My Dad and his Life in the Shadows
At six years old, I lost my biological father. Well, I didn’t quite lose him, he was in a car accident that crushed his skull and nearly killed him, and it left him changed and emotionally distant. Though I love him and cherish the memory of him, I barely remember a thing about him.
Not long afterward, when I was twelve years old, he died as a result of complications from the accident years before. Shortly before that, my stepdad had come into my life. Following the death of my biological father, he became the dad that I had truly never known.
Arin Tequichea was the Oklahoma-born son of a half-blood Cherokee. I knew him as “Skip,” the nickname he introduced himself to everyone as. I’d first met him when he and my mom were dating. My mom would occasionally take me by the little billiards bar where he bartended in the Bay Area, California. He was good looking, debonair, and charming, and he was always nice to me. He’d joke with me and banter back and forth with my grandpa and uncle who both frequented the bar, and he’d give me and my mom a hard time about my hair that I was always obsessed with keeping perfect.
One day, it seemed like out of nowhere, he and my mom got married and whisked me and my sister away up to Oregon to start life anew.
For the few years leading up to that, my older brother and sister and I had been living back and forth between both sets of grandparents and our biological dad throughout central California. Over those years, I’d had people who cared for me, for sure, but I’d also suffered some pretty real abuse and neglect—something that I never fully realized until much later in life. It all shaped me accordingly. By eleven years old, I was a juvenile delinquent and on my way to a juvenile detention center. I was living with my dad, and he was barely home and barely “present” when he was home. As I learned later, that was largely a result of the brain damage from his accident. I was constantly running away, on my own all the time breaking into anywhere I could—from houses to my elementary school—committing all kinds of theft and vandalism. In fact, I could probably have a PhD break-ins and vandalism if there were such a thing. After Skip and my mom married, they brought my sister and me up to Oregon, and that saved me from my fate at “Juvy.” (My brother, older than both of us, opted to stay down in California with our dad, then moved back with our grandparents once our dad died.)
Up to that point in his life, Skip had never really known what it was to have real family. His dad had abandoned him and his sister at a young age, and over the rest of their childhood they’d had seven stepdads—all of whom physically and emotionally abused him until, finally as an older teen and a pretty big one at that, he beat up his last stepdad so that it never happened again. At seventeen, he was arrested for armed robbery of a grocery store. On court order, he joined the Air Force and soon found himself in South Korea post-Korean War. He excelled in the military, and outside his job duties he boxed in the military circuit and hustled Korean goods for extra cash. After that, he was stationed in southern California where he played a part in then-classified testing for the development of the F-15 strike aircraft. After his mandatory four-year tour, he left the military and went on to be many things—among them construction foreman, resort manager, high-end restauranteur, jeweler and jewelry designer, and world traveler.
Over the course of his life, he lived in ten different countries and exotic locales from Scotland to New Zealand, Tahiti, Mexico, and Hawaii. By the late 1980’s when he met my mom, he’d lived his forty-plus years however he’d wanted—tied to no real family and as a lifelong bachelor. In marrying her, he suddenly had a twelve-year-old boy and fourteen-year-old girl to take care of, both of whom lost their biological dad soon after.
In Oregon, he and my mom worked their butts off to take care of us. They kept a good roof over our head and food in our mouths. We were never starving, by any means, but to this day I don’t ever want to eat another cheap Carl Buddig lunchmeat packet again. Skip always worked strictly for cash, tending bar and working as a cook at up to three different jobs at a time all over the Portland area. One day, when I asked him why he only worked for cash, he said simply that it was the best way to work because the government couldn’t take more than what it was owed.
It was a rough life at times, both financially and otherwise. I remember one night, when I was around thirteen, he came home late as usual through the basement door of the wood-stove-heated farmhouse we rented. He looked like he’d been through some kind of hell. His knuckles were bloodied, and he was carrying a thick chain doubled over itself with one end wrapped in medical or workout tape to make a gripping handle, clearly so it could be used as a weapon. I wasn’t supposed to have seen him come in, but I did—so of course I asked what happened.
He’d been working his night job at a shady bar in northeast Portland—the crime-ridden part of the city. He was closing down and locking the door from the street side when a crazed guy high on PCP attacked him. PCP is a hallucinogen, known to take away pain sensation and often cause massive aggression and violence in the user as well as give a sense of invincibility. It was a pretty big drug at the time. The man started swinging the chain wildly, and he managed to dodge the attacks and get a few punches in but the guy just wouldn’t stop—he was a big dude, apparently, and felt nothing. Another bartender finally saw what was happening and came to help. The two of them buckled the guy at his knee, but he still kept fighting and swinging the chain at them. They eventually had to break the man’s hand by holding his arm down and stomping on it repeatedly just to get him to let go of the chain.
I listened in aww as this tough, swarthy man in front of me—who was by then the only dad I knew—quietly and begrudgingly told me how the world can sometimes be. He was embarrassed—embarrassed at where he was working, at what he’d just been tangled up in, and at the fact that I’d seen him come home like that. He didn’t feel like he was being a good father figure in the least. To this day, I don’t think he ever had any idea that he became my hero that night.
Over the years to follow, Skip would take the delinquent, troubled young boy that I was and teach him to work hard, push himself to be the best he could be, and to be meticulous in any endeavor in life. He took a scrawny, scared-of-the-world kid and taught him to stand on his own. Knowing that I was getting picked on at the new school, he taught me some boxing from his younger days and put me in my first martial arts school. When I took to that well, he ensured that he and my mom kept me able to go to classes through the years even with their pretty meager income.
He also taught me to truly stand up for myself—what courage really means. “Stand up and fight, even if you think you’re going to lose,” he’d say all the time. He talked about how that applied not just to being bullied, or fighting in self-defense, but in so many situations that I would find myself in later throughout life. And although those are always easy words to say, he didn’t just say them, he showed me what it meant to embody them. It took me a while to get there, but to this day if I have any great strength it’s that I have absolutely no qualms standing on my own against anyone or anything, even if I do lose (which is more often than not). I can’t imagine living otherwise.
When he saw I had an affinity for writing and music, he nurtured that. He was the first person to teach me how to play guitar. We’d stay up nights practicing, and he’d play songs from his days in Hawaii in the 60’s and 70’s and reminisce with stories about his wild times back then. He also praised my writing and encouraged me to keep doing it. Both became sources of expression and outlet that I relied on throughout the rest of my life.
But, like many of us, Skip had another side altogether. It’s just that his “other side” was a bit more involved than the typical person’s skeletons. He was far from perfect, as anyone who knew him and either loved or hated him would be quick to elaborate on. He wasn’t always good to me, and he definitely wasn’t as good as he should have been to either my mom or my sister. He knew that, especially as he faced his demons in his later years. It’s what drove both of them away from him—my older sister going off to college and never really keeping in touch, and my mom divorcing him shortly after I graduated high school. Aside from that, though, there was a whole other aspect to him entirely; one that I wouldn’t find out about until well into adulthood.
After I’d graduated high school, my mom moved back down to California and my sister was already in college. Then it was just me and Skip living up in Oregon together. Trying to find my way, I tried community college for a bit but I just wasn’t suited for that path. I was having trouble finding any direction and, like a lot of young men in similar situations, my adverse upbringing really kind of lent itself to finding purpose and fulfillment in military life. Skip supported me every step of the way while I figured out what I wanted to do. Finally, a couple years out of high school, I went off to begin what would turn into a twenty-year career in the relatively unknown ground combat special operations component of the Air Force.
Within my first year in the military, I met my wife—who I’ve been lucky enough to be with ever since. Throughout my career and our life together, Skip was always there for us. Although long-divorced from my mom, he remained my “dad” and treated my wife like the daughter he never had. Well—really like the daughter he’d had in my sister years back but had completely failed in being a dad to. (He later confided that he knew how much he’d failed with my sister, and that it was a kind of redemption to have a “daughter” in my wife.)
Then, a few years into my career when I was in my late twenties, I learned a truth about my dad that I could never have foreseen. So many times over the years, he’d told my wife and I that there were things about his past we wouldn’t like. He often said we “wouldn’t want anything to do with him” if we found out some of the things he’d done. We always chalked that up to the rantings of an old man who loved telling stories. But then one day, he called out of the blue to tell us news that hit like a hammer.
“Son,” he said somberly, “I’ve got some things I need to tell you.”
“OK,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“Well,” he started slowly. “My name is not Arin…” He paused for a bit. I stayed silent, confused and waiting for him to explain. “…my real name is Jerry,” he said. “And Tequichea isn’t my last name, either.”
Over the course of about an hour, he told me how he’d been wanted by the FBI for years, and that he’d been living under both a fake name and social security number since before I’d met him as a young boy. Now he’d finally been caught, and he was probably going to jail. He said he just needed me and my wife to know. He told me how utterly ashamed he was, and how sorry he was for keeping it all from me.
“Wait…are you even Cherokee?” I remember asking.
He laughed slightly. “Yes, son, I’m Cherokee. Everything I’ve told you about my childhood is true, just not some of the stuff between that and when I met your mom.” He told me how he’d chosen the Cherokee alias because of his Native American roots.
Who the hell was my dad?
Sometime in the 1970’s, the man I knew as “Skip” had gotten mixed up with a mafia family out of Hawaii that ran drug and diamond trafficking between Africa, Mexico, Hawaii, and California. He became, among other things, a transporter—flying contraband from various pickup locations to drop offs in the States. He’d gotten into it after an old high school football injury—a shattered foot—had taken him out of honest work for so long that he felt like he had no other options. Living in Hawaii at the time, he was really close to the mafia family and they wanted to help him, so they offered him good money to use his private pilot’s license for transporting.
But then the family was busted. The FBI arrested them one by one, and some were being sentenced to long prison terms. As soon as Skip was indicted, he took his plane and fled to Mexico to avoid the arrest and imprisonment that he knew was inevitable. He stayed in Mexico for a few years, working with underground contacts in the States to gain a new identity and social security number so he could go back home and live in the shadows. And that’s exactly what he did.
A few years later, while working at that dive bar in the Bay Area for cash under a fake name, he met my mom. A girlfriend from his past had tipped off the local FBI that he was in California and working at the bar. FBI agents showed up asking for him one night, but he just so happened to be off on a weekend getaway with my mom on a day that he normally worked. Immediately after hearing of the FBI agents looking for him, he and my mom decided to pack up and go to Oregon where they hoped he wouldn’t be tracked again. He actually wanted to go back to Mexico—but my mom convinced him to go to Oregon because she couldn’t follow him to Mexico and still take us with her.
My wife and I were blown away at the news. We didn’t know what or how to think. After telling us everything, he was so ashamed and worried what we’d think of him. Ultimately, I came to the decision that it was a part of his past and that we all have our demons. Who was I to judge? “You know, Skip…unless you told me you’d ever done something bad to women or children, or innocent people, I really don’t care what you did back then in the drug and mafia world. Hell, drugs were a part of the times and those were all shitty people, anyway,” I told him.
“No, never anything like that,” he assured me.
“Then you don’t have to worry one minute about us being ashamed of you,” I said.
Over the next couple of years, my wife and I kept the truth about my dad a secret. Although I’d had no part in what Skip had done in his earlier life, nor in covering up his identity for all those years, we really didn’t need the questions being asked. But we weren’t keeping anything from the law—Skip had been caught by the FBI, and he was back and forth to court and legal proceedings in California waiting to see what fate had in store for him. By then in his sixties, he was sure he was going to prison. Still, I offered to testify as a character witness on his behalf, but he insisted that I shouldn’t be a part of any of it. He didn’t want his past affecting my life and future.
It took a long time of back-and-forth proceedings and legal negotiations, but he was finally cleared. He was acquitted of all charges and got his real name and social security number back. His lawyer was able to prove that, although he may well have been guilty of the crimes committed so many years back, there were no witnesses alive to testify and there was no longer any evidence against him. His lawyer also showed the judge that even though he’d lived under a fake name and social security number, he’d since raised a family and had been positively contributing to society under that fake name and was never again involved in drugs or the mafia. He’d also been paying taxes under his fake social security number for the past few years (which, ironically, was how he was finally caught), and that was an additional convincer.
My wife and I were incredibly relieved. Still, for fear of judgement we didn’t talk about it to many people—only close friends and family. Over the years to follow, every time Skip came to visit, the three of us would inevitably get into conversations about his past a little here and there, but we tried not to dwell on it. With each year that went by and each visit that came, he became visibly more ashamed when it would come up. Still, we never got the full truth. I later learned from a close relative of his that he’d also been an “enforcer” for the mafia family—the guy who hunted down and intimidated or beat those who hadn’t paid the family what was owed. Back when he was indicted and fled to Mexico, he’d apparently already once been charged for assault and battery related to those “duties.” And, I learned that he’d adopted a son sometime in the 1960’s but that, for reasons forever to remain a mystery, he’d abandoned the boy to his adopted grandparents and never kept in contact.
Growing up with Skip as my dad, I always wondered why he was so paranoid. He would talk to me all the time about keeping a watchful eye on everyone and everything. “Trust no one,” he’d say. He would constantly tell me the value in keeping a low profile, how living “in the shadows” was the best way to be. He would talk about how it was necessary sometimes to deceive people, and to never trust anyone who asked information about my life even in small talk—to feed them misinformation if they did. Only when I look back, knowing the truth of his life, do I fully understand what shaped the man who became my dad.
I’m not sure if he meant to, but he passed those inclinations on to me quite well. I took up his ability to live in the shadows, to be perfectly comfortable dwelling in the dark side of life, and to deceive at times if it suited the situation. It definitely didn’t help a whole lot in my life choices over the years, nor in my personal relationships, but some of those skills and strengths surely helped me to excel in the world of special operations where guys like me seemed to find a place to fit. Because my job relied on the ability to be comfortable in the shadows, to be fiercely independent, able to maintain a low profile in all kinds of situations, and to think outside the box, my upbringing with him served that well. But I also picked up both his paranoia and his short-fused temper. Both were definitely exacerbated by my wartime experiences in the years to follow, and became some of the demons that I battle to this day.
Throughout my career and after I retired from the military, Skip told me every chance he got how proud he was. He’d send cards for every holiday, always with a hand-written note that sung praises about me and what I’d done with my life. He’d say the same every time I talked to him on the phone—which was, regrettably, only every great once in a while—or when he came out to visit. “I’m so proud of you, son. You went on to live a truly honorable life, something that I wish I’d done,” he told me. “You and Katie both have accomplished so many great things for yourselves and built this wonderful life together.” He was full of joy and pride when he spoke. “I just couldn’t be happier for you. You have a beautiful wife, two beautiful daughters, and you guys have made a family that is just so full of love. Cherish that and hold onto it—it’s something that I wished I could have done but I just didn’t know how.”
And those were the truest words he’d probably ever spoken. Throughout his life, Skip had managed to push nearly everyone away, save for a longtime nephew who loved him no matter what and a couple of lifelong friends. My wife and I and our daughters who loved him and called him “Grandpa” were the family he held on to more than anyone. Even then, he often tried to push us away. We loved him dearly, but we were so frustrated and downright angered at times with him, especially in his last years. His visits were full of great times talking and laughing and hearing his stories, but inevitably he’d fall into his habit pattern of reclusiveness—staying upstairs alone in our guest bedroom, watching his old movies and trying to hide his massive drinking problem. In the moments we’d accidentally catch him when he was drunk, his nasty side would sometimes rear its head. But he cherished his granddaughters and, save for a couple of times when his uncensored “old man mouth” was within earshot, they always received nothing but love and kindness from him.
During his last couple of years, we knew he probably had some significant health issues developing, but he refused to share any of it with us. When we asked about it, he’d fall into his default of misinformation-giving. So many times, we’d offer to fly out to see him in the small town he’d retired to in northern Washington, to make sure everything was fine with the trailer he lived in and to help get him started to move across the country to live near us. But he always came up with excuses and reasons to delay. “No, no, I’m fine. There’s nothing to see in the little town I live in, anyway. And my trailer’s not big enough for you to come visit. I’ll just come out to see you.”
We also knew he was tortured by his past. We watched him over the years go into sad rants more and more during our conversations with him, detailing the abuse and neglect he’d suffered in his childhood and the shameful life he believed those experiences had led him to. We knew the demons of his past were the source of his drinking and inclination toward reclusiveness, but we didn’t know how to stop him doing it. After all, he was passionately independent, and he could also get very mean when that independence was threatened.
In what would become his last year, we had him out for Thanksgiving. Minus the usual quirks—that we were well used to by then—it was a good visit. Sure, he said some wildly inappropriate things during a Thanksgiving day potluck dinner with our old neighbors, but he did grace the table with one of the grand stories that he loved to tell about living in “Scawtt-land” back in the 1960’s (he always used a perfect Scottish accent when he said the name of the country). He talked about visiting all the historic castles, and how he’d had an “in” at one of the most famous golf courses in the world, and how he could pretty much take his pick of any woman in the land. Luckily, his story about once dating the actress Lynda Carter—the star of the original Wonder Woman series—when he lived in Hawaii didn’t come out. I always cringed during that one.
During that visit, for the first time he got to go see his two granddaughters practicing at their dance school. Though normally full of complaints to “get back home and rest” if we had him out for more than an hour, that night he stood watching our girls for over two hours, beaming with pride and telling the “dance moms” in the studio all about his granddaughters.
After the visit we all agreed that he would come out to celebrate both of our birthdays in the upcoming spring. His birthday and mine were only four days apart. Secretly, my wife and I planned that we’d try to finally convince him to move near us. His coughing was getting worse, his drinking heavier, and he would start wheezing after climbing only a couple flights of stairs. We’ll work it all out in the spring, we thought.
Then, late one afternoon in February, a uniformed officer from our local police department knocked on my door. “Sir, are you related to a Mr. Jerry …?”
“Yes, that’s my stepdad,” I said, a bit nervous inside. Oh, shit…what the hell caught up with him this time? “Do you want to come in?” I asked the officer. I was thinking I was surely going to be answering some questions related to something he’d done years back that he never told me about.
“No, thank you,” the officer said awkwardly. He put his head down. “I’m sorry…” he continued, “but he passed away this morning.”
I can’t express the level of shock I had in that moment. We’d known Skip’s health was failing. He had an ongoing cough, and for the first time in his life he was getting physically frail. But we really thought he had a lot of years left. “Other than this damn cough I can’t seem to shake, doctor says I’m healthy as a horse,” he’d insist to us all the time.
The officer got me in touch with a detective in northern Washington who’d been called to the scene and conducted the investigation into his death. It was a freak accident. He’d been trying to climb out of a small window in his trailer after the lock mechanism on the door malfunctioned and he couldn’t open it. He was trying to make it to a VA medical appointment later that morning, an appointment that my wife had finally convinced him to make. Somehow—probably due to a combination of the frailty of his body, the sub-freezing winter temperature, and (we imagine) alcohol—he got stuck halfway out the tiny window. He couldn’t get himself out of his position and ultimately died of positional asphyxiation, doubled in half with his diaphragm pressed against the lower sill of the window preventing him from getting a breath. A worker at the RV park found him hanging out of the window hours later, when it was far too late.
Why the hell would he have done that?! Was he drunk? Was he that far mentally gone, and we just never realized it?
So many questions went through our minds. We were tormented at the news, and even more at the sad and lonely death that had become my dad’s fate. As soon as we could, my wife and I took the flight across the country to what had been his home. My mom, who’d been divorced from him for the past twenty years plus and was understandably not fond of her time married to him, was gracious enough to fly up from California to meet us and say goodbye together and help take care of what little belongings he had. There might have been a handful more people who would have come if they’d known and been able, but we had no way of getting a hold of any of them until we could go through his things and find contacts that were either hand-written on random pieces of paper or saved in his phone. He kept everything secluded from everyone, including us.
We got to northern Washington just after a huge snowstorm had belted the region. When we got to the fifth wheel trailer he’d been living in for nearly a decade, we were mortified by what we saw. He’d been living in squalor for the last couple of years, and we truly had no idea. The man I once knew as incredibly hardworking, meticulously clean, and neurotically organized—who would never let a single house “fix-it” project sit and who would wash and hand-wax his vehicles on a weekly basis—had been living in extreme contrast to that. His trailer roof had been leaking, obviously for years, and was covered with mold. Inside, there was black mold growing in every corner, and his mattress was damp with moisture. His refrigerator and kitchen had accumulated what was obviously months of grease and grime built up on all the surfaces, and there was rotten food on the counters and in the fridge that we knew must have had rotted long before he’d died. (He’d been complaining about occasional bouts of nausea for the past few months, and we realized that was probably why.)
On seeing all of that, my wife and mom broke down. From all appearances, it seemed he had given up and was just waiting to die. Yet he’d been keeping it all from us. “I don’t want to ever be a burden to you two,” he would tell us all the time. At some point during every visit, he would go on about how he didn’t have much longer and tell us in detail what to do with all his things once he died. He’d say how he didn’t want to get to the point where we had to take care of him, and he was adamant about it. “If that ever happens, please…just take me out back and put a bullet in my head.” Of course, we always took it as morbid joking more than any sincere sentiment. But we realized, as we looked through his trailer that day, that he’d been serious. His health was failing, his mind was fading…and he probably knew it. He didn’t want to burden us with any of it.
We felt so guilty. Why didn’t we see this happening?
Later, after looking through his medical records, we learned that he’d had a positive result for colon cancer screening a few years earlier but had never followed up for testing as requested by the doctor. Maybe he’d been dying of cancer? We couldn’t say, for sure, because he’d told us nothing about it and had never followed up himself. He’d been assuring us for years that he was going to his doctor all the time and that he had a generally clean bill of health, but in actuality he’d only gone about once a year and had never listened to any doctors’ recommendations. If we’d ever had any idea how he was living, and the real condition he was in, we’d have been on a plane straight out to him—forcing him to move near us. But, like nearly all things in his life, he hid that from us, too.
And on that cold winter trip to northern Washington, we said goodbye.
At the front of a quiet room lined with dark wooden benches reminiscent of a church, in a quaint funeral home in a small portside town in northern Washington, the man who had become my dad so long ago laid perfectly still in a pressed wood box prepared for cremation. As we walked into the room and laid our eyes on him for the first time since hearing of his death, he looked so peaceful, as if he were just sleeping. And he seemed to have the ever-so-slight hint of his famous smirk.
In life, he had always been full of jokes. My wife and I, in our shock and mourning of the moment, remarked to my mom that we felt as if he was about to pop up and say, “Hey, I got you kids! That was a good one, huh? Now let’s go get some grub at this great diner I know up the road…” Of course, in the fictional narrative we made up in that moment, he’d tell us all about the diner and the cute waitress who worked in it—how they’d dated and she’d fallen in love with him but he didn’t want to be “tied down” so he had to drop her. He had a “big fish” story for everyone and everywhere, and they usually involved a woman who was completely enamored by him. Some of his stories were true, and others we knew were the embellishments of a lonely old man. But right then, we wished we could hear any of them just one more time.
I’d been getting angrier and angrier with him in the years up to his death. There was no way around it—sometimes he could be a pain in the ass and a real jerk. I never understood why he always seemed to be keeping secrets from us when there was just no need for it. And I didn’t get why he would constantly strive to distance himself. In truth, in those last few years my wife was the glue between us that kept me from doing the same thing to him that he did to everyone else in his life and always seemed to try to do to us—distance and push away. I planned on finally talking to him about all of it during the upcoming spring visit. I had a lot I wanted to unload. And there was a lot that both my wife and I wanted to get to the truth of regarding his health. And, we wanted to convince him to move near us. We no longer had the chance to do any of it.
My wife and I sat on the front bench next to his still and lifeless body for what seemed like an hour. Through our tears, we talked about him and our memories of him. We lamented about the extravagant stories he’d tell over and over, his passion for world traveling and exotic places he’d been, and his completely inappropriate language and behavior at times. We longed to hear any of it just one last time. We talked about how, of all the people in our lives, he was the one who was always there for us as I endured the hardships of a military career in a combat job, during a time of war, while she went through the trials that came along with that. We talked about how much love he showed our girls, and how we wished he could have hung on at least long enough for them to truly remember him.
Just one more conversation…. Just one more hug.
That’s all we wanted. None of our frustrations—none of our anger—mattered anymore. All we wished for then was one more chance to say, “I love you.”
With tears welling in my eyes, and a trembling hand, I got up and went over to his body one last time. I caressed his forehead. I felt like I needed to touch him before I said goodbye for good. His skin was ice cold, and just then the reality that he wasn’t just “sleeping” truly set in. Looking at his restful face, I saw him not just as my dad and father figure, but as the hurt boy that he once was and the lonely, tormented man that he became. Through a quivering voice, I mustered my last words to my dad. “I love you, buddy.” I don’t know why I said “buddy.” I never called him that, it’s just what came out. I took a deep breath, put my head up and spoke my next words as resolutely as I could through the pain and hurt that felt like wringing in my heart. “Thank you for everything you did for me, Skip. I will never forget you…and I will make sure our girls remember their grandpa.” I looked down at him, a single tear making its way down my cheek. “I love you.”
My stepdad—my dad—didn’t have to die the way that he did. He could have died surrounded by the love of the son he had in me, the daughter he had in my wife, and the grandchildren he had in our girls. He could have had others around him, as well, who at one point had loved him. But through his pain and the demons of his past, he chose to push himself away from everyone, right up to the very end. The man who had done so much in his life, who had once been a model of strength and perseverance, and who had seen so much and endured so many hardships, died as he had lived—alone and in the shadows of his demons.
Yes, my dad could be a downright asshole. He could be a liar, a brute, and a womanizer. And, once upon a time, he was a hardened criminal. Those who knew him would nod their heads in agreement. At different times in his life, and at different moments, he was all of those things. But he was far more than any of that, and none of those qualities defined him. He was kind and funny. He was intelligent and artistic. He was generous to those he loved, even if he didn’t always know how to love them the right way. And he was full of a zest for life that you could literally feel when he told his stories.
My wife and I had the fortune of knowing his true heart. We saw it in the love that he showed us, in the pride had in us that he relayed every chance he got, and in the gentle and sweet love that he showed to our girls. We saw it in the pain on his face, and in his voice, every time he talked about the hardships of his childhood and the bad choices he’d made afterward.
Just one more conversation…one more chance to tell him we love him, no matter what.
I thank my dad for what he did for me. I honor him for the strength he gave me and the good qualities and wisdom that he passed on. I don’t blame him for the vices I may have picked up through his influence. I choose to learn from both the good and the bad. I choose to do exactly what he told me so often to do—to cherish my family and the love we have, and not let anything get in the way of that. I choose to never let my own demons, of which there are plenty, conquer me as they did him and drive me to a place of loneliness and solitude of my own making.
The man who became my father, when I needed one most, is still teaching me even in his death. I love him…we love him. And although he is no longer with us, I choose to lift him from the shadows of his demons.
