On my Dad: The Hermit.

Well, my AC was just fixed. Now that I can think a little clearer… it’s time to finish what I started.

In the last blog, I told you about my father’s last days on this Earth. Now, I’d like to back up a bit to the man I remember best. We all go through different phases in life and there are many different versions of my dad to talk about. I’m hoping to do a third post at some point to talk more about who he was when he was more involved in the church and when I was much younger. But those memories are unfortunately the fuzziest. Life doesn’t always unfold the way you expect it to. I don’t think there’s really any such thing as an “easy” life, to be honest. We all have different trials and hurdles to go through.

My parents had me in their early 30s and were often older than my friend’s parents. By the time I reached high school, my dad’s body was already breaking down. He’d had a slipped disc in his back from some old sports thing I think (football, probably) that had actually begun to erode and by the end of my life it was less of a “slipped” disc and more of a disc that ceased to exist. He had similar issues with his knee and a few other joints. He was in a lot of pain a lot of the time—and he was a big man. Honestly, I don’t think I even fully understand all of the issues my dad had, I was going through a very teenager-y time and was honestly just bummed that he couldn’t go out and do things with me like he used to. My mom was always busy, I was an only child (and a very shy one), and I didn’t have a lot of friends. For the first half of my life my dad was my best friend.

There was even a brief period of time when I was a toddler that he was a stay-at-home dad because he was unable to find a job in Indiana (we didn’t live there for long for exactly that reason). And the craziest part is that sometimes my dad worked up to like 3 jobs at a time. Somehow, he always made time for me. That was something it never felt like I could say about my mother (despite her only having the one poorly-paying job), so when my dad stopped being able to keep up, it took a pretty big toll on me. Suddenly, the man who was always there for me no matter what any time of day couldn’t take me to the church gym to play basketball and help me practice for a team I didn’t have the nerve to try out for anymore. He didn’t even attend my high school graduation because he had been in so much pain and the seating would’ve made him miserable. He couldn’t drive because he was heavily medicated.

It wasn’t immediate, by any means. It was a slow shift. This all started during the time he was working at least 2 (if not 3) jobs. He had his normal 9-5 substance abuse counselor gig, and then after that, multiple days a week, he would drive over an hour to do outreach at a local jail or something to that effect. I could be getting the specifics mixed up, it’s been so long, but that was definitely something he did at one point. Either way, it was more therapy and a decent-sized time commitment where he was driving back and forth for long periods. He spent a lot of time sitting, and when they found a blood clot in his lung and attributed it to all the driving he was doing, he finally quit that job. That was the beginning of this particular phase of his life as I see it.

From then on, it seemed like he got worse as the days went by. His back hurt more, he was constantly on blood thinners for fear of getting another blood clot. It got to the point where he said he couldn’t even handle the drive to work or even sitting in his chair at work to talk to clients. Now, keep in mind, that my dad was always the bread-winner. He may have even made twice as much as my mom at some points. Don’t get me wrong, she has an important job, they just don’t treat it like it is. I remember that when my dad finally stopped working she was making around $12/hr. Minimum wage was somewhere around $7.25. And she’d been in her position for over 10 years already. They treated her like garbage and I think that’s what made her absence sting the most.

He stopped going in to work as much, started going to the doctor more, started having to dip into his FMLA time off, until finally he ran out and was terminated. He spent my entire high school career trying (and failing) to get disability from the government (he finally got it when I went to college). And all 3 of us were living off of $12/hr. We couldn’t even pay our rent, but our landlords were nice enough to work with us. For a year we were on a very small level of food stamps, only for the government to turn around and tell my mother she had like a month or less to pay everything they’d given her that year back. It’s complete madness to me how republicans (which we were, by the way) act like it’s so goddamn easy to get on these programs and that there are just so many people taking advantage when we did absolutely everything “the right way” and still were fucked over at every single fucking turn. I remember bursting into tears one day when a classmate was regurgitating some bullshit his parents had said about how it should be harder for people to get help. You better believe I gave that fucking bitch a piece of my mind. It should come as no surprise that I wasn’t registered republican for very long.

My teenage years were hard. Teenagers should be worrying about stupid shit like crushes and what to wear to school, not if they were going to have food to eat when they got home or if they were going to get kicked out of the house because their family couldn’t pay rent. I didn’t get a “normal” teenage experience. I remember watching all my friends go to prom and get senior pictures and have sweet 16 parties and all these “normal” teenage things I was always left out of. Everyone else drove themselves to school, but I didn’t even have a car that I could learn to drive on. I had no independence, no money, and I took all of that out on myself. Why would anyone even want to hang out with me? So I barely tried to hang out with anyone because I knew even if they wanted to I wouldn’t have a ride and honestly I figured I’d just have an anxiety attack and be no fun to be around anyway.

I know my dad felt bad for “robbing” me of my teenage experience. Everything in our lives seemed to revolve around his pain and the fight for disability. But, I think he tried to focus on the one positive thing from all of this… he was always home. He had an infinite amount of time to spend with me, because what did he do all day other than sit in the only chair that didn’t cause him excess pain? So, I came home from school every day and hung out with my dad, a lot like I had before. But, before, I’d spend a few hours at home alone waiting for my dad to come home, eventually followed by my mother who always seemed to be working.

We’d talk about music, or listen to music, or even he’d give me music lessons, or we’d watch a movie or binge a TV Show together. (One of our favorites was this early 2000s show called Dark Angel that we had on DVD). A couple of times he helped me write some of my own songs, sometimes I’d help him come up with lyrics. We’d also talk about psychology because I’d always been fascinated by the way brains work—I still am. He’d tell me stories from his years of being a therapist or of his past and even the addictions he overcame decades before. And we’d also have discussions about Christianity, even branching out into the territory of a debate.

One of my favorite things about my father is that despite being a 3rd generation pastor, he didn’t think he knew everything. He had some very strongly held beliefs, but he adapted them over time. He took real criticism and didn’t try to tell me how to think. If I made a good point, he’d acknowledge it and sometimes he’d even sit on something for a while and then come back to you with a “I’ve been thinking about what you said the other day and these are my thoughts…” Obviously, he wanted me to be a Christian, but he didn’t use my questions to berate me for my low faith, he actually tried to help me understand and come to my own conclusions. And I think there were things I even changed his mind on a few times.

I’d say probably at least 50% (if not more) of the movies I’ve watched in my lifetime I watched with my dad first. I get most of my favorite movies from my dad, even. Perhaps, our favorite thing to do was watch musicals together. Rogers and Hammerstein, Gershwin, Stephen Sondheim—if it was a musical and we could find a copy, we watched it. In Middle School, they were talking about doing a production of Into the Woods—a musical I’d not seen—and my dad got so excited he tracked down the original cast recording and made me watch it, knowing I’d love it and want to participate. It’s still my favorite musical to this day.

My dad was an avid journaller—something I’ve recently picked up myself. He had shelves and shelves full of filled journals over the years. Unfortunately, I’ve not found most of them. We’re hoping they’re off in my mom’s storage unit somewhere, but I worry they may be gone for good. I have a few from this time period of my dad’s life. I knew my dad was going through a lot, but I was still too young to understand most of what he was dealing with. I’ve not read all of the journals I have, either. I think that will likely take me a very long time, seeing as they have been such a difficult read, but let me summarize what I have learned from his POV.

Despite him keeping up a positive face most times for me, he was filled with turmoil. Here, he’d spent most of his life helping people past their addictions and now he was in so much pain that he was likely dependent on his pain killers. I think that took a toll on him mentally. But also, all my life he had been the breadwinner and, now, he felt useless. He felt worse than useless, he felt like a burden… another mouth to feed, and what was he bringing to the table? He came up with multiple ideas to try to earn money from home—he even kept his counseling license for a while and tried to do virtual therapy, but that was still in it’s very early stages at the time. And eventually, I think he realized that he wasn’t really in a good enough mental state to provide therapy anymore. His self-esteem plummeted. Most of the things he tried never really panned out, and I think a big part of that is because he never felt very confident or supported in his endeavors, so he gave up quickly.

You might have noticed, but my parents didn’t have a very close relationship. It always felt to me like they were playing their roles rather than actually in love. It’s possible they were once and I just don’t remember it. But I think they really stayed together because they believed it was a sin not to and for me. My mom actually told me she wanted to leave but “couldn’t afford to” when I was an adult and things were still bad (they never got better). It seems like a miserable way to live. I don’t think my dad had felt loved by my mom in a very long time based on his journals. And I know she rarely supported his ideas because I remember it. I’ve since had a taste of how de-motivating it can be to feel like your partner—the one person you want most to believe in you—just doesn’t.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think every idea is worth supporting—mine, his, or anyone’s—we all have duds. But I think we all deserve to have someone in our corner. The more I read his journals, the more I wonder if he felt that I was the only one he had in his corner almost all of the time during this time period. That’s no way to live. I was a child, and he needed adults around to help hype him up and rally around him to support him at least sometimes. We all do. Only narcissists are able to believe in themselves when no one else does.

And then, there’s the “God” of it all. In some of his entries he sounds so confident and secure in his Christianity, and in others he felt like he had been forsaken. He’d done everything He asked and his life was still in shambles. Many (maybe all) of the churches he had worked at in the past had treated him like complete dirt. The last one, where he was the Music Minister, constantly asked for more from him but refused to hire him full time. They placed all of the blame on him for every little problem, even though most of the problems seemed to come down to the deacons not giving him what he’d asked, or the choir and unpaid volunteers not giving their all—they’re unpaid! What can he really do about that? He can’t force people to show up when he has no leverage. Perhaps he was meant to guilt them, but that wasn’t my dad. He finally left, and they hired a new music minister full time… He filled in as a substitute pastor after that, but never worked for a church again. It hurt him deeply that the next person was given the thing he was always asking for. He felt like they just wanted him gone. I don’t even think that was his worst experience.

The truth is, I think it was my dad’s open-mindedness that the church didn’t care for. He wasn’t about the doom and gloom. He didn’t push his own narratives, nor did he push the narratives of those around him… he actually preached what he read in the bible. Crazy, right? He believed the Old Testament should be considered more for reference and that Jesus had changed a lot of things. My dad told me multiple times he believed women can—and should—preach. A sentiment a lot of Christians (especially Southern Baptists) would balk at. He didn’t hate anyone or treat anyone differently because of their race or sexuality. And he didn’t think everyone was required to live their life the same way he did. Today’s Christians could’ve learned a lot from my dad.

No matter what I needed, any time of day, my dad was always there for me—and anyone else who would call him. At his funeral, an old friend of ours got up and told probably one of my favorite stories about my dad. When he was serving as the Music Minister at that last church, there was this guy named Brandon who was in his 20s or early 30s at most & always wanted to help out where he could. He eventually offered to work the sound booth for my dad—he did a great job, and I spent a lot of my childhood “helping” (and possibly annoying) him in the sound booth. One day, my dad found out that his brother played guitar. Well, he’d been watching Brandon, and had noticed he had more of an ear for music than he gave himself credit for.

So, one day, he brought a guitar he had laying around the house (he always had so many instruments) and gave it to Brandon and asked him to tune it for him. Brandon didn’t know how to do that, but he took it home, figured it out, and brought it back to church, where my dad told him “great, now you have a guitar, play it” (something to that effect) and basically tricked him into learning the damn guitar. Brandon had no fucking clue at the time that my dad was fully capable of tuning (AND playing) the guitar at that point. My dad could play almost any instrument you handed him at least a little. While his Masters was in Counseling, his Bachelors was in Music Education—as he liked to say he “squeezed 4 years of college into 9.” It was part of the curriculum that he know how to play any instruments someone might play in band, and he was always learning more, just for fun.

Brandon started getting really good with the guitar and Dad “made” him start playing during church services and supported him when he wanted to invest in a nicer guitar. At the funeral, I found out Brandon leads the music there now (the guy they hired after my dad is long gone) and credits my dad for believing in him and seeing what no one else saw. He was a musician without an instrument—so he gave him an instrument. I remember he didn’t think he could even sing. Brandon and his wife led a song at my dad’s funeral after telling us this story… I balled. I’m crying just thinking about it. My dad did this silly little thing for someone one time and it changed the entire course of this man’s life. That’s the man my dad was.

He was always doing something, always learning, always studying. I think in another life my dad would’ve made a great monk. He loved preserving history and retelling stories. He loved thinking about things from a different angle, he loved a debate. He could learn how to do anything if you gave him a book on it. He was great with technology, and loved to recount the time he told a college friend that “personal computers would never take off.” Years later, my dad had one of the first laptops ever made. He definitely ate those words. After he quit working, he started studying Spanish again and he got really good with it. Better than I ever did with my 3 years of classes.

But something I’ve realized that was horribly lacking those last 15+ years of his life was community. He was in so much pain and felt so down on himself that he had trouble reaching out to other people for help—or even just a conversation. He stopped even going to church. My old pastor led the service at his funeral and told us all how my dad had been such a treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom and support for him all of those years and that he regretted not calling on him more. That’s something we have in common.

The house was always a mess because he spent so much time at home and was in so much pain that he would just leave everything in piles around his chair. He certainly had flaws, one of them being that he didn’t help around the house much at all, especially in those last years. It was a definite problem and drove my mother (and me) insane. But I think that kept him from feeling comfortable inviting people over. So, he sat there alone. It doesn’t even sound like my mom interacted with him very much at the end.

The more I reflect on my dad, the more I see myself in him—the more I realize how similar we are. I, too, love to study and love helping people and talking through things with people. I love a debate. I love my alone time. But, what I’ve learned from my dad’s journals is that there is such a thing as too much alone time. I need people too. And not just my partner, I need community. I need to get out and experience things and meet new people and find opportunities to share my knowledge, because they’re rarely knocking down my door, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And if I don’t, I think I will slowly deteriorate much like my dad did.

After he passed, I went on this journey through time trying to figure out exactly where it felt like I lost him. The Dad that raised me. For a long time, I thought he’d disappeared when I went to college and he had his first stroke—and I do think that was a major factor. But, now, after reading his journals and reflecting on memories I’d locked away because they caused me too much pain… I think it started before that. I think it was a combination of the depression and lack of human interaction that started the process. And then, after the stroke, he was slower and with a shorter fuse. It snowballed after that.

I had to move back home for a couple of years during college, after his stroke, and it didn’t go well. I had so much to do—I had 2 part time jobs and was attending college full time and had to drive a hour to get to any of these places, and I had a shitty boyfriend I thought I needed to see. I didn’t want to spend much time at home and I wasn’t thinking about how lonely my dad was because I was so focused on myself. It’s hard not to give myself shit about that now, but I’m trying. One of the only vivid memories I have from that period of time was when we got into this big fight. My parents were upset that I was leaving the house so late to see my boyfriend and I basically told them I was in my 20s and they could get over it and it became a whole thing about how I’m never around. It got pretty heated and toward the end, my dad told me I was an “awful daughter.”

The dad I knew never would’ve said that to me. Especially just for living my early adult life. I cannot stress to you enough how much of the time I was working. I was livid. I’d spent so much of my life in this house, why couldn’t I ever just go out and have fun? I never did it as a teenager, so I felt like I was making up for old time and that they were just strangling me. He apologized almost immediately but the harm was done. I stormed out and found a way to move out of the house just a couple of months later. I think the truth is, that he’d been stuck inside that house for so long he forgot what it was like to have a life and responsibilities. He was just lonely and didn’t want to be alone anymore.

Everyone always tells me that I’m “so patient,” which always amuses me, because I, of course, feel like I have no patience at all. But if they’re right, then I got it from my dad. If I could only describe him with one word, that would be the one I’d choose. Patient. But after the stroke, he lost his patience entirely. It was such a drastic change that I didn’t even know what to do with him anymore. I’d say something and he’d take it the complete wrong way and fly off the handle and I just didn’t know how to talk to him. He wasn’t the same. I couldn’t have these deep meaningful conversations with him anymore. It felt like he was always yelling at me.

And then, in his loneliness, he turned to Fox News. It was always on. I think he may have eventually also struggled to read and research as much has he used to, because the Dad I knew never would’ve fallen for the bullshit he was falling for. He used to write research papers for fuck’s sake. He couldn’t vet Fox News just a little? I definitely think he had too much faith in “the system,” everyone back home does. So did I, once.

My dad used to tell me stories about being in school during de-segregation. In fact, he told me that his family actually lived in the poor neighborhood in their community and he actually went to school with and befriended a lot of black students—something that was unfortunately not common back then. We sat in the kitchen listening to his college choir sing “Go Down Moses,” and he told me that it was an old slave spiritual, something many Christians I’ve met aren’t aware of. It changes the entire damn song when you know the meaning.

We discussed racial issues regularly. It was not news to him that people of different skin tones were treated differently than I was and he made sure I was also aware of that. I do think, however, since he grew up when things were so bad, that he might’ve missed some of the smaller signs that things hadn’t gotten as much better as he thought. We also lived in a very white community my whole childhood, so I think his interactions with people of color had dwindled. When he worked, that wasn’t the case, but now that he was at home almost all of the time and just listening to Fox News? Yeah… not a lot of color…

But, tell me how this same man freaked out during the 2020 riots after George Floyd was murdered? He let Fox News rile him up into some kind of frenzy, thinking they were going to abolish all police and we were going to live in a state of anarchy. He started buying guns. My dad notoriously hated guns. One of his favorite tv shows of all time was Kung Fu because he refused to use guns. Those characters were always his favorite.

He just became this reactionary, easy to brainwash person that I simply couldn’t fathom. If I’m honest, I think I avoided talking to him sometimes because it hurt so much to see what he had become. It seemed like he and my mom were always at odds, he was always buying things they didn’t have the money for, forgetting to pay bills, and never helping around the house.

So, when he reached out and sent me just some fucking bible verse I didn’t want to read, I didn’t respond. He’d pivoted so hard that even when I asked him about things we used to talk about, it was hard to carry on a conversation unless it was about Christianity—the one thing I didn’t want to talk about. Even psychology had changed so much by then that he was pretty lost. If I could go back in time, I would try harder to appeal to him, the version of him that I hope was still hiding in there somewhere. I don’t know if it would’ve helped. But I should’ve tried. It hurts me so much to know that he was so lonely for so long. I can only help that telling his story helps someone else.

No matter what your situation, or how scared or busy you may be, you need community. We all need community. We like to think that we’re so different than other animals, we’re so independent because we have all these gadgets and technology that allows us to do things by ourselves… but we’re not. We need each other in more ways than you can possibly know. If you’re lonely and have trouble leaving the house, ask for help. Don’t just assume it’ll come to you. That someone will eventually notice your needs that you’re too afraid to voice. We’re all so overwhelmed and overstimulated these days that we tend to be shoved too far up our own asses to notice what the people around us are going through. But it doesn’t mean we don’t care.

Speak up. Speak out. Say the things you want to say because you never know when you won’t be able to say anything to that person ever again. And it’s never too late until it is. No one deserves to be miserable or lonely. Everyone deserves support. Find it. Keep it. Cherish it. And for the love of god, don’t stay with someone just because it’s “the thing to do.” I often wonder what both of my parents lives would have been like if they had split up when things stopped working. For all I know, maybe they never worked. I really can’t say. But I think everyone deserves to be with someone who supports and believes in them and actually wants to spend time with them. Don’t stay with someone out of fear of what will happen next. You’ll figure that part out when it comes.

Something about my dad passing has really made me realize how little of my life has ever gone as planned. Even just 2 years ago I would obsess about the “what-ifs” of every single little thing. But now, I realize it doesn’t matter. Things are going to go the way they’re meant to, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. I can stay positive and resilient and believe that things will work out in my favor, or I can “plan” and get stressed and discouraged when it never does. As they always say, “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Well, I don’t have to believe in the Christian God to say that’s certainly true. You and I have no control over our lives any more than a rabbit can control when it rains. The best we can do is make sure we have somewhere safe to hide when it starts to pour. So, find your community before the storm hits.

I feel like everyone who loses a parent says the same thing, and I’m no different: I think about my dad every single day. Every. One. I think of something I want to tell him or show him. When it snows, I think about the time he took off work just to spend the day with me when they cancelled school because of snow on my birthday. I was literally getting off the bus to walk into daycare (which I hated) and I heard him holler for me and I still think it’s one of my best memories. I think of him every time I see an instrument. I think of him when I order food at a Mexican restaurant. He was always so proud of ordering entirely in Spanish. I can tell you his response to almost any situation like he’s still sitting here next to me. I miss him more than I’ve ever missed anything in my life. I often still refer to my parents like they’re both still alive and then catch myself. Every now and then I still forget that I can’t just text him anymore.

And it’s crazy, because he’d been in such bad health for so long that I thought I was prepared. I tried to be prepared. But there’s just no such thing. I often tell people I think I aged 5 years when my dad died. Something about it just changes your brain. I think some of it has to do with resentment that just all vanishes… I don’t know, it just feels so pointless to remember all of the bad shit once someone is gone, I suppose. It makes it a lot easier to remember all the good that person brought into your life. We had some really rough moments, but when it comes down to it, I truly believe he did his best and I think that’s all you can ask.

Sometimes I feel bad for anyone who would date me next, cause here’s the thing. I’m never going to shut up about him. I can’t. That feels like maybe a weird thing to do early in a relationship, some extra heavy baggage to bring in, but I guess it’s just part of who I am now. If the only thing that remains on this plane of my dad is the stories I tell, then that’s what it’ll be. I’ve got plenty.