I have my father

Image by Martin E. Dodge

I don’t remember when Dad called me to announce he had cancer. We don’t talk often enough because our conversations can be challenging. He is hard of hearing and prefers to speak in monologue. It is challenging to share my new happenings with him, and to be fair, I am not interested in listening to his genealogy research. We also have two opinions on how I grew up, particularly during my high school years, so I avoid talking about the past. My childhood was typical for having divorced parents, although we had our brand of family dysfunction, neglect, and abuse sprinkled in. I never imagined my Dad would be staying with me full-time.

Make no mistake, I love my Dad. We have had great conversations, and I thank him for instilling a love of nature in me. My upbringing led me to be fiercely independent and accustomed to solitude. My mom was a single working parent who did the best with little. When we are kids, we don’t seem to realize our parents are people with needs too. But I am not writing this to lay blame, take responsibility, or engage in forgiveness. I am working through some thoughts about how my Dad now resides with me.

After my Junior high school year in Vermont, we did not part ways on favorable terms. I moved in with my oldest sister and brother-in-law in Virginia and was enrolled in a new high school for my Senior year. After graduating high school, I moved back in with my Dad, who had divorced his second wife and moved to Maryland. I struggled to find stability in the small town. I relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia, where my girlfriend’s mom generously let me stay with them until I saved enough money to get an apartment. My second-oldest sister moved to Charlottesville, and for a while, we shared a place with friends.

Over the years, my independent attitude grew. My latchkey-kid adaptation matured and perfectly matched my identity as an outsider. I remain close to my sisters because the oldest was a surrogate parent, and the next oldest, once a bitter sibling rival, became my best friend. Growing up, age differences kept me from getting close to my cousins. Mom was working and trying to have a personal life. I saw Dad every two weeks for visitation until I moved in with his new family. Moving in with my Dad involved switching to a new school system to start high school. Meeting and maintaining friends were not strong traits of mine.

My dysfunction boiled over during my Sophomore high school year when I developed Osgood-Schlatter's disease. Walking was painful, so I gave up running track and JROTC, and a darkness then seized my psyche. Society tends to blame music, movies, TV, video games, and the wrong crowd when kids go bad instead of what drives them onto a perilous path. I think my family therapists from 1987 would agree that the turn I took was not surprising or fueled by unsupervised screen time. The internet didn’t exist.

However, I can thank Star Wars for becoming a coping mechanism for me. Dad took me to see Star Wars in the theater when I was 5-ish years old. It was in 1977, and I was born in 1972. The trash compactor monster spawned a recurring nightmare, but the movie provided me with moral behavior that was lacking even in the religious people in my life. The toys were precious, and the movie sequels provided years of escapism, adventure, and comfort. I am an original trilogy guy. And you would never guess that I am not the fanboy I used to be, because I have a Star Wars room.

Anyhoo, I continued to spin deeper into dysfunction for many years. I once wrote an essay about emphysema as a grade schooler when living with an aunt who was a smoker. I started smoking in high school and did not quit until I was 32. My Dad did not drink or smoke, but my Mom’s side of the family knew how to have fun. For me, alcohol started as a social toy, became a cure for loneliness, a salve for boredom, and a pain management strategy as I grew older. The lifestyle of my fellow hospitality peers was a great match until I started aging out of the crowd. Ultimately, hip replacement surgery would dictate a new lifestyle for me. The irony of the hip thing is that it was not alcohol related. Stress and anxiety initiated the injury, and it happened while I slept.

My Dad and I went years without talking on the phone or seeing each other. I was busy with my work-hard and party-harder mentality, rarely taking time off or going on vacations. I would visit family occasionally. My family has five June birthdays, which we consolidated into a single celebration to make visiting easier. I tried to attend as best I could. I always worked on Holidays, and for decades, he would ask why. If you, the reader, do not understand why certain professions work on Holidays, you are a part of the problem. Just saying. But thank you for reading this far. Hahaha.

Dad could be overbearing. With genealogy, he would inform you of what he published instead of asking if it was ok to publish. One time, I had a difference of opinion and did not want a detail included in his genealogy article. His response was that my opinion did not matter because it was public record. In anger, I told him never to ask me about such things again and not to mention whatever he publishes in the future. I never want to treat someone the way my Dad sometimes treated me. There are many times when I have used my Dad's bad behavior as a guide for what not to do and say.

His life with his 4th wife was consumed by their travels and his genealogy research. A family squabble involving his current wife put a wedge between Dad and us kids for a while, too. Selfishly, I thought that when his wife passed away, we kids would see him more often. It was a fantasy just like my desire for his approval.

Eventually, on a rare visit, I noticed my Dad’s hands had started to look frail. I was startled when Dad turned down my plan to take him for a canoe ride with me. He introduced me to canoeing, after all.

He said, “It was past his time to do so.”

And this was years before his cancer diagnosis.

My Dad handled his cancer treatment like a champ. We did not know the extent of his suffering until a friend of his mentioned a few details. We kids live far away and cannot visit on a regular basis. Moving closer to Dad was out of the question. The phone conversations we each had with him varied. My oldest sister was all business and planning. My second-oldest sister endured the obvious attitude that she was his least favorite kid. And I was the fun one. In general, my Dad talked about his treatment in a way that made every appointment he attended seem like a cure was inevitable. During our last visit with him, after he had life-extending surgery, he thought he was going to leave the hospital. We knew better. His positive attitude was unshakable to the end.

Near the end, we kids struggled to hear Dad over the medical machines and a sudden burst of activity in the hospital hall outside. He recounted the final moments of his 4th wife after a decision-making process between him, her eldest grandson, and his wife's daughter.

His monologue ended with a mysterious, “Have fun with my ashes!”

My sisters and I can’t recall a change in topic we may have missed due to the hospital noise. All we recall is being too exhausted, struggling to keep up with what Dad was saying, and trying to figure out why he might be saying it. His voice is so weak, and he can’t understand us because of his hearing. How are we supposed to have a conversation about his ashes with him, even if we had the presence of mind to ask? There was so much noise, and the hospital's helipad was nearby. We could not get closer to his face without crawling on top of him. Dad allowed us to leave his bedside to go sit down, and he never reopened that topic.

I said my goodbyes that day. I must go to work. I don’t know if that is an excuse, but I do have bills to pay.

My last words to my Dad were, “You are a strong man.” And “I love you.”

The cancer had left him unable to eat, and there were no procedures that could prolong the inevitable. Hospice care was to be the final stage when he chose. He would be drugged and unconscious for his comfort until he passed. It could be tomorrow; it could be a week.

My sisters were able to see him move to the Hospice ward. He passed in his sleep the day after I left. My sisters were with him. I was not.

I look forward to the day when passwords become an obsolete personal security measure. My Dad’s obsession with overcomplicated passwords bit him in the end. The passwords he provided to us don’t work. We kids are locked out of important information, which may include what to do with my Dad’s ashes. He never discussed ashes beyond wanting to be cremated and that his headstone and plot were paid for. I hope Apple believes our tale of woe and will allow a workaround to access my Dad’s Mac Mini.

For my father’s memorial service, I wrote 200 of the 500 words I used to tell family and friends about my Dad. Microsoft Copilot wrote 300 words, and they were amazing. The prompt I created for the AI to use was, “Write a 300-word memorial for an electrical technician who loved nature walks and family but overcomplicated his passwords and complained about bad technology.” It was technology imitating life and life imitating art, all profound and disturbing, all at once. Dad would have loved it.

I did not know Dad would be coming home with me after his memorial service. My oldest sister, as the executor of Dad’s estate, handled a lot of tasks, and we, the other two, did what we could, but this was an in-the-moment situation. We decided that I was the best suited to house Dad until we figured out the plan for his ashes. The force is with him. So, my Star Wars room is now the “I am your father’s room.”