For those of us whose fathers are still with us, Father’s Day is an occasion to honor and appreciate them. For those of us whose fathers are gone, it’s a much different experience.
I last saw my own father on Father’s Day in 1998. Twenty-five years ago. He was living with my sister in Ohio. My wife, my son, and I had visited for the weekend. Alex was just three months shy of his second birthday.
Dad was 76 at the time. He’d had bypass surgery 17 months earlier. Six grafts in all. He still had a smattering of health issues. He’d spent decades chainsmoking and drinking. Not to excess, but a consistent stream of beer here and beer there in the bar he had operated, a thin, flimsy front for his gambling establishment.
He’d been retired for a decade. He hadn’t chosen to stop working; the feds shut down all of the bookies in our hometown in one fell swoop in December 1987. He then supported and assisted my mother throughout her six-and-a-half-year battle with ovarian cancer, a fight she’d lost more than two years earlier.
In the weeks after our final visit, he had shown some symptoms that suggested something was not entirely right. Evidence of perhaps a mild stroke he’d suffered.
When he was working, he kept busy every day of the year, with the exception of the Monday before and the Wednesday after baseball’s All-Star game. On those two days, there were no sports — and thus no bets to be placed.
As I was driving home from my own job the night of the 1998 MLB All-Star game, I called my sister. She said Dad had been doing well, feeling good. I said it would be nice for both of us to not be so worried about him all the time.
I got home. I started to watch the All-Star game. The house phone rang, back when everyone had landlines and actually used them. It was my sister. She said Dad had suffered a massive heart attack, and he was being taken by ambulance to the hospital.
He lingered in a coma for a week. One of the doctors gave us a little optimism that Dad could perhaps come out of it. He then apparently suffered a massive stroke while unconscious. Eight days after the heart attack, he passed.
Twenty-five Father’s Day after the last time we were together, I still think about him, if not every single day then damn close to it. I’ve spent a lot of time talking about him over the past few months, in ways I never had. I’ve discussed openly what he did for a living, after years of treating it like a secret.
He did what he did at a time when gambling was illegal. It didn’t seem abnormal to me when I was growing up because it was the only normal I knew. My mother worked hard to ensure that life would be as normal for the family as it possibly could be, despite Dad’s job.
A dream I had about him in June 2020 caused me to sit down the next day and start writing Father of Mine . The entire story is made up, but the life he led and the people he knew provided the background, the details, the flavor. Part of me thinks he would be very upset that I wrote it. Part of me hopes he’d realize it was my way of keeping his memory alive, and of acknowledging the simple fact that he did what he needed to do to provide for his family.
Good and bad are fluid, fuzzy terms. He was a very good man. He was simply a gambler who stumbled into a life that made gambling the center of it. The house never loses, so he became the house.
And he (with my mother’s not-subtle guidance) helped make our house the only home I knew, until I met my wife and we started our own. He was quiet, reserved. He rarely got upset. But he’d watch TV after finishing his work, and he would laugh.
I loved to hear him laugh. I can still hear it. He’d laugh out loud while watching shows like Hogan’s Heroes, Sanford and Son, and Barney Miller. The episode of Barney Miller where the brownies had been laced with hash had him crying, particularly when Jack Soo’s character talked of dipping the brownies in coffee so that they would be “mushy mushy .”
It makes me both happy and sad to carry around such clear memories, so many years later. It keeps those who have gone before us alive. How can they truly be gone if we still remember them so vividly?
Many of you on this Father’s Day are remembering your own fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and godfathers. Embrace those memories, even if there is sadness lurking in them. Hopefully, the fathers, grandfathers, uncles, and godfathers who read this will make memories today that will remain vibrant and robust for their family members 50 years from now.
I don’t know why I wrote any of this. It just felt like the right bookend to his passing, 25 years ago — which was also 25 years after the fictional events in Father of Mine. I’d like to think that through some cosmic machination he’ll be able to read it. And maybe he’ll laugh once or twice while doing do. (Then again, it has no hash brownie scenes. Maybe I should have added one.)
I don’t know what comes after this life for any of us. No one does. We have ideas and beliefs and faith, but no one truly, actually knows.
I hope I’ll see him again, someday. I tweeted last month that I have a replica of the phone that was in his bar down in my barn. Sometimes, I’ll pick it up and talk to him, and I hope he hears me.
Hopefully, we all will see our deceased fathers and grandfathers and uncles and godfathers again. Until then, all we can do is enjoy the memories as best we can, taking comfort in the warm feelings those recollections will stir.
Until then, all we can do is try to be the best fathers and grandfathers and uncles and godfathers we can be, so that the memories our families will have of us will still be rich and rewarding, many years after we’ve gone to see our own fathers again.