Today is February 5th and it would have been my dad’s 83rd birthday. I normally mark the day by posting a simple message like “I miss you, Dad” on Instagram or Twitter, when Twitter was still a thing and I was still on it. Today, I want to do something a little different and tell you a story. My dad could be tough and for a big part of my adolescent life, we butted heads. A lot. At one point, it got pretty bad and we actually didn’t talk for a while. It seemed like we were often at odds with one another about something, but maybe that’s just how I need to remember it. When he got sick, we got another chance to get good and let all of the things that once seemed so important just melt away. As heartbreaking as it was to see him deteriorate like he did, I really am grateful for the time that it allowed us to spend together. We managed to get to a place where we respected each other, not just as men, but as father and son. We spent a lot of time on the front porch—often in silence. We watched a lot of westerns and we talked about some of the things that went unspoken for decades. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good. I was holding his hand when he died in 2013 and while I was extraordinarily sad, when he took his last breath I was also grateful. He had fought as hard as he could for as long as he could, but now his pain was over and he could finally rest.
A few years after he died, my stepmother Linda sent me a box of photographs. There were hundreds of them, from before I was born all the way up through high school and beyond. As I was looking through them, there was one photo that stopped me. I was maybe seven or eight, and Dad, Linda, and I and Dad’s best friend Dennis and his family all took a road trip up to Lake Shasta. On the way back, we stoped in Virginia City, Nevada, to grab lunch and walk around for a bit—I don’t really remember that part. Virginia City became one of the boomtowns of the 1860s after the Comstock Lode of silver ore was discovered in 1859, I think. There’s a historic downtown area with shops and restaurants and a bunch of old buildings from the town’s heyday. Anyway, we were walking around and Linda took a photo of Dad and me in front of an old abandoned warehouse. We’re both smiling, wearing matching windbreakers that Linda had made for us, and Dad had his arm around me. I had completely forgotten about it and as I looked at the photo, I was hit with a wave of emotion at how happy I was—how happy we were, my dad and me. In that moment, all of the bad stuff that we had gone through gave way to the love between a father and son captured in that photograph.
A couple weeks ago, I had a very lucid dream. In it, I was sitting on a deck or a patio of some kind on the coast of what looked like Monterey, California just watching the waves break. From behind me on my right, I heard a voice say, “Well, hello young man.” I turned to see Bob Meis, one of my dad’s oldest friends walking out onto the deck. “Bob?” I asked. “What are you doing here?” He just looked at me and smiled, then he shifted his gaze to over my left shoulder. I turned to see my dad walking up to me, looking just as he did in the photo of us in Virginia City—complete with the jeans, the white t-shirt, the windbreaker, even the boots. My eyes welled up with tears as I got up and I just collapsed into him, sobbing. “Dad,” I managed. I told him how much I missed him. “I miss you too, Squirt,” he said. He used to call me Squirt because I was born a month premature and weighed less than five pounds. We sat down and just watched the ocean in silence for a bit the way we used to watch sunrises on the porch. After a while, he got up and said that it was time for him to go. I asked whether I could go with him. “Not yet,” he said, smiling. I woke up feeling happier than I’ve felt in a long, long time. I called Linda and told her what had happened. “In my belief system,” she said, “it sounds like you had a nice visit with your papa.”
Maybe it was just an incredibly intense dream—the result of random neurons firing bits of memories into my brain’s visual cortex. Then again, maybe it wasn’t. I can’t say for certain what it was and I definitely don’t know what happens next. If there is something else after this, I hope he’s there and that he’s happy and is able to somehow feel how much I loved him and miss him.
I don’t think we ever really got to say goodbye. I mean, we did sort of, but he was so medicated by the end that I’m not sure what got through. Maybe this was some sort of closure…for both of us. Either way, I’m glad it happened and maybe knowing what it was or wasn’t isn’t even the point.
I miss you, Dad. Happy Birthday.
What an achingly beautiful tribute... I'm gonna go call my dad now.
Beautiful. I had a similar relationship with my dad, and I will write about it some day before I expire.