What do you do when you’re left with nothing? When my dad died, the house that my parents owned was not a house I’d ever lived in. It was in Acton, the small town I grew up in, which at the time had just shy of ten thousand people. This town is where most of my childhood happened. Two factories, an old flour mill, one stop light, and just enough of nothing to get you into trouble. That was Acton.
My parents had moved three or four times since I’d left, so I didn’t have a lot of memories of my dad in that particular house. It was a small ’70s-style three-bedroom townhouse that backed onto a graveyard. We’d had one or two Christmases together there, which was always Dad’s favourite time of year, so that’s what I remembered.
He loved turkey, and laughing, and having his boys home for the holidays. But there wasn’t a lot of Pop in that space. He wasn’t the sort of guy who owned a lot of sentimental things. He had a chessboard that he’d picked up in Mexico decades before, but other than that he didn’t have anything he was overly emotional about.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, on the day I went to that house that I barely knew, after my dad died, to help my mom clear out his stuff, I was looking for something, anything, to make me feel like he wasn’t gone.
I don’t remember a ton from that day, but I do remember it was hot as hell out when my brother and I got there. The air conditioning was on in the family room where my parents had spent most of their time in front of the TV, but it only cooled the one room. I remember looking around and thinking their tiny living room felt huge. There was this void now, an emptiness that Pops would normally occupy. My dad wasn’t a big guy, but his laugh filled any room that was lucky enough to have him.
My mom said, “Why don’t you and your brother go upstairs and see if there’s anything there that you want?” It was painful to hear her say it, a sharp reminder that Dad wasn’t coming back, but we nodded and headed up to their bedroom, even though the idea of going upstairs and spending even one minute in an airless room sorting through my dad’s stuff sounded like a nightmare. My brother was quiet. I’m sure he felt the exact same way I did. We’ve still never talked about that day.
As I walked past the room my Pop had turned into a makeshift arcade, I was thinking to myself: What if I find something amazing? What if my mom knows he’s left something for us? Is that why she sent us up here? He had been fighting cancer for a year, so it didn’t seem totally unlikely.
In the room was a modest-size two-door closet full of clothes left in piles. There were old stereo cables and a couple of books that didn’t look like he’d ever read them. There was car stuff, and a manual for a PlayStation. I started to dig through a box of old receipts, hoping to find a bag, a binder, or an envelope—anything that simply read: Read This When I’m Dead. Something where he would have written down all his thoughts and philosophies to carry over into my life. I wanted something that was from his past, something that was the truth. I wanted advice and answers to questions I hadn’t even thought of yet.
I wanted him.
My dad was different from the other dads I knew. He was charming, charismatic, a recovering alcoholic. He was American, and he’d done two tours in Vietnam. He had scars and secrets. These stuck out in our small town, where everyone was all up in each other’s business. Growing up in a small town, you get that kind of sameness, but my old man was different. He had an unrelatable history, and this unattainable cool that was tough as hell to figure out. Throughout my childhood Dad did have a few close friends, but aside from me and my brother, I don’t remember him ever having a best friend. Not anyone he ever fully opened up to, anyway.
I don’t know why, but my parents loved moving. They didn’t want to settle, so we probably lived in seven or eight different houses in that little town, not including one horrid year they thought we’d be better off living in a sprawling suburb just outside of Toronto. My brother and I both had a hard time adjusting that year, so our parents bought us waterbeds? We still call that one the Waterbed House. But for our family, it was never about a house. It was always about us. Us against everything.
My mom worked, so my brother and I were typical ’80s latchkey kids. My parents would get back into town around 6 p.m., they’d stop for coffee on the way, and then, as a family, we’d eat around eight. Dinner was pretty low maintenance, but always delicious. We’d crush hot hamburger sandwiches, which were toasted white bread with a hamburger patty and gravy, with mashed potatoes on the side, and we’d eat the whole thing with a fork and knife. Or my mom would make spaghetti, and we’d eat the leftover sauce for days out of a giant pot that took up an entire shelf in the fridge.
We never ate alone; we always ate as a family. And we never ate and ran. It wasn’t that we weren’t allowed; we just didn’t want to. This was always the best part of my day. Dinner lasted for hours, and it felt like a really safe space. There were no rules about swearing at the dinner table, and the dinner table is where I told my parents, while I was still in junior high, that I’d lost my virginity. The stories we shared over dinner were never talked about outside of that kitchen. Some things would carry over from one night to the next, but you never got grilled on a Saturday morning about something you’d said at dinner the night before. It was cool like that.
There was nothing my dad loved more than listening to his boys ramble on. He loved kid stories. He loved our drama, he answered our questions, he’d laugh when one of us would take a sip through a straw with our nose. My dad didn’t have any of those moments when he was a kid. His stories were alarming and astonishing. He had a childhood so bad it barely sounded real to me.
His parents were drunks. They treated him with a mix of neglect and violence. Hell, he was so unwanted they left him at a gas station when he was a kid and just continued on with their road trip—just straight up left him there. That was normal. That was his childhood. At some point after he turned eighteen his best option in life was to join the Marines and escape. Vietnam was a better option than living at home.
He told us about the war, but like most vets who came back from Nam, Pop’s stories were never full or complete. Instead, they’d evolve over the years as we got older. When he thought we could handle more, he’d tell us more. He never talked about PTSD—shell shock, as they called it then—and he never talked about Nam in any way that would come off as proud. My dad was the only person I’ve ever known who had killed someone. He’d always say, “Nobody likes war, but some people need to know how to fight.” My dad was a fighter. I’m not sure where he put all the nightmares, but before my brother and I were born he dealt with them the way a lot of vets did. He drank. But at some point, he flipped the script, he made a commitment to be the first father in his family to not raise his kids with the back of a hand or the bottom of a bottle. My dad was the least violent person I’ve ever known. That was not the man my mom married. She got the other one.
The story of how my parents met and fell in love was told to me as a grand romantic tale. It shaped my view of romance; it was the first “true love” story I’d ever heard.
My dad served more than his fair share in Nam, and after two tours and facing a forced third, he went awol while on leave in California and took off to Montreal. The first thing my dad did when he landed was pack up his uniform, boots, hat, gloves, and anything else that identified him as a marine and send it to the Marine Corps Recruiting Station in Buffalo, New York, in a garbage bag. He kept his medals, but everything else went. To him, it was all garbage.
The second thing he did was find a place to live. This happened to be the same old Montreal duplex where my mom was living. At this point, in the late ’60s, my mom was modelling part-time and singing in a mod band called Us and the Other Guys on weekends. She was also very much engaged. I don’t know what my parents’ first date was like, or how long their affair lasted, but I do know they fell incredibly hard for each other immediately. My dad always said, “First I fell in love with her chili, then I fell in love with her.” Even then my mom cooked with her whole heart, and this was probably the first time my dad had ever eaten anything that was made with love.
My mom’s fiancé was a guy named Cliff, and they all hung out. All three of them. Until they didn’t. One dark, cold Montreal night my dad, Ralph Arnold Weston, took Cliff Something Something for a walk around the block where my dad calmly but bluntly said, “I’m going to be straight with you. You’re with Diane, but I’m in love with her. I’m going to marry her. You have until we get to the front door to decide whether you want to do this the easy way or the hard way, but when we get to that apartment, you’re going to take your ring back.” Cliff knew what the hard way looked like. So, he walked right upstairs and took his ring back, and that was it.
For me, that was romance. That was my foundational understanding of how love could be found. Love over everything. Even if it had to be the hard way.
I don’t tell that story anymore because, really, it hasn’t aged well. It doesn’t make you feel good, and frankly most people would find it horrifying. Most people would see it as toxic, chest-thumping bullshit, or they’d see my mom as some sort of victim or prize. The main reason I don’t tell this story anymore is because I’d be heartbroken if anyone thought of my dad as anything other than gentle and kind. This version of him wasn’t the guy who raised my brother and me. This was a young man whose entire life and place in the world had been shaped by violence. That was all he knew. Yet this story was told to me as romantic, because for them it was.
As we sat around the dinner table talking late into the nights, I’d look for that person, the man he used to be, that man who had no problem with the hard way, the man who proposed to my mom, the version of my dad who was confrontational, violent, and drunk. I never saw him. During those years when my parents first met, he was a heavy, almost professional alcoholic, drinking hundreds of dollars a week in booze. One year, after my brother was born, for my mom’s birthday my dad checked himself into rehab, and he never drank again. That was his gift. That was the sort of man my father was: committed, focused, present.
In my early childhood there was the dad of the stories, and there was the dad I saw every day, a gentle man—kind, wise, funny. My love of storytelling is rooted in those family dinners, forkloads of hot hamburger sandwiches, the truth evolving and shifting, and us all laughing until it hurt.
The year before junior high, I started hanging out with Andy, this kid who lived four doors down from us. Our parents were casual friends, but they always pushed for the two of us to hang out. Andy and I didn’t have a ton in common, but his dad was a doctor, so he had way cooler toys than I did. They had a boat, and would vacation in Florida, but he’d still cry and complain about everything. For the most part Andy was a horrible friend. However, his dad did have the most incredible collection of nudie magazines I’d ever seen. Nothing domestic—these were all foreign, high-end, and hard to get. And there was a ton of them. Desperate for friends, and with a deep love for showing off, Andy created a club called The Bushmen: something he was in charge of. He had the porno; he had the power. The club started with the two of us before he recruited a third, a kid named Jake who had a leather jacket and a better moustache than kids twice our age.
Every day after school, Andy stuffed an Adidas bag full of the doctor’s porno, always remembering the order they were stacked in so they could be put back into the sock drawer the same way, and we’d head out to Killer’s Hill. Killer’s Hill was this insanely steep drop-off at the end of a dead-end road made up of landfill, rocks, and old tree stumps. It was littered with broken beer bottles and scrap metal. Killer’s Hill wasn’t built for kids so of course this was where most dares took place, because, really, if you didn’t almost die was it even fun? We’d throw ourselves down that thing on bikes, toboggans, or on each other—piggyback-style—screaming like maniacs as we raced barefoot to the bottom. Every single thing on the way down wanted to hurt you, and it often did. We’d hose off the mud and blood before heading home and then try like hell to convince our mothers we were fine. This rarely worked. Killer’s Hill was responsible for more trips to the doctor than anywhere else in town, and we loved it. Andy was never interested in getting dirty or hurt, so when he was around, we’d sit on rocks, up at the top, and just flip through the pages of his dad’s magazines. Very carefully. Although we were a group while we sat there, this was an individual exercise. Nobody got too close or made it (more) weird, and we barely spoke. To be honest, other than a shared love for doctor-grade pornography, none of us really had anything in common.
One day, Jake convinced Andy to leave the stack of mags at Killer’s Hill while Andy and I went home for dinner. Andy, pathetic and, again, desperate to be liked, agreed. While I was at home and my mom was still cooking, I remember hearing this sound. It started small and then exploded. A torrential downpour! It rained more in those forty-five minutes than I’ve ever seen. I remember my mom looking out the window saying, “Roz, did you put your bike in the garage?”
“Yeah, Ma,” I answered.
What she should have asked was: “Roz, do you trust that Jake kid enough to hide the doctor’s smut rags to make sure they don’t get ruined?”
“No,” I would have answered. “Absolutely fuckin’ not.”
At some point after his dinner but before bed, Andy snuck out and went looking for the magazines. I’m sure he hoped they’d all be stacked back up in that Adidas bag and placed safely under a tree. They weren’t. They were soaked to the point that the pages no longer existed. As a kid, and in a situation like this, you have very few options, but Andy panicked and snuck the wet stack back into the house while the doctor was in the bath. He piled them back up in the same way that he’d found them in the sock drawer and hoped for the best.
The best did not happen.
It took about a minute for Andy to rat me out to his dad and in the amount of time it took to walk past four houses the doctor was ringing our doorbell. Standing out of sight at the top of the stairs, I died a little as he stood there telling Pops what we’d done. It could have been the rain, but I swear the doctor had tears in his eyes. When Dad closed the door, he turned casually and walked up the stairs. He got about halfway up before he saw me. He stopped and looked me straight in my face to ask, “Were you guys into the doctor’s things?”
“Yeah. I’m sorry, Pop,” I said.
“Don’t do it again.”
That was the end of it. When I got to school the next day, I was the only kid who hadn’t had the shit beat out of him by an angry father. Andy said that while his dad was kicking his ass, he kept telling him, “If you think this is bad, just imagine what Roz’s dad is doing to him.” As I stood there, feeling guilty as hell, Andy asked me how bad I got it.
“Brutal,” I replied.
That day I missed gym and walked with a fake limp until the bus came. I don’t carry a lot of regret with me, but selling my dad out like that still haunts me. It turns out that I was the pathetic one who just wanted to fit in. I hate that I did that to him.
I always knew my dad got shot. It was no secret. He had this round scar on his arm that didn’t grow any hair. The skin was shiny and didn’t look like it belonged there. When my brother and I were younger, he said it was an accident, that his gun went off when he was cleaning it. That was another one of the stories that changed over the years.
As a kid, my dad’s war stories were cool. He’d go into detail about what snake tasted like, and how it would rain so hard in the jungle you could fill your helmet every five minutes if you turned it upside down. He taught us how to build fires, and how to camp, and to this day I still know that the key to surviving in the bush is to always keep your feet dry. Always keep your feet dry. As I got older, the stories changed. It wasn’t an accident while cleaning his rifle; he was shot during combat. And that scar? The reason it looked so bad, he said, was because they took a small, round piece of skin off the very back of his hip, slapped it on top of the hole in his arm, loosely sewed the patch on, and pulled it tight like a change purse. Then they sliced off the skin that was sticking up off the top of it, wrapped it, and sent him back out there. He’d always say, “If you think that piece of skin is shiny, you should see the rest of my ass.”
I remember walking through the dining room one evening, in my early high school years, on my way to the family room when I passed Dad sitting there, in his chair at the head of the table, with a handgun. He had two or three layers of newspaper spread out, and the gun was in pieces perfectly arranged in front of him, but I knew what I was looking at. I also knew he did not own a handgun. “Where’d you get the gun, Pops?” I asked him.
“From someone who shouldn’t have had it.” End of story.
My life with my dad was ever evolving. As I grew up, his stories constantly changed. It was one of the most fascinating things about him. It taught me just how important our stories are. They’re foundational, and like our own DNA, our stories make us, us. Our stories create our world and carve out our place in it. Pops taught me always to tell the truth, but it didn’t necessarily have to be the whole truth. At least not all at once.
Years later, on that hot, humid day in my parents’ closet searching for something from my dad, the July heat just kept getting more brutal. My brother and I sat, each doing our own thing. Sweaty, sad, absorbed in our own heads, and lost in our memories. This is when I realized that what I was looking for didn’t exist. There was no Read This When I’m Dead. No book or diary, no letter or card. No magical thing to bring my dad back. There was just a closet full of stuff, but not enough stuff to put him back together and take him with me. We loaded up a few boxes and helped my mom clean up. Everything else was garbage.
My brother took Dad’s old pipe collection. It was a hand-crafted, six-pipe wooden stand with a container off to one side that still smelled like Rum Raisin tobacco. He still has that on a shelf today.
I took one of Dad’s old cardigans. It was generic. Light brown scratchy wool with faux suede trim and elbow patches. It wasn’t his favourite, it wasn’t a gift, and it had zero sentimental value. It wasn’t special, but it was his. I asked Mom if I could have it. She said, “You can have anything you want.”
“This is it,” I told her. “This is all I want.”
When you look through my world now, or my house, there isn’t a lot of my dad in it. I have his cardigan in my closet, on the last hanger on the left, and it’s never moved from that spot. There are hardly any pictures of him—good cameras were too expensive back then, and the cheap one we did have was always hidden away in his sock drawer. I have two framed shots of my dad: in one he’s in his late teens or early twenties, in Nam. He’s wearing his Marine-issue green combat pants and a Marine-issue thin white T-shirt, with Marine-issue bandages covering up the Marine-issue hole in his arm from a Vietnamese-issued bullet. He’s smiling—looks happy. This was the kind of photo other soldiers took to send home to their families. My dad came home with his picture stuffed in the bottom of his own duffle bag. In the other one, he’s a little kid wearing a suit and a tie, with his big ears sticking out. He had no idea.
My kid, Roxy, sees those pictures of him, but she never got to know him. Now I’m a dad myself, I don’t have anyone to turn to. There’s nothing my dad loved more than being a dad, and for the first time in the history of his side of the family, he was goddamn good at it. He died before I could ask how to do it—how he did it. I wish he had mapped it all out for me, from the heart and in whatever way he felt comfortable. It didn’t have to be a book. Hell, it didn’t even have to be typed or coherent. I would have taken his morphine-induced ramblings in his final days. I wanted him to tell me what I was supposed to do. I’ve never really planned for the future. I didn’t have a vision board, and I didn’t set goals or write checklists of things I wanted to accomplish at certain points in my life or career. I chased opportunity and made damn sure I was ready for it when it came. I lived for daily indulgences, quick deadlines, and fresh starts, with a willingness to walk away when things weren’t going my way. To rip it up and start again.
Since we had Roxy, my focus has shifted from moving forward to looking back. Not obsessing about my past, but always keeping half an eye on what I left behind. To be honest, although I do leave a pretty huge footprint through the radio and TV show, thousands of minutes of YouTube vids, and months’ worth of podcasts, so much of that’s not me. Not who I really am. There’s so much that I’ve never talked about, which is the reason I’m writing this book now. I’m leaving footprints for my kid, so she has a path to follow.
I’m writing the thing that I wish my dad wrote for me.