When My Father Died (Patreon)

One of the defining periods of my life was when my father died.

I have complicated feeling about my father. I loved him, he loved me, and though he was an alcoholic, he wasn't in any way a violent man. He shared my love of games, and taught me chess, and Shogi, and Go, and played my first wargame with me. But since he was an alcoholic, he also sometimes took me to the restaurant in walking distance from our house (The Mont, for local Normanites) and sat in the bar area drinking, while I sat next to him (on the other side of the brass railing that defined the bar, so I officially wasn't in the bar), and playing chess with me. Sometimes we did this at 2am, when my mother had no idea I was out (though to be fair, only in the summers, not during the school year), and sometimes watching as I played chess with other drunks.

And sometimes, I just ate nachos and played Miss Pac Man on a sit-down machine. Because he was too drunk for anything else.

I never felt unsafe. Maybe I should have, but you can see our house from The Mont, and I had my own door key, so I was always able to go home, and I always knew my father would walk rather than drive, since he'd walked to get there. He did, sadly, sometimes pass out literally in the doorway at the front of our house, having successfully unlocked the door, but laying down before he managed to get inside and close it.

But time with my father was precious. Especially time when he was both relaxed, which always required a drink or two in him, but before he was slurring his words. Walking with him to the Mont was an ideal way to get as much relaxed-but-cogent dad time as I could, and I could walk home when he stopped being able to carry on a conversation.

It wasn't always like that. That was mostly a matter of my late teens, after my sister had gone off to college, and after my father had managed to step down from being Dean of the Economics Department of the University of Oklahoma. Fewer children to actively care for, less responsibility, and the progressive nature of alcoholism made those years, before my parents got (lovingly, amicably, but definitely) divorced, the worst for me dealing with my father's addiction. His disease.

I have that disease. It just manifests differently, for me.

So, when my father left his job, was divorced by my mother (who still considered him family, but knew he was no longer than man she had married -- and she was right), moved out of the house, and got to a point where he could no longer function, I had some less-pleasant times with my father. I was married myself at that point, and I no longer viewed his actions through the eyes of a child. My father used taxi drivers to bring him groceries and alcohol (no InstaCart or similar services in Oklahoma in those days, the 1990s, but if you got in good with a taxi service, they'd bring you anything legal, and maybe things not-legal, but the cost of the drive as if you were riding, and the supplies, and an extra $20). He hired sex workers for companionship, and sex, but also to cook. Never to clean, though.

And he was drunk. Not, 'he got drunk,' but he was drunk, nonstop, for months at a time. Maybe for years. He did, eventually, drink himself to death. But not before a lot of hospital visits, prior to that last one.

He lived alone, when he wasn't paying for someone to stay with him. His mother, my grandmother, paid for things she thought he needed that he didn't, or that he couldn't afford, or that he couldn't remember how to afford. When he died he still had great financial resources, he'd just lost or forgotten about many of them, and my sister and I had to rediscover them. And he was a nonstop drunk. And that meant he hurt himself.

My sister wasn't living in the state at this point, And my mother was no longer his wife. And my grandmother was too frail to do anything if he needed help. So when he fell and hit his head and called my grandmother because there was blood everywhere, it fell to me to go see if he was badly enough hurt to need an ambulance. Or if he thought there was someone in his apartment and needed support getting them to leave. (Which there never was, but given his lifestyle it was possible.) Or if he decided to go over legal documents for my grandmother, who couldn't really grasp that her son was destroying himself.

And he was my father. I loved him. And, while I knew he was killing himself, I was powerless to stop him. We'd tried intervention. Much later, before the divorce, he went to a rehab and got sober. But, he couldn't maintain it. The reality of, well, reality was more than he could handle on his own. If I'd known then what I know know, I'd have tried to get him into therapy. But at the time I'd only had BAD therapists, and I did not believe good ones existed. So I knew my father was killing himself, all efforts to save him had failed, my grandmother worried about him (a lot), and I was reduced to social, familial, palliative care.

To be clear, my wife helped a lot. My mother helped when and where she could. My grandmother assisted me in any way she was able. But mostly, I was the one going up the steps to his second-floor, two-bedroom apartment, and cleaning his blood off the wall. Or, on one case, the Clamato Juice he thought was blood.

I'll be honest, cleaning up blood was less gross than Clamato.

He was in-and-out of the hospital, both from falling injuries and for things like his liver function reducing. He claimed for years he was not killing himself, that the alcohol was good for him. Then, in the last 18 months or so, he accepted that he WAS drinking himself to death, and that he was unwilling to make any changes to prevent it. My sister asked if she needed to come home to see him, and I told her that if she wanted to be SURE she saw him one more time, yes, now was the time to visit.

She did. That was less than a year before my father died.

He was already in the hospital when he went. I had visited him in the hospital the first dozen or so times he went in for a few days, but I had stopped bothering to make the trip every time. Even my grandmother no longer made the trip every time. So, while I knew he was in the hospital the night he died, I had not gone to see him. Somehow, though, when my phone rang late that night, I knew why. It was my grandmother. She was still his medical emergency contact. I should have changed that, but I hadn't. The hospital had called her to let her know and she, in tears, called me.

Contacting most of the family was easy, it was really just my grandmother, my sister, me.... and my mother. She was no longer his wife, but they had both been very clear they considered each other family, and loved each other, just no longer as spouses. My sister took the news with sadness, but not surprise. But my mother was out of town, at a music festival. I had her contact information. And, I had a decision to make.

My mother did not have any duties, legal or familial, to perform in the days right after my father died. She was at a festival, with friends, having fun. Did I call to tell her that her ex-husband had finally died? Or did I wait until she got home? Was the news going to ruin her hard-earned vacation? Was not telling her cruel? Was it inappropriate? I wasn't sure what etiquette was for telling your mother than her ex-husband she still loved has finally managed to drink himself to death. Weirdly, this was the second-most difficult decision I made regarding my father's death.

My wife recommended I call. My wife is smart. I called.

It took a bit to get hold of her. But, even though it was late at night, she was awake in her hotel room. She had been working on lyrics for a song about the men in her life, and for a long time had needed one more line about my father. It had come to her, before my call, and it talked about his death. We had all known it was coming. I suspect we had all known it'd be soon.

The most difficult call I made about my father's death was who to ask to be pallbearers. He did not have many friends at that point. Maybe two. And neither of them was hale enough to help carry a casket. In the end, we had some family, and I asked some of my closest friends to fill out the roster. I really appreciated them stepping up.

Friends help you move, one of them noted. TRUE friends help you move bodies. I have true friends.

Dealing with my father's estate was simplified by the fact that, having discovered he had no will, I had gotten my father to write a simple holographic will, also known as a olographic testament. All that means is that it's exclusively written in the creator's handwriting, no one else's writing on the page, and they sign and date it. No 3D holographs required. They are legally binding in Oklahoma, and while we had to have my grandmother's lawyer get it approved by the court, it let us avoid probate.

My sister and her husband came down to help my wife and I clean out his apartment. It took weeks. His landlord was amazingly kind about it. They had liked my father, who always paid on time, never made a racket, never complained, and was friendly to everyone. The landlord gave us an extra month free of charge to get the apartment cleared, and lent us a 2-wheel hand truck to help manage the stairs. I was in my 20s. We managed.

Lots of people wanted to warn me that my sister and I would fight over who got what. We didn't. Most things we instinctively agreed which one of us got. If we didn't immediately agree, we put it aside in a to-deal-with later pile. When that was all that was left, we split it roughly evenly in a completely amicable process. We often used logic. My sister had taken Russian language classes, so she got his coffee table book in Russia. I could get the ancient stuffed lion toy home without having to pack it, so it went with me.

I had more than a decade of RPG treasure division experience to lean on, but I didn't need it. Never have, in fact, for any of the family estates I have been part of splitting among inheritors.

As an economist, my father has liked getting annual reports from companies. He had found the best way to do that was to buy 1 share of stock, so they were legally required to send him their annual reports. As a result, he had a single share of stock for scores, if not hundreds, of companies. Luckily, my brother-in-law was a trained stock broker. So, he figured out what we needed to do to get those sold and/or transferred to us. But each and every one needed my name, and my sister's name, and "co-trustees of the estate of" my father's name. We got a rubber stamp with the parts that didn't have to be signatures, and made an assembly line. My brother-in-law would get the form. My wife would stamp it with the stamp. I'd sign. My sister would sign. It'd get stacked up. Then, as a second round, my brother would put it in an envelope. My wife would address it. My sister slapped on a return address sticker. I licked it, sealed it, and stamped it.

It took a couple of hours.

There were other things that had to be dealt with. My father had an entire shoebox of credit cards. Many were old accounts, but some didn't have expiration dates on them, so we weren't. Others had never been activated. But many were current, and had balances. My wife sat on our living room floor, and went through all of them, making phone call after phone call to credit card companies. There's a funny story about that. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u3w3uGLvhk)

And, basically, that was it.

Looking back, I see I did a lot of growing as a result of my father dying. I suppose that makes sense, but only recently did I think of it that way. It was the first major death of my immediate family, and honestly, the first major death in my immediate social circle. I have lost far too many dear friends and some other close family since then, but my father was the first. And as I approach the age he was when he died, I can't help but compare our lives, our addictions, and the relative size of our social circles.

I loved my father very much. But even with his genius, his Ph.D., his awards, and all the thousands of lives he touched as a professor... I never envied him.

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