Next time you find yourself going through hell, remember, somebody else has been there, too.
I don’t remember most of the advice my father dispensed during our 34-year relationship. Not that it wasn’t good advice. I just never listened.
Sons don’t listen to fathers. Not actively. Passively they hear what they are saying but the real message doesn’t sink in until days, months, or even years after the fact. Usually well after the wrong decision was ultimately made.
I never listened to my dad. I heard him. I pretended to understand, nodded my head, answered him back with something like “I never thought of it that way” or “that is something that might be an option.” Oh who am I kidding? Those would actually be courteous answers. I was a know-it-all kid and my responses consisted of a couple “yeah yeahs” and a sprinkling of “OKs,” just because I wanted the lecturing to end.
But there is one piece of advice I do remember from my father. Whenever faced with some difficult challenge, some seemingly life altering decision or even just some minor bump in the road of adolescence that wouldn’t matter a few years down the line, he would say “you’re not the first to do it, and you’re certainly not going to be the last.”
I wasn’t the first person to almost fail out of college, attend the funeral of a close friend, and certainly not the last to break off a relationship and spend the engagement ring money on a trip to Vegas (although that group may be particularly small). It actually helped knowing other people experienced almost the same situation and lived to tell the story. And, in some weird way, it comforted me that more souls were about to experience the same highs and lows that come with this life. It seemed kind of simple. Maybe even too simple. A more elaborate way of saying “suck it up.” But it always seemed to work and I’d often repeat it to myself even when my dad wasn’t around.
Now that I’ve got a kid of my own the expression has a double meaning. I’ll probably use it when he gets his first serious injury, experiences his first real loss, and repeat it back to him in the car on the day I drop him off at the airport, Vegas-bound (welcome to the club son!). Every time I look him in the eye and repeat the wise words of his grandfather about not being the first nor the last, I think I’ll also be saying it for my own personal benefit as well.
I’m not the first father to feel helpless while his son is in pain, cries over the loss of a friend, gets angry with his own failures or while he deals with heartbreak in his own odd way. Other fathers have shared the same experience. One of them was mine.
Happy Father’s Day Dad.
—Photo drcorneilus/Flickr
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