Family Stuff

I’ve been a creative little boy over the past several days, and I’ve got some stuff queued up to share with you soon. But today, I want to take some pride in letting you know that the CED2010 project is being undertaken by Leah and the kids along with me. Leah has been either cross-stitching or scrapbooking every night (although she won’t let me take any pictures of her in the process) and the boys have been taking extra time to build, draw, and make stuff. Sometimes we sit in the kitchen and create together, other times I find them in their rooms working on interesting stuff. Yesterday I noticed Liam building with Lego Duplos in his room while Conor was busy creating a map of one of his many made-up cities. I thought it’d be cool to take some pics and share them here.

This is cool, eh?

A watercolor doodle on drawing paper, scanned into Photoshop, along with an odd thought I had rolling in my noggin when I woke up this morning.

Quick Journal note: Leah took Conor to the dentist while Liam and I stayed home to be creative. He made 5 different flags to hang in his room, representing his self-declared “City of Happiness”. I made this. It’s a good day.

I haven’t had a chance to see the movie yet, but this review grabbed me and made me think deep thoughts about parenting and selfishness and control over one’s reality. Both my boys enjoy reading Sendak’s wonderful book. But really, the person in the house who loves it the most has probably always been me.

The IMAGE Blog ◊ Why the Wild Things Are.

I’ve actually enjoyed several of the entries on this site since discovering it last month. A very potent mix of ideas about faith, art, creativity, and how they all co-mingle.

My oldest son Conor (a.k.a. Cartographer) has been sick the past few days, and this afternoon he came home from the doc with a new drive to pay lots of attention to his body temperature. He wants to take his temp every ten minutes or so. Okay, fine. He likes a routine, that’s his thing. But then he told Leah and me that from now on, every morning even after he gets better, he wants to take his temperature after he brushes his teeth but before he goes out to wait for the bus.

Being the rude blurt-out guy I can sometimes be, I said “Dude, that’s just hypochondria.”

Leah looked at me with a sour ‘that was unhelpful’ kind of look, but before she could say anything, Conor answered instead. He said simply,

“Yeah, I want to add hypochondria to my daily routine.”

So yeah, Leah and I both just laughed, and then I said, “I love you, dude.” And that was that.

So. Father’s Day.

It’s cool being a father. My boys are amazingly smart and funny and surprising and wonderful. They keep me sane even when they’re driving me crazy. Being a father on Father’s Day is pretty nifty.

But I’ve spent a lot more years being a son on Father’s Day than I have being a father. And that part of this particular holiday has – more often than not – been less than cool.

You may recall that my father died last December. Here’s the post I wrote the day I found out. Now, I haven’t seen or talked to my father on Father’s Day for several years, although we sent cards up until a couple years ago when they started coming back ‘address unknown’. So I’m used to not connecting with him on the holiday, but this is the first year where, as I put it in my post back in December, “the way it seemed like has become the way it is.”

Robert Bradley, Age 41 (1987)

It has been seven months since the death of Robert Bradley, and although his ashes are now resting in an urn somewhere in my Grandmother’s house in Michigan, we have still not been able to agree on a “convenient” date for our family diaspora to get together and have a memorial service for him. Seven months, and no memorial. My dad was a jackass, but really, his memory deserves better than that. And also, we deserve to have whatever measure of catharsis comes from the ritual of a memorial service. I’ve been wrangling with my aunt and grandmother for awhile over trying to schedule one, and earlier this week it got especially stressful – and we STILL have no date scheduled.

Anyhow, not really what I came here to write about. You don’t need to hear the messy stuff about scheduling a memorial.

The thing I want to share about all this is that a couple days ago my lovely wife Leah came up with the perfect idea for how I can get at least a little catharsis and some closure. Like with so many other things I’ve done in my misfit life, when the standard/typical/mainstream rituals of life don’t suit my needs, I make up my own rituals – and this is what Leah suggested we do today.

We went to get a small two-foot high resin statue. I chose a lion, because the one thing my father and I always enjoyed together in good times and bad was rooting for the Detroit Lions. The lion has been set on a pedestal in our backyard under a tree, and later I will go out there, put some notes, pictures, and a few symbolic bits of memory-fodder into the bottom of this statue, and I’ll think about my dad for awhile. And I’ll tell him that in the past few months, I’ve actually come to understand how incredibly easy it is to let depression and bitterness and stress overwhelm a person, and how someone in that situation might easily lose sight of the blessings of life and become a drunken violent bastard who cuts himself off from everyone who tries to care about him.

I will tell him that I choose not to become that person. I refuse to become that person. But yes, I will admit that I am beginning to understand how easy it would be to do so. I have danced with that temptation a couple of times recently. But I’m not going to hang out in that particular dance hall, thank you very much. I’ve got too many people who love me and too many blessings to count. I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.

And because I may not get the chance to stand up in front of my family at a memorial service and say anything like what I just wrote, I choose to share it with you – anyone who is reading this and those of you who have contributed to giving me the resolve not to become what my father became. And many of you have contributed mightily, make no mistake.

Now, for the next few hours, I’m going to focus on being a great father to my boys and great husband to my wife, and we’re going to go have a fun afternoon. Later, at twilight or so, I’ll become Robert Bradley’s son again for a short while, and I’ll raise a glass to him, and to the fathers of several of my friends whose fathers have died. Then, hopefully, I’ll move on.

Thanks for being my witnesses and my friends.

See you tomorrow.

For those who haven’t seen my Twitter & Facebook status updates in the past couple hours, earlier today I learned that my dad died this morning.

His health has been degenerating for about 15 years. For the last 18 months or so, he’s been in an assisted living facility in San Antonio. I don’t have much information about the actual circumstances, but I’m pretty sure he died alone. My aunt, who lives in Midland, Michigan (where I grew up) doesn’t know much either at this point. The facility called my grandmother – also in Midland – this morning and then Grandma went over to my aunt’s house and told her, and then they called me. The facility has my Grandma as the second contact person, but she got the news because no one can find my half-sister Jodi, who was living somewhere in the San Antonio area but none of us can track her down now.

So, almost certainly, my father died alone in an assisted care facility bed having not been visited by a family member probably in months. This was a situation he cultivated, though.

Dad was a mean drunk and a bitter man, but most of us tried time and time again to re-establish relationships with him after several estrangements. I certainly did. He was my dad. But eventually, he pretty much made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with any of us, and soon enough he got his wish.  He spent the last years of his life essentially alone and this morning, he died alone, and my grandmother had to learn of her son’s death not from a family member, but from a nurse. And my dad brought that about by his own behavior and his own bitterness.

Still, he was my dad.

He threw my mother out of the house when I was six months old, and he somehow managed to get custody of me, then kept me from having any contact with my mother or anyone in her family for my entire childhood. I didn’t meet my mom or any of her relatives until I was 21. I sought them out at that time, and now have a fair (although infrequent) relationship with my mom. My dad was pissed when he learned that. That was just one of several rifts that came between us.

Still, he was my dad.

He was abusive to us as children and to my stepmother as well, until eventually she left him, after my step-siblings and I had gone off to colleges and my half-sister was in high school.

I have spent my adulthood being hounded by the spectre of his influence. I work hard not to be like him. I strive to be a different father than he was, a different man. Most of the weird passive-aggro navel-gazing overdramatic behaviors that many of you know me to exhibit – those are my coping tools on display.

Because he was so bitter about so many things, and it literally ate away at his psyche and his health, I desperately have tried NOT to be bitter about my past with him. I’m partially successful at it, but still, I do get bitter sometimes. There have been times I’ve hated him. Certainly times I’ve hated the him that is in me.

But I’m here, I’m okay. I’m a good person and a good father and I hope I’m a good husband and a good friend. I’m not an alcoholic, I don’t use my fists to keep people at bay, and I’ve got people who care about me, like me, and people who WANT to see me, know me, hang out with me.

Any of those things my dad ever had, he threw away.

Still, he was my dad. He gave me his love of Star Trek and comic books and football. He embedded in me a lifelong love of the Detroit Lions, who are so pathetically bad, and almost always have been. In his own ass-backward way, he took care of me and raised me when he could easily have walked away. And regardless of what happened as a result, I am who I am and I like who I am, and my dad was a big part of that.

Maybe I’m breaking some taboo about speaking ill of the dead. But this is my truth. This is my scab-ripping moment. This is the beginning of the processing that people who know and care about me have already told me is necessary in order for true healing to begin.

I journal it because, as Fred Hicks put so well in his journal yesterday, I’m a textrovert. I needed to write this so I could know how I feel about it.

Bob Bradley was my dad. I did not like him, but I love him. I’ve sort of emotionally prepared for this day for a few years now. With his health problems and continued insistence on holding to his bitterness, it was not hard to know this was coming, and in many ways, for me, it happened a long time ago. So today I sit here, kinda numb, kinda melancholy, but not really grieving. I think that may have already happened, in sort of a slow hissing leak rather than one sudden needle-pop.

On the other hand, today it is official. Today there will be no more last-minute shots at reconciliation. Today, the way it has seemed to be becomes the way it is.

Writing that last sentence may have just cracked my shell a bit. Frak.

Okay, I’ll share more when it feels appropriate. I honestly love all of you who have already sent support and condolences, and those of you whom I know are about to do so. Thanks.