TWO MONTHS LATER, on the evening of November 28, I was driving my teaching assistant home from our class. It was our last of the semester. We crawled through traffic because a Junior A hockey game had just ended; the downtown streets were flooded as folks left the arena.
My cell phone rang from an unknown number with the Ottawa area code. It was 9:27 p.m., after midnight there. I picked up, despite being behind the wheel, and put the caller on speakerphone.
It was a nurse at the hospital. I recognized his voice; he was a Caribbean man I remembered from my last visit.
He asked if I was busy. I told him I was driving.
“I’ll call back,” he said, “when you’re done driving. How long will you be?”
I told him I was stuck in a traffic jam; I was close to home.
I didn’t want him to hang up; I suspected what this call was. “Can I just ask: has my father died?”
“I should call you back in a few minutes,” he repeated.
“I’m on speakerphone,” I said. “I’m stuck in traffic, not driving. You can tell me.”
“Yes,” he said, “your father passed away a few moments ago. I’m very sorry for your loss.”
He’d tried to telephone my sister, he said, but nobody had answered her phone. I was the second contact on the list. It was the first time they’d ever had to call me—Leica had always answered before.
My father died like this, without fanfare. There were no trumpets, no grand gestures. When it happened, despite all that had occurred before, death seemed to come without warning. My insides began to vibrate. I was stuck in my car staring at tail-lights. My student was silent in the seat beside me.
The nurse told me Dad had asphyxiated. “I was right there, walking past his room when I saw he was having trouble. We tried to help him, but we couldn’t relieve the blockage in time.”
After all the illnesses and near-death experiences, Dad had choked to death.
I was only four blocks from home and nearly outside my grad student’s place, but traffic wasn’t moving. I parked the car and reassured my student I was fine so she could walk home, then called my sister.
She answered on the fourth ring, her voice small and distant. I’d woken her.
“Leica,” I said. “I’m sorry to say I have bad news.” I tried to think of how to brace her for what was to come next. “This is the call we’ve been dreading,” I said. “The hospital called. Dad’s died.”
“What?” she asked, her voice rising, still small and far away. “What do you mean?”
“The nurse phoned just now. He choked to death.”
“Why did they phone you?” she asked, puzzled.
“Nobody answered your phone. I was next on their list.”
“They have my cell. It’s downstairs.”
“I’m so sorry, Leica,” I said. My voice was cracking.
“Am I dreaming?” she asked. “Am I dreaming?” There was panic in her voice. I’d never heard her so high-pitched. “Tell me I’m dreaming. Is this a nightmare?” she asked.
“This isn’t a dream, Leica. I’m sorry.”
I heard her say, “Rolland, Rolland, Dad’s died. Wake up. Dad is dead.”
Then she sobbed and sobbed and sobbed on the phone with me.
I flew to Ottawa the next afternoon with my black suit. We had about four days, I think, to prepare for the funeral, during which we visited the funeral home to secure arrangements for Dad’s cremation, met with the priest at the church, Photoshopped an image of him for the funeral home, and a few days later picked up his ashes, which were much heavier than I expected, about the weight of a mid-sized pumpkin.
The morning we arrived at the church for the funeral, the framed photo of Dad was on a small table with the urn, a cherrywood box. The table looked empty. We realized that we hadn’t thought about flowers. Luckily, Dad’s ex-partner had sent mums to the church, so we placed those behind the urn and photo.
When Dad’s first three brothers arrived, they each shook my hand, which caught me off-guard. My father was dead, their brother, and they only wanted to shake hands? I was practically reeling with disappointment that even at their brother’s death, my uncles could afford only the slightest sign of affection.
My uncle Pat sat a third of the way back. My uncle Larry was even further behind him. Other than Leica and her kids, his brothers were the closest family Dad had, and they were sitting like strangers in the large church. There weren’t more than fifty people at his service, half of whom I didn’t recognize. Why wouldn’t his brothers sit at the front of the church? With distance, I can surmise that they were too much like my father, too self-effacing and terrified to be on display. They probably didn’t know that it was expected of them or that it might be important for Leica and me to have them up there with us.
The last uncle to arrive was Ted, who hugged me hello. I was so grateful for the tenderness I nearly sobbed. I asked if he and his family would sit at the front so it wasn’t empty. They agreed. Every small act felt like a huge gesture of generosity.
When the time came for the eulogy, I approached the pulpit. I’d been clear with myself that I wanted to tell the story of my father as I knew him, without sugar-coating. Leica had heard it beforehand and loved it, but I feared the brothers might resent me if I said anything critical. I had no idea what they might think.
Looking out at the forty or so guests scattered amongst the forty rows of pews, the church felt too empty. My sister sat in the front row, with our mother right behind her. Rose was in the pew behind them, on the other side of the church, with her daughter. The brothers weren’t sitting together.
The world felt very large at that moment, standing with the pulpit in front of me, my hands on the wood frame holding my neat white papers. The world was terrifically expansive and unknowable, and this moment was much too small, much too everyday. I should have been burning, aflame. I should have been twenty feet tall. We should all have been weeping on the floor of the church. I wanted my uncles to explode into tears. I wanted the doors to fly open and my father to walk in on a cushion of air, aglow, and invite me to speak in his favour.
This is all I said:
I wanted to speak today at my father’s service because, as a writer, it’s a way I know to honour the things of the world I love.
Let it be known that I loved my father.
My favourite story of Dad took place at Chez Louise, where he used to drink and play pool on their one table. One day, Dad watched a young guy hog the pool table all afternoon. Men would come in wanting to play together, but this kid kept winning and refused to take his name off the chalkboard, so everyone had to play him, instead of getting in a round with each other.
Eventually, Dad had had enough; he put his name on the board and played this guy. Now Dad always left a long pause after this line. He loved to tell a story in pieces, with cliff-hangers everywhere, so that you had to ask him questions to find out what happened. “So … was he any good?” I asked him, and Dad answered, “Not good enough.”
Here are a few things I know about my father:
That he liked the Toronto Maple Leafs and not the Montreal Canadiens (though he used to like the Montreal Canadiens).
That in the ’70s his friends from the CB club called him Dirty Ernie.
That the last time he took me fishing was for a work derby at Columbia, and I caught the biggest perch and won a rod and reel, but he didn’t catch a thing—it’s just coincidence we never fished together again.
That maybe the fish I caught at his derby wasn’t a perch, and Dad would know. It’s the kind of thing he’d remember.
That he was a great worker and a darn good shop steward, because he believed in fairness and honesty and doing a job well.
That he drank too much and threw up once in our all-white Monte Carlo.
That one winter he gave his warm coat away to someone who needed it more than he.
That he loved me, that he loved my sister Leica and my brother-in-law Rolland, that he loved his granddaughter Natasha and grandson Nathan, that he loved my mother, and he loved Rose and her family, that he missed his parents, but especially his own mother, he missed her most of all, and that he loved his brothers, all four of them.
That one time when a plate of his dentures were broken, he met an undertaker in a bar, both of them drinking, until they went back to the funeral home so Dad could try on old dentures that the undertaker had collected in a bucket. None of them fit properly.
That the night after he lost his leg, he cried alone in the hospital room until he couldn’t cry anymore, but nobody heard him, he said; he didn’t want to disturb anyone.
The poet Ted Hughes, in a now-famous letter to his son, said that your vulnerability is like a child inside you, it needs nurturing and mentoring, it needs to be let out to enjoy the sun. He finishes that letter by saying: “The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.”
I know my father didn’t let love in, didn’t trust himself, or others, didn’t feel safe enough to put down his armour very often. He said as much to my sister in these last weeks, that he kept his distance on purpose, which was a mistake of his own judgment, from his own fears. I know his heart was fierce and unwieldy. He had a rich interior life, so much so that he didn’t know how to handle it, what to do with it, where to put that fear and love he felt for the world. So he poured it into a cold glass and drank it down, day by day. Love is a sickness if you don’t share it.
I have great comfort knowing my father is free from those worries, knowing he is free to love us in the manner he wished he could while he was alive, knowing he is free to be the man he wished he could be. In these last months he has loved us better than he was able to before: he let us in when he was terrified in the hospital, and suffering with pain, and you can’t imagine what a gift his openness was to me. I am profoundly grateful—and changed—by that. Through his struggle I came to know my father as the hero I had wished him to be, not for his strength, nor his courage, nor by any test of manhood, but because of his willingness to be vulnerable. Because he admitted to that terror … and then let me hold his hand as some company through it.
Dad didn’t text me often in his final months, and rarely without prompting, but he sent me a final note last week, out of the blue, which I think gives a great insight into what kind of man he was: ever the smart aleck.
Our exchange went like this:
“Hi, Mick, are you still upset over the closing of the Twinkie factory?”
I answered, “Ha ha, you’re hysterical, you old bugger. You doing well? I’m still hunting for a ticket for Xmas.”
He replied, “I heard you want to get a job running the factory where they are made.”
“I’m gonna knock yer lights out,” I wrote.
“I ain’t got any lights left,” he said. “They are all burnt out.”
“Ha ha. You’re cheeky today. Love it. I’m still chuckling about Twinkies.”
“Well, I know how much they meant to you,” he replied, “so cry if you like.”
After the funeral, Leica, Rolland, my niece, nephew, and I stood in a receiving line in the side room for the reception. We shook the hand of everyone who passed. In the lineup, I saw Gerry, Dad’s old friend who’d lost his leg to a train.
When it was his turn in line, Gerry gripped my hand and shook it. “It was a bass,” he said.
“A bass?” I asked. “Were you there?”
“It was my boat,” he said. “And you caught a six-pound bass.”
In the summer, I asked my uncles if we could meet when I was in Ontario to talk about Dad, for research into this book. I wanted to ask the boys what kind of man they thought my father was.
Leica arranged for us to have a meeting with my uncle Pat in the afternoon and the other three agreed to a barbecue at my uncle Bob’s place afterward (because two of my uncles didn’t want to meet formally; they didn’t want to talk much about Dad or growing up). Pat wasn’t invited to the barbecue; he’d had so many drunken conflicts with his brothers over the years, they didn’t see much of him, even though they all lived in a town of 2,000 people.
The most interesting thing about our visit with Pat was how freakishly he looked like my father. They always resembled each other, but when I knew I’d never see my father’s face again, and here it was, somewhat translated into the genes of his brother, it created a kind of longing in my blood. My body ached for him to be kind to us. I remember wishing we could spy on him for a day, without him knowing, to see a man who could be my father moving through the world.
At the barbecue that afternoon, I was awkward. Leica tried to help by pressing the point that we were here so I could ask questions, but I kept feeling that I didn’t know these men well enough to feel I had any right to an intimacy with them. All these years, I realized, I’d seen them filtered through my father. It felt like this was the first time I’d seen them without that veil.
Soon after I got there, my uncle Larry said, looking at me, “I don’t know what I can tell you. You knew him better than I did.”
I wanted to scoff and say, “I barely knew him at all,” but the matter-of-fact conviction in his voice said he thought it was true. He wasn’t just putting me off.
I think I answered, “I don’t know if that’s true,” and he replied with something like, “I’m sure it is.”
My uncle Bob said the same thing, later in the day. “I didn’t know your father very well. He was a lot older than me. He was nearly moved out by the time I was born.” Bob is seven years younger than my father. I didn’t understand how seven years could make a difference until later the brothers told me that when Dad was twelve, he was sent off to a farm to work for the summers. All the boys had to pay room and board to my grandfather from the age of twelve onwards, except Bob, the youngest. The other boys had worn my grandfather down by then.
If we do the math, Bob was only five when Dad started leaving for the summers. My father also had a job in the grocery store in town during the school year. Twelve is the age at which Dad started smoking. He was living a mostly independent life by then, paying rent and board, buying his own clothes, working year-round.
When the day started to wind to a close—most of the cousins had left and the aunts and uncles had moved inside, sitting around the table so my aunt Debbie could put things away in the kitchen—Leica insisted we talk.
She put her hands on the table. “Mick wanted to ask you questions before you left,” she said to everyone. “He can tell you more what he wants to talk about.”
I explained that I was working on a book about my relationship to masculinity, which also meant my relationship with my father. I thought that they might have some insights into Dad; they might have some stories they wanted to share.
Ted asked about our afternoon with Uncle Pat. “What did Pat talk about?”
We told him a few of the stories that were new to us, nothing exciting.
Ted hadn’t taken his eyes off of us. “Did he tell you about how your father had been abused?”
“No,” my sister said.
I asked, “What does that mean?”
“Apparently, your dad was sexually abused by a young guy who was older than him by a few years.” Ted glanced at Uncle Bob. “Did you know this?”
Bob hadn’t heard about it, but Ted’s second wife had, from her sister, who’d been with Pat for more than a decade before finally leaving him. (Yes, brothers married sisters, both men choosing them as their second wives.)
“What ages were they?” I asked.
“Your father was about twelve,” Ted scratched at the back of his head, thinking, “so the other kid must have been about fifteen. He was older than us.”
“You know who it was?”
“Yeah, we grew up with him.”
“What was his name?”
“T—W—.”
I wanted to look at my sister or take her hand, but I couldn’t move. I didn’t want to break my attention to Uncle Ted. I thought if I studied him hard enough I could decipher more of the facts from what he was saying.
“How does Pat know that Dad was abused?”
“Apparently, he walked in on them. I’m not surprised he didn’t mention it to you. He showed up at my place one night, years ago, totally tight; he could barely stand. He wanted my gun, he said. He was shouting that he was going to kill the guy.”
We knew from the family stories that anything you heard from Uncle Pat was difficult to believe. He used the same kind of creative convenience that my father did: there was a seed of truth in what he said, but the details that sprouted from it could change based on the situation at hand. Pat, for example, told us that afternoon that his son Brandon had been thrown in jail for a time because he beat up his girlfriend. Pat didn’t speak to his son now, because, he said, “We don’t put up with that in our family. That’s not who we are.”
Everyone at the barbecue had laughed when we’d related that part of the conversation. “Brandon learned that from his dad,” Ted had said.
Lynn had nodded her head. “He beat on Fay a bunch of times.”
But this wasn’t the same. Men like Pat don’t admit to witnessing sexual abuse when they’re sober. Their egos can’t handle it even when they’re drunk.
“What happened to the guy? Was he ever arrested?”
“He’s still in Madoc,” Ted said. “I hear about him because of business I do there.”
“He’s alive?”
“Oh yeah, he’s alive,” Ted said.
My first thought was to find this guy.
In the weeks following, I ran a variety of scenarios through my head in which I met up with him, but each encounter ended the same way: with me wondering how much of the story was true. It was clear, anyhow, this wasn’t the sort of topic I could have ever broached with my father. Neither was it the sort of thing Ted would have told me while Dad was alive.
Leica and I drove home that evening, piecing together what we’d heard from the uncles. Dad was fending for himself at the age of twelve. Dad might have been, likely had been sexually abused. Dad went to his grave without ever mentioning it to us.
There was nowhere to put that information to make it sit comfortably. We could only do what we’d done so often in our lives with my father: we held it with some compassion and hoped it wouldn’t be painful in the days ahead.
The biggest irony for me is how that little piece of information about my father confirms something I teach my students year after year. The famous script editor Robert McKee describes how a classic story device offers a little detail at the climax that causes you to reframe everything you’ve assumed through the course of the action, so that at the end you travel back through the story and know it all differently.
When I think through my understanding of my father and his relationship to me in light of Ted’s news, so much seems to fall in line for me, like locks in a tumbler clicking into place. That my father rarely touched me, that he could barely speak about the gay parts of my life, that he was ashamed to be vulnerable, and that he was desperately lonely, all made more sense now. Certainly it’s too tidy to pin my father’s relationship with me on any one detail, but that isn’t to say the echo of my father’s life doesn’t now seem clearer. I’d wept on many occasions throughout my father’s life wishing his days could have been easier. He suffered because the world isn’t fair. I’m sure in part he suffered in the shell of his masculinity, which he thought protected him, but it was his silent prison too.
It’s no wonder I came to masculinity from the opposite direction, skipping gaily through a hairy femininity, when the father I had was a man fraught with collapse. It’s no wonder I considered myself a failed man: I was offered either this perversely limited life within a prideful blue-collar masculinity, or I could be a sissy fag judged poorly by comparison. Either choice seemed embroiled with complications and self-loathing. Nobody can live such a caged life and be happy.
I thank the stars I was lucky enough to sense I didn’t want that kind of masculinity for myself. At a young age, I somehow intuited that, in rejecting my father’s version of manhood for one of my own devising, I was making a better trade. Still, I spent years judging that version by the old standards. The failing is not in all masculinities, I know, but it is in many of them.
After Dad had drunk himself into the hospital a few years ago, I felt some new magic, some evolution from the confluence of talking to my therapist about my father’s collapse and writing this book, and it occurred to me that perhaps my being a failed man was worth celebrating. Being a failed man was a measure of my success.
It took Dad a lifetime to get sober. It took him just as long to be vulnerable enough to let Leica and me into his life so we might help him in his suffering, and even so he went to his grave with secrets no one should have to bear.
Perhaps my father’s silence and distance had some influence on the eagerness I’ve felt as an adult to bare all. There was so much unsaid in my family, I’ve spent my creative life speaking up.
These last few years since my father’s death, I’ve never felt more masculine, partly because I’ve settled into a gender that, if it’s not of my own making, is at least of my own choosing. Life is richer each day, from the effort of putting into practice my therapist’s advice to pay attention: the more I practice listening, the more it widens the space for silence. The more silence, the more room to listen.
Six months after Dad’s death, I met a handsome furry man from Québec who has become as much an accomplice as a partner. We met via a cruising app on one of the days when I was advertising my personality rather than my body or sex stats. He was drawn in by the canoe and the lake swimming. Every day he is teaching me that the body I have now is one I can love as well as he does. The last two years have been happy ones.
For every book written there are two stories. Every book has a shadow. There is the one in your hands and the one I had intended to write. The book I wanted to write was an angry finger-wag at the world, telling most men how to behave, showing them how to live by counterexample, and offering a whole lot of advice and judgment about what fuckups they have been.
Late as late can be in the process of writing, when I thought the book was a loss because it didn’t do enough of those things, I realized the story I had written was a personal one, not about do’s and don’ts, not about being superior in my gender choices and free to fuck up in my sexual (mis-)adventures, but an intimate walk through my days as a perhaps unusual man, a testament to the degrees one will go to in trying to fill a well of abandonment, and a vulnerable confession about how my complicated relationship to my body helped shape me.
As much as I’ve moved forward, I still feel Dad’s hand at work in my life. He lives on in my body. He’s here in my unsettled stomach, like a nervous bell sounding the alarm. He’s here in the addict’s whisper, calling me to drink in the back bar where nobody will know me to ask questions. He’s here in the shame I’ve felt for wishing I weren’t alone, for wanting someone to hold me, for being weak and frightened. He’s here in new disappointments as my body ages, growing more fat on my abs than muscle. He’s here in the parts of me that still feel shame for not being a better man.
My father is also a gift, even in the ways he was a negative role model. Most obviously, he’s here in the masculinity I set aside and the one I adopted instead. He’s here in my sobriety. Here in therapy. Here in the steps I take to speak a truth that was far more hard-won than it is embarrassing.
My father lives in our hospital experience, where we practiced how to be a father and son. He is here in the risks we took, here in a trust we found together beyond our disappointments, here in the reward from letting each other in.
My father is here in the depth to which I have feared the world, which goes hand-in-hand with how I have loved it. He’s here in my innocence, which is his innocence too.