What’s worse? The sickness or the cure?

I had a dream my mother hugged me.

Not just hugged me.

Held me.

Tightly. With genuine care behind her intent. Like a new mother holding an infant, she embraced her adult son with the intention of somehow making everything okay again.

There was no hesitation in it. No awkwardness. No history.

She just grabbed me and held me.

And I let her.

That’s probably what fucked me up the most when I woke up.

Because some part of me has wanted that hug for a very long time.

My relationship with my mother is complicated because she did love me. I know she loved me.

She protected me. Defended me. Enabled me. Sheltered me. Sometimes so aggressively that protection stopped feeling like protection and started feeling like containment.

She could be loud. Aggressive. Angry. Overprotective. There were things I wasn’t allowed to do because something might happen. Places I couldn’t go. Risks I couldn’t take.

The world was dangerous and apparently I needed to be protected from all of it.

I understand more of that now.

Especially knowing what happened before it.

I’m a parent now.

I understand what terror can do to love.

I understand wanting to put your children in bubble wrap because you know something they don’t know yet.

Terrible things actually happen.

Sometimes the person you love gets cancer.

Sometimes the giant becomes skeletal.

Sometimes the strongest man you know suddenly needs a cane.

Sometimes there is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

My father was a big, strong former power lifter and contractor. A physically imposing guy. Strong hands. Big personality. The kind of man who seemed almost impossible to imagine becoming weak.

Until he did.

Cancer and chemotherapy reduced him to skeletal remains.

What’s worse?

The sickness or the cure?

I still don’t know.

But before all of that, he was my hero.

Not because he was perfect.

He wasn’t.

People have a tendency to clean up the dead. Remove the bad habits. Sand down the personality defects. Turn them into saints because apparently dying is the ultimate reputation-management strategy.

My father has certainly received that treatment.

He had a temper.

And when I say temper, I mean we could tell who was coming through the door at night by the sound of the keys.

Mom’s keys sounded like Mom’s keys when we were young. Frantic, disheveled but ultimately motherly and wrapped tightly in safety to some degree.

Dad’s keys had an entire emotional range.

You could hear them before the door even opened and know whether one of the three of us had fucked up.

If those keys jangled a little too aggressively or that garage door came swinging open too fast and THEN you heard those heavy work-boot footed steps coming through the house?

Holy fuck.

You better be ready for it.

And my father wasn’t physically violent or abusive.

Sure, we got the occasional spanking when we were little. It was the 1980s. Apparently everybody’s parents were briefly allowed to hit them on the ass and then send them upstairs to think about why getting hit on the ass was their own fault.

But that wasn’t what made his anger intimidating.

His personality was drenched in violence when he got angry.

His voice. His size. His presence. His face turning shades of red to purple. The way the entire energy of the house could change because Dad had walked through the door pissed off.

He didn’t have to touch you.

You fucking knew.

And God knows this is part of the family inheritance too.

I inherited that temper and, unfortunately, gave it my own interpretation.

Maybe even took the original role and made it my own.

There are parts of my father I’ve spent my entire life trying to emulate.

That probably isn’t one of them.

But it’s there.

I can change the performance.

I can’t pretend I don’t recognize the script and who wrote it.

His attention span could also be nonexistent.

I inherited that too, so thank you, Dad.

Anyway, what were we talking about?

Almost every interest I still carry around started somewhere with him. Those are the good parts and understand the quantity of good outweighs the “quality” or strength of the bad.

Music. Movies. Horror. Sports. Fishing. Humor. Detroit lions. A good deli sandwich. Cooking. The ability to find something incredibly funny specifically because you probably shouldn’t. The ability to be a man-child and still be a prince to those around you.

But ESPECIALLY horror movies.

I watched A Nightmare on Elm Street with my father and my older brothers when I was way too young to be watching A Nightmare on Elm Street. Probably four years old. We had it on Betamax

And all three of them thought terrorizing the youngest child afterward was absolutely hysterical.

Including my father.

ESPECIALLY my father.

They taped knives to my “My Buddy” doll and threw him at me after forcing me to watch Child’s Play (Before or after NOES). I am still emotionally scarred from that

They constantly hid under my bed and waited until I was almost asleep before grabbing me or jumping out.

They weaponized basically every fear Freddy Krueger had just introduced into my developing brain and then went to bed perfectly content with themselves.

My father was a grown man participating in this. He was a practical joker to the fullest extent. 

Actively.

He wasn’t supervising.

He was part of our usually directing the fucking operation and he did it with strategy like Winston fucking Churchill.

And somehow I remember it with complete warmth.

That’s childhood.

You can be absolutely terrified and completely safe at the exact same time.

I thought Freddy Krueger could theoretically murder me in my sleep.

But I also knew my dad was there and it would be OK. It was endearing.

And if Freddy actually showed up, my dad would have done exactly what he always threatened to do to anybody who fucked with one of his kids:

“Beat the piss out of him”

That was one of his signature phrases.

I loved when he said it. It wasn’t SHIT, it was PISS. Such a fun pivot.

There was something wonderfully definitive about it.

Problem solved.

Then there were the mornings up north.

Completely different version of him. The focused Dad. In his element.

Early fishing trips on the Boston Whaler. Lake Charlevoix still and cold in the morning. James Taylor. Jimmy Buffett. Van Morrison. The Eagles. Chicago.

Those tapes became the soundtrack to him.

For me, especially Chicago.

At some point Peter Cetera’s voice became almost synonymous with my father in my brain. I can hear that distinctive high-tenor voice now and something happens inside me before I even have time to identify the song.

I’m back on the boat.

I’m a kid again.

My dad is alive.

It isn’t exactly sadness. It isn’t exactly comfort either. It’s some strange combination of warmth and longing and grief for a time in my life when I didn’t know I was supposed to be memorizing any of it.

I didn’t know those mornings would become sacred later. Even towards the end.

They were just mornings.

The boat. The music. The smell of the lake. My dad moving around with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where he was and what he was doing. An authority of Northern Michigan and a pro-fisherman.

Nothing dramatic happened.

That was the point.

We were just there.

Being happy. Sometimes with my brothers. Sometimes just us.

It was special.

I remember the feeling more than the details.

Being around him felt safe.

He could charm the shit out of a room too.

Good God, could he charm a room.

He could talk to anybody.

One thing he always told me was that you treat the gas station attendant exactly the same way you treat the CEO.

Not nicer because you feel sorry for somebody.

Not nicer because somebody can do something for you.

The same.

That stuck.

He was incredibly well loved and, more importantly, respected. Especially as a custom home builder for many high profile CEOs and businessmen in the Detroit area. He adored by his direct clients, their wives (We all learned our ways from him) , architects-including the wonderfully famous Irv Tobocman and even his day laborers who he would play pranks with constantly on job sites. 

I genuinely cannot remember hearing a bad word about him from anyone who knew him.

Since his death, he has basically been enshrined as a saint.

Again, he wasn’t.

I knew the guy very well.

But he was certainly a great father.

He was also a workaholic to the nth degree, yet somehow he showed up.

Football games.

Soccer games.

Cub Scouts.

Performances.

Practices.

Whatever we were doing, he was invested in it.

Whoever wronged us he would go to bat for us or explain to us what we could have done better. He threatened a couple teachers here and there but also threatened me if I didn’t apologize for my role in whatever reason they were “picking on me”. He was fair.

And when we needed to cry, he was there for that too. 

Which is strange because during the last two years of his life, I stopped crying.

Not because I wasn’t sad.

I think I was just sad all the time.

Eventually sadness stops announcing itself.

It becomes the weather.

I was also a teenager.

Possibly the worst developmental stage imaginable for processing the slow death of your father.

I was trying to chase pussy.

I started smoking weed freshman year.

I wanted to be anywhere mentally other than inside a house where the two permanent residents- My mother and myself- knew what was coming and nobody could stop it. Not even the surrounding cast of characters who came in to watch the slow burn of death be ignited in the last few months of his sickness.

And then I found football.

Football was perfect.

Football rewarded me for recklessly destroying another human being.

Defensive tackle.

Pulling guard.

Find somebody.

Hit him.

Drive through him.

Keep moving and destroy everything in your path.

Turns out this was excellent preparation for how I would handle most emotions for the next decade or two.

My grades started failing.

I skipped class.

I stopped caring about trumpet and symphony band, which had previously been a huge part of my life.

I was a damn good musician but at that point I didn’t care about much. I skipped symphony for six straight weeks and hung out with friends in the lunch room.

At a small private school.

Which is not particularly easy to do.

My dad wanted to talk to me about it.

He was about six months from death. This Was probably December of 1999. He looked it. You could see the aura around him.

And I needed to get my AOL chat time in before bed.

That sentence alone should tell you everything you need to know about being fifteen and what a selfish little shit I was.

He followed me down the hallway.

Or tried to.

This huge, strong former power lifter and construction worker was now reduced to basically skeletal remains, feebly following his teenage son as fast as his failing limbs could allow with a cane because he wanted to talk to him about why his grades were plummeting.

Why he was skipping class.

Why he had suddenly stopped caring about music.

Why he seemed to have stopped caring about basically everything.

And I turned around, annoyed.

“Dad, I don’t have a lot of time!”

He looked at me, teary-eyed and shouted

“Jamie, I don’t either.”

FUCK.

There are sentences you hear.

And then there are sentences that alter the chemistry of your brain.

That one never left.

It hit me immediately.

Not twenty years later in therapy.

Right there.

My father was dying.

He knew he was dying.

I knew he was dying.

And somehow I had managed to become irritated with him for interfering with my AOL Instant Messenger schedule.

I’d love to tell you that this unlocked some fully developed selfless part of me.

It didn’t.

I was still fifteen.

But it unlocked something.

Maybe pity at first.

Maybe empathy.

Maybe simply the understanding that another human being could be experiencing something infinitely larger than whatever I was experiencing.

My father literally did not have time.

And I did.

I still feel beyond guilty about it.

People can tell me I was a kid.

I know.

They can tell me teenagers are inherently selfish.

I know. I get to coach them every day.

They can tell me I was grieving before I even understood what grief was.

I know.

None of that makes the image disappear.

My father.

The cane.

His eyes filling with tears.

Me trying to walk away.

“I don’t have a lot of time.”

“Jamie, I don’t either.”

And maybe that sentence is part of understanding my mother now.

Because while I was losing my father, she was losing her husband.

She was watching this enormous man disappear too.

She was watching her children fall apart in completely different ways while probably falling apart herself.

And then he died.

And she still had to be our mother.

I understand now how that can fuck a person up.

I understand how fear becomes control.

How protecting a teenage son who just lost his father becomes overprotecting him.

How overprotecting becomes sheltering.

How sheltering becomes enabling.

How enabling can still feel like love when you’re the person doing it.

I understand how somebody who has already watched one catastrophe happen can become obsessed with preventing the next one.

I get it.

I really do.

But understanding it now doesn’t change what it did to me then.

That’s the part I think people confuse.

Understanding is not absolution.

My mother loved me.

My mother also hurt me.

Both are true.

I don’t have to make her a villain to say that.

And I don’t have to pretend the damage didn’t happen just because I can finally understand where some of it came from.

We were a family trying to survive something enormous.

Survival creates some strange adaptations.

Some of mine nearly killed me.

Some of hers made it incredibly difficult for us to have a healthy relationship once I became an adult.

And now we aren’t speaking.

That sentence is still bizarre to me.

My mother is alive.

And I cannot call her.

There is something uniquely painful about grieving somebody who is still alive.

She exists somewhere in the world.

She can answer a phone.

I can technically dial the number.

But the relationship has become too fractured for that to be healthy.

That kind of loss doesn’t have a funeral.

Nobody sends flowers or a deli tray.

There’s no Shiva.

There’s no clean ending.

The person is just absent.

Recently, I have felt abandoned by the majority of my family at some of the exact moments I needed them most.

Getting sober.

Going through divorce.

Trying to rebuild a life while simultaneously taking responsibility for how badly I had damaged the previous one.

Sobriety removed the anesthesia.

Divorce removed the structure.

And suddenly I was standing there without either one.

I didn’t need my mother to fix my life.

I didn’t need her to tell me I was right about everything.

I needed my mother to be my mother.

Last February, I gave her my amends. A tenth step that was beyond overdue and something I worked on for weeks, if not an entire lifetime.

That mattered enormously to me.

I took responsibility for my side.

My addiction.

My behavior.

My selfishness.

The ways I had hurt her and everyone else who loved me.

I wasn’t asking her to erase any of it because I had gotten sober.

Then she apologized back to me.

“I don’t think I was able to be such a great mother to you back then.”

That sentence hit me.

Because that was really all I needed.

Acknowledgment.

Not some massive confession.

Not me being right and her being wrong.

Just:

Yeah.

Something happened here.

I wasn’t always what you needed.

Of course I accepted her apology.

I wanted to.

And then three days later, she betrayed me.

And somehow we ended up in an even worse place than before.

That may have hurt more because I had just lowered the drawbridge.

I had allowed myself to believe something had changed.

That’s the fucked-up thing about hope.

Sometimes the most painful part isn’t what somebody does to you.

It’s realizing you had finally felt safe enough to stop expecting them to do it.

So now there are boundaries.

Distance.

Silence.

I hate that.

I hate that I can understand my mother and still not trust her.

I hate that I can love her and still know that having her in my life right now may not be healthy.

I hate that the person I instinctively want comfort from is also somebody I have had to protect myself from.

Which brings me back to the dream.

Because none of that existed there.

No argument.

No family politics.

No explaining myself.

No proving anything.

No accusations.

No alcohol.

No grandchildren.

No history lesson.

Nobody was right.

Nobody was wrong.

I was just her son.

And she held me.

And maybe the strangest part is that I didn’t resist.

I didn’t ask for an apology.

I didn’t remind her what happened.

I didn’t tell her why I was angry.

I didn’t need her to admit anything.

I just let my mother hold me.

Because underneath four decades of anger, resentment, addiction, recovery, parenthood, divorce, therapy, boundaries and every other piece of armor I’ve accumulated, there is still a kid whose father died.

A kid who watched the strongest man he knew die peacefully in front of his eyes.

A kid who once told his dying father he didn’t have enough time.

A kid who learned far too young that parents can disappear.

And maybe that kid still wants his mother.

Maybe he always will.

The dream didn’t fix anything.

My father is gone.

My mother is alive, but we aren’t speaking.

And I’m still here.

Trying to become the kind of man my father believed I could be.

Trying to show up.

Trying to stay sober.

Trying to be there for my children.

Trying to remember that being somebody’s hero doesn’t mean being perfect.

My dad certainly wasn’t.

The guy tortured me with sheer delight in all of his pranks.

But he showed up.

He made the game, even towards the end of his life. With a cane. With a smile. With advice afterwards for how I can improve. 

He took me fishing.

He played the music loud.

He let me cry.

He chased me down a hallway with a cane when he barely had enough strength to walk because, with three months left to live, he was still worried about whether his son was going to be okay.

My father wasn’t a saint.

He was my dad.

He was my hero.

And my mother wasn’t always the mother I needed.

But she is still my mother.

That’s why the dream hurt so fucking much.

Because for a few seconds, I wasn’t a 42-year-old man with boundaries and resentments and a complicated family history.

I wasn’t sober.

I wasn’t divorced.

I wasn’t anybody’s father.

I wasn’t trying to fix or survive or understand anything.

I was just somebody’s son.