“You gotta hold on to what you believe in.” I’ve brought my guitar to the hospital. Dad has managed to make a fist and he’s shakily punching the air above his chest as he sings the lyrics to a song I wrote back in 1976. I’m playing the chords, muffing as many notes as I’m nailing, my fingers weak and clumsy from lack of practice. I should feel proud that after all these years, Dad is singing my words. Instead, I feel vaguely dislocated, as though I’m standing outside myself, watching and condemning everything I say and do.
I joke that he sings my songs better than I do.
“Sure, son,” Dad’s laugh stretches into a loud smacking yawn, bringing smiles to the nurse and the man lying on the other bed. I bite into a doughnut I’d purchased at the hospital snack bar.
“Whatcha got there, son?” Dad’s eyes brighten as I offer him a bite. As usual, every move I make, every sidelong glance, registers with him. Whatever I’m eating he insists on sampling. I shouldn’t be eating this crap. Dad’s a living example of what will happen to me if I’m not careful. But lately I’ve been gulping down booze, desserts and sleeping pills in large quantities. I go extra crazy on desserts whenever I’m visiting Dad.
“What have you been up to, Danny?” Dad’s question lifts me out of my haze of self-recrimination. I mutter something about a new song of mine that the Backstreet Boys have recently recorded. Right now they’re the biggest-selling group in the world. Dad, bless his jazz-loyal heart, has never heard of them.
“Your infection’s starting to clear up. I’m proud of you, Dad, you’re a fighter.”
I’m using a carbon-copy of the same rah-rah-rah speech he always gave me when I was rallying from some childhood illness. I think back to a week before, when the toxins were so high in his bloodstream that he ripped all the tubes and needles from his body and attempted to get out of bed, thinking he had to go to work. As I adjust his hospital gown to cover up his half-exposed brown thighs, I feel my self slipping again, falling back and away, into the deep dark blue.
“D’you have any other stories for me, Danny?” he asks, with a vulnerability that slays me. Our positions have been reversed now. Challenging as it’s been to be his son, at least it was in keeping with the natural order of things. If this reversal is supposed to signify the final passage in my ever-shifting journey with Dad, I want no part of it. My sadness feels all the sharper because Dad, recently, appears to be more accepting of the change that’s happening between us.
I ask Dad if there’s a specific story he’d like me to tell him. Since he’s gotten weaker, he prefers stories he’s heard before. That way he knows what’s coming and can savour the build-up leading to the release much the way people crave familiar songs, or children find reassurance in hearing the same bedtime story night after night. He asks for my Merv Griffin story.
“The audiences in Canada really love you, Dan,” Mr. Griffin observed to me, during a pre-show prep interview in 1977. I stammered my thanks and then asked Mr. Griffin how he’d come to know this.
“I heard a tape of a live concert of yours. Where was it you were playing, again?” Mr. Griffin appeared perplexed by the stir I was creating north of the border.
I stared back at him in his loose, beige sweatpants. Wow. Merv Griffin, in sweats. I couldn’t wait to tell Mom about this.
“Regina,” I finally replied. “I was performing in Regina.”
“Vagina?” he asked, his voice dropping to an incredulous whisper. “You performed in Vagina?”
It seemed terribly wrong, a dreadful mistake, to hear Mr. Griffin even say “vagina.” Hell, I’d probably only heard the word actually spoken once or twice. I started to pedantically spell out “R-E-G,” but by the time I’d hit the “G” and noticed Mr. Griffin obediently spelling the letters along with me, I lapsed into a fit of hysterical giggles.
Dad’s laughter turns to coughing, to choking and, somehow, back to laughter. He rarely laughs this hard anymore. It’s as though his body is being pummelled from within. Is it possible that he could laugh himself into a fatal heart attack? Would that be so bad? When I start thinking these morbid thoughts, it’s time for me to go home.
Darkness is falling when I hit Queen Street. It’s a six-mile walk home. I calculate the energy expenditure—ninety minutes equals four hundred and fifty calories equals three doughnuts—and I head off.
As I watched my dad physically break down, a part of me wanted to go down with him. Bev, horrified, knew that criticizing my behaviour would make it worse. At least I was home, rarely leaving except to work out or visit Dad or track down a missing royalty payment. All she could do was hope that I would emerge from this dark place when the inevitable, the unmentionable happened. Late at night, as the wine and sleeping pills worked their magic, I’d lurch and wobble my way downstairs, gripping the banister with both hands, and stumble into the basement guest room. Dropping to the bed, I’d close my eyes to the same dream: there’d be shards of glass, my foot sliced and bloodied, and a well-scrubbed surgeon about to lop off my leg. I’d wake up dehydrated and bloated, throw on my track shorts and stagger out the door for my 7 a.m., ten-mile purge. My legs, my lungs, my heart seemed to collude so that the previous night’s act of self-destruction took on the form of a pre-race handicap ritual to give my body that extra challenge.
That my extreme devotion to running verged on self-cannibalism (my latest in a series of pain inoculations—a vainer form of cross-addiction) wasn’t lost on me. I’d dropped over forty pounds in the last two years. Anorexia athletica (gorging on calories and burning it off with exercise afterwards) was apparently my condition—there’s a succinct little term for everything these days. Basically, I wanted to shrivel up into a ball and die a slow, drawn-out death. Alongside my father.
Dad’s willpower was staggering. In the army, he smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, but he stopped cold turkey in his early twenties after realizing that the dangers of smoking cigarettes outweighed the pleasure. When we were kids, all the children in the neighbourhood would swarm him on the front porch after dinner. Smoking one Cuban cigar after another, Dad would enchant them with his extemporaneous tales of talking animals and Negro sheriffs battling it out in the Wild West. Then one day, due in part to his children’s constant nagging him to stop with the cigars, he did just that.
Thinking of Dad’s resolve one night, I called him at the hospital and talked about my growing dependence on sleeping pills. The nightly dosages were increasing; the half-bottle of wine from six months ago had crept up to one and a half.
“You’re strong, son. I know you. You can cut that stuff out any time you want. Once you’ve made up your mind to do something, you don’t let anything stand in your way.”
“I guess if you could do it, then I can, right?”
“You’ve already shown me that you can do anything you want.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
I’m sitting in a nondescript café across the street from St. Mike’s Hospital with my mom, sister and brother. We’re about to go upstairs and have Dad’s intubation tube removed. He endured a third amputation barely a week earlier (this time, a little higher up his left leg), something that, due to the SARS crisis, had had to be delayed for far too long. The nasty, discoloured infection that started spreading across Dad’s stump over a month ago had gone out of control, sending him into what would be his final coma.
After a waitress drops off our food, a Muzac version of my old hit pipes its way through the café, appearing to chase our server out of sight and into the safety of the kitchen. Mom reminds me that at least Dad won’t be needling me anymore about this being my only classic. But I’m already missing Dad’s jabs. His ceaseless teasing seems quaint in retrospect, an indicator of how closely he monitored and paid attention to me.
Once Dad’s intubation tube is removed it will just be a matter of time before he dies. Mom explains this matter-of-factly to the three of us as we stare down at our untouched plates of pasta. We know this, just as we know it’s important for Mom to tell us anyway. “Dad’s simply existing now,” she says. The scans are showing extensive brain damage. The two of them have discussed what was to happen if it ever got to this point. I know that all of us, playing with our plastic forks, are sharing the same thought right now. He doesn’t have to fight any longer. He doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore.
Mom, the fragile one, is perfectly calm, the only truly composed person at the table. I’ve never known anyone to love a man so completely as Mom has loved Dad. But I can tell she’s feeling some control, for perhaps the first time ever, in her relationship with him. And that this, for the moment at least, is giving her a kind of serenity. I’m saying all the right things, making the proper gestures, trying to hold it together. I know it’s silly, but I feel that as the oldest child I should set an example by remaining strong, on the outside anyway.
“You know your dad,” Mom says ruefully. “He likes to boss everyone around. So he has his memorial planned right down to the last second. And Danny, he wants you to play ‘McCarthy’s Day’ and ‘Daddy’s Song.’”
This shouldn’t surprise me, but it does. As usual, Dad has a few tricks left up his sleeve, a few final jolts, just to let me know that, even at death’s doorstep, he’s still way ahead of me. Dad wants me to sing the most personal songs I’d written about him. How can I possibly make it through performing those songs at his memorial? “So you think you’re a singer, eh boy?” I imagine Dad saying, in his challenging, mano-a-mano tone. “Okay then, boy, prove it!”
I suggest to Mom that it may be safer to play these songs from my CDs during the memorial.
“That’s entirely up to you, Danny.”
When I stopped performing and releasing records to concentrate solely on writing for other acts, I’d resolved to never again play my songs or talk about my career, except when I was working. But I broke my promise and played one last song for Dad the month before he went into his last coma.
“It’s about you and me, Dad. It’s called ‘My Father’s Son.’” I took the CD out of its casing and started to feed it into the stereo system.
“Uh oh. So now you’re gonna take some more pot-shots at me? I gotta listen to another song about what a terrible dad I was to you?”
“No, Dad, honestly, no pot-shots. It’s hard to explain. Just listen.”
The song’s intro had already started. Dad stiffened imperceptibly in his wheelchair. As the first verse kicked in, I was taken aback at how intently he was listening:
the strongest man I ever knew
I never was a match for you
always wanted your attention
never knew just how to get it, so I rebelled
tried to be your opposite, I did it well,
strange but true, how our lives are like a circle now
I’m so very much like you
you were my unsolved mystery
always barely out of reach
at baseball games when parents came
you were always missing, that’s okay
you had your meetings and promotions anyway
somehow I knew, the more I tried to be so different
the more I was like you
memories die hard, love dies harder still,
I forgive you, I have no choice
‘cause when all is said and done
I am my father’s son
Dad was frowning slightly as my song neared the halfway mark. He looked as if he was thinking up a rebuttal, or at least a wisecrack, to throw my way. But his reaction to the third verse moved me so deeply that I haven’t been able to listen to or play the song since.
the first time that I saw you cry
was the morning that your daddy died
I stood there in amazement
as you packed up your suitcase I heard you say
“son I need you here to get me through the day”
and through your tears, I saw the boy inside the man
and it was suddenly so clear
memories die hard, love dies harder still,
I forgive you, I have no choice
‘cause when all is said and done
I am my father’s son
… what is love, without forgiveness
you did the best you could
I let go of the anger, when I finally understood
How was I to know that as my voice sang through the speakers, “The first time that I saw you cry,” I was watching my father cry one final time?
The day after Dad died, I went for a run. It was hot and all I wore were shorts and shoes. White dandelion seeds were floating everywhere and I pretended they were little pieces of his soul. No one would be passing me this morning. I’d see someone jogging one hundred feet ahead of me and I’d speed up, determined to overtake him in some make-believe race, imagining Dad saying, “Look, Donna, look at Danny go!” the way he used to when I was a child, doing something that impressed him. That’s when the sobbing started. It sounded like someone else’s voice, the way it kept leaping out of me in heaving, gulping gasps. That was the first time I’d cried since he’d died. I’d never cried like that before.
I have to get all this crying out of my system so I can be strong for my mother. As I walked onstage to sing at Dad’s memorial, I clung to my father’s words. He’d have been proud of his memorial, at least so far. Although truthfully, it had been pretty difficult for me to take in. I kept thinking back to that cold day in Washington, D.C., in 1979—when Dad had shown me how to be strong for your family. I’d been there, I’d watched and learned. Now it was my turn to lead so that one day David would set the same example for his own family once my time had come and gone.
The memory of Dad’s strength pulled me through “McCarthy’s Day.” But as I slowed into the song’s final refrain, “This is just a song to say, that I’m proud for what they are,” I caught Dad’s sister Doris’s face and felt myself falter. No more looking into the audience. “Daddy’s Song” was too new, too raw. I remembered how my grade three teacher got me through my first live performance. I’d been chosen to sing the solo song for the school talent night, and my parents were sitting in the front row. Just look up at the basketball nets when you’re singing, Danny. Then you won’t be too nervous.
And so, as I sang “Daddy’s Song” at my father’s memorial, I looked up and stared through imaginary basketball nets, hanging from the walls of the church:
I always knew this time would come
still I’m not ready, is anyone
as a child I believed
daddies lived on and on
I guess I was wrong
we had our moments, didn’t we though
thought we’d never speak again, the day I left home
I was so much like you, tried so hard to be strong
I guess I was wrong
why when it rains, does it always pour
why does this pain feel like nothing I’ve felt before …
as a child I believed daddies lived on and on …
I guess I was wrong
daddy your love, for my mother your wife
moves me more deeply, than all else in my life
on the hospital bed, she holds you till dawn
love’s all that lives on
as a child I believed daddies lived on and on
perhaps I’m not wrong
I stood up, clutching my guitar to my chest, and left the stage. I spotted the exit to my right, pushed open the door with my shoulder and found myself standing in the warm night air. Expecting tears, I found myself smiling instead, thinking of the last gift I gave my father. A famous Italian pop/opera singer had informed me that he intended to record “Daddy’s Song”—provided that I rewrite the verse about Mom holding Dad on the hospital bed. When I refused, Dad treated me like a hero, sacrificing fortune in the name of artistic integrity.
Do we ever stop wanting to make our parents proud of us? Does their dying free us of this need? I’ll never stop trying to impress my father.
“How much longer do you think you have, Dad?” David asks me. I’ve grounded him, and Bev’s at the cottage, so he’s stuck with me tonight. For a seventeen-year-old on a Friday night, that’s a fate worse than death. Things will get worse for David, for us, before they get better. It will take every lesson Dad ever taught me to try, along with Bev, to rescue him.
“You didn’t answer me, Dad. Do you think you’re gonna live a long life? Or do you think you’ll end up like Granddad?”
Karen shows up before I can think of how to answer. She’d been feeling pretty low and I’d suggested she spend the night here. As I’m putting together some food for Karen and David, there’s another knock on my front door. It’s Karen’s teenage daughter, Malaika, wanting to keep a close eye on her mom.
I try to channel Dad’s way of making people feel better, especially during a crisis. I do the best I can. I let David know what will happen if he defies my orders and goes out. I keep tabs on Karen. I reassure Malaika that the chili is tofu-based. I weigh the pros and cons of telling Bev about David being grounded, and more disturbingly, why. I decide to wait till she gets home.
“When I was twelve, I asked Granddad if he was scared of dying.” David, Karen, Malaika and I are talking in the living room. David, after standing over me, staring me down and announcing he’s going to go out despite the consequences—”no Internet, no cell phone, no money, no girls in the house, till the end of time”—has reconsidered. “Granddad said that once you reach your seventies you’re not afraid to die, you worry about the people you’ll be leaving behind,” David says.
“That’s what happens once you become a parent,” I say, sounding a little too much like a parent.
David’s going to be eighteen soon. The age Dad was when he was drafted into the U.S. Army. The age I was when I signed with RCA. There’s only so much I can protect David from. I find that deeply unsettling. I can only imagine how unsettled Dad must have felt about my future when I was eighteen. It will take a few very difficult and unimaginably scary years before David finds something to rescue him from himself. As Dad found sociology and I found music, David will discover writing. Prose. And he will lose himself in that with a passion similar to mine, and his grandfather’s. I wish Dad could read his grandson’s writing now. And maybe he can. Maybe he is. Who really knows these things?
I still dream about Dad. Every night. He’s in this curiously undead state. We’re together, doing regular, everyday things, nothing dramatic or extraordinary. I’m just hanging out with him, like he’s still alive. We both know that to everyone but me he’s dead, but that somehow he’s managed to pull off this caper, defying life and death in his indefatigable Dad way. He has the same cocky, “let’s keep this between us” grin that he displayed when we played football in front of the Bible class on that Sunday afternoon. We’re both relaxed and quietly happy. There’s an unflappable, easy closeness that we never quite shared in real life. But even in this dream, we both know that soon he’ll be taken away from me.
The thing I cherish most about these recurring dreams is Dad’s absolute physicality. Something about knowing that this mystifying man whom I loved and battled and sometimes despised so utterly is now gone, forever, makes the world seem, at times, inescapably cold, boring and barren.
So here I am, the first son of an atheist father, his skepticism planted deep inside me, ready for him, indeed beseeching him, to visit me once more. As I bury my head deep in my pillow, Larry’s final words to Dad as we gathered round, touching him and crying over him while he breathed his final breath, come back to me. Goodbye, Dad. Will I ever forget that moment? Will I ever be able to let go and finally say, and mean, those two, unbearably sad words? Goodbye, Dad. I don’t think so. Instead, I reach out in the darkness and pull my sleeping wife closer, imagining Dad doing the same thing with Mom, and murmur the closing phrase that his youngest sister, Doris, the one he was always closest to, said at his memorial: “He still holds my hand.”