10
SUKIERAE
THE DAY AFTER Spencer was born in 1995, when for some reason they trusted us to leave the hospital with our brand-new baby boy, we went straight to Lounge Ax. It just felt normal for us to be there, and when a tiny human being is thrust suddenly into your world, you need to feel normal again. We introduced the baby to everyone (or I guess vice versa). We did the same thing when Sammy was born four years later.
I wasn’t ready to be a dad, but that’s probably true for anybody. Spencer wasn’t planned, and not in the same way my parents claim I wasn’t planned, where it’s followed by a wink and a nudge from my father. Being parents wasn’t a possibility we seriously registered in our brains. Susie was under the impression that she couldn’t get pregnant, because as she explained to me, “I had a doctor tell me once that I’d never be able to have kids because I get my period once a year.” Turns out, her doctor was wrong. Then, after Spencer was born, she started getting pregnant “like a crazy person” (her words), and for a few years she was “very miscarriagy” (also her words). We were unprepared and scared shitless by all of it.
The reality of having Spencer in the world hit me harder than I’d anticipated. It was disorienting. It wasn’t just the responsibilities of parenting that caught me by surprise, but having something else in the world that I loved not just as much as but more than I loved music. I did not see that coming.
When Spencer and Sammy got older, I wanted to make sure the work I did, and the music I made, was a part of their lives. I knew what my dad did for a living—well, vaguely—but I only visited the railroad one time that I can remember. So I never really developed a clear mental image of where he was or what his work was like. We didn’t want our kids to have that same mystery, so Susie and I made sure they came to as many shows as possible. It’s why Spencer and Sammy were always at Lounge Ax, and why they were backstage with me whenever I played somewhere a short drive away. I wanted them to know what a backstage looked like, so when we were apart for longer than we wanted to be, they’d at least be able to visualize it. They’ve traveled with me; they’ve been on the tour bus, they know what the routine is, what the hotels are like, what my life is like away from them.
I don’t believe that your kids should look at you as infallible. They should be able to look at you as a person who is struggling and persevering. They have pretty well-tuned bullshit detectors. I’ve said to Spencer and Sammy more than a few times, “Listen, guys, I have no idea what I’m supposed to do right now. What do you think?” You can never go wrong with asking questions. Well, maybe you could if you have an especially devious kid who knows how to manipulate you. But even then, if you ask enough questions, you’ll eventually get to the right place. It’s my same strategy when arguing with somebody about politics. You can’t just tell somebody they’re wrong. They have to arrive at that conclusion on their own or it’s never going to happen. So I keep asking questions, not in a confrontational way, but with sincere curiosity. Give people enough rope, and they’ll hang themselves. They’ll eventually realize they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
I just pretend every child is a miniature “staunch conservative” who’s pretty sure that I’m an idiot. Let them talk, and keep asking questions, and they’ll talk themselves into a corner. “Well, what would you do if you were the parent and your kids acted this way?” You need to approach it with enough humility so it’s clear that you’re being sincere and not just asking loaded questions. “I wish I knew the right answer, maybe you can help me, I don’t know.” Trust me on this, it drives them crazy. I think they would have usually preferred a time-out.
I know the boys didn’t like it when I went on the road and disappeared. I didn’t like it, either. We all dealt with that distance in our own ways. I did it by being really sad and beating myself up emotionally. Spencer did it, at least when he was younger, by watching a lot of Wilco videos. We had a VHS tape of Wilco highlights—it was two or three hours of videos and interviews and late-night talk show performances and live clips, anything the band did that was recorded in the nineties. Spencer would watch it over and over again while sitting on the floor with his mini Les Paul Junior guitar and his tiny amp, and he’d pretend to play along, mouthing the words until he started to commit them to memory. It drove his babysitters insane. Then, when he’d watched the video so many times that even he couldn’t sit through the “Outtasite (Outta Mind)” skydiving video again, he’d pack up his guitar and amp and walk to the front door. His babysitter would ask where he was going and he’d say, “I gotta get to the gig.”
Very cute, yes. But as a dad, a story like that gave me the bends. Hearing that your four-year-old is having fantasies of hitting the road with a band so that he can be closer to you is almost too much to take.
A CONVERSATION WITH SPENCER ABOUT HOW MUCH OF OUR RELATIONSHIP HE REALLY WANTS ME TO REVEAL IN THIS BOOK
JEFF: Can you just write this part? I feel like it’d be better if you wrote this part.
SPENCER: I don’t think I could do any better. I’m probably more biased.
J: You’re just protective.
S: I want this book to be a pure representation of who you are. And I’m not sure if I’m the best person to capture that. This might be typical of a lot of young adults, but I’m trying to figure out to what extent you, my father, are changing and to what extent I’m changing. You know what I mean?
J: You don’t feel the same way about me that you did when you were a kid?
S: It evolves and matures. My perception of you has changed a lot even in just the last few years. And not necessarily negatively or positively. When you’re growing up, you automatically get confronted with how your idealized version of your parents differs from what they’re really like. Both versions are presumably true. So that’s what I’ve been trying to figure out these days—what are the things about you that I haven’t noticed until now, or was thinking about in the wrong way? And what are actual instances of you as a person changing? I can’t rule out that your behavior is different than it was when I was a little kid.
J: Wow. That’s heavy stuff.
S: It’s what I’ve been grappling with.
J: I was hoping that maybe you could just talk about how I sang “Forever Young” at your bar mitzvah and it was really emotional and sweet, and that makes me a good dad.
S: [Laughs.] Well, sure, there’s that.
J: Even that was entirely Susie’s idea. I just managed to pull it off without crying.
S: It’s an emotional song.
J: Let’s fill this chapter with stories like that. We could talk about how I wrote a song for The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, and I brought you and some of your friends to the studio to do the na-na-na-na-nas part.
S: How old was I? Eight? Maybe seven?
J: Eight at the most. And you were so excited to be there, to be recording a real song with me. It was one of my favorite things I’ve ever gotten to do in a recording studio.
S: Or how about when you brought me onstage at Madison Square Garden on my thirteenth birthday to play drums on “The Late Greats”?
J: Best birthday present ever, right?
S: Definitely the most terrifying.
J: You were so good!
S: Thank you. I was also a thirteen-year-old kid who suddenly had twenty thousand strangers staring at him.
J: Huh. I never thought about it that way.
S: No, no, I don’t mean it was bad. It was such a huge deal for me. All I’d wanted for most of my life was to be in a band with you, and here it was finally happening. I just mean, if you want to focus on the things that really define our relationship, I don’t know if that’s the place to start.
J: Where would you start?
S: Some of my favorite memories are when you’d drive Sammy and me to preschool, and you’d play Captain Beefheart for us. What was the CD you put on all the time? Safe As Milk?
J: Whatever has “Electricity” on it.
S: Such a perfect song.
J: It’s nonsensical and funny and weird. It seemed like perfect kids’ music to me. And then you guys started asking to hear it, and I thought, “I am victorious as a father.”
S: I haven’t listened to it in a while, but I know when I do, it’s going to give me extreme visceral preschool feelings.
J: How old were you when we started jamming?
S: Jamming! That’s been a huge part of our relationship for what feels like my whole life. We’ve been doing that since I was at least six.
J: It was never a planned thing, like a father-son activity that was on our calendar. We’d just be sitting around the house, and there was nothing else to do, and I’d look at you, and we’d both know it was time.
S: It usually started with you saying, “You want to jam?” Like some dads say, “You want to throw the ball around?”
J: And then we’d go down to the basement and start playing.
S: Me on the drums and you with a guitar and amp. We’d improvise without speaking. Now that I’m a grown-up, or a grown-up-ish, I play with other people, and I go to a school with a music conservatory, and I’ve discovered that the unspoken bond that you and I have when we’re making music together—where it feels like we can anticipate each other and know where a song is heading without saying a word—it’s not as common as I thought. I took it for granted because that’s what we did all the time.
J: We have our disagreements, though.
S: Oh yeah. When we were doing the Sukierae record, I remember being horrified that you wanted to put a piano on “High as Hello.” It just didn’t sound right to me.
J: [Laughs.] That’s right. You were very upset.
S: But you were calm about it. You told me, “I’m just trying something. Relax.” The piano ended up in the final mix, and I like it now. But in the moment, I just couldn’t believe you would do that to the song.
J: If that was my worst offense as a dad, I think I did okay.
S: I don’t know if I ever told you about this. Sammy and I were at Jewel buying cereal one night.
J: What? Where was I?
S: On tour, I think. It was around nine p.m., and we ran into a teacher from our high school. She looked at us with this really sad, mournful look. Like “Those poor kids.”
J: Buying their own cereal. How Dickensian.
S: She walked over to us and gave us both a gentle squeeze on the shoulder.
J: I don’t like where this is going.
S: Hold on, it gets better. So she says to us, “I know it’s hard with your father never being around.”
J: Oh come on!
S: It probably didn’t help that we were there with Scott Reilly.
J: Bullethead? He’s harmless.
S: Yeah, but a couple of teenagers buying cereal with Mojo Nixon’s manager? It didn’t look good.
J: I feel like this book just needs to be honest, you know? I don’t want to gloss over anything. Even if it doesn’t “look good.”
S: Okay, how about this? You just come right out with it, say something like “I feel like I was a really bad dad at some moments in my kids’ lives. I feel like I really let them down when I was struggling with addiction or on the road too much. But they have since assured me that they really appreciate the . . . blah, blah blah,” whatever. You just talk about how you feel you failed, and how your perception didn’t always line up with reality.
J: Yeah, but that could come off as a little needy. I know that I am needy, but I want to hide that from the public as much as possible.
S: Okay, so maybe you don’t talk about it. You show it with stories.
J: Yeah. Let’s show something that doesn’t seem like a cliché. Everybody knows parenting is hard, and being the son of a musician who travels all the time is hard. But how do we demonstrate the complexities of our relationship? I want to write about it without relying on the same tired father-and-son tropes.
S: Well, here’s something. On the Sukierae tour, remember the show we played in Austin, Texas? With the lady in the front row taking pictures?
J: Oh yeah. She was the worst. She just walked right up to the stage and stood in front of everybody, snapping photos like we were doing the show just for her.
S: In between songs, you started yelling at her, “You’ve got to go back to your seat! You’re being a dick right now!”
J: She was being a dick.
S: She was furious when you told her that. She came and did something again, and you addressed her again. And then she left. I don’t remember if we asked her to be taken out or if she left on her own. But then hours after the show, when we were out in the alley, walking to the tour bus, she found us. She might’ve been drunk, and she was bawling her eyes out. She was screaming at you, “You’re such an asshole! My nephew died! I’ve been looking forward to this for months! This was my release from that! You’re such an asshole! I fucking hate you!”
J: She ambushed us.
S: Well, yeah. But here’s the thing. I’ve been around you enough, and I’ve seen you be around enough people. When I see you interacting with your peers, I don’t see it as peers interacting. I project my own privilege onto it. I assume that everybody you’re talking to thinks of you as some rich, exalted celebrity. It’s taken me a while to realize that, from your perspective, it doesn’t matter who you’re talking to. In your mind, you’re just talking to another human being. I’ve even encountered things like that in my own life, where I’m talking to other people and I’m just interacting like we’re equals, and I’ll realize that other people are witnessing an inequity, like I’m a spoiled rich kid with a rock star dad, or whatever. So I project that when you’re talking to other people, especially when it’s a fan.
J: You thought I treated her badly?
S: I did at the time, which is why I intervened. But you were just being honest with her, and saying, “No, you were out of line and disrespectful.” You were treating her like an adult. And I got in the middle of it. I just wanted you to take it a little easier on her. I felt like, she’s so vulnerable, and you’re so powerful. She doesn’t deserve this. But I was wrong.
J: I don’t know. Maybe you weren’t wrong.
S: No, I was. Because you don’t undermine your own team. It is completely inappropriate and dangerous for me to undermine you when something like that is happening.
J: But maybe I should have been kinder to her.
S: When people have any sort of success, other people tend to perceive them as transformed. But they remain the same in their self-perception, generally speaking. Or maybe not. But that’s been my experience watching you, in my limited career as a young person. It seems like, regardless of how much or little creative or commercial success you’ve had, you feel the same.
J: I do feel the same.
S: And you look at the world the same way that you did when you were eighteen and in Uncle Tupelo. It’s everything around you that changes. I think that’s been one of the things I’ve admired most about you, and I’ve tried to emulate.
J: That I haven’t changed much since I was eighteen? [Laughs.]
S: Your lack of preciousness. It’s like you’re floating through life, and I don’t mean to say you’re being aloof. You just really care about the moment. You don’t even write things down too much. You have this kind of intense focus on the moment. I’m really anal in a lot of ways, and I like to make stuff meticulously. I like to cover all my bases and feel like a finished product is the absolute maximum idealized form of something. But working with you, like early on in the Sukierae sessions, we would just try stuff, and spend time following things and going down rabbit holes that we knew might not even help. I wanted to hear the finished thing in my head already. But you were like “Relax. We’ll get there. Let’s just throw some stuff against the wall and see what sticks.” That had a big impact on me.
J: I’m glad about that. [Long pause.] You want to jam?
S: Absolutely.
SPENCER CAME OF age in the studio, and it was a real revelation. I realized how talented he was while I was working on the second Mavis Staples record. Mavis and I had done some promotional videos where it was just me and her with an acoustic guitar, and she liked the idea of making a whole record like that. We started on that record with that concept, and as the material was coming together, it really felt like it would be better if we could give them a more full arrangement. One song that Mavis said she wanted to cover was “Revolution” by the Beatles, and it felt like it wouldn’t feel exciting enough without drums. I asked Spencer, who had been drumming in a band called the Blisters with his friends since he was seven, to come by after school. I said, “You remember that song, right?” And he said, “I think I remember it.” Then he came by after school and sat down, and we played it once through, and it sounded exactly like the Beatles record. He played it perfectly. I was stunned. “Did you practice this?”
“No, that’s how it goes, right?”
“Yeah, that’s really, really good . . .”
Then I sat him down and played him some songs, letting him do some overdub drumming. He was playing to my acoustic guitar, on tape. Things that aren’t cut to a click, as they say—with a metronome, basically—tend to be kind of hard to play to for a drummer, because the tempo kind of floats naturally, it slows down and speeds up just enough to be obvious when a steady beat is put next to it. It’s really not a fair thing to ask a drummer to do because it usually makes them sound like they have no idea how to play the drums, but Spencer sat down and matched my performances bang on in no more than a couple of takes, like it was my DNA playing the drums with no perceptible speeding up or slowing down. When instruments play together tightly, you don’t notice that. You only notice it when one guy takes off and makes everybody sound like they’re slowing down, or vice versa. Tom, our engineer, looked at me, and said, “I don’t know if he knows what he’s doing is really hard.”
I thought about that a lot. Basically, we were doing what we’d done his whole life. Playing together is something he enjoyed doing with me, bonding-wise, since he was as little as I can remember. We would get on the floor and play music together. He’d also grown up in a culture of belief. The way that professional baseball players have kids who end up being professional baseball players. The odds of any kid being a professional baseball player are really, really small. And it’s not just connections—you have to actually be able to do that. But it’s not a thing that they believe they can’t do, because they have a modeled behavior, and an atmosphere of “Yes, this is something perfectly reasonable to expect out of life.”
And I think that’s huge for people to be able to live in an environment where they believe that they can accomplish things. That it’s not strange to accomplish things. I think that has something to do with it. But Spencer just basically came out of the Mavis sessions thinking, “I really, really enjoy doing that a lot.” After we finished that record with Mavis, we kept doing what we’d been doing, having him come by after school and having him play drums on songs I was working on. And that’s really what we’ve been doing ever since. Putting drums on Wilco records—most songs start with Spencer, and then Glenn kind of comes and replaces him with Glenn’s style. Almost everything I’ve recorded in the past seven years or so started with Spencer. When we toured as Tweedy, I looked over a lot of nights and said, “I don’t know how I got to be this lucky.”
Sammy came around to it a bit later, when he was really young I think he thought of it as more his brother’s thing and he wanted his own thing. He fell in love with photography and poetry. Recently he started getting interested in modular synths, so I brought home the refrigerator-size system Jim O’Rourke left at the Loft when he moved to Japan. Within a few days Sammy was hooked on ambient drones and had started making his own patches.
Then, for his senior year project in high school, he got the go-ahead from his adviser to make a record. Susie and I were a little nervous that he might have backed himself into a corner, partially because he had the impression that whipping up a record was pretty easy and normal, and partially because his adviser assumed that having Tweedy as a last name meant you can play an instrument. We were even more nervous when I asked him what kind of record he wanted to make and he informed me that it would be “Kind of like John Fahey with some modular synth but mostly acoustic fingerpicking in the American Primitive style.” Which was surprising for a lot of reasons but primarily because neither of us had ever even seen him hold a guitar. But he did it! He scheduled some lessons with our friend Jim Becker from Califone and he made a record of fingerpicked acoustic guitar instrumentals and experimental noise collages.
After Spencer heard it he texted me. “How does Sammy feel about you playing guitar all over his record? Wasn’t it supposed to be his senior project?” I got a thrill out of getting to be the one to tell him that I hadn’t played a note, that it was all Sammy. Spencer was astonished. He’d been away at school and he had only heard the discouraging aftermath of one of Sammy’s first lessons. Lately, I’ve been having Sammy come by after school and double my vocals, and you’d never know it wasn’t me if I didn’t credit him, except that he maybe sounds a bit skinnier.
Sammy listens to music like it’s his fucking job. At eighteen years old, he’s almost impossible to stump. I’ll put things on in the car and be like, “Do you know what this is?” And he’ll be, “Yeah, I think it’s Leonard Cohen, Live at the Isle of Wight 1970.” No, he knows. “Okay, tough guy, what’s this?” “Um, it’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne. That’s a great record.” I’ll be, “How do you know this?” “I listen to it all the time.” He knows so much, it’s insane.
I love how Sammy is making his own connections, cross-referencing, listening to stuff he likes and then reading about who they like, going back and listening to Kluster and Kraftwerk when LCD Soundsystem talks about them. Listening to Japanese noise, looking at his mother’s old schedule for Lounge Ax, realizing, “Oh my god, Merzbow played your club!” But it’s not just stuff like that. It’s also “What’s your favorite Etta James record, Dad?” It’s pretty wide ranging. His friends don’t understand it. He has a friend who claims to not like guitars, singing, or chord changes in music. He only likes power electronics, like records by the band Whitehouse. That is pretty fascinating in itself. How does that happen? “You know Luke’s parents hate Wilco, right?” Well, that explains it. They’re noise people or whatever. But he’ll put on a John Prine record, and before any delightfully melodic folk storytelling can even begin to unfold, his friends will say, “How can you listen to this? Why would you ever listen to this?”
When Sammy sang with us on our recent Japanese tour, he asked questions like “Does that mean I have to come to soundcheck?” Yes, it means you come to soundcheck. You’re not just going to come out and sing it in front of an audience. Finally, he had no place else to go but to soundcheck, so “You want to try ‘Thirteen’?” We had been playing it in the dressing room with him for the whole trip. He did a great job, and it was amazing to have him onstage with us.
Now Sammy says that he’s ready to devote more of his energy to growing as a musician. I never push him, but I do tell him, “You have a unique advantage over a lot of people making music, in that you’re a really good listener. That’s almost more important than being a good performer. To be a good writer, to make your own music, you have to be a great listener. To make interesting stuff, you have to be an insightful listener, and you are that already. To me, that’s more of a special attribute than having a lightning-fast faculty on the guitar or something like that.”
And Sammy has challenged me to grow in ways I could have never predicted when I was his age. Susie is Jewish, and both Spencer and Sammy were bar mitzvahed. So when it was Sammy’s turn to start Hebrew school and he began begging to get out of it, I offered to help him by studying with him, and decided I was going to convert. He was bar mitzvahed, and I had a conversion ceremony. It was more involved than I thought it would be on a number of levels, including a level that required a mohel, a storage closet, and a sharp object. You’ll be able to read all about it in my follow-up book, Leave Them Wanting Less.
“I WANT TO SEE if I can get this out without crying,” I told the crowd at Purdue University around midway through our set in 2006. “I lost my mom this week. And she was very, very dear to me. She would have wanted me to be here tonight, even though it’s someplace that I really don’t want to be, I have to be honest with you. But she would be mad at me for not being here.”
I’m still amazed that I made it to the show at all. It was early October of that year. My mom had died on a Friday and Wilco was booked to play in West Lafayette, Indiana, the following Wednesday. I was a wreck. Inconsolable. I don’t know if it was the best idea for me to play a gig so soon afterward. I was very raw and emotional. But I believe what I said up there. She would have been angry with me if I’d canceled the show because of her. This was the woman who drove me out to the country to buy a guitar that we’d read about in the paper, who rented the halls I used to play in with the Primatives, who paid for the PAs and passed out flyers and collected the money. She was my biggest fan, and not just in the mom sense. When her doctors discovered that she had blocked arteries in 2002, which caused her EKG reading to flatline and they had to scramble to save her, she walked out of the hospital the next day because she wasn’t about to miss Wilco’s tour-ending show in St. Louis. Nobody believed in me like she believed in me.
Her death was unexpected. She didn’t take great care of her health, but she was happy and vibrant. She had a heart attack while playing cards with friends—the same social circle of women she played cards with once a month for more than forty years. One of them told me, “She went down like a ballerina and she was gone.” So I guess it was the kind of death we’d all sign up for. A good death, if there is such a thing. There were no bedroom vigils, no praying for a recovery, no whispered conversations with doctors. Just a bunch of “old broads” (in their words) sitting around card tables, slapping down cards, and eating gooey butter cake, until one of them decided to cut the game short.
Music helped me survive my mom’s death like it helped me survive everything else. Music kept me emotionally afloat during those first uncertain years of fatherhood, even as I doubted whether I wanted to play music again. Music kept me alive when I thought the pills might be the thing that finally killed me. And music is what kept me sane when cancer came back for Susie.
The first half of 2014 was torturous in ways I didn’t know it was possible to be tortured. We learned in February that there was another tumor growing in Susie’s chest, in the very same spot where they’d removed a tumor twenty-two years earlier. But they didn’t know exactly what it was, if it was cancer or something else. So they did biopsies, and the doctors kept telling her, “We’re not sure yet, we need to run more tests.” For four months we waited, trying not to let the worst-case scenarios play out in our heads.
It happened just as I was trying something new, to write and record a solo album. I loved making music with the rest of Wilco, but I wanted to see if I could do it alone. I’m on a need-to-know basis with any instruments besides the bass and guitar. But it makes me think about songwriting in a different way when I can’t just say, “Hey, Pat, do you have a piano part to put here?” Or, “Okay, Nels, this is the part of the song where you tear a hole in the space-time continuum.” My limitations as a musician make my songs feel different than when I’m relying on other people to go ahead and be great all over them.
Without breaking stride after the Mavis record, Spencer kept coming by the Loft every day, and something was just starting to take shape. It was a thing we were doing because it was exciting and it felt fresh. But it was also a coping mechanism, a way for us to hold on to each other without just hugging all the time. We were hopeful, but also really freaked out. Why can’t the doctors tell us what’s in Susie’s chest? Why is this taking so goddamn long? Just take a fucking X-ray and tell us what’s in there! Every day that there was no news, Spencer and I kept working to take our minds off the phone not ringing. Sammy was invested, too. Paying close attention and weighing in on lyrics and arrangements. Thinking and talking about music made our world seem normal. Our family needed music to keep going.
The news, when it came, wasn’t good. She had not one but two types of cancer—a rare form of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (primary lymphoma of the bone), and liposarcoma, the same cancer she had twenty-two years ago, which the doctors didn’t know was cancer until they’d cut it out of her. She would need six rounds of chemotherapy treatment and a surgery, where they would have to saw her rib cage in half, and then radiation and two more years of maintenance chemo. Unlike the first time Susie got sick, I wanted to know everything. I’d sit at the computer for hours, Googling the minutiae of her cancers. I don’t know if it accomplished anything, other than annoying her doctors by me asking too many questions. But I needed some semblance of control. And I needed to be a pillar for her the way she had been for me when I needed her the most. She had driven me to too many hospitals, held my hand when I explained to countless nurses that I thought I was dying. She’d endured living with a drug addict and stayed with me when any reasonable person would have cut and run. The least I could do was have her back when cancer came after her a second time. Being the badass she is, she was facing down the situation in a way that almost made me feel sorry for cancer. But she also got scared, and she started relying on me more than she ever had before. She needed me, and I wasn’t going to let her down.
I only showed her the cracks in my seams once, when she was in the hospital for a bone marrow biopsy. The doctor was explaining what they needed to do, and it involved cutting and sawing and drilling and removing part of her spine. He kept using the words “skeletal” and “lesions.” It was a lot of information. I tried to do the thing where you’re listening but not really listening, where you’re just nodding but trying to distract yourself by staring at the ceiling. The next thing I heard was Susie shouting, “Jeff! Jeff!” And then I was out. Next thing I remember I’m in a hospital bed out in the hallway, with a couple of nurses checking my vitals, and I see Susie being wheeled past me on a gurney, rolling her eyes at me on her way to surgery. “Hi,” I said, waving at her with a limp hand.
For months and months we went back and forth, to and from the hospital. She had so many treatments and procedures and tests and scans sometimes it was hard for her not to wonder if it was worth it to put her body through so much. In the midst of it all, we made a record—Spencer, Sammy, Susie, and I together. It was our project. Spencer and I played the instruments, but more than any other record I’ve ever made, it became something the whole family stayed focused on. It needed all of us to keep it going. We would listen to the songs together, hearing arrangements grow and take shape, and it was a warm place for us all to disappear. It became a healthy outlet for our fear and anxiety and sadness. We called the album Sukierae, which was a family joke. When Susie was a kid, she had a crush on Peter Noone, the lead singer for Herman’s Hermits. She read in some teen magazine that his sister was named Suki, so she started asking all of her friends to start calling her Suki. Just in case she ran into Noone, they’d have that icebreaker—“Your sister’s name is Suki? That’s my name!”—and then they’d fall in love and get married. It was the perfect love story. We added “Rae” because it’s her middle name and “Sukierae” is what a handful of her closest friends ended up calling her and still do, to this day.
Susie got better and our lives have all gone back to something resembling how it was before. Like everything that nearly tears you apart, it brought us closer together.
CANCER CREATED ANOTHER detour, this time during the course of writing this book. My dad was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer late in the spring of 2017. My father and I had become closer after my mother died. He only fully emerged as a parent when she stopped being around as competition. With her gone, all of a sudden he was warm and affectionate, in ways I didn’t realize he was capable of. I would have been happy if it had happened sooner, but I feel lucky we got so close at the very end.
Luckily, my sister and I were both around and free of responsibilities enough to be with him a lot during his final days and months. There wasn’t anything anyone could do for him but make him comfortable. So we sang to him at his bedside and got him to tell us what he thought about the whole “living” thing now that he was near the end. “Life is happy and sad and it hurts” is what he told us. Try and sum it up better than that—I can’t. About four days before he died we finally managed to get everything set up so that he could receive hospice care at home. The house I grew up in. The mauve one.
We let everyone know it was time. Debbie was already there, and my brother Steve made it back to town. Susie, Spencer, and I were all there, but Sammy had a summer job and we had left him in Chicago. Initially we thought my dad was going to be around for at least a few more weeks, so Sammy had felt like he’d still have a chance to say goodbye when his job ended. But when we finally got my dad settled in the hospital bed we’d had set up in the living room (where my mom and I used to torture him with late-night TV movies), his condition began to deteriorate, fast. It seemed like he’d been holding on just so that he could die at home.
Suddenly, it started to feel like he had hours, not weeks, left. We didn’t know what to do about Sammy. It was a tough call, but he told us he needed to be there. So we raced back to Chicago, picked him up, and drove back. A ten-hour round-trip. When we were about an hour outside of Belleville my sister called, sobbing. She didn’t think we were going to make it back in time. My dad’s breathing had become extremely labored and he was no longer conscious. The hospice nurse had told us that the hearing is the last thing to go, but before we could even suggest to my sister that we say goodbye over the phone, Sammy asked me if he could say goodbye.
My sister held the phone up to my dad’s ear and Sammy told him, “Grandpa, it’s Sammy. I just want you to know I love you. I’ll always love you. You’ll always be here in me as a part of me and Spencer. I don’t want to say goodbye, but I want you to know I’m going to be all right. Spencer’s going to be all right. And my dad’s going to be all right. We’re going to be all right. So, it’s okay to go. You won’t ever really leave us. We love you. Goodbye.”
It’s hard to drive a car safely when you’re crying harder than you’ve ever cried. I was so proud of Sammy. I don’t know where he gained the emotional insight that the dying might not want to let go because they’re worried about the living, but it was poignant and beautiful. In the end, we were able to make it to his side. Sammy and Spencer and I sang “I Shall Be Released” together, and I tried to sing “Hummingbird,” my dad’s favorite Wilco song, but I don’t think I got very far. My dad died about a half hour after we’d made it back from Chicago, with his girlfriend, Melba, holding his right hand and me and Sammy and Spencer holding his left; family at his side, and a stereo we hadn’t even noticed was on, playing Wilco softly in the strange new silence.