This is the most embarrassing thing I have ever said, until recently: I once told my dad that I’d piss on his grave when he died, and I’d like it. I was a teenager, doing teenage things. He was a dad, trying to keep me safe.
Thirty years later, I was there in the hospital for his final days, with my two brothers and my stepmother. I held his hand, and I will never know if he could hear me say I loved him. I’d said it plenty by then. We all had. But never with such finality. He died on April 28, 2019, all of us older and closer then, none of us able to keep him safe, from pancreatic cancer.
Think of how often you tell someone you love them in a lifetime. Think about when you knew it was the last time.
I wonder now how my dad would’ve survived this pandemic, if he were sick during it. I wonder how we would’ve said goodbye over video because we couldn’t be in the same room or even hold hands. I wonder how painful those final moments would have been, how painful they actually have been, for so many families, so many sick people.
I still hear my dad’s voice sometimes. The way it broke when discussing a movie like “Schindler’s List.” The way it lifted when he talked to or about his two granddaughters.
I yelled a lot when I was a kid. Did my dad ever swear at me? I don’t think he did. He once took my bedroom door off its hinges because I slammed it. Is that the same thing? I think of that when my daughters slam their doors.
Which brings me to the most embarrassing things I have ever said now: the times, too many to count, when I lost patience with my teenage daughters doing teenage things in this pandemic and swore at them. It’s as impossible to take some words back as it is to take away the pain of a fatal cancer or a once-in-a-century pandemic.
Now, I wonder if it’s a miracle I didn’t swear more at my daughters, all of us cooped up inside for 15 months — my wife, a fellow journalist, juggling the work-from-home life as well — my three computer screens in the bedroom, workweeks that eclipsed 80 hours plus my volunteer work representing 6,000 journalists as national president of the Society of Professional Journalists, self-medication with too much coffee and beer every day, playing my PS5 too late at night and often well into the morning. This is not an excuse. But this is my reality. This is my apology.
I tell my daughters I’m sorry. I tell my daughters I love them.
I hope they know.
I know they know.
They know.
Words can be full of such piss and vinegar. Words can carry such weight. Words live, and evolve, as people do.
If you can, today, tell your father you love him.
Mine knows.
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June 19, 2021 at 04:24AM
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Opinion: I will never know if he could hear me say I loved him at the end - The San Diego Union-Tribune
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