This made sense in part because it had become clear, in the prior year or two, that the “family secrets” I had “discovered” in therapy were not, in fact, true. It turned out I’d been under the misguided direction of an incompetent therapist. Understanding that, I was walloped with a terrible sense of guilt for the pain I’d caused Dad, but also of grief for time lost. I’d let eight precious years slide past.
My siblings said Dad was in good health, but 77 is 77. Life does not go on forever. It came to me that it might be wise to mend Dad’s and my broken bond, or risk, after his inevitable death, living out my life regretting an important relationship left undone. Presently, a thought struck like lightning: if I didn’t mend the bond, Dad would walk off the planet with an important relationship undone. So perhaps I could repair things between us not for my benefit but for his.
That September I wrote a short note asking him if he would see me. He called two days later, in tears, evidently overjoyed. On Saturday, September 12th, we met for lunch in Palo Alto. Nearly a decade had passed—I was 41; he was 77—but, oddly, it seemed like I’d seen him only the day before. Resentment, fear, anger: these are locked in time. Love is not. Love is timeless, eternal. Love knows no bounds. Love is jazz.
It was plain that Dad had changed. For one thing, he looked older. He stooped a little. I noticed that he’d missed a spot shaving; a small harvest of short white whiskers stood on the lined plain of his cheek. I felt anxious, seeing it. On his car, a taillight was busted. The Dad of old would have fixed it forthwith. The hint of decay rattled me.
But something deeper had changed, too. Dad was munificent in his forgiveness for my long absence. He seemed to love me—everyone—with an open-heartedness I’d never known in him. I felt like I was staring into high-beam headlights of affection and acceptance. It was a blinding kind of love, almost more than I could bear.
After that first lunch we began to see each other regularly. I met his second wife and their son, my half-brother. On a chilly Saturday that fall, Dad took me to a college football game. I went happily. I do not care about football; I just wanted to be with my dad. Dad and I, friendly from the start, became friends again.
♦♦♦
One Saturday afternoon in late November, we walked around the old neighborhood. (He still lived in the house in which I’d grown up.) Conversation flowed organically. I thought to ask him about regrets. He shared a few and then asked if I had any. I imparted mine. I asked about his proudest achievements. He talked about family and work, and then asked about mine. I named a few. It was an easy exchange that traversed the landscape of our lives, a landscape shaped by improvisation, with a love that was not a reference point but a meeting place. It was, at heart, a conversation about love.
Later, Dad drove me to the train station. In the car he slid in an old cassette of his Dixieland band.
“You know, Dave,” he said, “I really hope you do something with music.” The band, he said, “has brought me so much joy and happiness, and I hope it’s brought happiness to others. We’ve gotten to go so many places and do so many things.”
I was taken aback. For twenty-five years I’d felt guilty for wanting to play music. And here was Dad, offering a benediction. Here was permission. Here was the music of a father’s condition-free love.
At the station I clambered out of the car and then leaned in the open door to say good-bye. We made plans for the next weekend. I told him I’d call soon. Then I closed the door and he drove away. And I thought, Oops – I forgot to say “I love you.” I decided I’d call him the next day—Sunday—to tell him, but for whatever reason it slipped my mind.
At 7:20 the next morning—Monday, November 30—my phone rang. My older brother’s voice came down the line. “I have some bad news,” he said. “Dad died last night.”
It was a quick and massive heart attack. This was no doubt the way he would have wanted it. It saved him years of suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, symptoms of which it seemed he was beginning to show. The heart attack happened just a little more than three months after he and I reconciled. Those were my three months with Dad.
Where is grief known? Who sings the song of the heart? What is the song? And whose heart is it, anyway?
One year after Dad died, I got the journalism job I’d always wanted, capping a two-decade career. I like to think Dad would have been proud. Five years later, disillusioned, I left it. Two years after that, a friend I’d known for twenty years killed himself, an act that shattered the worlds of those who loved him.
And I began to play music.
I made two rock and roll albums with a friend and, subsequently, a softer-tinged solo album about my old friend’s suicide. I have formed a band. I have formed a band because I love playing music. I have formed a band because Dad said I ought to, and because, one time, I forgot to say “I love you.” I have formed a band for Dad.
When the band plays one of my songs—songs of, I hope, joy, release, relief, grief, hidden mourning, mournfulness—and we hit that final chorus and the song becomes more than a song, and time and space are erased, I smile. And I think, “Yeah, Dad!”
And we bang that damn thing home like our lives depend on it. I do it in the same way that Dad, by example at the end of his life, taught me to love: like my life depends on it—which, at this moment, it seems to.
Dave Ford is a San Francisco writer and musician. His album, “Home,” can be heard at myspace.com/davefordmusic and purchased at cdbaby.com or through iTunes.