Yesterday

Looked Just Like You

Call your dad and tell him you love him, bros.

Right now.

This is not a request.

Do it, and thank me later. Or never. Whatever, I don’t care. What I care about is you calling your dad and telling him you love him.

Right now.

So this post is gonna be a bit (he said, unironically) of a traumadump, and maybe I need to get this out of my head (which is what this thing is for), or maybe I just want to impress upon all the people who still can do this thing the importance of it because I can’t anymore. Fair warning, it gets rough, and there isn’t a happy ending. Unless you count you being able to do this thing I can’t anymore a happy ending, which I do. So while there may not be a happy ending to my story (yet), there can be a happier end to yours.

Before we begin I’d like to make it clear I understand that some people may not have the best relationship with their fathers. Some dads are abusive, some are neglectful, some are absent completely. I understand that, and I may still be talking to you even so. You never know. Let’s see how it shakes out, shall we?

So strap in, grab a drink, and walk a dark path with me. If you want.

I grew up fairly normal for a kid born in the late 80’s. Dad, mom, brothers, house in suburbia, dogs, the whole nine. I grew up Baptist, so I had a strong grounding in Christianity. I became a teenager, with all the incumbent troubles. One I didn’t expect, however, was the reality of deadly disease.

One day mom was diagnosed with cancer. It was rough, watching her die by degrees every day. Eventually she passed, and I can only hope that the Good Lord had mercy on her and admitted her to his heavenly kingdom. But this basically shattered my family, and I’d like to say it was me and little bro against the world, but I was far too wrapped up in myself to care about most anyone else, as teenagers tend to be, in my experience. God bless little bro for taking care of this broken soul in our later years.

I still cared, but I was very self-absorbed, and didn’t notice the troubles he or our older brother (who had had far more time with her than we ever would) were going through. I also didn’t notice what dad was going through. He had lost the love of his life, the woman he’d borne children with, spent decades with, and it absolutely destroyed him. It took him a long time to come out of it.

Unbeknownst to me (of course), but reported by various family members, he took to the drink. He threw himself into work, and a lot of it was out of state. We’d gone with him several summers to earn some pocket change and get some real world work experience, which I believe benefited us greatly, so we knew what he was out there doing. But nobody really knew what was going on inside his head. And nobody ever will, until everything is revealed at the Final Judgment. I pray he is shown clemency.

So dad was largely out of the picture for many years. I never hated him, or resented him, or had any ill will towards him. He was off doing his thing, and I was doing mine. Mine was horrendously destructive, but that’s a post for another day. I don’t know how destructive his was, but I can imagine.

Eventually, dad remarried and seemed all right. He seemed happy, but there were cracks I notice as I look back. It wasn’t all his fault, or anyone’s fault, really. The woman he married had health issues, serious ones, and I can understand a lonely man who’d lost his love reaching out for some kind of human contact to reestablish some kind of normalcy in his life.

Eventually we “reconnected,” despite him coming down almost every weekend and checking in, and me being astoundingly retarded during those interactions. God bless his soul for loving me through that. We gradually got to a place of friendship and respect when I was in college, and he was proud of me for furthering my education, and we watched a lot of movies together. Die Hard is now a family Christmas tradition due to this, and I even showed him the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo, which he enjoyed but had “seen” before.

A brief aside, if you’ll allow me the indulgence, on that incident. I watch this great movie Yojimbo. Dad’ll love it, I figure, so I set him down next time he shows up and prop up my laptop and we start watching it. Great movie, we’re having a blast.

Then things get weird.

This is a 60’s Japanese samurai movie. I know for a fact he’s never seen it in his whole entire life. And suddenly he starts calling plot points. And continues to do so beat for beat. It’s uncanny. It’s creepy. I start thinking my dad is psychic or something. I ask him how he knows all this, and he states that this is the plot of Fistful of Dollars, the Clint Eastwood Western. Which it was.

Fistful is a great movie, but it turns out the plot was stolen whole cloth from Yojimbo, and dad knew cuz he’d seen it. There was even a legal dispute about it. So dad’s not psychic, but he knows some stuff and has seen some stuff and this is a major memory for me about my dad. Thanks for the indulgence.

Things progress and lots of family members kick the bucket and eventually my little bro moves out with his betrothed. I move in with them and help out around the house. I am underselling my brother’s clemency and love for me. Dad comes by every once in a while and we have a fun night getting drunk with each other and watching dumb movies and telling stories.

Eventually it comes to a head. I have to move out. Well, God’s Providence knows no bounds, and my best friend is stating he’s going to move out and needs a roommate. I jump at it like a shot, sleep on the floor for a while, and get a job at a fast food chain.

Dad bought a mattress for me. God love him, please.

I am horrendously bad at keeping in contact with people. I’m trying to get better, but mostly I seem to think if they’re not getting in contact with me then there must not be anything wrong, and I don’t want to bother them, so I don’t bother. Because I’m a selfish, reclusive asshole.

For those like me, with this mentality, this is THE WRONG MENTALITY TO TAKE IN THIS REGARD. Call them. They’ll be glad you did. It’ll be good for you and them. You are not bothering them, you are brightening their day by showing them you love them and want to remain in contact. This is a hard lesson, but one we must learn.

So I’m in a new city outskirts and have a new job and lost A LOT of weight and every once in a while someone’ll get in touch. Sometimes that person is dad. Well, dad must’ve had the same mentality I did at the time, because we hadn’t talked for roughly six months. An entire half a year without even speaking to my father, who I had a very good relationship with at that point and loved very much.

Then one night I get a call.

Now, I’m an alcoholic, so I was sleeping it off on the mattress dad had bought me, resting for my shift flipping burgers. I’d barely been asleep for a couple hours before Older Bro calls me. I answer, thinking he’s just choosing an inopportune moment to have a chat. He wasn’t.

Dad was dead.

I couldn’t believe it, but deep down I knew it was true. I had to be up for a 5am shift the next morning. I was learning the maintenance guy’s routine so I could cover for him while he was on vacation. Or I had already learned it and was doing that, the details are fuzzy on that point. I think I said, “Please tell me I’m dreaming, this is just a bad dream.”

OBro proceeded to tell me that, no, this wasn’t a bad dream. Dad was dead. He’d had a heart attack after choking on some food at dinner, and had died before the ambulance could arrive.

DOA.

That’s it.

Dad’s gone.

If I remember rightly, I thanked him for telling me, and he told me the memorial service would be a date and time I couldn’t attend, so I didn’t even get that cold comfort. I would just have to sit here, in this new city, with one friend, and the knowledge that I would never speak to my father again.

I hadn’t talked to him in six whole, entire months.

By choice.

I regret every single second of that time.

I spent the next week at work like a zombie. Just mechanically doing my duties until someone finally asked me what was wrong, because it was obvious something was wrong. I told them my dad had died. They were shocked, said I should’ve taken time off, but the maintenance guy was gone and nobody knew how to do his job but him and me. They needed me there.

So, like an idiot, I kept working, in spite of the pain.

And it was painful. Some of the worst pain I have ever experienced in my almost 40 years on this planet. I was processing a lot. I’ll never get to call him again. I’ll never get to watch Die Hard on Christmas with him again (a fairly recent “family tradition,'“ it must be said). I’ll never get to listen to Cream’s live reunion album with him again. I’ll never get to expose him to weird music that I think he’d like again. And on and on the list goes.

Eventually I regained the ability to act like a normal human person. It wasn’t easy. There were a lot of tears, pain, and bad thoughts. But it’s been several years on and I’ve mostly dealt with it. But one thing I can’t deal with, and continues to absolutely ruin me of an evening, is the fact that I can never call him up again.

As I’d neglected to do in my hubris and folly, to my and (I’m sure) his detriment.

So the ultimate message of this post is, “Don’t Be Like Me.”

Call your dad and tell him you love him. And if your dad was absent, consider trying to find him. I’ve seen several stories of that working out astronomically well. And if your dad was abusive, I’m very sorry about that. He still sacrificed a lot for you and likely had a lot going on inside his own head. Try to be understanding. Try to give him the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming he’s evil.

I mean unless he did something like touch you inappropriately, in which case he should get the noose.

But that aside, try to get in contact with your dad, bros. Ideally you have a good relationship with him, you just don’t check in enough.

Check in now.

Right now.

This is, again, not a request.

I’m going to do violence to myself in aid of this post. There is a song that beautifully encapsulates this whole nonsense I’m spewing. It is by a group called Atmosphere, and the song is called “Yesterday.”

It is a rap song, and I know some people might have a prejudice, deserved or not, against that. Just, please, for me, listen to this one song. This one rap song. Not only is this an amazing display of lyricism and poetry, with an absolutely infectious backing track, the lyrics are incredibly heartfelt, poignant, and germane to the topic at hand.

I cannot listen to this song.

It brings me to tears every single time I hear it, and I am not ashamed to admit that. I cry over this song. I showed it to my older brother recently and had to step outside while it was playing and get a smoke because I cannot handle it. It’s so beautiful and tragic and hits me exactly in the weak spot.

So I’ll turn it over to Atmosphere, with a final exhortation to…

Please…

Bros…

Call your dad, and tell him you love him.

I can’t, and I wish so fervently that I could.

I would love to talk to him one last time, and find out if he’s proud of me or heard a good joke or anything he wants to talk about.

Do what I can’t, and call your dad and tell him you love him, that you’re grateful for all the sacrifices he made, that you appreciate him raising you and that you love him very much.

Don’t be like me, bros, and let that last opportunity slip through your fingers.

Don’t wait until it’s too late.

Atmosphere

Yesterday