How Our Kids Will Eventually Kill Us
featuring the near-final words of Todd Hannula 🤓, Lon Shapiro, Thaddeus Howze, Gutbloom, Tom Mitchell, dudemesticated, Sonny Bohanan, Jeff Elkins and Simon Trepel, MD with art by TheNinjaDad
“You kids will be the death of me” —Every Dad Ever
To celebrate Father’s Day—the distant cousin of a holiday bastardized from the more meaningful Mother’s Day—I called upon fellow writers who willfully admitted to fatherhood. (Like wearing a shirt that says “I’m With Stupid” with an arrow that points up.)
We are no doubt the lesser sex. Our offspring will surely come to realize this weakness and use it to their advantage one day to put us out to pasture.
Here are some of Medium’s finest family men and how they see their impending demise:
Todd Hannula 🤓 springs forth with his fatal flaw:
“My son inspires me with his athleticism. Spinning, jumping, flipping, and triple whipping — that’s a thing! Unfortunately, he keeps encouraging me to join him on the trampoline or on his parkour adventures. I have trouble backing away from challenges like these…and so I’ve upped my life insurance while I enjoy pain free moments away from the action in the air and on the street.”
Lon Shapiro soaks the idea:
“Self-inflicted waterboarding.” (Read on here for the full gory details.)
Thaddeus Howze lays down the gauntlet, showing us “the Way:”
“‘Is that all you got?’ I was talking trash but it was the first time I had see the boy so focused. I have to stop thinking about him like a boy, he will be a man soon enough.
I was breathing harder than usual. He’s twelve now and the years of training are finally coming together.
I knew it would come to this one day. It was inevitable. I just never realized it would happen so quickly…” (Read on for how the battle ensues.)
Gutbloom envisions his personal apocalypse now:
“My hard fought adulthood crashed against the siren song of my most narcissistic project. I made a copy of myself and hoped to change my own narrative.
The tragedy is that one day, and that day may be rather soon, he will get up and walk out of the computer room, leaving me to...” (Read on for his end.)
Tom Mitchell gives us a whiff of his passing:
“I shan’t waste away in hospital. I shan’t pass peacefully in my sleep. In some restaurant, bar, hotel, train station, school reception or cinema toilet, my blood pressure will tip into the red and my heart will explode. Mainly through love, but partly through the smell of…” (Read on for more.)
Mr. dudemesticated half-jokingly concedes:
“I envision this happening in one of a few ways. My middle son, currently 5 years old, has boundless curiosity and regularly vocalizes his stream-of-consciousness thinking. There will either be that one question, or trivial thought, that literally overloads my brain OR in my attempt to have a little mental peace I’ll jump into (or out of) a moving vehicle. That, or in an effort to have a daughter — though with my 3 sons, it appears I only make boys — my wife will end me when the ultrasound technician says “oh, look what I see…it’s a little wee wee!” OR, my oldest son (now 19) will make me a grandfather before I’m 40 and my heart will stop beating. So, as you can see, I’m not long for this world!”
Sonny Bohanan claims:
“In the decade since my first child started driving, there have been seven, possibly eight, collision claims filed against my policy. Yes, I’ve lost count. The only thing I’m certain of is that the driver at fault in each one had the last name ‘Bohanan.’
I can no longer afford luxuries such as food and clothing, and have withered to a shadow of my former self, subsisting on crusts of bread I liberate from my neighbors’ trashcans under cover of night. When I feel the cold hand of Death close over my heart at last, I’ve no doubt he’ll be clutching an insurance adjuster’s clipboard in his other hand and will have arrived with news of yet another collision claim filed against my policy. So this is how it ends: With a whimper, not a bang.”
Jeff Elkins expresses his dying breath:
“I grab the small one, knowing tickles is what he needs, but to my surprise, the other four come to his defense. They jump, and kick, and laugh, overwhelming me with their numbers.
And there, under the pile, I am smothered by their love and joy.”
Simon Trepel, MD gets his last rites:
“My Daughters are already becoming the death of me. But the ‘me’ that is dying is the one that lived: without knowledge of how to love something so helpless, so deeply.
The ‘me’ that is dying are parts that valued work and money, over relationships and new experiences.
The ‘me’ that is dying is the naive former tenant, who thought it impossible to learn something so big every day, from something so little.
The ‘me’ that is dying becomes the birth of my better version of man: a Loving Father.
This is by far my Daughters’ greatest gift to me. It is worth dying for.”
Ernio Hernandez strums his pain:
“My daughter will use my heartstrings against me, somehow poisoning my tears at her first performance or recital. Thereby melting my heart before stopping it. I’ll be proud of her one last time before my own body kills me softly. Or… she’ll just impale me with my own glasses.”
Share yours below!
Further Father’s Day fun:
