he lived at The Oasis, as we would call it in English, or As Lagoas (the lakes) as he would call it in Portuguese. He also spent a few years living in Juaziero and then in João Pessoa.

He traveled often, and when I was 26 years old we reconnected. He promised me in a letter that if I left the US he would visit me. I held him to it, and when I was studying in London he came to visit. He got off the train at Waterloo Station, I had not seen him in years, but when he disembarked I recognised him right away, he looked just like me in a male version. It was spooky in a way. We were close friends from that day on. I set him up with an email account, we corresponded often and began traveling together. We traveled through Chile and Argentina as well as Portugal and Spain many times. I visited him in Brazil as often as I could, and we got to know one another in the way a daughter and father do, we love parts and love the parts we don’t love so much as well.

I must have been asked a hundred times, did he remarry. Yes but it was bitter and did not end well, in fact very poorly. I saw my father go through a pretty awful time after his last marriage, he never trusted women again. And the next question is do we have any other siblings, no.

His World View
Dad saw the world through a rather extreme vantage point. As some old folks do, they tend to repeat themselves, please stop me if I ever do that! Here are some of the replays.

‘If you are going to give something to someone, give anonymously, otherwise you are doing it for ego.’

‘Don’t believe the hype, and most of what you see around you is hype.’

‘Group think is for sheep, you need to do things on your own and think for yourself. Don’t trust anything anyone tells you.’

‘The US is an evil military dictatorship.’ Anyone who had even one conversation with Dad knew how strongly he believed this. Dad spent his days reading world news. He was the most well-read person I knew, to the point it was impossible to keep up with his depth of knowledge on world politics. He often expected people to know what he knew, which made discussions difficult, and if you didn’t know what was going on, he considered you ignorant and one of the sheep. There was little room for discussion with him on this issue, I would ask what do you expect people to do about the US military? Apart from choosing not to live in the US, to not support US foreign policy, well what can one do? He chose to speak out, and he did often. The people around him would either rally with him or duck for cover during these rants, and there were many.

‘Over population is the number one problem today, but nobody wants to talk about that.’ He would say this to me so many times I could hardly take it anymore, I’m his daughter after all! He would say it like I disagreed with him, when I never did, nor do I have children. Yes, population is a problem, 200,000 new babies are born every day, that is a problem when it comes to our impact on the planet’s ecosystem. What I arrive at is (again), what can we actually do? I don’t have kids, but I won’t lie I wished I had a child. For this reason, I error more on looking at how we use resources and how we can live more in balance with the planet’s boundaries as a species, rather than figuring out how to convince people to not have children. This was the ground for many debates between us.

He did not believe in love, I’ll spare you the exact wording on this replay as I don’t care to repeat them. Suffice to say he believed love was a terrible feeling that would corrupt the mind. I told him I loved him every time we spoke and in my emails, he once wrote me that he did not love me, but he cared for me and explained the difference. I respect that he considered such nuances and went out of his way to inquire into where he stood on such matters. Over the last few years he softened and would say he loved me. I think he knew I needed to hear those words from him.

On education he had some rather mixed messages. He did not support either my sister or I to go to college, he said he would give us $10,000 to go traveling instead. His father, Dick, paid for my sister and I to attend university. He would say over and over again, ‘I spent 10 years unlearning what they taught me at the university,’ and he would ask me if I felt the same. And then he would fund schools and support other children to go to college, anonymously as possible. I think he had one measure of what ‘learning’ was for us and another for other people’s children. Education was good if it helped people out of poverty and opened doors for them, but for my sister and I, he wanted us to think on our own and that was not something one gained from going to a university, that came with life experience.

What I learned from Dad
Underneath all of his staunchly held and loudly professed beliefs were the lessons, and these I treasure.

He taught me to inquire, not only through our many long conversations but through thinking over things on my own. Our conversations will forever live with me, in a way they were a form of meditation. He often raised questions that took me time to ponder, I’d go for a walk and come back to the conversation with a new perspective. There are few people in life where the conversations never end, they somehow just continue to open wider and wider, that was how it was with Dad.

He taught me the joy of learning, it has become ingrained in me. I know it is time for me to move on when I’m no longer learning, it means I need more room to grow. This also ties into ‘titles’ or ‘labels’ — he never wanted to be ‘one thing’, he wanted to do many things. Learning this from him freed me from being married to the idea of being an Architect for life. I studied architecture for 8.5 years, in the face of my father’s discouragement, and later practiced as an Architect for 11 years, but now I am doing property development combined with community development. I think of it as widening the scope of architecture and a way to get at the root of architecture. I am not constrained by the idea of a title or profession, thankfully I learned this from Dad.

I learned to live well simply from him. This I believe came from his time as a sailor, he learned to live with very little and took pleasure in honing the skill of simple living. I am not quite as ‘refined’ in my simplicity, but I find pleasure in less rather than more. He taught me this when we travelled together, particularly in how to pack only what one needs to make the act of traveling more enjoyable. I pride myself in my packing skills now and travel lighter than most but not as light as Dad did. With respect to my current life, I have some work to do, my life is complicated right now, and my father’s death has me thinking about his life and how I want to live the next few chapters more simply. I don’t have many ‘things’ and frankly I’d like to live with a lot less. He lived with so little and lived so well. This will be an area of more growth for me in the years ahead.

Live life on your terms, not what other’s expect from you or think about you. This was one of those snarly lessons with barbs all over it. This one lived deep in my subconscious for many long years. I admired Dad and had him on a sort of pedestal, as daughters tend to do with their parents. That came back to bite me a few times when we would disagree, or I would hear judgment about my life from him. I had to do years of therapy to evict the sharp inner critic which stemmed from my father’s unrelenting critical mind. I think all daughters want their father’s acknowledgment, and I had to learn to live without it and to seek that from within. I’m stronger for it now, but it was a long road that one.

Courage and tenacity, I have both and tribute them to Dad. I live my life as best I can according to what I believe to be right, which often takes going against the grain. It requires a willingness to put one’s ideas out into the world and perseverance to bring them to life. I believe we are the same in that we both want a better world, we both see so much around us that is not working, and we use how we live our lives as examples of possible improvements. He wanted to demonstrate that living a self-sustaining life-style was possible. I am choosing a life path that demonstrates that we can work together to pool our efforts and resources to create a better world.

We need to talk about death. I was squeamish to put it lightly and unable to have a conversation with Dad about death, he tried to raise it a few times and tears welled up in my eyes. He knew how hard it was on me to think about life without him, and so we never had the conversations we needed to have. His last two months were hell. We could have avoided a great deal of that if we had spoken about death earlier, and I had had the courage to face my fears. Dad was having heart problems, he did not want me to know about it and he did not want me to come to Brazil, I think because he did not want to upset me. Dad suffered a severe stroke August 30th following a surgery to clear one of his artiries. The doctors were keeping him alive, against his wishes, and he suffered tremendously because of that. I came to Brazil seven weeks after his stroke, I regret I did not come sooner. He had been asking to be allowed to die since the stroke, but the doctors and nurses thought he was depressed, so they ignored him, drugged him and restrained him to the bed. I knew he was not afraid of dying, he would say that often, he was even ready for it when his time came. When I arrived my first task was to convince the doctors to remove curative care and transition to palliative care, this was no small task in a country entrenched in strong Catholic beliefs. Palliative care was new to the north of Brazil, it had arrived only two years prior, and I received an onslaught of judgment. Once the transition was underway, I sat by my father’s bed, who could not communicate at this stage, and watched him slowly grow weaker and finally pass away. It was heart breaking, and the greatest act of love I have ever given to any one person. This experience taught me that my fear of death was holding me back from the acts of love it can bring out in us. And it taught me to have the courage to talk about death and prepare for it.

Closure
We started to drift apart when I stopped drinking alcohol about 5 years ago. I think he loved to rumble, and I started to prefer a quieter, gentler path of inquiry. He also disagreed with my interest in working with groups and building communities, he came from a ‘go it alone’ mentality. His tone would increase in volume in direct proportion with the amount of wine he had to drink, and he started to push me away. I think this was a healthy separation for me, in a sense it prepared me for his death. I think he knew what he was doing by pushing me away, it was his way of saying ‘I’m not going to be here forever and you need to stand on your own now.’

The common threads across his life were his love for critical conversation, great food and wine and travel, and of course he lived his life on his terms, independent and free from expectations of others. That takes courage in today’s world.

I will always love you Dad, and you will always live on in me.

Camia
Canoa Quebrada
November 2019

Camia Young

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