The After Burn...

We gave my dad an amazing send off.  So many people showed up, in the pouring rain under a Severe Weather Warning.  And despite the foul weather and solemn occasion,  a great deal of joy was expressed and experienced.

One of men I call a brother showed up yesterday all the way from DC with his girlfriend to be there for me and my family.  I have known him and loved him for 27 years.  He emblematic of the quality and caliber of people in my life today.

So many wonderful long time friends coming and lending support as we ushered my dad into his official goodbye, to be followed by a daily one for the rest of our lives.  He was quite a man.

I was able to pull off the eulogy.  I only almost lost it a couple of times.  I was able to hold it together.  And it seemed to be well received.  It is hard to write a eulogy.  So many things to say, what to put in, what to leave out...  And with my dad and I, it wasn’t the “daddy’s little girl” kind of relationship.  We were much more armed combatants for most of my life.  He going right and me going left and seeing eye to eye on almost nothing.  Not so easy to talk about all of that while still doing my best to honor him for the man and father he was.

I was happy to be able to report the healing that occurred between us which dovetailed nicely with our somewhat sketchy past...if you didn’t have a difficult past and find the willingness to talk about that, how could you ever let everyone in on the amazing healing that happened as a byproduct of your individual and mutual journeys in recovery?

I was overwhelmed by the outpouring of love and all of the people who gave of their most precious resource:  their time.  Who wants to show up at a funeral in the pouring rain?  No one.  Not one single person.  Yet, they all came. Not one person who had committed to coming balked.  Not one single person.  And all of those that showed up yesterday have earned a most special and dear place in my heart.  Giving of oneself and one’s time is a very selfless act and I am forever grateful.

I have debated whether to share the eulogy here...I mean, it is long and perhaps no one will want to read the whole thing.  But I also feel like it is testamentary to the power of the human spirit, to healing and to what recovery can and will do for you if you turn over your will and life over to the simple, but difficult process.  And so I have decided to share it, to represent what recovery can do to families torn apart by addiction, trauma and PTSD.  My dad and my story is absolutely one of redemption...and in today’s world, who doesn’t want to hear about that?

I offer this to all of you, so that you too may bear witness to the absolutely life altering, wondrous, life affirming journey of recovery and all of the most amazing things that happen when you surrender and give your life over to good orderly direction...one day at a time.

Again, still...

Goodbye Dad, I love you.

Thank you all for coming today.  Thank you for the outpouring of love and support.  My mom and I have been carried through this time by all of you as well as each other.  We are most appreciative and grateful for all of the phone calls, flowers, gift baskets, meals, cards and all the other ways all of you have shown how much our grief is shared by all of you.  One of the greatest gifts I have been given in this life is the gift that I do not have to walk through anything alone, ever, even when I might want to.

Ok, I am going to try to get through this...I apologize in advance for all the stops, starts and falters, but I make no apologies for the tears that fall for any of us.  My dad earned tears so let’s give him some. And also, because I am irreverent and kind of a jerk, tears because I think they would have made him incredibly uncomfortable...hahah, just kidding.  But it would have.

For those of you in recovery, we are going to run this kind of like a speaker meeting.   I am going to talk way longer than you want me to but we will wrap this up, I promise, within about an  hour.  For those of you not acquainted with recovery, welcome to your first meeting...hahaha.  Kidding.  Kinda.

One final caveat…there will be swearing.  I know swearing isn’t really allowed in eulogies, but here we are.

Ok, now that the thank yous and the structure of this is all laid out, we can begin.  My father.  What can I say about him?  He was larger than life.  He was an Athlete, Army Ranger, Green Beret, Special Forces, Colonel, Drunkard, Lover of Irish music almost as much as the whiskey, Ex-drinker of old fashioneds, the smell of which is permanently etched all over my childhood.  Ex-two pack a day smoker who was the first to quit followed by my mom and then me, the reverse of the order in which we all got sober.

Oh, yes, let’s talk about the sober man that most of you knew and loved.  Absolutely the better version of the man I called dad.  

My dad was easy to love but hard to know.  I spent most of my life feeling like he gave all of you things that he refused to give to me.  Then the day came when I grew up and realized that he was giving everything he could, but that which I wanted, he did not have to give.  Intimacy was uncomfortable for him, having absolutely nothing to do with me.  An outgrowth of his childhood shit that was unresolved or perhaps resolved to his satisfaction and ability.

Here is what I absolutely know about my dad:

He taught me to shoot whiskey and pool.

He literally had the same hair style for his entire life.

His wardrobe was pretty much stuck in classic 1965.

The first time he saw a dentist was when he joined the army. He paid dearly for that megawatt smile. 

When I was 19, (I had a fake ID) I out drank him at an Irish pub and won an all-expense paid trip to Ireland courtesy of dear old dad.  When we both came to the next morning, he walked into my room and said, “I am pretty sure last night was the most expensive night of drinking I have ever done...”  I nodded and said, “yep, sucks to be you.  When can I leave?”

My mom came home from a business trip and was like what the fuck even happened here.  I am sure she felt that way a lot about the two of us, perhaps even still, me, today.

In May of 1989, I headed to Ireland.  My dad had one directive in 1989 and that was NOT to go to Northern Ireland.  That was the only place I went in Ireland.  Landing in Belfast as bombs exploded almost daily.  He was not pleased, but I am sure he wasn’t surprised.  I mean that was kind of our deal...he would tell me to do something and I wouldn’t do it even if you beat me.  And he would tell me NOT to do something and I would do it immediately.  Drove the poor man crazy with rhythmic regularity.

I know my dad loved my mom.  This is a tricky subject not because he lacked loved for my mom, he idolized her and he needed her.  She the ballast to all of his bombasticness.  But hard to talk about because they were always an odd pair: her liberal, him conservative, he gregarious, my mom perfected introversion to a near art form.  He outdoorsy and wild, her stable and at home or wherever there was AC.  They were opposites in so very many ways, but it worked, for them for 60 years.  It wasn’t always easy, I am sure.  But if they had marital issues, they both, to their credit, kept it from me.

I know my dad loved his family.  He loved my son Logan, his stand in representation of the son he never had, with such ferocity and loyalty.  He loved my daughter too, but daughters were tricky for him and I think, for all of her life and most of mine, he was left vague and grasping of what to do with strong-willed, self-possessed women who didn’t need or want his loving guidance and would thumb our noses and a few middle fingers at his perceived familial authority.  

He loved hockey, specifically the Chicago Blackhawks.  Go Hawks!

I know he loved his siblings and spent a lot of time working hard to keep a family of very different individuals as close as one can keep extremely intelligent people who had very different ideas about how one should go about living life.  My dad had a complicated relationship with his parents, his mother dying young and horrifically from a cancer that likely could have been cured had they had the money for preventative care. I know my dad felt a great sadness at his inability to show up for his mom and how much all of them took her presence for granted.  His father, a very smart guy who put up with no BS whatsoever, had his draft number pulled when my grandfather’s hard earned college money was being drunk and pissed away by my dad.  I am pretty sure after his first year he had something like 1.5 grade point average.  My grandfather said something like, “I am working myself to the bone for you to have a good time, you need to grow up!”  And then got his buddy to pull his number.  I wasn’t alive in 1964, but I can only imagine what having your father get your draft number pulled might do to a person…more on this in a few.

He loved his pets even though he fought us about getting every single one of them.  It was almost as if he didn’t want to care, that the loss of them broke him so completely that he always resisted their arrival.  I am sure all of my pet hording over the years was a not so mild rebellion, which now, in retrospect feels cruel.  And I regret that cruelness.

There was a span of years where he would spontaneously yell “HOORAH,” for no reason at all.  We do not know why.

He was an amazing tennis player and took it upon himself to make me a great tennis player and diver and soccer player.  I was a decent tennis player, a pretty good diver and a meh soccer player.  But I am grateful for his lead and resource in all things athletic and outdoorsy.  Without his influence and somewhat forceful hand in my rearing, I would not have the love of fitness which has absolutely enriched my life a million-fold.

My dad gave me the love of the outdoors.  When I was 6 or 7,  he would wake me early on Saturday mornings to go hiking. What I thought would be a lovely walk in the woods was quickly turned into what I later referred to as the Forced Death Marches, as he filled my fifty-pound pack with landscaping and rocks for our yard.  I am sure I didn’t weigh 50 pounds myself and often feigned an injury to avoid the whole endeavor.  But today, they hold a fondness for me that I can’t quite explain...

I was hiking across Santa Cruz Island a few years back and it came to me that without my dad’s influence and direction, I would not have the love I do for camping, and hiking, white water rafting and backpacking.  He gave that to me...at times absolutely when I did not want it.  But I have it now and I am so fucking grateful...

He gave me swear words too.  What I say when frustrated or angry or hurt is exactly what he used to say when he found himself in similar situations.  So, all of my pithy and foul vernacular is mostly due to him, but I definitely came up with a few of those on my own...

A couple of things you might not know about my dad:

When the whole Iran/Contra thing was happening... he was right there in the thick of it.  He testified before Congress and hung out with Regan on occasion.

He got drunk with John Denver on a wayward camping trip to Colorado in the 60s.

He was the best whistler and pigeon noise maker I have ever known.  And he learned the whole pigeon calling while in spy school in Baltimore.  I know weird, right?

He was strange.  There isn’t enough time for me to go into all the ways he was weird but I will tell you one of his great loves was to fashion himself as a self-appointed and largely unwanted aisle policeman in stores.  He would go around and tell people what to do with this air of authority that made complete strangers actually do what he said.  These times were hilarious for my mom and I in retrospect but horrifyingly humiliating in the moment.

He spoke Spanish fluently.

He was a lover of “other people’s junk” another love he passed onto me.  Some of my fondest memories between me and my dad were both of us riding the high of estate sales, garage sales, flea markets and on occasion, we were not above the most shameful dumpster dive.

Funny story:  My mom is not a lover of other people’s junk…this is important to the story.  When they lived in Tallahassee, my dad was a daily regular at the Goodwill.  He would buy and bring home “treasures” and they would be regulated to HIS side of the garage.  And after a while, they would pile up. And my mom would make him clean it and if she couldn’t get him to part with anything, she would do it for him and take all of the crap he bought back to that very same goodwill.  Only to find in a couple of days that he had gone back and bought the very same item again...of course completely without his knowledge. Small fortunes were spent and lost on the Goodwill in Tallahassee.   It wasn’t about what it was or if it fit or if anyone actually wanted it, it was about the DEAL!  He brought home a treasure once and placed it on the kitchen counter and said  “look!”  with such glee.  When my mom asked, “what is it?”  He said brightly, “I have no idea but it was only a quarter!”  The fact that having an item that only cost a quarter that you have no use for and have no idea what it is, isn’t really any kind of deal at all.  But that was completely lost upon him.

My dad had a habit of showing up at places my friends and I frequented and dancing and drinking with us.  If you look closely at the slideshow, you will see a few photos where he is cutting a rug, most likely quite hammered or at least feeling no pain.  It was never creepy or weird, it was fun loving him.  And all my friends adored him.

He was in Vietnam for a whole year.  The first year of my life, he was gone.  He left when I was 6 weeks old and came back when I was about 14 months old.  I will never know how much that time away fractured our relationship, but I know it did.  And I know the dad I had before he left, was not the same one who came back.  I mean how could he have been?.  I may have not known it then, but I absolutely do now.  

He served with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment (Blackhorse Regiment) as an intelligence officer.  And he saw some shit. He never talked about it.  When asked he said, “I swore that if I made it home, I was going to leave what happened in Nam in Nam.”  Except that is impossible.  I know that, and but sadly he did not.  None of us could have known the length and depth of his trauma.  At first, he managed with work, career developments, drinking and smoking like a fiend, exercise.  But eventually that all caught up with him.

He was intermittently hilarious and rageful.  We never knew which version of my dad we would get.  And I have to own that he was not my favorite person for most of my youth.  We fought like cats and dogs; we saw eye to eye on absolutely nothing.  He had this idea of what kind of young lady I was supposed to be and I had completely other ideas about that whole thing.  And I was absolutely marching to my own beat and he did not get that, like at all.  So, we raged and fought and hurt each other for years.  It was awful.  So much love but so much anger and I am not sure we were ever really angry at each other, so much as we just couldn’t figure out how the fuck to relate to each other.  Each of us vied for control, neither of us ever winning.

And it carried on like that for years.  His PTSD symptoms getting worse along with his drinking.  He had night terrors and drank incessantly.  I got sober in 1995 as did my mom.  We waited with bated breath for him to catch a clue.  It took 8 years.  After a particularly awful family Christmas vacation in the Bahamas where he was drunk pretty much the whole time.  His deliverance came on New Year’s Day 2003.  He awoke, hanging hard, to a letter from my mom telling him that she was not going to watch him kill himself.  She made it clear that he could give the whole sobriety thing a try, but if he wasn’t willing to do that, she was not going to sit idly by and watch him drink himself to death.  The threat was implied, but extremely effective.  He could get sober, totally up to him, but if he chose not to, well then, he would be doing that without her assistance...she was firm, loving and unyielding.  Very new traits for my mom at that time.  Her always being the one to yield, to capitulate, to acquiesce.  Her own growth in Alanon saved not only her life, but his as well.  If she had not done her own work for 8 years, we would have had my dad’s celebration of life years ago.

In a moment of grace, he surrendered.  He went to AA that day and remained sober the rest of his life.  He would have had 23 years on January 1 of this year.  

My dad, never idle or still, got into action, got a sponsor and started working the steps.  He always very uncomfortable with anyone who identified as gay, ironically, he selected Carl who was as gay as the day is long to be his sponsor.  My mom and I laughed, behind their backs of course, never knowing whether either of them knew about the ideologies of the other.  They spoke the language of the heart so it really didn’t matter about the whole gay thing.  But like so many things in this life, their relationship worked.  Carl sponsored Dad and Dad grew up and got sober.  My dad took care of Carl as his health failed and stood beside his sponsor as he left this world.   Showing me one more time that the power of recovery is greater than our prejudices and predilections.

My dad’s service in AA was unending.  He did it all.  Sponsoring, speaking, reading, secretarying meetings, he was the best newcomer person I have ever seen.  He was the best guy to work with a newcomer who was still shaking and couldn’t hold a full cup of coffee for weeks.  He was a big book thumper, using that incredible memory to memorize just the right passage of the Big Book to wallop you good with it when you least expected it.  Such a strange twist that all that mental faculty was taken from him, and what an absolutely marvelous job he did at accepting what it was.  AA taught him surrender which was a tool, in the end, that he absolutely needed in order to release this life and all of his will, that he always seemed to have in overabundance.

My dad had a few recovery related idiosyncrasies:

“It is what it is.”  

God, he said that so much that sometimes I wanted to sock him when he said it.

“Relax.  Don’t Struggle.  Take It Easy.”

He said this all the time also.  I think more for himself to remember than for any of us.  He was an intense man and I think this mantra became his mantra because he needed to remember to relax, to not struggle and take it easy.  I know he practiced this every single day of his life in recovery with some days showing remarkable progress and a few days, not so much.

Whenever he had the chip position in AA, he would call himself the chipmunk.  None of us know why…it was funny for sure, but where he got this, I have no idea.  He was always one to turn a phrase for the effect produced.

He horded recovery literature as some of you are aware because my mom and I donated a great deal of it to the Alano Club before he passed.  He used to get Big Books at garage sales and then carry them around in his car, so that every single newcomer he ever came across had a big book, in English or Spanish, always.

He became friends with Dr. Bob’s son and Sandy Beach and he knew our literature backwards and forwards.  He went to like 3 meetings a day for years.  Until his ability to hear and follow the conversation became so compromised that he just stayed home.  No longer wishing to engage with others because it was too hard for him to follow along or remember people’s names.  We were never sure how much was a memory issue or a hearing issue, in the end it didn’t matter, he just didn’t want to go anymore.

He had Louie body dementia for 12 years and he had amazing recoveries and then horrific losses.  And in the end, the dementia won and arrived us at this place where we are all gathered today.

He was a complicated man, possessed of many dichotomies and incongruencies.  But he loved and he cared and he showed up and he never gave up. Not on me, not on my family, not on anything.  I never saw him surrender to anything before AA in his whole life, seriously.

I miss him acutely.  So weird that we grieve many losses with the one giant loss.  We grieve the person we knew, we grieve the person we didn’t.  We grieve the person we wanted them to be, and the person that they were.  Forgiveness, for me, is giving up the wish that things could be different...and that changed everything for us.  I realized many years into recovery that what I was really doing was a subtle violence to both of us when I kept insisting that he show up different, more to my liking.  Once I finally gave it up, let him just be him and stopped fucking our relationship up with grand expectations that he could never live up to, we reached a new depth in our relationship.  We healed.

We healed so much that when he left us on Christmas there was no agony, regret, issue, problem, wish that things would have been different...I mean other than he not be afflicted with dementia and dying of course.  He and I were clean.  

I didn’t know when I got sober that you all would teach me how to be a kind and loving daughter.  I didn’t know that you would show me how to heal and in so doing, our relationship would heal too.  I am pretty sure we never got even marginally close to being the people each of wished the other to be, but we found acceptance and even a great love in that place where forgiveness flourishes and denial slips away.  AA gave me a worthwhile relationship with my dad.  I didn’t know that would happen, but I am so very grateful it did.  We come to get sober, and if we are lucky enough to stick around for the rest of our lives, God tends to right all the things that went wrong.  Not completely, not so that it is all better.  But in a way that the past matters less than what we are doing in the here and now.  And my dad and I had a really good here and now.

With death comes clarity, it is like the loss of someone you love burns away all the things that blind you with ignorance and denial.  The acuity of grief allows for the unseen to become seen and the unfelt brought into full flower.  Our human tendency is to shrink from grief’s inferno of emotion and tend to blunt it as best we can.  But for me, there is another way to welcome grief.  To see that this too, despite it blazing hotness, brings a warming comfort for all that was and all that can never be taken.  Those we love live on forever in our hearts and minds, and for me, those memories burn brighter now, with an aching clarity that makes me somehow feel more alive, more present and more in love with this life, and all its vagaries, than ever before.  And all of you, those here today and those that are attending in spirit, all of you, in all the ways you have stood by, born witness to the life lost and the grief felt, have earned a most special and honorable place in my heart.  I thank you for coming, I thank you for loving, and I thank you for honoring my dad.  My mother and I feel the love and it has carried us through this difficult time.

I hope, in return, I made you feel something today. I hope you cried a few tears; he needed those. I hope you laughed, he loved  that. And I hope most of all you leave here smiling, my dad had the best smile and he offered it to all, no exceptions. Take that with you. I pray you take the memory of his smile with you and that you recall it in times of despair and it brightens your life just a little.  May god bless you and keep you, until then...