It's in The Basement

I'm an unabashed fan of the Rocky movies.* I always have been. In fact, one of my go-to cocktail party stories the last few years is the true story of how I was cast as an extra in the last Rocky film, and missed out on the opportunity because I didn't lie to my then-boss. In that movie, Rocky gets back into boxing because of what he describes as some "stuff in the basement." Enduring grief from a life event that he hasn't finished processing or getting out of his system. I can relate.

Most of the time, my dad's absence is a nagging fact I simply live with. I know he's gone, but as I move through each day, meeting my various obligations and challenges, it's not something that slows me down. But every so often I get the feeling that I have my own stuff in the basement. This week it all came roaring back. Twice.

Friday night I had some too rare one-on-one time with my kindergartner, our middle child. We went to the movies and had a great time. We were laughing all the way home in the car until out of nowhere he told me about a dream he had had a few times, where my dad is talking to him, but then he disappears and won't come back no matter how much my son asks him to. He told me he cries in the dream. In seconds he was crying hard.

Every parent sees their kids cry all the time in the early years. It's a routine event. But seeing your child cry from real, unsolvable grief is totally different, and it hit me viscerally. I tried to take his pain away, to comfort him any way I could think of, but he was really too sad to reach, and naturally his grief brought up my own feelings of loss that had long been sitting in the basement. The hardest part was knowing that the best I'd be able to do would be to help my son deal with the grief, because there would be no way to remove its cause.

As part of being Grandma, my mom has a second role for my kids as their connection to my dad. Every once in a while when my older two, who actually knew him, feel sad about his absence, talking to her has made them feel better. Thankfully that worked late last Friday, too. But before we got on the phone, I let slip a secret that I hoped would calm things down, and instead brought us all a second bout of sadness a couple of nights later.

I told my son about a special story book my dad recorded his voice over about a month before he died. By that time the writing was on the wall and my wife wanted my daughter, who at the time was only ten weeks old, to have some lasting piece of my dad. She knew the two might meet only once, and she had the foresight and the heart to buy the recordable book and ask him to read it, so my daughter would at least have that. Recording that book with my dad as he lay in bed wearing an oxygen tube in his nose, less than two weeks before the shit completely hit the fan, was a gut-wrenching experience. It was clear to us both that he wasn't doing it just because we lived in different states, and we wanted our baby to have his voice between visits.

When we got back from that visit I stashed the recorded book in a hiding place, and for the next two and a half years I felt like a character in an Edgar Allen Poe story. I was always painfully aware of where the book was. I could sense the damn thing when I got near it. Once when I was alone in my house I allowed myself to take it out and listen. Mistake. After a few minutes it was hidden again. That was at least a year ago. One thing my middle guy has in reserve is enough perseverance to nearly always get what he's after. I hoped he would forget about the book, but once he knew about it, he HAD to hear it. By Monday night I caved.

I tried to explain to the princess what she was about to hear, but being two and a half, she didn't process it, and continued happily playing. I tried harder to prepare my boys for the feeling of hearing Papa's voice again. I tried hardest to steel myself, because though I know it's OK to cry in front of them (according to one grief counselor anyway), it would be really unsettling for them to see me in that state. I didn't want to upset them more than necessary. It went about as well as I thought it would. Within a couple of pages we were all in tears, and only Mr. Middle wanted to go on, which I allowed. It was not only tough hearing his voice, but it was tough hearing just how sick he really was by then. His voice is weak and his breathing is labored. It is also clear how unbearably sad he was as he spoke to his only granddaughter - a precious baby whom he knew he wouldn't see grow up. It also conjured for me a flashback to that room, that visit, which was not my last time with my dad, but was the last time I'd see him in his own home, under his own power.

The book is safely put away in a new hiding place for a while. When my daughter is old enough to understand but still young enough to appreciate having a story read to her, I intend to try again. But for the moment, it is still too hard to listen to it. Though I can't rule out one of her brothers asking for the book again and maybe again after that. I would let him, but it would be difficult. When he gets thinking about it, the poor boy really misses his Papa.

The farther into the past my dad's death, and particularly his end-stage illness, recedes, the more I come to understand that grief of this magnitude ebbs and flows. Sometimes when I haven't felt it for a while, I wonder if I am an insensitive robot who can't love people. Then I tell myself I'm growing past a traumatic experience, and nobody could bear a constantly high level of grief. The past few days showed me I'm not a robot, I'm just grieving at my own pace. And so are my children.

To bring this back to Rocky, it turns out that Bill Conti, the composer of the unforgettable "Gonna Fly Now" was a high school classmate of my dad's. I don't know if he knew this, and we never once talked about it, but it's true.  If you stuck with me through this long post, here is a nice video clip I hope you like.

*Except for Rocky V, which never happened.

A Dad in Full

When my dad died two years ago (two years ago!) one of the things that gave me solace was that my sister and I were fully formed by the end of his life. Families, careers, communities, plans. We were established. By living to see his children into their 30s and with families of our own, my dad had in some sense "made it." He left behind five grandchildren, and it seems likely that that's how many there will be. So he saw an accurate glimpse of the future of his family.

Of course, that's complete crap, and lately I see that we're all growing and changing in ways I hadn't anticipated. There are whole lifetimes unfolding in which my dad would have been a major player had things been different. But it wasn't until the past few weeks that the fallacy of his seeing something to completion really dawned on me. I realized recently that I've entered some new phase of fatherhood- and adulthood- and I am only just figuring out what's happening and where we go from here.

My children are still quite young at two, five, and eight. Parenting the younger two consists mostly of doing the same things my wife and I have been doing ever since we became parents, but the oldest one is growing into a new phase of life. He is finishing second grade next week, which I realize still makes him closer to babyhood than adolescence, but he is old enough to have had some real life experiences and lessons now. Old enough to have felt real disappointment and real triumph. Old enough to dream about his future beyond the standard firefighter or baseball player dreams. He has what count now as "old friends." He has in some ways become a member of our tight-knit community independent of his family. His security still derives from Mom and Dad (he dropped the Y months ago), but he also has his own identity.

As he changes, what he needs from us is changing, and we're following him into a new and bigger universe of people and possibilities. In time the same thing will happen with the younger kids, too.

I now know that I was not fully formed when I lost my dad, I was just really steeped in a particular phase of life and had yet to move into the next one. In fact, ten or fifteen years from now I also won't be fully formed. There is more to figure out, more to accomplish, and certainly more my kids will need me to be.

Even at the end of his life, my dad also wasn't finished growing as a person. Perhaps nobody ever truly is. And now that I see how much more is ahead of me, I sure would have wanted to benefit from the wisdom of his experience. It isn't just that I miss him, it's that sometimes even a grown man with a family, career, community, and plans, could use some advice or encouragement from his old man. On Fathers Day this Sunday, love your dad and thank him, but also love your kids and thank them for needing you to evolve. And never stop evolving.