The Long Road Here

My dad is about to die.

That statement alone invokes a powerful reaction, no matter who says it. But when your definition of what “father” means is so fractious and elusive, it calls to mind more than what generally meets the eyes. Even the eyes confoundedly staring back at me in the mirror.

Everyone’s relationship with their parents, and really by extension, their personal narrative, is unique. Mine is unique on steroids. I’ve gone most of my life without contact with my biological father. I carry the last name of my mother. Save for a couple intervals between age 15 and 23, I’ve really had no contact with him.

Act One, Before Painful Realization:

Before the initial relationship attempt with my dad, I had an idealized notion of what he could still be. What we could be. I was a fairly observant lad, if rambunctious and deviously defiant. And I observed the hell out of other fathers. I absolutely idolized my mom’s dad, Big Bob Hagan. I had more uncles with kids, my cousins, than anyone. My best friend had a sweet father. I envied all of these relationships.

And it’s what I didn’t have, what I could never get. It’s just that for a while I thought I could. The years would go by, the unasked questions were answered, and the unanswerable questions were asked. Still, despite the void, I felt I could fill that void, and fill it with my “real” father.

I didn’t know my dad but I knew who he was. I knew some of the bad things that afflicted him, and some of the qualities that made people gravitate toward him. I had a few pictures. For several years, I knew where he lived. But I didn’t know him.

I was in a “don’t ask, don’t tell” mode when it came to explaining the situation during my childhood. My closest friends knew. Many classmates kind of knew. New friends either didn’t know, or knew and were courteous enough not to press me. Still, there were many moments when the situation came to the forefront. I dealt with it in various ways, with differing levels of absolute honesty. No matter how I dealt with it, it was accompanied with pain.

I longed for a normal relationship with my dad more than a little girl longs for a pony from Santa Claus in every movie ever made that has an interaction between a little girl and Santa Claus. More fragile than the typecast little girl, my pony never showed up under the tree.

Act Two, Strained Reconciliation

At 15, I started trying to get to “know” my dad. He came to my family’s cottage, and we watched a Notre Dame football game. I had always loved Notre Dame for one reason and one reason only; my grandpa Big Bob liked them and watched them play football every Saturday. He liked them because they stood for the Irish working class or something, but by the time I liked them it was a fairly privileged and prestigious school, and wasn’t exactly leading the charge for the disadvantaged. No matter, we were a Notre Dame duo, me and Grandpa Bob.

Coincidentally and ironically (I think they both work here), my dad went to Notre Dame.

Act Two is filled with attempts to recreate and recapture father-son moments. But from that initial meeting onward, the powerful feeling of resentment grew. “What the fuck were you doing?” “How could you not make an attempt to raise your son?” Those questions are not easily answered, especially when the visualized notion of who your dad was becomes a tangible image of what he was not.

But still, an attempt was made, and I think it was an honest attempt, especially on his part. He gave me a car (a 1989 Nissan Sentra, a legendary car around Lakewood High School in the late ‘90s). We played some golf. We even played a game of catch, the time-honored signature father-son activity.

Here I must digress. I was already pretty good at catch. Which means I had, subconsciously or not, filled a few of the voids on my own. My uncle Jim would play catch with me for hours on end. My aunt Monica’s ex-husband Dennis worked on my throwing motion. My mom’s boyfriend Norm took me to the Dawg Pound from the age of nine, and we were a world-renowned heckling duo during sparsely attended Indians games at the old stadium, and I watched every American league middle infielder intently, including the incomparable Omar Vizquel, first with the Mariners.

So when I first played catch with my dad, the resentment built. “This was your job, motherfucker, and you suck at it.” Blooming with youth, and brimming with piss and vinegar, I seized this as an early symbolic opportunity. I quickly realized he wasn’t awesome at catch. Although my most dominant pitching days were in fifth grade (struck out four batters in an inning, think about it), I had a decent arm. “I’m going to give you the hardest fastballs I have.” And so I did. He struggled to gather the first one. But I saw the competitor in him, the exact fucking same competitor I have in me, emerge. His easy smile turned to a concerned growl. He threw the ball back as hard as he could.

I caught it in my bare hand.

Now it’s my turn again, and I wish I had a radar gun on this one, because I’m rather certain it’s the hardest ball I’ve ever thrown (for the record, the highest I ever recorded was a somewhat pedestrian 75 mph at an Indians game with my cousin Timmy in tow. Who knows how accurate those guns are? That reading was probably high). He wasn’t coordinated enough to catch it cleanly in his glove hand. It bounded off his wrist and made a loud noise. He cringed hard, and quickly tried to act like it didn’t hurt at all. Game over.

That’s the last time we played catch.

Act Three, Here Comes the Nation

I made it through college, admittedly only because I had just enough inherent academic talent to overcome a lack of direction and inspiration. I also drank a lot in college, and may have enjoyed smoking a few doobers on back porches. I guess that experience is not so different than that of many other college students. But I would occasionally write the passionate paper, and ace the test when I needed a 96 for a C+ for the term. I scooted through in four years, and harvested up a bushel of great friends.

I also started giving up on the idea that my father was my dad.

Right after college I worked for my uncle Tim for a year, another of the men on my Mount Rushmore of father figure icons. We bullshitted our way through every county of the state of Ohio during his run for governor. We were comforting doses of keeping it real for each other. He knew his personal assistant slash driver should be a little more professional, and I knew I should be doing more than trying to find him a good Krispy Kreme. But he also knew he wasn’t going to win, and I wasn’t gonna give him any shit, nor feed him any packaged spin that his dutiful professional handlers had to. I was gonna hang out with him and drive 87 mph to our next stop. It was a good experience for me, albeit one I “should” have taken more from. I took plenty though, it was a year on the road with the Bull.

This brought me back to the early formative years, Act One, and all the male influences that influenced me in a real way and not just in fantasy. Tim and Jim, my mom’s oldest brothers, I already mentioned. My uncle Billy was in Connecticutt, but he was cool, and had his own sense of how to navigate a life. Bobby was a hard ass, a tough guy with passion and street smarts. Jack was a reporter and a writer, funny and often deadpan, contemplative but often seeming outwardly emotionless. Chris was a jack of all trades, and liked to have fun. He taught me how to sail. Jeff was the youngest of my mom’s brothers, a hipster and an intellectual, and an occasionally roommate in his post-college years. He was the older brother that I picked on, not vice versa, and his commitment to not being a bad person precluded him from putting my snot-nosed ass in my place.

Yeah, my mom had seven brothers and six sisters, so this list is long. Jimmy, Katie’s wife, was a tall hulk of an athletic man, burdened by his own intellectual prowess. Jeff, Maggie’s ex, was the gruffest of the gruff, but would take all the kids to play putt-putt and played a mean game of pepper. Anne’s husband TJ was a farmer and a free-thinking, and hired me to work at his moving company when I was a teenager. Almost 15 years later, I’m still there, and he’s entrusted me with a big chunk of the operation. I even developed a kinship with my Aunt Mary’s temporary husband Ebe, an Iranian man with an early knowledge of computer games. I once borrowed a Farsi-English dictionary from the library in order to connect more with this mysterious and friendly looking Persian.

My friend Zak’s dad always welcomed me in their home, and treated me with the kindness and the gentle firmness of a graceful man who knew I was growing up without a dad. Many other friends had cool dads too, and I’m pretty sure most liked me well enough.

So here I was, starting life on my own. Rent, bills, going to work, playing ball, trying to make out with chicks. I learned all of these lessons and more, some more successfully than others, without emulating my dad for any of them. I didn’t want to have him anymore. I had me, god-damnit, and a mother that struggled and did a damn fine job. And I had a composite image of a father, a mosaic of personalities and perspectives. It’s just that none were mine.

Act Four, Current Situation

I found out a few months back. My dad was terminally ill. The forgiveness of my mother and her brothers has it that they had forgiven him much more than I, and they’d been in a lot more contact with him than I had. I got the call at work from my uncle Chris, his best friend of the brood. I took the news in stride, rationally, with concern, and with humor. I took it like a god-damn man. I told my cousin John, a confidante and business partner, and then walked into the break room and sat down. He walked in a couple minutes later. He knows me just about better than anyone, and can read my soul without saying a word. I looked at him. I started crying.

And that was it. Back to work. Kick some ass. Comment on a picture on Facebook. Play a little ping pong.

And I’ll be gosh darned, I was fine. I was really feeling fine. I really didn’t talk to many people about it. I decided to open up about it to a newer friend on a weekend fun trip a couple months ago. I thought, why not? I’ve got nothing to hide, and I’ve long been done covering up for who I am. I’m ok, if a little eccentric, as I am. It felt good. The reception I was given was compassionate and non-judgmental. The reaction was more of intrigue than anything. Hell, I have a story to tell. Nothing wrong with a little catharsis. But the words of a friend at the end told me what I had to do.

“Matt, you should go see him.”

Maybe I knew it myself, but the words of another person, someone removed from the situation but one that was listening to my story, gave me a new perspective. I really should go see him.

And now it’s reached that point. I talked to another friend on the phone tonight, this one from college, who had been delivered my story in a piecemeal fashion over the years. I talked to my uncle Chris again for a while.

“Do what you gotta do Tiger,” he encouraged.

There’s no script for this. But I think I’m going to be good.

I’m going to drive down and see him this Saturday. I don’t think he will have anything profound to say, because I don’t think he can speak above a whisper. I know I won’t have anything dripping with gravitas coming from my mouth. But he’ll feel better seeing me, I know. And I’ll feel better seeing him. Hey man, no hard feelings, you've made me who I am.

And I ain’t going nowhere.