Music & Whiskey
Some people have things in their life that they regret. Sometimes I feel like some of us are more full of regrets than others. My dad was never one to regret anything. A very storied past. I still know all the stories too, and anyone who ever met him would never deny the legend of Jim Kane. “Jimmy Lee!” or “Seamus!” if my Mom was slightly perturbed, or very angry with him, respectively.
There were times I tried to poke and prod him—maybe in the last 5 or 6 years—about telling me all his stories again. Part of the reason being that I wanted to see if he still remembered them, and if they were the same as I remembered. More often than not though, I feel like he would just respond, “you already know all my stories, what am I going to tell you then?”
One of the first things that I noticed when I walked in and saw my Dad's lifeless body on the floor was that he had been holding his phone. In the moment, it stuck out to me as purposeful. Even though he was declining I would see patterns throughout the house. Things setup on the counters for regular use, or oddball items place in specific locations to help an aging mind remember to do the routine thing, whatever it was that needed to be done.
He rarely ever called me, despite my encouragement and reassurance that he was never bothering me. I used to tell him, “Dad, if I can't answer, I won't, but I'll call you back as soon as I get a chance.” That didn't really seem to sway him. My Dad was pretty fiercely independent, even in his old age.
As part of his morning ritual (and especially after my Mom passed) he would listen to music. He told me that he would use his phone in the mornings, read the news, sit and have coffee and just listen to music.
When I left the night before his passing, I told him to make sure that he had his phone on him. I don't know why I thought he might call me, though I suppose I had my suspicions... and whether or not it was his specific intention, I'm going to say that the playlist of music he left me was his way of writing a last will and testament. The songs are very reflective, and I see a lot of his love for my Mom in the lyrics, as well as the sorrow of his loss of her.
He also left me a few swigs of some Dewar's 15 year old scotch that I bought him one Christmas several years ago. Nice and smooth even at room temperature. And I'm thankful that he left it for me, because it was almost as if he knew I was going to need it.
Both of my parents were signed up as full body donors. Part of the medical donation process is an interview with the next of kin about the deceased. The interview for my Mom was relatively quick, and I let my Dad answer those questions. She drank in her youth and smoked weed a couple of times (one of those times was with me), so she was pretty much a “no” for every question that they asked. My Dad, on the other hand, had a laundry list of things that happened to him in his life, or shit that he did with (and to) his own body.
It was hard to see him in pain at the end, but I'm sure he had that one moment looking back, just as the light was taking him, where he would have agreed that the pain was worth the journey. Eventually I'll tell all his stories but they'll probably be mixed in with my fiction so that I don't upset anyone, or have to explain too much.
Has the deceased ever been incarcerated? Have they ever done methamphetamine? How much did the deceased drink? How much did they smoke?
The answer to all of those questions being a resounding “yes,” by the way. He would have been a great one to play “Never Have I Ever” with. Jim was a bit of a caricature at times. He was also the protagonist of his own story, and there were plenty of times where I felt like I lived in his shadow growing up. But he was always just “Dad” to me.
Sex, drugs, and rock n' roll, then prison... Then he met my Mom. They were both in rehab together. They had a pretty tumultuous relationship, before and after my Mother had me. She never said that was I was a mistake, instead I was “the best thing that ever happened” to her. But my parents hadn't planned on having any children. So after I came along there was an adjustment period of about 5-8 years for my Dad while he figured out what it really meant to be a father. Some of my earliest memories of him were seeing him behind a pane of prison glass, having to talk to him through a telephone with a metal cable, and having the time we could visit cut short quite abruptly... If you know, you know.
At one point I had to stop the woman from the medical donation place that was conducting the interview, and just say straight up, “look we can talk about the man's life all day if you want, but that'll take a while. Let's just say that he was a moderate drinker.”
A lot of the problems that my parents had probably could be attributed to my Dad's addictive personality, in particular his drinking, though later in life if would be a predilection toward opiates. Throughout his life, he would go through stints and he had long periods of sobriety. And over the past decade or so, him and I hadn't sat down and had a few drinks with the exception of sharing a beer when my Mom died, but I'll talk about that more later.
It seems pretty surreal that he's gone because I don't have my Mom to commiserate with. My wife is here with me, and she's been amazing through all of this, but she just doesn't know my Dad in the same way that my Mom did, and as I do.
Thankfully the last thing that Dad and I said to each other was, “I love you.” I know that was important to him because his father never said it to him.
I see a lot of myself in him, and I'm not very vocal about my feelings. So, making a playlist of songs is something I absolutely would do to express myself. I know that this was my Dad's way of doing that. Most of these songs I would have never picked out for him. Especially not for his last moments on this plane of existence, so in a way they're also deeply personal songs.
My Dad hadn't really drank since before my Mom passed. He was too busy trying to take care of her, as her alzheimer's progressed it required more and more of his emotion and attention. The way he was able to cope with her decline was with all of the opiates they prescribed for his back—it was a work injury that happened in the mid-2000s. He had been on some form of prescription pain killers and muscle relaxers since then, or for at least the last 20 years. I tried to get him off that stuff, but I could never convince him, so I just let him take the shit. His dependence on the pain killers wasn't as bad as it was toward the end though.
Alcohol doesn't mix well with opiates. As a consequence, I don't think him and I had gotten hammered on a bottle or two of whiskey and a case of beer since before my wife and I met. My grandma had also been living with my parents while my Dad was still working and before he retired.
You can't exactly go to grandma's house and get blind drunk listening to music at full volume in the middle of the night. Which was probably for the best, because my Mom hated it. Nevertheless she did tolerate it when I was younger and it was just the three of us in the house. She'd let my Dad and I bond and have guy time.
Getting trashed with my Dad is something that goes back to when I was 16 or 17. More specifically though, my senior year in high school he let me get drunk with him and his friend, Harold, during the NBA playoffs. We'd drink beers and watch the Lakers with Kobe and Shaq... Used to have to take a drink every time Shaq would miss a free throw. If you know anything about Shaquille O'Neal's free throw percentage, then you are probably laughing about how many drinks that was.
I remember very distinctly being hungover in Mrs. Robert's English class, because my Dad only let me drink if I got my ass up out of bed and went to school the next day. That's what real men did. If you get too drunk the night before, you just have to suck it up and go to work the next day. It was a very clear lesson. In a way, learning that early on has really helped me in life. Addiction and alcoholism can be hereditary, so learning to understand how to navigate that from an early age, and not having to struggle with it as an adult, has been a bit of a blessing, and has made me much stronger willed. I was a straight-A student in high school and graduated as our salutatorian, I even got to give a speech standing in a Masonic hall.
In any case, I hope you've been listening to the playlist at the top of this post while you've been reading along! My Dad picked some really good songs. I knew he liked John Denver, but we mostly only listened to the more popular tunes. “Back Home Again” appears on his original playlist multiple times, “Drift Away” by Dobie Grey is another one, it shows up a few times. Then he puts the Uncle Kracker version on there too! I know for a fact that was NOT a mistake.
“I think he did a great job covering that song!” My Dad would exclaim. Usually in a bit of a drunken stupor.
We used to talk about music a lot. It was a big part of who we were as father and son. My love for music is a gift from both of parents, but even my Mom would have told you, she was terrible about remembering names and dates for songs and musicians. Every once in a while she would remember one, and be very excited about it. My Dad, on the other hand, could name-that-tune in just a couple of notes sometimes.
Last year, or possibly even the year before, I remember picking him up and I was driving us to go get some Jack In The Box or something to eat, and I put on “Summer Breeze” by The Main Ingredient. I thought it was the original version of that song, but he was super quick to correct me;
“Nah, that's not the original. The original was Seals and Crofts. Look it up. You can pull it up on your phone? Look it up.”
Sure as shit...
I do regret not staying last night. By the same token, I don't think he would have wanted to drink, and that's how we would have ended the night... Honestly that probably would not have been a great 911 call. The last thing he would have wanted was for me to get arrested for elderly abuse. I don't think every police officer who shows up to that kind of situation is going to be sympathetic to behavior like that. But who knows.
Unlike with my Mom who went to a hospice facility, my Dad had in-home hospice care. The staff wasn't 24/7... We had been working toward being able to have a full-time caregiver, but we just couldn't make it happen in the time that he had left. That being said, the company we used is the only one that I've ever come across with a 5-star rating, and not a bad review anywhere that I could find. If anyone is interested, feel free to reach out to me privately and I'll be happy to provide their contact information.
I do know that he called the overnight line and a nurse did come out to check on him after I left around 8:00-8:30. I was told that the nurse was there around 11:00-11:30, the nurse probably would have stayed with him for at least a half hour. I don't think it was even 9am when his morning nurse came back to check on him and maybe a little after 9 when his nieghbor called me to let me know that he had passed. Based on what I've been able to piece together, the 3 hour playlist that he left started around 2:30am and continued until around 5:49am. That's when he played Afternoon Delight.
I know he knows that he was loved. Toward the end I had to erect some adult barriers between us to make sure I was handling my own shit, and still able to pay all of his bills at the same time. I also didn't approve of the fact that he let himself get so heavily addicted to opiates, so that may have complicated our relationship, but I don't think it ever soured it. If anything I think he enjoyed hearing about my wife and I spending time together. Or any of the mundane stuff that I had to share about my week. Even if it was only for an hour or two on Sundays, we still sat with each other. Sometimes we talked politics. Other times it was just a series of random thoughts that we would share with one another. I didn't always enjoy having to trek to the other side of town to bring him groceries, but it gave me a damn good reason to go see him at least. So as much as I didn't like it doing it sometimes, I'm going to miss not having to.
