On my dead dad
Or, why a book made me ugly cry
For the last eight or so years of his life, four-fifths of my father's children refused to speak to him. It's a lot to explain why without telling the whole story of our lives (other than perhaps just saying he was a Bad Dad) but I'm going to tell the part that put me over the edge. (I think of it as The Condo Story, which longtime readers may remember I alluded to all the way back in, uh, November. So not THAT long ago, but whatever.)
I used to own a condo in Salt Lake City, in the one zip code that took longer to recover from the housing crash than everywhere else. When my husband and I decided to move (back, for me) to Arizona, we couldn't sell it for enough to cover everything, so we rented it out at a loss to us every month. It wasn't ideal, but we could manage it.
Then I had a baby and we couldn't afford to cover the loss and pay for daycare. I had said I might liquidate my 401k to cover selling it, but my dad said not to, that they'd help us out. (And to be fair, he did give us some money, once.) Then he said they'd buy it from us as an investment, but nothing ever came of it. It was hard enough for me, a child raised to never have needs or wants, to ask for money that one time, so I couldn't exactly be like “hey, when are you going to buy the condo??” My parents had sold their big fancy house and moved back into their (still quite large, lol) paid off house. My dad, as you'll recall, then had a stroke. At this point I asked my mom if there was any money left from the other house that we could use to pay closing costs and finally get rid of the condo. “That's a sad story,” she told me.
Apparently, they already owned a condo in Utah. (dun dun duuuuuuun) They went to Utah to look at properties, and my dad picked out one that was—obviously—not the condo that I desperately needed to get rid of. Mom warned him that I'd be hurt if I found out and he said “what she doesn't know won't hurt her.”
Well! That may technically be true, but when I did find out it was extra hurtful! But wait, it gets worse. After dad been in the hospital/rehab a while, one of his coworkers called and was like “hey, he's got some mail here on his desk.” Skipping some story here, but long story short, dad had a mistress, her daughter was the realtor they used when they bought the condo, the daughter was also their tenant, and my dad was giving her the money to pay the rent, which he had opened a secret bank account and sold some stock to do it without my mom knowing. All of this subterfuge and betrayal for the sake of his girlfriend's daughter! I guess she wanted to pick her own place? Because he still could have done all the other betrayal, just with my condo instead of the newer one!
So, that's a big part of why I didn't talk to my dad again. (Understandably so, if I do say so myself.) When my sister texted all of the siblings in the fall of 2022 asking for our email address for a form for the funeral home, I was like “uh, is there something we don't know or is this just anticipatory?” He wasn't dead yet, but getting there. And then when he was finally gone, at first I didn't really feel anything at all, not even relief. Twelve hours later I had Feelings, but it was more like grief for the childhood I didn't have, the relationship that wasn't worth mourning. He was a narcissist, and trying to get apologies or closure from narcissists is the proverbial blood from a turnip. You mostly just have to make peace with that, because the odds are incredibly slim that they will ever admit to doing anything wrong. So I wasn't feeling sadness because he was gone, it was for what I didn't get—and now definitely never could.
(It doesn’t give you the option to caption YouTube videos, for some reason? Anyway, after the burial, I posted a video of them cranking his coffin down into the ground with a clip of this song over it, starting at this point. If you don’t know the song, it is brutal about a dead Bad Dad.)
Perhaps at this point you are wondering what book I'm going to tie into this vast oversharing about my dead father. Great question! It's the just-released Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun, which is a sapphic romance about two former best friends who are taking their dying former English teacher, Joe, on one last cross-country trip. (This is not a spoiler; it's literally in the back cover blurb.)
The book is, in a word, fantastic. It's a road trip, so you've got forced proximity, they are friends-turned-enemies, so you've got that snarky banter. There are some amazing jokes, one of which involves Taco Bell, plus a running gag of taking queer icons’ names in vain. I laughed!
I also cried! Both of the women viewed their teacher as type of stand-in parental figure. One of them had lost her dad when she was young and her mom had been emotionally unavailable, at least partly because of the work she had to put in to keep them afloat. The other woman had a good dad, but her mom had split when she was a kid and never looked back. So lots of parent baggage, and the need for a safe adult who could give them some of the constancy and affection they had lacked. And Joe does die, y'all, that is not the happy ending here. The descriptions of everyone's grief as they watched this man they loved die wrecked me, just absolutely gutted me.
I think part of why I responded so viscerally (not since Finding Neverland has a work made me cry so much) is because it was sadness about an experience I didn't get to have. I didn't have a good relationship with my dad. I didn’t grieve or mourn him when he died, because there was no sense of loss. I think, once again, it was sadness about an experience I didn't get to have. Yes, it broke their hearts to watch a beloved mentor and father figure die, but it was a sign of their closeness.
Chances are, if you read Here We Go Again (and you should), parts will make you sad. The writing is lovely and the love and grief are both so vivid. It probably won’t make you weep so hard you mess up your contacts so badly you can’t even see, although you never know. As long as you’re still alive, there’s always a possibility.
oh man I could write an essay in response to this post. I'm sorry about your Bad Dad, and that Alison Cochrun book made me cry, too, for reasons that your post helped clarify for me.