My father died forty-one years ago, today, in our home in Neshanic Station, New Jersey. He was slightly less than seven months shy of his fifty-eighth birthday. I was slightly less than four months past my fourteenth birthday. We did not spend a lot of time on this planet together. Truth be told, we squandered a significant amount of what little time we had fighting with and talking past each other. Of course, since he was dead and buried long before I got to be twenty-one, I never had the opportunity to see how much he had learned in seven years.
This year, I turned fifty-five. I am now two years younger than my father was when he died. These past few years, as the trajectory of my career and my life has taken twists and turns I could not have imagined as recently as five years ago, I have felt closer to my father than I ever recall us being when he was alive. My own life experience these past few years has given me a better understanding of how he lived his day-to-day than I had ever previously possessed; including but not limited to the first fourteen years of my life.
What follows here is what I wrote last year on the fortieth anniversary of his death. Twelve months later, I remain on the run through the forest with the Devil nipping at my heels, hoping (perhaps against hope and logic both) that it is not too late for atonement...even when it is sought four decades after the fact.
Monday, May 31, 2021
The First Forty
We honor our parents by carrying their best forward
And laying the rest down.
By fighting and taming the demons that laid them low
And now reside in us.
-Bruce Springsteen
It was on this very day, forty years ago, WPK, Sr. died.
Dad - Christmas 1980
Here is to hoping that the first forty years proves to be the hardest.
And all we know about manhood
is what we have seen
and what we have learned from our fathers,
and my father was my hero.
And my greatest foe.
Not long after he died, I had this dream,
I'm on stage, I'm in front of thousands of people,
and my dad's back from the dead
and he's sitting in the audience and suddenly
I'm kneeling next to him in the aisle,
and for a moment we both watched the man
on fire on the stage.
And then my dad who for years,
he sat at the kitchen table, unreachable,
but I was too young, I was too stupid
to understand was his depression.
Well, I kneel next to him in the aisle,
and I brush his forearm, and I say,
"Look dad. That guy on stage -
that's how I see you."
"My Father's House (Broadway)
-Bruce Springsteen
-AK
