So Long, Pop; I’ll Miss You. (Or, “Even In Death, Life Never Stops.”)

Hello, everyone. (Realistically, to all two people who read this thing, I guess?) This has been an unusual couple of days for the ol’ Gidman. It is, with mixed emotions, the time I’d suspected was coming for a long, long while. My father died Saturday morning, after another trip to the hospital for a bad fall in his bathroom. He was eighty-three.

I had received a call from my mother about it; but I didn’t pick up because I didn’t hear the phone ring. She left a voicemail saying she wanted to catch up and “had news,” but didn’t say what that news was. I was visiting a friend, so I said, “If it’s not important enough to just tell me in the message, it can wait until I get home later, I guess. World won’t end.” Then about ten minutes later, one of my brothers called, and I sarcastically said, “What the fuck! Everyone is blowing up my phone this morning; jeez, who died??”

Turns out, it was my father. Hell of a way to start a weekend.

There’s one big thing they don’t tell you about death, and dealing with the loss of a loved one: it is equal parts sad, annoying, and boring. But it’s all mixed together, so you don’t know which one is going to slap you in the face until it does, and something random and unexpected is bound to pop up and ruin your day when things are finally starting to feel okay again. Now, I’m being hit with phone calls from people I don’t talk to very often, and people consoling me, despite the fact that I’m not seeking it. I’m not good with other people’s feelings, and this is one of those situations where I have to be. Everyone processes their grief in their own way. I do it by making inappropriate jokes, keeping things as light as is allowable, and trying to be as stalwart as possible for the people I care about, until it hits me directly. Then, I’ll probably cry for a little bit, and ultimately move on with my life, while trying not to be annoyed by this whole process.

Don’t get me wrong—I loved my dad. But, if I’m being completely honest, I’m not exactly devastated by his passing. If anything, it’s kind of a relief. I know that sounds heartless to say, but it’s the truth. He’d reached a point where he needed to be in an assisted living facility, but was too stubborn to admit it. Pop was always too stubborn to ask for help, (a trait he unfortunately passed down to me, but I’m trying to be better about it.) I’d always assumed my father would stubborn himself to death, and it looks like he went out the most fitting way he could have: quietly, without a lot of fuss, and more stubborn than a headstrong mountain goat ramming an oncoming train out of spite. But, he could never really see the effect his stubbornness was having on his family; particularly one of my dearest sisters, who had been given the unfair burden of watching out for the old man, because she was the only one who lived close enough to him to do it.

The challenge with this is that you could never out-headstrong my father. The one qualified candidate I’d nominate for the task is myself, and I’ve tried and failed many times over several decades.

So, despite needing oxygen, and a cane, and a scooter, Pop tried to continue his treasured independence. He’d fall, he’d go to the hospital, and since he was at an age where he wasn’t fully in his right mind, his paranoia meant that he’d tell the hospital not to give out any of his information, because he didn’t want to be a bother to anyone. (Personally, I think he also thought that if we found out, we’d nag him about getting the kind of care he needed, but refused to have.) Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your perspective—the hospital doesn’t take that sort of request lightly, which meant that his family (and my aforementioned sister, his power of attorney,) couldn’t get answers from them about his status each and every time he’d fall and end up in the hospital yet again. (He had fallen about four times in the last three or four months, if I remember correctly, but don’t quote me on those exact numbers.)

But that’s the kind of guy Pop was: He meant well, but was walled off, internalized, and ultimately damaged.

Growing up with the man wasn’t easy. He was adopted, had a rough childhood in 1930’s-50’s rural Nebraska, and was raised with all the toxic masculinity and bigotry that his world had at the time. He was also a Navy man. He’d seen many tours in many wars, sometimes right under my nose as a child, while I had no idea he was overseas. My mom had a calendar she kept in our kitchen, where she’d write down that month’s itinerary for everyone. Some weekends, my mom had Pop written down as “Reserves.” When I was a kid, I thought that just meant he was off doing some kind of Navy practice somewhere. Nobody bothered to tell a blissfully ignorant nine-year-old that his dad was off firing salvos at strangers, and being shot at in return, and I didn’t know to ask. But a life like that affected him in ways we didn’t see or understand at first as children. He had a lot of issues he wasn’t getting treated for, and when I was young, it was a time when therapy was taboo; thought of as a weakness for people who couldn’t handle their baggage “like a normal person.” He had a lot of PTSD, long before anyone even knew what PTSD was.

This came out in a lot of different ways: the aforementioned stubbornness, anger problems, putting up walls to keep us out. Mostly the anger problems are what I remember more often than not. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was like an emotional minefield; quiet and serene until you took that one wrong step, and then, BOOM! I don’t speak for my two older brothers, or my three younger sisters, but I know that most of my “behaving” was done to prevent stepping on that quiet patch of dirt that would trigger him blowing up at me, or them, or whoever may have just had the misfortune of being too close to the blast to avoid getting caught in it. We’d get yelled at until his face turned red, spanked if we really spoke up, and he genuinely didn’t understand that we were frequently afraid of him. I also don’t think he understood that fearing a man was not the same thing as respecting him.

To be completely fair, I was a mouthy kid. I thought I knew everything, and let my actual intelligence fool me into genuinely believing I was smarter than everyone else in the house. (To be fair, I still think it’s an arguable point, but that’s just because I’m me, and I think I’m fantastic.) There were more times than I care to count when Pop and I were on our feet, yelling our heads off at each other, inches away from each other’s red-faced, spittle-flying arguments about being right vs. being disrespectful. So many times, my mom would say, “WOULD YOU TWO STOP? IT’S LIKE WATCHING YOU ARGUE WITH A MIRROR!” Which would usually cause Pop and I to shout some version of “I’M NOTHING LIKE HIM!” at the same time.

I still have problems with disrespecting authority figures, which in my later years, I realize stems from this way of living. Pop was in charge, and his word was law, no matter how wrong and stupid I may have thought it was each and every time. Now—as far as I’m concerned—nobody has genuine authority over me, unless I’m humoring them into believing that to be true so that I can keep a job, or avoid an argument, or what have you. But rest assured; in my head, I truly only answer to one person: myself.

But, as I said before, I loved Pop, even with our horn-locking moments. He worked himself until he bled, put up with six mouthy kids, (Believe me, in my family, if you didn’t have a quick mouth and a sharp wit, it was like blood in the water for the sharks,) and our lives were always a constant, poverty-level living for as long as I lived with my family. But, we always had food on the table, and a roof over our heads that I never fully appreciated as a stupid kid. It had to be one of the most stressful things I can imagine a man having to put up with, and he shouldered that burden like a champ, even if he didn’t handle himself very admirably while doing it at times.

The thing we always shared was that his birthday was the day before mine. I was my father’s belated birthday present, and he always took the time to treat me like one when late August rolled around. I’m terrible about ages and birthdays between my family members, because I’m just that shitty about remembering things like that. But, having Pop’s birthday the day before mine made it super easy for a narcissist like myself to remember it every year, and he and I always took the time to call each other and catch up. We never felt obligated to get each other a gift; but we always had our birthday calls. And, for some reason, every year, he’d ask, “Guess how old I’m gonna be this year?” and I’d guess wrong every time. He’d laugh and go, “Nope!” and then tell me, because it was a little game he liked to play. Last year was the first year I guessed right, and it thrilled him so much. I’m going to miss that a lot this year.

He wasn’t perfect, but I didn’t recognize that as a kid. He was just the big strong tough guy who took care of us, and all the love in the world can’t change the fact that I too should probably have gotten therapy long ago. There were times he was downright bigoted, learned from the way he grew up. But he eventually changed that part of himself as best he could. He did, eventually, yell less and lay down less and less of the sturm und drang woven into his DNA. I don’t know if all the anger and pent up PTSD eventually got too tiring for him to hold onto, and it took a lot longer than I’d have liked, but the iron warhorse I knew my father to be eventually softened into a very stubborn Clydesdale. He managed to change, even if only a bit, and I can recognize that about my father now.

For a while, I was sitting here trying to think of all the good memories I had with the man; but honestly, there aren’t a lot of them left. But, that’s sort of the thing about life: the good memories and the bad memories are equally important. They both shape who you are, and that’s not always a bad thing when it comes to hard times. The hard times taught me a lot more lessons than the good times did, in fact. (Sure, they screwed me up in a lot of ways, but who isn’t a little messed up by their parents, right?) The important thing about life is that it keeps going on, with or without us, and each and every one of us just have to keep trying. We try to live, to grow, to love each other, and to (hopefully) become better as a result.

I like to think that my father was a slow growth kind of guy, and only now at the end, can I see the differences; like when they speed up plants on science shows. He definitely changed, as we all have, and I think it’s important to recognize that it happened. If we don’t change, what do we have? The same shit we started out with. Pop may have been a terrifying force when I was a kid, and an exasperating pain in the ass as an adult, but he changed over the years, and I still loved him every step of the way.

…Except for his stubbornness. He held onto that right up to the end, that crotchety old bastard; and I respect the hell out of him for it.

Goodbye, Pop. I hope you felt that you lived while you were still here, and that you know I loved you.