Hello World
I found myself thinking about myself 10 years ago and what I wanted to be 10 years from then — whether I’d be ok with how everything went. 10 years ago I was entering my senior year of high school. I thought I wanted to be a lawyer or a writer and if I measure myself now against my plans from 10 years ago I have ‘failed.’ Law school just wasn’t in the cards and writing with any regularity is hard. Which brings me to why I’m writing now: because I believe that doing hard things tests the best of our energies and skills. The other reason is that in those last 10 years I’ve accomplished some things I never would have dreamed of or thought possible 10 years ago and I think I owe it to all the previous versions of me to share what really is possible, what I’ve learned, and what tips I can offer.
The why for writing here is that I hope to help some people — ideally people between the ages of 12 and 30 — and that the opportunity of helping anyone is more worthwhile than any risk of personal embarrassment.
The why now is because 10 years ago today my father lost his battle with cancer. For 10 years that’s something I’ve never really talked about because… it was hard. I’m coming to terms with the fact that not doing something good because it is “hard” isn’t a good justification.
One of the most memorable questions anyone has asked me in the last ten years was, “What was your dad like?” That question, asked by someone I had been friends with for seven years at that point was one most people never asked me and not one I had a great answer for. I sobbed for a little bit, mumbled something, and we moved on because answering that question has usually been a hard thing.
I’m not writing this so my dad will read it — I can’t imagine they need bathrooms in heaven and he rarely read anywhere else — but because I think talking about him is something worth doing and that might help others.
It helps if you can visualize him first: big, burly man with a large belly and a chubby face covered in a beard and dotted with bright blue eyes. If you’ve seen Santa Clause, you can probably envision my dad. Every December, kids would come up to him while we were in a mall and without missing a beat he’d encourage them to be good and let them know he was watching. This was a great thing because he loved meeting new people. He could strike up a conversation with a just about anyone on the topic of their choosing and the only thing I think he ever wanted to get out of it was A. To make the other person laugh and B. to learn something new. The guy really loved talking to strangers.
He was almost always the funniest guy in any room and when he wasn’t he had an incredible laugh that would bellow. He had the uncanny ability to put a smile on your face even if you were mad at him.
He was, undoubtedly, the best type of person to get stuck next to on a long flight or have as a customer.
Some of the best things about my personality are merely watered-down imitations of his.
The reason it’s tough talking about him is the uncomfortable mix of recency bias — that it’s a lot easier for me to remember his last year, the one where most of his personality and energy was consumed by trying to stave off cancer, than the 16 before that — and the taboo of discussing any shortcomings of those who have passed.
I unfortunately have much stronger memories of the person he was through the last stage of his life — trying to convince him to eat, carrying him to the bathroom, skipping school to drive him to doctor’s appointments — than I do when he was my ‘dad’ — developing an affinity for jazz because that’s what we listened to on the way home from school, hearing him in the crowd at my sports games, sharing a Costco hot dog, and watching Florida Gator games. I haven’t worked hard enough on focusing on the good instead of the most recent and so I often recall memories that are painful instead of positive.
The other is that lionizing my father doesn’t tell the whole story. Doing so would not be a fair representation and would exacerbate difficulties those that are dealing with the grief of losing a loved one are also dealing with. For all the love I have for my dad, I’m able to say quite confidently that he would not have been in consideration for Husband of the Year in most of the years he was in that role. There are also definitively years he would not have received votes for Father of the Year.
As much as I now know how much he told others how proud he was of his kids, it would have been nice if he told us. He was frequently too consumed with how much he wanted us to be the best, most successful versions of ourselves we could be that he’d start with ‘critical feedback’ and then forget to do the whole ‘congratulations’ part.
My favorite example of this was when I excitedly told him that I got an 800 on part of my SAT (a perfect score) and without missing a beat my dad’s only response was “Why didn’t you get 1,000?”
My dad was human and some of the best parts of my personality come from me doing the best imitation of the opposite of what my dad would do.
The last hard thing is acknowledging how much good came because my dad passed away. Navigating the nuance with that is tricky. It’s definitively not a good thing that my dad died and given a chance I’d gladly trade you all the good things to get my dad back. That said, there are aspects of it that I am very grateful for.
The first is that he stopped suffering. My dad died on September 16, 2006 but I lost him way before then. I can vividly remember the sheer panic he was in when five days before he passed, he mistook MSNBC coverage of the five year anniversary of 9/11 as an active terrorist attack. I remember early on hoping that he’d make it my high school graduation in June 2007, adjusting to being hopeful he’d make it to the year 2007, and ultimately, to the end of September. I also remember feeling very selfish for that.
A second one was that the crucible my brother and I were forged in gave us the courage and strength to weather anything. No subsequent challenge since then has approached a level of difficulty anywhere close to that. If that didn’t kill us, we’re ever confident that everything else afterward was only going to make us stronger.
Losing a parent also forced us to value our mom even more. While we couldn’t love her anymore, we’re a lot more vocal about how much we do and how much we appreciate her. This appreciation ended up extending to our entire ‘family’, which is to say it’s affected how we treat our friends.
The pain of the grief and the residual anger taught me that I’d never lose someone close to me without exhausting every possibility. It’s why 10 months later, faced with losing someone else I cared about, I thought it would be a good idea to pick a fight with the U.S. Government. I was still hurt and I was still angry and didn’t think a couple Congresspeople telling me something was “impossible” was a good enough reason for me to lose someone else. The strength and level of caring developed as a result of my father’s death ended up allowing me to help pull off something “impossible.”
That story is here
If you got to the end of this and you’re wondering what you can do, here’s a couple of my suggestions. The first is to tell whatever living parents you have- by phone, text, email, video chat or in person — how much you love or appreciate them. No matter how much you like or dislike them, you’ll almost certainly miss them when they’re gone. The second — the hard thing — whenever you get the uncomfortable response from someone to some harmless question that their parent passed away, that you ask them for a happy memory, a favorite joke, or a positive attribute.
If you got to the end of this and you can relate to this, I can offer you a few more things. First, if you think I can be of help — even if you’re a stranger — it would be my pleasure to try to help. Second, I used to think going through this would literally kill me — that I’d fall apart and be unable to pick myself up. It has not; it’s given me the perspective and ability needed to pull myself up when I fall down. It did take a while to pull myself together and if you’re still struggling, keep struggling.
I’ll leave you with a personal mantra I’ve formulated to cope: dedicate yourself to making the people watching you — wherever they may be — proud. I can say without any doubt that in the last 10 years not only would I be proud of what I became, but my dad would be too.
