My Father, an Epitaph

Albeit long overdue

Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a parent relatively young is the stark finality of the situation. September 23, 2018 — my own calamity, only 12 days and 17 years later from the country’s, I guess. You know that kids born post 9/11 can legally drink now? 85% to one score, let alone four plus seven. I don’t remember much about that day other than the Dallas Cowboys were playing — his favorite team, and the reason why I’m such an insufferable football fan, or a sports fan in general, really — and that I was the one to determine that the plug had to be pulled. And then I went and had lunch with a close friend. What a weird context to grab a pizza and a beer with someone, you know? I had seen family members and pets’ deaths before that — I mean, walking home from a club in Hong Kong, I saw a body bag being put over someone in the mid levels — but it doesn’t seem right or fair when it’s who was part of giving you life in the first place. Growing up is realizing that adults are clueless as you are, but maturing is realizing that they’re all doing the best that they’re capable of. At least if they stuck around.

The shock was overwhelming — the grand finality of the moment that had been coming for years since he was diagnosed with cancer. It was “renal cell carcinoma”, to be exact, a particular strain which had a low sample size and under a 5% 5-year survival rate according to the oncologist we talked to in 2013. Nevertheless, nobody in my family has seen anything under the 99th percentile, so he lasted a lot longer than we all expected.

To be quite frank, I don’t remember that much of his life. We had our moments, to be sure — the reason why I was pushed into chess and academics and generally had a direction in life was due to his direction. It’s not a coincidence that my path was no longer demarcated post-2018. We didn’t exactly get along, as any precocious youth is wont to experience, where the combination of genius and hormones results in never being able to ever relax or not get in the last word. And in a family of people who have to have the last word, this is pure grounds for perennial turbulence.

Once, I remember, I tried to drive off in anger, having just recently got my license, in my first car, a 2006 Chevy Impala. The argument was over whether a Champions League title or a World Cup was more impressive skill-wise to win. Utterly fucking pointless, but we nearly came to blows. Who would have realized then that Lionel Messi would eventually win both? My dad ran out while I was putting the car in reverse, idiotically trying to get me to stop by running behind the vehicle. I almost drove over my dad because of a sports argument that wasn’t even worth Colin Cowherd’s bloviating breath. Youth, man.

The hardest part was learning all of the amazing stories about him and things he had done from anything but personal experience. By all accounts, the man was brilliant, but I never really got to fully experience it in real time, due to being too young and insulated, in a sense. Most of what I learned was through family members, who knew him much better than me, but I was the one they felt bad for instead of the other way around. I remember my dad once telling me as a joke, on my birthday, that if he hadn’t had a kid, he would have won a Nobel Prize. He was correct, of course, and I respect him more for acknowledging it. But it’s still pretty hilarious without context.

We never really shared any interests other than sports and my own betterment. He was a life scientist, devoted to discovering new intricacies in obtuse specimens of caffeine-degrading bacteria, for example, but I was handed a Wall Street Journal at the age of 8 and told that “reading it daily would give me a good life.” No comments from him on my post-2012 New Yorker addiction, however. I was a pure math type and a lover of words, purely functioning off of intuition and lack of adherence to commonly accepted standards, yet he was a being of rote diligence and a devotee of procedure. I’m a soft-skills systems thinker and a generalist, and he was as pure of a technical specialist as it gets. I don’t think it ever fully computed inside him how I operated. Opposites reject in some senses; they don’t necessarily attract.

Losing a parent is like breaking up with a serious significant other, in the sense that you essentially have a meaningless Ph.D in another person which you can’t ever use again. It’s like a political science degree — what we know and what shapes us really doesn’t matter to the rest of the world, for the most part, but we experience and own the influences that made us who we are, whether it’s some bullshit college propaganda or the Soviet chess school.

The last thing I ever did with my dad before he was essentially bedridden for the rest of his life was when we went to the U.S. Open, one of his lifelong dreams. What an insubordinate, churlish youth I was — I moved to New York because I wanted to get as far away from my hometown (and my parents) as possible without leaving the States, but it had that fringe benefit of being there. I went to the U.S. Open every year on his dime, of course, getting drunk on upsold vodka “cocktails” in Flushing Meadows, postulating and posturing with the crowd that had just taught me that “summer” could be used as a verb. It had always been his dream to go see all the greats play, and we sat just above courtside and watched Novak, Rafa, Serena, Venus, and Nick Kyrgios, of all people, play absolutely beautiful tennis. If you’re a tennis fan, you truly haven’t lived until you see how dichotomous television versus live tennis is. We missed Federer, perhaps the biggest tragedy of the trip — the stars hadn’t aligned.

I’ve written about Norton Juster, Christopher Hitchens, Martin Amis, and am in the process of writing about Cormac McCarthy in some vague sense, yet it felt totally callous this evening to never have given my dad the send-off he truly wanted and deserved. This isn’t it, of course. One of the last things he requested was a celebration of life function, but I was unable to provide it or motivate myself to make it happen, due to an utter state of loss and confusion that persisted for years. I remember a man whose life was tragically cut short, who always stood tall, who kept his problems to himself (rather than spout them off in every direction like I choose to do), who never had a single negative thing said about him (other than from my mouth), whose genius was extinguished far too young, and who was cherished by everyone who came into contact with him. How do you celebrate an utter tragedy?

We don’t choose to come into this world, but we are given a certain legacy that we can reject, reshape, or mold to befit our own abilities. For those of us lucky enough to have a backdrop worth paying respects to, it’s worth treasuring.

Happy Father’s Day, 2023.