I remember 9-11. Strolling into work where someone was pulling out CRT televisions with a news station on with the twin towers ablaze and smoking.
But I remember 9/11/2010 for a much different reason. Fifteen years ago today, I got the voicemail from the nursing home in Boulder, Colorado that my father was living in. I had just returned from an Alamo Drafthouse special production of Firefly with a live QA from Ron Glass (yes, that Ron Glass). I grew up on Barney Miller and loved that he was a part of the Firefly universe and that we got to meet him. There was a lot of laughter that night.
Then the voicemail came – because of course I turned off my phone during the show and wasn’t yet addicted to the inter webs like I would later be. So arriving home, I found the voicemail letting me know I should call. And the word was that my dad had passed.
Growing up, my dad never directly caused me any pain. But, he was raised by his grandparents and he thought they were his parents and considered his birth mom his sister. Until when he was 18 and she asked him to be the best man at her wedding, because she was her mother. That broke him. Not in a way he was conscious of, but it drastically changed the way he could be intimate with women.
One short failed marriage brought be my half-brother. The longer marriage with my mother brought me and my sister. The later marriage after their divorce brought step-siblings I only met a few times. But the commonality was that strong women would bring out a rage that had been fermenting since his birth mother broke the news to him.
I recall being in a family therapy session toward the end of my parents marriage and I let the therapist know that my dad’s eyes would change – like the incredible hulk’s – when he’d go into a rage. But the rage was always directed toward women. My mom and my sister. Later, to his 3rd wife’s daughter.
I didn’t realize any of this until after his death. Some of it came in the float tank. Some just through working through my own trauma which originated in part because of his birth mother. Oddly, one thought that came in the float tank, was the thought that my dad may have been gay – or at least bisexual. He seemed to grotesquely appreciate women’s bodies, in only the way a man raised in the 1940’s and 1950’s could do.
I recalled one night, after my parent’s divorce, that I spent in his apartment. At the time, he had a male roommate from his pentecostal church. While I didn’t really understand homosexuality in high school, I’m pretty sure that roommate was gay. I only mention this, because of the strange theater that my dad presented to try to imply that his roommate usually slept on the sofa bed and he was having to find a place for him to sleep as I was taking the sofa bed.
Part of this realization happened in the float tank and part happened during a ketamine therapy procedure I did to try and wring out the last remnants of my trauma before I started school.
Almost simultaneously, I had the realization of how much he had loved me. And how much I had loved him. I was lucky to have a supportive father. I wish my sister could have experienced more of that. He was a regular laugher. I recall my last in person conversation with him, and he would laugh into his pain. He was a key driver in installing a commitment to service. I used to help him with his church moving ministry. But also his service in the Navy and my half-brother’s service in the Coast Guard in part guided me to join the Navy Reserves.
And, as I enter my last semester of pre-requisites for nursing school, I know that he was a formative factor in driving me to this course.
I love you dad. You helped me more than you could ever know. I wish you could have helped the women in your life as much as you helped me. But you’ve taught me so many lessons. Many in the negative. But many in the way you lived your life.
Thank you.
Laughter: the Accidental Therapist 