Posts Tagged ‘my father’

This post was going to be about a new digital painting that I’ve completed and I was going to show it off here, but that can wait until this evening. The painting is done and waiting in my Picasa Web Album, but as I was about to embed it here on the Monkey, I got a phone call.

My aunt in Michigan was on the other end of the phone, sobbing. MY first thought was … Oh, no, now Grandma is sick, or worse.

But no. Apparently a little while ago, a package arrived via FedEx containing my father’s ashes.

My sister stepped up. She sent the ashes to Michigan, as we hoped, and as my father wanted. His remains get to be where he wants them to be. This is good.

There is a slight personal gut-punch in this for me, and that is, after all the messages I left, and the cards I mailed to my sister, asking her to contact me so we could talk about Dad’s ashes, she has never replied to me. She DID send the ashes, and that’s a win, and I’m happy. But my kid sister has my number, address, and obvious effort on my part to reach her … and has not reciprocated.

But I’ll take what we have. The outcome may not be as nice for me personally as I was hoping, but the outcome overall is achieved. We’ll have Dad’s remains to spread at his memorial in Michigan sometime next month. Something tangible to say goodbye, and my aunt and grandmother satisfied.

Time for a post that I’ve actually written myself, eh? Is it about roleplaying or VAM or geeky stuff? Nope. It’s about my father’s cremated remains.

I’ve been IM-ing and Facebook-commenting to several interested parties over the past few days about this, so I finally figured out that maybe it would be appropriate to just write a detailed post about it, since I’ve been dragging many of you into this miasma with various tweets and such. Read the rest of this entry »

After I wrote here on LJ last week about getting the news of my father’s death and the strained state of my relationship with him, I spent a lot of time over the next few hours pondering and processing.

As a guy fond of fantasy and myth, it’s probably not surprising that I spent a lot of that evening thinking about various “what if?” scenarios. What if I’d been in touch with him before he died? What if we’d made one last attempt at reconciliation? Better yet, what if someone other than a hospice nurse had been there at the end? What if I had been there?

I imagined that somewhere, somewhen, in an alternate universe where just a few different choices had been made, some different things said, things worked out better, and I was there with him right up to the end. I imagined what that might be like.

In one of those odd and wonderful things that the universe occasionally cooks up in spite of the cynics and skeptics, I happened to subscribe to Sean Patrick Fannon’s LJ () just a day or two before that, because I wanted to follow his ongoing Quest for a lady geek to share his life with. I’ve know of Sean for several years, because we share some common friends and associates, a passion for roleplaying, and a fondness for our Irish heritage. But we’ve never actually met. I’ve listened to him on podcasts, read some of his work, but never personally met him. Well, I was just catching up on the news of his Quest on his LJ when on Thursday morning, Sean wrote about his father being in serious ill health and being taken to the hospital. Sean and other members of his family went there to join him and keep vigil. During that time, Sean shared some updates about developments with his dad.

Suddenly, that alternate reality that I’d been imagining gained all kinds of poignant clarity.  Without even knowing it, Sean’s heartfelt sharing of his family ordeal reached across the aether to my laptop and captured me. Every day, I would read his journal, with its emotional ups and downs and its example of a true family acting like a true family, and I would be confronted with my own regrets, my own hopes, and my own what-ifs. And I was able to process them.

I’m still not fully comprehending how this whole odd mingling of lives and journals and fathers is really affecting me, but I know that Sean’s sharing of his week has been an incredible help to me in dealing with my own grief and regret.

And now I find myself without a good way to close out this entry. I suppose I’ll leave it with this: Thanks Sean, for sharing your feelings and your ordeal this past week. I grieve with you and I appreciate you.  I am awed at how these sorts of uncanny things happen – even in the midst of sadness, grief, and turmoil, threads of lives weave together and bring healing and empathy.

And here’s to two men of Irish blood – Charles Edwin Fannon and Robert Richard Bradley, who each in their own way helped make their sons the men thay are today.

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.