Echoes of My Father - Retro Review & Memories
In May 2019, I got a text that said my Father was in the ICU due to a series of events rooted in his Dementia. I don’t remember how long he was in the hospital. I remember they moved him from one hospital to another but the full length of time was long enough for my sister to make an emergency visit. It was great to see her, even if the circumstances were awful. My sister and I had a rough start to 2019 which made the rest of the year one of grief, mourning, and rediscovery.
In the second hospital, it was clear to me that we would not be leaving with my dad, it was a matter of time. Each day when we left, I expected to get a call or text telling me he had died. Before that moment arrived, I had a chance to be with him and members of the family over the course of a few days. There were difficult moments I witnessed, but the toughest moment for me was being told to say something to my Dad and I didn’t have much to say. My Father, on what I believed to be his death bed, and I didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. I could say something like, “There were a lot of people in the room” and a moment as a person as that deserves some level of privacy, but that would be an excuse. The truth is, once I went to college, my Dad and I fell out of the practice of being in touch.
So here I am, almost 20 years of being out of touch and I have a few moments to say something and I had nothing. I think about what he must have been wanting to hear. I believe the testimony of those who have come out of unconsciousness and tell others they could hear what was happening around them. I wonder what he was telling me. I said something about Coventry Football and car racing. I could have said something about tennis but I hadn’t watched a match in ages. I felt the moment passing by and I was frozen. It’s a moment you see in the movies or on TV but there is nothing that prepares you for the moment you’re standing next to your unconscious parent. There is no thought-out dialogue I had in my pocket to reference. My Dad and I functioned in our low communication system but that system failed us when it really mattered. It failed us for two decades and it bruised my memories of what my Dad was like and what he meant to me.
I lost my Father a few days later, I lost my Dad long before and I’m going to find him. I invite you to come along.
I’ve had a few years to let the grief and pain of loss flutter in the winds of life. I was on YouTube late in 2022 and the algorithm put a Law & Order video in front of me. This was the show my Dad and I watched in the late 90s. I think the timing just worked out where we were in the living room at the same time and I was happy to watch a show that was a little beyond my comprehension. I got the gist of the stories but there were some lawyer tactics and dramatic reveals where I hadn’t quite made the connections to fully understand. As I remember liking the show so much and I used to own the first 3 seasons on DVD, I went looking for Law & Order on a streaming service. None of the services we already subscribe to had it. Amazon Prime has season one but anything beyond that was going to require another subscription, which, no thank you. What about DVDs?
In my search, I found the box set that had the first 20 seasons. I found a cheap DVD player and I was going to watch my way through the series. It was a show he and I liked to watch together and would be a fun trip down memory lane. Two things happened on my way through the series. The meaning of the episodes, watching as an adult was fascinating to me. Thinking about what the world was like in the late 80s early 90s. The easiest example was the closeted lifestyle of gay men. This is used as a major lever in several stories for motive and reluctant testimony. I wanted to write about it. I wanted to share what my memories were of living at the time, how it relates to now, and how well the show stands up 30+ years later.
The other thing that happened was the realization that my Dad and I watched a lot of great shows together when I was a teenager. I thought it would be fun to look for those shows, watch through them and think about my Dad as I was watching. What memories would I unlock and what about these shows made him so interested? I have no idea, even today as I write this post what I will find in this experiment. I do know I will watch some great 90s TV and I hope to find more memories of my father in the echoes of the past.
Why Am I Doing This?
If you’ve made it this far, I want to give you a well-defined reason why I’m taking on this project. I’m doing this for two reasons, one for my benefit and one for yours.
1) For Me - I hope to exercise the muscles from the 80s and 90s that hold the best memories of my childhood. The memories of the 2000s sit in front of those which I would prefer to feature when I remember my Dad. I want to learn now, before I have my own child, how to build strong memories and give roots to the memories so they may feed from the soil of life and propagate into the future all on their own.
2) For You - I hope you find something in our story that you can latch onto and think about its application to your own relationships. I don’t think the story of my Dad and me is unique. I think there are lessons out there for both you and me. I hope you find a way to open your thinking to your past and present. Who are the people and creatures important to you and how do you think about them in the moments you have with them? Time feels slow, although, it’s anything but. Being present is about giving the moments we share the thoughts and feelings those moments deserve at the time they occur. I want to open your presence to the moments we are living. I missed them for two decades with my Dad. If you’ve missed some yourself, as I’m sure we all have, let’s try to unlock those moments. Or, at the very least, give ourselves the time to think about the memories we know we enjoyed, but the details have gone a little fuzzy. They may not come back into focus, but being there can help the next time we have a moment in the now.
3) For Us - I want to have some fun writing about old shows. Law & Order, Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, This Old House and some classic tennis matches from the 90s are currently on the menu. There are a lot of rabbit holes to go down in these shows. I don’t know where we will end up, but the nostalgia trip alone will be worth the price of admission. For you, that price is time, for me, the price is time and the cost of the DVDs. The rewards…….we shall see.
CHR;)
