Category: Fatherhood

Being a father and dad in America.

Closure

On By Chris SoutherIn A Boy's Life, Family, Fatherhood, Life in these United StatesLeave a comment

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June 22, 2020
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At 1:58 this past Tuesday I closed all legal proceedings on my late father’s estate. It was a quietly bitter-sweet victory in a long and emotionally-charged process that I don’t wish on anyone who has lost someone they truly care for.

To quickly recap, my father was diagnosed with Stage 3 lung cancer in the spring of 2018. He fought it but lost his fight October 18th of that same year. At the time, he lived with a wealthy but (and I say this without any humor) evil woman who refused to share him with his family and who constantly lied to her friends and family about our (lack of) concern for him. She was the widow of a fairly wealthy financial wizard who left her a more-than-tidy sum. She had two daughters whom she had put through school and who, according to my father, she annual presented with approximately $30K – $50K in cash and/or gifts. Her house was about 6000 sq. feet and had a garage large enough to hold her $250K Winnebago, which she was only able to enjoy thanks to my father who did all the driving and maintenance, which was not insubstantial.

The truth is, she was a sick woman. Sicker than she would admit, according to my father who had confessed to me that her memory was increasingly a problem. But she was so dependent on him that she wouldn’t let him out of her sight unless it was to have him do something benefitting her. Her dependence also meant she was extremely selfish. For example, despite being quite wealthy, she refused to pay for garbage pick-up. Instead, she required my father to drive their trash to the local dump. Once when I was visiting about 3 months before he died, she made him “take out the trash,” at which point, I discovered the first of many eccentricities. To say I was incredulous is an understatement. Here he was, a very sick man, and he’s hauling the trash to the dump to save her a few dollars.

For a time, the family tried very hard to include her in things despite our feelings towards her. Both she and my father were invited to family get-togethers, but either she would come and act terribly put-upon, or she would beg off and implore my father not to leave her. I invited them once to my home, only to have her make passive-aggressive comments about our financial situation (which is fine) and how having to climb the stairs in our home made her legs hurt. The latter was the excuse my father gave for neither of them ever coming again. When I invited just him, he said he couldn’t leave her because she got too upset when he left her for any length of time.

Eventually, she aliented the entire family, at which point most of us gave up any pretense of liking her and tried our best to open my father’s eyes to the truth. A point of note here; towards the end, I did manage to have a few moments alone with him at his house and when I begged him to leave and come with us, he looked at me with what appeared to be complete resignation in his eyes and simply said, “No.”  I don’t know how much of his refusal was out of loyalty to her for having provided for him for a decade, or how much of it was his not wanting to be a burden on me and my family. Possibly a bit of both. Either way, I knew then I wouldn’t see him again.

Before he died, he signed a Will turning over his meager belongings to me with a gentlemen’s agreement that all of his money would go towards college funds for my three children. But, when he died, a new Will was released. The new Will did that exact same thing, only it forced the issue through Trusts. This was “her” doing. She didn’t trust her own family, so she didn’t think my dad should either. And of course, he went along with it to make her happy.

Little did he know how much this legal framework was going to cost his “estate,” eating deeply into an already meager final financial reckoning. Not to mention how much additional work it put on me, the Administrator, setting up estate accounts, then trusts, selling property and moving assets around, even coming out of my own pocket to pay for things the courts required upfront and which, if I funded it out of the Trust, which is my legal right, would further eat into what was designated as “college money” for my children.

I cursed my father often. I hated him for what he’d done and not just “what” he had done, but that he had done it at all. To be honest, I’m still not sure how I feel about what he did. I understand the situation he was in, but I also can’t imagine doing the same thing to one of my children.

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Completed on 12.31.2021

It’s been more than a year since I wrote the first part of this blog. I have largely moved past anger into acceptance. Acceptance that my father was just a man. A flawed and possibly haunted man. Haunted by a past of choices made, promises kept, and loyalties misplaced. Today, I think I mostly feel betrayed. Though I’m adopted, my father never treated me like an adopted child. At least, not until he died. He wasn’t an emotional, touchy-feely man, but I had always felt that he would do anything for me if I just asked.

Which is what made his passing so devastating for me, and the rest of the family frankly. A lifetime of loyalty–ours to him and vice versa–tossed away and handed to some “Johnny come lately” in his life. Betrayal and disappointment. Those are my feelings. I doubt they will ever go away.

My father didn’t “die” of lung cancer. Though he did have terminal Stage 3 cancer, he died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head. The irony is that I had taken his old rifles and shotgun home with me a couple of months before. The one he used was one of his newer ones that, I’m assuming, his partner bought him, which he didn’t feel obligated to give me.

So far as I know, and I admittedly don’t know much, there was no note left. I spoke with the ME and he believes it was self-inflicted; something I did question. When he died, his partner didn’t call any of the family. Most of my family in NC has a long history of volunteer work at the Fire Department and even those that are retired from it now still keep a police scanner running in their homes, day and night.

My cousin who is retired from the Dept. heard the call come over the radio. She called me as soon as she knew what had happened. Two of my other cousins  (still active) were dispatched to the home. I’m told his partner was very blase’ and told them, “If you want to see him, he’s in there,” referring to his body, lying in a pool of blood in the bathroom. She showed no remorse; no pity; no emotion, according to them.

Living in Atlanta, it took me three hours to get there. By the time I arrived, his body was gone and the police were pulling away. Since she was his wife, all of the rights and decisions were hers to make. His partner refused me entry into her home, as I had discussed with my father that she probably would. Obviously upset, I yelled at the closed door about what a horrible person she was. As I did, a neighbor came over and made a derogatory comment, asking if I was the son, “Who never came to see him in ten years.” I laugh-cried, partly at the absurdity of the statement, and partly at the audacity his partner showed lying to everyone about what had really been going on. But she had them all fooled.

When I drove away from her house that day, it was the last time I would see her. The “second Will” named me the Executor of his estate, and blessedly, he had also already made arrangements for his body to be cremated. I was thankful that, at least, his wife/partner would not be allowed to dictate the terms of his final wishes.

Why did he do it? I’ll never know for sure. What I suspect is that he reached a conclusion. After months of irreversible lung cancer eating at him, and I believe, facing the cruel reality of his family (myself included) finally having given up after years of calls and two-hour visits, which always resulted in his partner even further alienating him from us, he reached a decision. That decision being that he was not going to get better. He was only going to get worse and without admitting himself into Hospice–something he would rather die than do–he made the decision to unburden this world and those around him of his existence. He once confided to me that his partner had told him she wished he’d just go into Hospice care. He didn’t want to ever be that helpless.

A couple of weeks after his passing, I got a call from my lawyer. My father’s widow had suffered a mild heart attack and while at the hospital, called her lawyer and said that I had caused her illness. My lawyer called to find out if, in fact, I had spoken to his widow and if so, what had transpired.

I told my lawyer the truth; I hated the woman but I had not seen or spoken to her since I pulled away from her house the day my father died. My lawyer laughed, told me to keep doing the same, and that was the last I heard from his widow, or her lawyer.

Never in a million years could I have imagined an ending like this. Even today, knowing my father’s religious beliefs about suicide, I have trouble believing he took his own life. But I understand. I believe he felt that it was the last decision he could make that was truly his. If he had stayed and gotten sicker, which he would have, he knew his partner would send him to Hospice as soon as it was apparent he was no longer capable of self-care. And he knew that, being his wife, there was absolutely nothing the rest of us could do about it.

And since he had made it clear he would accept no help from the family unless it was us coming to him and having to deal with his partner, something we had all tried at one point or another only to have our help thrown back in our faces later, he knew he was on his own. By marrying “her,” he had sealed his own fate. She was now and forever, his lifeblood and legal decision maker.

There’s more to my father’s story, post-death, and maybe I’ll include it in later blogs. But, I felt this one needed an ending, a little closure. If for no one else, but me. I only wish I felt a satisfactory closure to my father’s life, but I’ll have to accept that some things will forever remain uncertain and unsatisfactorily resolved.

A Dust Pan for Dad – A Fish Out of Water Story

On By Chris SoutherIn Dad Blogs, Family, Fatherhood, Life in these United States, MarriageLeave a comment

The other day I was picking up a few items at the grocery store, walking through the produce aisle, selecting some bell peppers here, a few (overly) expensive mangos there. Coming towards me was a middle-aged man and what appeared to be his two children–a boy and a girl. Nothing unusual in that. If anything, it’s always good to see the continued debunking of the media myth that men don’t contribute in the home.

As I selected a few lemons, I couldn’t help but notice the father. Slumped over his cart as he was, it was clear he wasn’t entirely comfortable in whatever “this” role was, probably a new one for him. Seeing that, I started paying a bit closer attention to the situation surrounding him and his children.

I caught one of the kids talking about the apples and I heard the man say something like, “But do we really need them?”

I didn’t catch the rest; probably because I was immediately swept away into a memory from my childhood. One that included another middle-aged man–my father–also with his child–me–and also clearly not entirely in his element.

I was probably 13. After 11 years of what seemed to be a stable, if perhaps uneventful, marriage, my stepmom announced she wanted to separate from my father for a while. As usual, my father seemed caught completely unaware, a trend that he appeared to have ignored much of his life. But, it being the 80s and divorce trends on a steep trajectory upwards, while I wasn’t unfamiliar with divorce, I didn’t know what a “separation” meant and I found myself at a complete loss as to how we were going to make it without her at home.

Even at that young age, I recognized that it was very selfish of me to immediately jump to concerns of self when my parents were clearly having problems. But the last time my father had to care for me (and my brother at the time) by himself, he was not good at it and it only last about a year because he quickly met someone who stepped in and took over everyday home-making.

At 13, I needed little supervision. I got myself up in the mornings; made my own breakfast and got myself out the door with no intervention from my parents. Dad was gone to work long before I even got up and my step-mother stayed in her room getting ready for work until after I left.

My father was not a “household chore” kind of guy. He was a builder. Tell him something needed fixing and he was on it. Tell him he needed to cook dinner, however, and he was at a total loss unless it meant cutting up and boiling some vegetables.

I very clearly remember our first trip to the grocery store. It had probably been two weeks since my stepmother had packed up her things and moved out. She had rented, and furnished, a nice apartment about 30 minutes away. Any hopes I had that her moving out was just a temporary thing were dashed the first weekend I spent at her place. I remember looking around thinking, “She has every piece of furniture someone who is single would have.” It didn’t occur to me then that she had clearly been planning this, if not actively setting it in motion without anyone knowing it, for quite some time and was planning on it lasting more than a few days. I also saw a pack of cigarettes sticking out of her purse. So far as I knew, both she and my father had quit smoking years ago, so this was (also) a new development.

But, “visiting” your parent is awkward. There I was, a pre-teen and a middle-aged step-parent stuck inside a nondescript apartment for two days. No money. Nothing to do really. And frankly, if we were at home, we wouldn’t have much day-to-day interaction anyway, so suddenly being forced to interact just because it’s “your weekend” made for some awkward moments. I couldn’t wait for the weekend to end.

Back at home; after a couple of weeks of my having to come up with meal ideas for my father and me, not to mention that I’d not had anything to pack for my school lunch in days, a grocery-run was unavoidable and so I broached the subject with my father one Saturday morning. He was not enthused.

Now, I had no idea of my parents’ financial situation; not really. We had a comfortable house, but there were little things that led me to believe we weren’t doing all that well. So, I was very cognizant of money. Much like the children of the Great Depression, still today I’m a saver “just in case” and I’m confident much of my tendencies stem from the lean times of my youth when I spent my school lunch period pretending to study in the library so I didn’t have to explain to my friends that I wasn’t eating because my parents always “forgot” to give me any lunch money. And other small financial crises.

We drove to the store together. I’d shopped with my stepmother enough to know the drill. I grabbed a cart and headed right. In truth, I don’t remember much about the actual grocery store, but one particular selection impressed itself in my memories, again further cementing the fact that money was tight and this whole “on our own” thing was not going to be easy.

With “mom” gone, I had picked up the bulk of the housekeeping duties. I lightly cooked and cleaned up the kitchen. I dry-mopped the downstairs floors and vacuumed the carpets in all but my parents’ room. I did our laundry. In short, I did most of the housework.

I remember that the dustpan we had, had seen better days. The edge was chipped and dulled and it was difficult to get fine dirt and debris into it and so as we passed the aisle with household cleaning supplies, I told my father we needed a new dustpan. Of all the things we needed, why a dustpan? It’s one of those things. One of those battles upon whose hill you know you will die on while defending. But it needed to be done.

The dustpan selection ran the gamut from a super-cheap aluminum pan, similar to the crap-tastic plastic one we currently had, to a more expensive glossy white plastic unit with a small brush attachment. I picked up the latter and my father immediately said, “Why do we need that one? This other one (the cheaper alternative) is just fine.”

l remember making the argument that the cheap one is just going to get brittle and break like the one we already had, so we should buy the more expensive, but durable, one. I remember the look on my father’s face before he put the dustpan in our cart. For a brief moment, a pained expression passed over his eyes. I remember seeing him about to argue and then immediately change his mind. And I remember the resignation that fixed itself on his expression as he placed the shiny, white dustpan with the attachable broom into the cart.

That day, upon that hill, I’d won and he’d given up. Maybe that was why my step-mom left. Maybe at some point, he got tired of fighting and just stopped trying, or caring. And I guess she did too.

Like the dad in my recent shopping experience, my father was just as uncomfortable playing the homemaker. Back in the present, while watching the dad at the grocery, I experienced a momentary pang of empathy for what he was having to deal with. Whatever situation led to him being there, he was doing what he needed to do despite his inexperience and discomfort. For that, I gave him credit. Maybe, like my father from long ago, he too was going through something in his relationship. Or maybe his wife just had other plans that day and asked him to do this thing he didn’t normally do. I hope for his kids’ sake that’s what it was.

I don’t know what all happened between my father and stepmother back then. She did eventually come home, but it was six months or more later. When I graduated from high school and joined the Air Force, less than a year later my step-mother divorced my father, and once again, he claimed complete ignorance of any issues and was completely taken by surprise by the whole thing.

She will tell you she divorced because he ignored her despite her trying everything to get him to pay attention to her. If the never-opened bottle of Jack Daniels that sat in the back of their closet my entire teen years, or the nearly-pristine, lone Playboy I found in the back of my father’s dresser drawer, which surely my step-mother knew about, are any indication of the lengths she went to, none of it worked.

My dad was many things. And he was NOT many things. But of this about him I will admit, he was loyal. Perhaps too loyal. Once he committed to something, it was a done deal, for better or for worse. At 40, he adopted two young boys–one with documented mental issues–and when he and his young wife, who was 11 years his junior, divorced a few years later, he took us with him and did the best he knew how.

But my father’s Achilles’ was women. So far as I can tell, he never told a woman in need, “No.” The bigger the hard-luck story, the harder he pursued them. Lord knows I wish he hadn’t. I’ll never stop regretting the last time he couldn’t stop himself from getting involved, and never walking away, even as the relationship cost him quite literally everything. But he was loyal.

Not too long after his death, we found out something that turned everything we thought we knew about my father on its ear. And the more I think about it, perhaps that is the reason he turned out to be so loyal later in life.

Maybe that’s all any of us can or should ever try to be. Even when life goes sideways and things aren’t ideal, maybe the best you can be remembered for is having always being there for the people who needed you most. Even if it ends up costing you your own happiness.

DadMemes

On By Chris SoutherIn Dad Blogs, Family, FatherhoodLeave a comment

Sony offered up the first three installments of the wildly popular video game series, “Uncharted” for free recently. No doubt, trying to drum up dollars for the latest installment, Uncharted 4. It worked. I bought it.

Anyway, this is a cut-scene from one of the games. I didn’t take the picture (someone else did), but having played through this scene, I was reminded of it while trying to get my sprinkler back in shape after winter.

sprinkler

 

 

Dear Dad. The Things You Missed.

On By Chris SoutherIn Dad Blogs, Family, FatherhoodLeave a comment

Dear Dad,

I was doing some more work to get the Trusts set up for the kids the other day, as per your Will. And I realized that it was the same day of the month that you died. And for a second, I panicked, thinking I’d somehow forgotten that you had been gone for some significant time (like two years). But then I realized it’s March, and you died in October and, well, at least the panic passed.

It’s been 17 months since you died. In many ways, it feels like an eternity. In other ways, it feels like only weeks. I gotta tell you, that surprise Will really threw a wrench in things. I thought we had a gentleman’s agreement on handling your assets and then you had to go and surprise everyone with a new Will that said the exact same thing, only putting significantly burdensome costs and requirements on me for the next 12 years. And while, when I stop and take my feelings out of it, I understand what you “meant,” that part about purposefully not leaving me anything…damn that hurt. A lot.

If felt like, that at the end of 43 years of being your son and being grateful for all you’ve done for me, through thick and thin, you were finally, publicly honest and admitted, “He’s not mine.” The one person who stuck by you through three divorces and four women. One of the only people who called to check on you when you got sick and who drove hours on the weekend to come and sit in awkward silence, just to spend a few remaining minutes with you before your inevitable passing. The only person with the balls enough to tell your girlfriend what a horrible person she was–how YOU couldn’t see it is beyond me–and that you were my father and that not she, and not anyone, could tell me what I could and couldn’t do with my dad–especially when it came to taking you to your cancer treatments.

You’ll never know what you missed out on because of her. How many hours of baseball games and soccer matches and football where your grandchildren, or as close as you were ever going to get to REAL grandchildren, played like the amazing kids they are. Sitting around the living room at night and hearing their laughter and just looking at them and being amazed at their beauty. You missed out on all of that because you put someone else, someone you met only a few years earlier, over your family.

Or maybe you never really, truly felt they were yours to feel proud of, even though I tried my hardest to make it seem so.

That rich girlfriend of yours, the one you trusted over your own son, the woman who advised you on how to “protect” what you wanted to entrust to your grandchildren (your ONLY grandchildren MY children); she cost your Estate more than $20K in taxes and fees. She wasn’t nearly as smart as you gave her credit for, or even as knowledgeable about finances, as I am. You should have trusted me.

“My way,” the way we discussed between the two of us, would have cost nothing, would have sped up how quickly we settled your Estate, wouldn’t have saddled me with dozens of hours of paperwork and filed taxes (3 additional filings each year now) and legal fees. And it wouldn’t have caused me to resent  you in the late afternoons as I sit and slog through legal requirements for Trustees, as much as I do sometimes.

But you always were a sucker for the ladies, weren’t you? “Whatever she wants” is how one of your ex-wives described your divorce strategy. I shouldn’t have expected anything less from you in your passing.

I ain’t missing you at all. Not today at least.