Letter to a Father Before He Dare Die on Us
by Daniel Asa Rose
JUNE 16, 2011 TAGS:
Dear Dad --
Don’t you dare die. Ever. You’re only 88 and your four middle-aged children need you around as much as ever. It’s different from the way we needed you when we were kids. Now it’s more like, stay in the world ahead of us, OK? Caring from afar. We’re not ready to take the front line all by ourselves.
Do you even have a clue what it was like, your being our Dad? Just for kicks I’m going to list a few of the memories I’m grateful for. After all, why wait to extol your most excellent fatherliness for a eulogy you’ll never hear? Now, when you’re so very much around, I’m going to recite some things you can hear in good health, and perhaps be encouraged to stave off the inevitable a few decades more …
Not to embarrass you, don’t worry. Be assured that despite this uncharacteristically earnest gesture, I still harbor a boatload of resentments, which I’ll continue to cherish, if you don’t mind. But perhaps as they approach the end of their duel together, every child should provide his parent with an un-ironic, bare-assed reckoning. So here’s my living eulogy, very much a work in progress …
Thank you, Dad, for letting me greet you as you drove home from work every day, seeing me wave a block away and stopping the car to let me steer the final stretch with you.
Thank you for always asking if I had enough light to read by, and snapping on an extra light though I told you I was fine. Thank you for letting my big sister Renee and me float behind the sailboat when you were at the tiller, cautiously playing out the tow rope so we could feel we were getting away with something dangerous.
Thank you for outfitting my bike Tommy so beautifully after it was run over in the neighbors’ driveway. You knew I wouldn’t be disloyal enough to want a new bike, so you brought my beloved bike back to life, looking a bit orthopedic in its new gray neck brace, but with a speedometer and thrilling siren.
Thank you for taking me to the Munch museum in Norway. For turning me on to Yeats’ poetry. For providing me with lessons of every kind (piano, clarinet, oil painting, puppet-making, acting, horse-riding, fencing, etc). For letting me sleep in your king-sized bed when you and Mom were out at your dinner parties, and for carrying me downstairs to my bed when you got home.
Thank you for not only fronting me the down payment for my first house, but unexpectedly topping it off with a lawnmower. For selling me your Fiat convertible for almost nothing when my car died the first week of my first newspaper job, and later, when I was a globe-trotting travel writer, for the surprise of a new car battery when I came home from six weeks in the South Seas at 2 in the morning. I could tell the cabbie to leave because my car started right up.
Thank you for telling me that you could hear me playing from all the way down the street, that I was the loudest of all my friends but that was OK. For murmuring soft words with Mom in your bedroom at night: I always had the feeling you were retelling the antics of us kids, and your pleasure in us was there in the chuckling hum of your voices.
Thank you for helping to shape my work ethic, by which I mean my regard for honest craftsmanship; my conflicted but lively sense of morality; my distrust for the glib; even, dare I say, my sense of duty, so that I may appear as old-fashioned to my children as you always appeared to me.
For bringing me to the beach. For playing catch. For calming me during my asthma attacks. For seeing to it that my teeth got cleaned twice a year. For hoisting me onto a burro for a timeless father-son photograph but helping me hold the reins. For letting me watch that documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti with you and witnessing your moral outrage at the legal system that persecuted them.
Thank you for throwing up (very neatly, into a bucket, you who never needed a napkin at the dinner table) on the Skagerrak and showing us kids that you were mortal. For getting me Nicole DuPont, the dog of my life. For comforting me, and accepting my comfort, when your own father died.
Thank you for dousing the fire in the fireplace with water every night after we'd all gone to sleep. In that steam and hiss was your love toward your family made audible to our ears; and then in the morning I would climb the chimney stairs and feel the warmth in the bricks and that way it was palpable to our skin as well.
Thank you for leading me into your study when I was 9 and writing down the "words in my head" that became my first poem … which I credit with making me a writer, for better or worse. And then later, telling me as a teenager that I wrote "with authority." It was invaluable for a 15-year-old who so patently lacked it to be told that, in one area, he had such an outlandish thing.
For calling me to you whenever you had a package to tie, and showing me where to put my index finger on the string until your knot fastened down just so, without pinching me. It was a moment of coordination between us: split-second timing that spoke of conciliation from our fingertips.
Speaking of fingertips, thank you for all the haircuts! And for saying, years after they stopped, that you retained the feel of my scalp in your fingertips. You knew every ridge and bump of my head by heart.
Thank you for my first sleeping bag, for giving me the wherewithal not to be stuck selling wheatgrass from some sidewalk stand, for somehow refraining from annihilating my defiance, for continuing to champion my writing even (especially) when as an adolescent the writing was sexually shocking. For listening to my tirades so attentively that I felt sorry for all my friends who didn’t have you as a father.
Thank you for my beautiful name, those five syllables so fluid and strong, and for the way you spoke the word “Danny” when I was small. Thank you for always bringing back cool gifts from your travels. It wasn’t so much the Spanish chess set with ingrained woods but that you’d been thinking of us while you were away.
For uttering the words, “Here we go,” as we began to capsize the kayak in front of all those proper bathers at Wee Burn Beach. I responded, “Yup,” and over we went, and afterwards I told you those words, which you hadn’t remembered and were amazed to hear I had. I do believe our little exchange from half a century ago is the one I’ll hear last on my deathbed. “Here we go.” “Yup.” Were there more exchanges like that? What have we both forgotten?
I can hear you saying "Enough!" So I will stop. I just want you to know, Dad, that from the accumulation of these small details came, unseen, a largeness of spirit and vision; and that to balance out the non-thanks a parent gets in the normal, unjust course of things, there is also and actively this. There always will be.
Long must you flourish!
Love,
Dan
Daniel Asa Rose is a frequent contributor to Obit. Publishers Weekly named his most recent book, Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black-Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant … and Save His Life, one of the top books of 2010.
Don’t you dare die. Ever. You’re only 88 and your four middle-aged children need you around as much as ever. It’s different from the way we needed you when we were kids. Now it’s more like, stay in the world ahead of us, OK? Caring from afar. We’re not ready to take the front line all by ourselves.
Do you even have a clue what it was like, your being our Dad? Just for kicks I’m going to list a few of the memories I’m grateful for. After all, why wait to extol your most excellent fatherliness for a eulogy you’ll never hear? Now, when you’re so very much around, I’m going to recite some things you can hear in good health, and perhaps be encouraged to stave off the inevitable a few decades more … Not to embarrass you, don’t worry. Be assured that despite this uncharacteristically earnest gesture, I still harbor a boatload of resentments, which I’ll continue to cherish, if you don’t mind. But perhaps as they approach the end of their duel together, every child should provide his parent with an un-ironic, bare-assed reckoning. So here’s my living eulogy, very much a work in progress …
Thank you, Dad, for letting me greet you as you drove home from work every day, seeing me wave a block away and stopping the car to let me steer the final stretch with you.
Thank you for always asking if I had enough light to read by, and snapping on an extra light though I told you I was fine. Thank you for letting my big sister Renee and me float behind the sailboat when you were at the tiller, cautiously playing out the tow rope so we could feel we were getting away with something dangerous.
Thank you for outfitting my bike Tommy so beautifully after it was run over in the neighbors’ driveway. You knew I wouldn’t be disloyal enough to want a new bike, so you brought my beloved bike back to life, looking a bit orthopedic in its new gray neck brace, but with a speedometer and thrilling siren.
Thank you for taking me to the Munch museum in Norway. For turning me on to Yeats’ poetry. For providing me with lessons of every kind (piano, clarinet, oil painting, puppet-making, acting, horse-riding, fencing, etc). For letting me sleep in your king-sized bed when you and Mom were out at your dinner parties, and for carrying me downstairs to my bed when you got home.
Thank you for not only fronting me the down payment for my first house, but unexpectedly topping it off with a lawnmower. For selling me your Fiat convertible for almost nothing when my car died the first week of my first newspaper job, and later, when I was a globe-trotting travel writer, for the surprise of a new car battery when I came home from six weeks in the South Seas at 2 in the morning. I could tell the cabbie to leave because my car started right up.
Thank you for telling me that you could hear me playing from all the way down the street, that I was the loudest of all my friends but that was OK. For murmuring soft words with Mom in your bedroom at night: I always had the feeling you were retelling the antics of us kids, and your pleasure in us was there in the chuckling hum of your voices.
Thank you for helping to shape my work ethic, by which I mean my regard for honest craftsmanship; my conflicted but lively sense of morality; my distrust for the glib; even, dare I say, my sense of duty, so that I may appear as old-fashioned to my children as you always appeared to me.
For bringing me to the beach. For playing catch. For calming me during my asthma attacks. For seeing to it that my teeth got cleaned twice a year. For hoisting me onto a burro for a timeless father-son photograph but helping me hold the reins. For letting me watch that documentary on Sacco and Vanzetti with you and witnessing your moral outrage at the legal system that persecuted them.
Thank you for throwing up (very neatly, into a bucket, you who never needed a napkin at the dinner table) on the Skagerrak and showing us kids that you were mortal. For getting me Nicole DuPont, the dog of my life. For comforting me, and accepting my comfort, when your own father died.
Thank you for dousing the fire in the fireplace with water every night after we'd all gone to sleep. In that steam and hiss was your love toward your family made audible to our ears; and then in the morning I would climb the chimney stairs and feel the warmth in the bricks and that way it was palpable to our skin as well.
Thank you for leading me into your study when I was 9 and writing down the "words in my head" that became my first poem … which I credit with making me a writer, for better or worse. And then later, telling me as a teenager that I wrote "with authority." It was invaluable for a 15-year-old who so patently lacked it to be told that, in one area, he had such an outlandish thing.
For calling me to you whenever you had a package to tie, and showing me where to put my index finger on the string until your knot fastened down just so, without pinching me. It was a moment of coordination between us: split-second timing that spoke of conciliation from our fingertips.
Speaking of fingertips, thank you for all the haircuts! And for saying, years after they stopped, that you retained the feel of my scalp in your fingertips. You knew every ridge and bump of my head by heart.
Thank you for my first sleeping bag, for giving me the wherewithal not to be stuck selling wheatgrass from some sidewalk stand, for somehow refraining from annihilating my defiance, for continuing to champion my writing even (especially) when as an adolescent the writing was sexually shocking. For listening to my tirades so attentively that I felt sorry for all my friends who didn’t have you as a father.
Thank you for my beautiful name, those five syllables so fluid and strong, and for the way you spoke the word “Danny” when I was small. Thank you for always bringing back cool gifts from your travels. It wasn’t so much the Spanish chess set with ingrained woods but that you’d been thinking of us while you were away.
For uttering the words, “Here we go,” as we began to capsize the kayak in front of all those proper bathers at Wee Burn Beach. I responded, “Yup,” and over we went, and afterwards I told you those words, which you hadn’t remembered and were amazed to hear I had. I do believe our little exchange from half a century ago is the one I’ll hear last on my deathbed. “Here we go.” “Yup.” Were there more exchanges like that? What have we both forgotten?
I can hear you saying "Enough!" So I will stop. I just want you to know, Dad, that from the accumulation of these small details came, unseen, a largeness of spirit and vision; and that to balance out the non-thanks a parent gets in the normal, unjust course of things, there is also and actively this. There always will be.
Long must you flourish!
Love,
Dan
Daniel Asa Rose is a frequent contributor to Obit. Publishers Weekly named his most recent book, Larry’s Kidney: Being the True Story of How I Found Myself in China With My Black-Sheep Cousin and His Mail-Order Bride, Skirting the Law to Get Him a Transplant … and Save His Life, one of the top books of 2010.
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COMMENTS (2)
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Dawn Morton wrote on June 16, 2011 8:44am
Thank you, Dan, for hopefully sparking others to pen their own Living Eulogy to their Fathers. It's the least we can do both for ourselves as well as them, maybe even for some to allow that dialog of unfinished business that happens between a parent and child that should be aired out. Great job, as always, your writing is tremendous. [Report Comment]
Tony H wrote on June 16, 2011 7:37am
Suggestion to others = write a letter like this to anyone who's died in your life. Mail it to yourself. When you get it in your mailbox, read it. It's quite healing to do this. [Report Comment]
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