My father died when I was 7-years-old. At the time, my mother was in no shape to handle things, so my sister became the person that had to coordinate the estate. She was 23 and was overwhelmed. Things got done, except for one part... the headstone.
For years, my father was in an unmarked grave. My immediate family was never the type to visit gravesites, so in all honesty, I don't even remember when I figured out that there was nothing marking my father's burial. When I moved back to the area for a time during my early-20s, I know that I had older relatives bring it up to me then. My father's extended family are all in the same cemetery, so as we would go to a funeral, inevitably, one of my great-aunts would say, "Well, I was going to go visit your father's grave, but there's nothing there to mark it, so who even knows if I'm looking in the right place?"
I also had them helpfully point out that since he had served in the Army -- as most men his age had -- then all that was needed was to file paperwork with the Veterans Administration. At the time, I would listen politely and then go back to ignoring it.
Then about five years ago, my neighbor died... an extremely nice man, who's obituary caused a minor local controversy by saying "Local Santa Dies" (he was one of the mainstays in the area for portraying St. Nick during the holidays). He was also a prominent member of the local VFW. At his funeral, as they were giving a 21-gun salute, I was taken back to my own father's funeral. I don't remember everything, but I remember the guns and the American flag being folded. Suddenly, the idea of putting a headstone on my father's grave seemed important... perhaps because I was almost exactly the same age at the time as he had been when he died.
It really is supposed to be a simple process to get a VA headstone. They make it that way intentionally, of course. I contacted the cemetery and they happily e-mailed me the proper paperwork, along with where it needed to go.
In 1975, the paperwork probably would've been easy to fill out. 35 years later, not only did I not have the information about what dates he had served in the military -- beyond just knowing that it had been a brief, mandatory commitment -- I didn't even know his date of birth for sure, wasn't clear on the date that he had passed away and I had no idea about where to try to find his Social Security Number.
The date of birth and death turned out to be easy... the cemetery was able to tell me that from their records. In order to get the military portion, though, I needed the Social Security Number. At the time, I hadn't spoken to the one person that I knew would know how to get that in years... my sister. And, not a few years either, somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 years.
Once the process was started, though, abandoning it seemed wrong. So, I took the chicken way out and sent an e-mail to my sister via her work... just explaining what I was trying to do and asking for the information. It took a couple of days, but she replied with the information and told me that I was free to contact her if I needed any other information. A simple exchange that signaled the beginning of a thaw.
Because it's me, though, nothing can be too simple. When I attempted to get the dates of his military service and his serial number, I got back a form letter telling me that it appeared that his personnel file may have been destroyed. Turns out that there was a giant fire in the national archives in 1973 that wiped out thousands of military files. Something like 80-percent of the Army's personnel files from between 1912 and 1960 were just gone.... and because all they had were the paper files, there was no back-up. The letter said that they would have to go to other sources to find the information.
My father was in the Army for just a couple of years... but can you imagine if you were trying to get the information for someone that had been in World War II and they were saying, "Um, yeah, we don't seem to have that information anymore"?
It took a while, but eventually they were able to cross-reference military hospital records to come up with enough information for the VA. Basically, they gave me a letter to give to the VA that essentially said, "Look, we're positive that he was in the Army at some point. Now, give him a headstone and leave us alone."
That was that. I submitted the paperwork, paid the fee, and finally got a notification that it had been placed. At the time, I decided that I should go see it at least once... if only to just personalize the act of getting the stone.
Then my divorce happened, blindsiding me and putting the thought of anything else far on the backburner. Now, though, I was finally back on the East Coast with the opportunity to carry out the plan to put the finishing touches on marking my father's grave.
My memories of my dad are good ones, mostly because they are frozen in time as the thoughts of a 7-year-old... and just barely that, since I had just turned seven about three weeks earlier. He was just shy of his 42nd birthday. My siblings' memories though are far different.
My dad was a complicated guy. He was a bookie -- running numbers and taking bets -- but one with an addictive personality. An alcoholic from the time that he was a teen, he coupled that with a love for gambling that continuously put his own business in jeopardy. As quickly as he would take in money from suckers, he would turn around and blow the money at the race track... a sucker himself.
He was also 6-feet-6-inches tall, and weighed anywhere from 200 to 300 lbs. I'm not saying that because I'm not sure, but rather because that's really how much his weight could fluctuate depending on what year we're talking about.
When things were good, there was money everywhere (literally, there are stories about stacks of cash lying around the house). When things weren't good, there was nothing. Even I have memories about the difference in Christmases from one extreme to the other. Sometimes, Santa brought so much that you couldn't even step into the living room. Sometimes, Santa brought an IOU. Even my preschool self was aware of the fact that the birthday money that I would get from relatives never stayed in my piggy-bank very long... always sacrificed in an effort to turn around a losing streak.
When I was a toddler, my dad would take me with him to both the horse track and to the bar. Some of the earliest memories that I have are of the way that stale beer, cigar smoke and horse manure smell when mixed together and the awesome '70s décor that the track's offices had, since when he had business to attend to I was frequently babysat by one of the secretaries. I also have odd random memories from bars, like sitting on top of one, eating Andy Capp fries and watching "The Glenn Campbell Goodtime Hour." That show went off the air when I was four.
The "business" part raises a dilemma. Given what my father did -- taking bets and collecting the money from the losers -- there are unsavory elements inherent with it. There are stories about him leaving my mother for long stretches at bars to go tend to things. There are also stories about her confusion about why the nice men who would offer to buy her a drink would be gone when she came back from the powder room. She later found out that the bartenders were telling the poor schmucks who her husband was as soon as she was out of earshot.
To help illustrate the point, my godfather was a guy named "Tony the Shark." I have no idea what ever happened to him, but I know that it wasn't until significantly later that I realized what the "Shark" part of the nickname meant... or why there were never any customers ordering food at the small corner deli that he owned.
I've intentionally kept from looking too far into my dad's life in that regard. I like my childhood memories of the man, and I'd like to keep it that way. I don't really want to know what was happening while I was being watching by a racetrack secretary or a bartender.
Those experiences are the stuff of Hallmark cards compared to those of my siblings. For starters, I was too little and, by the end, he was too weak, for me to have ever had to experience the discipline of his belt. My older brothers were not as lucky. There was also jealousy that I was allowed into the bars with him. My sister and two brothers were typically left sitting in the car for hours while he was inside. Taken against today's standards, that sounds horrible, but in the late-50s and early-60s, it wasn't seen as any big issue... at least not to my father.
He died because of perforated ulcers... essentially, he bled to death internally. Even as a young child, I was aware of the fact that this was potentially fixable and that he was choosing not to fix it. See, in order to respond to the treatment, he would've had to stop drinking. He made a conscious decision that alcohol was more important to him than living was. (He was also seemingly an undiagnosed manic depressive, so that might have had something to do with it.)
My relationship to my father, however, goes far beyond just those memories and genetics. The death of my father has permeated my life in ways that I'm still figuring out in my 40s. In some cases, the effect is fairly linear. And, the two sons that are on this trip with me are a direct result of that.
If he hadn't passed away when I was a child, then my mother wouldn't have met the jackass that she eventually married at the beginning of the 1980s. That guy happened to originally be from a tiny town in Michigan and, for reasons that are still not very clear, they decided that it would be a good idea to move back there. I actually spent an extra year in Delaware living with my sister and her family -- after my mother and her new husband moved -- as the argument about where I would live played itself out. It turned out that the family that he still had in the area weren't overly thrilled to have him back and eventually my mother managed to figure out that he was a habitual liar. For me, though, as painful as the initial part of that journey might have been, the move to the Midwest was life-altering. When my mother moved back to Delaware when I was 16, I elected to stay in the tiny town, moving in with one of my friend's families.
My two closest friends are from that time of my life -- one male and one female -- and, while I was living in Los Angeles, the female part of that equation was living in San Francisco with her then-husband. When she divorced, she decided to come to LA herself. At the same time, one of her friends from college was just finishing up officers' training in the Air Force and was being sent to Los Angeles. They decided to get an apartment together. That friend soon became the mother of my sons.
My father doesn't die, I don't move to Michigan. I don't spend my teen years there, and I'm probably not friends with the boys' godmother, who introduced me to their mother. Kind of follows that if we don't meet, then it would be hard for them to exist.
It was with all of that swirling around my head that I set out to visit my father's grave for the first time since his funeral. Of course, that had to have an unexpected modern twist.
After all that effort and anticipation, I saw my dad's headstone first online. Thanks to technology, some cemeteries now have pictures of gravesites on their websites to help make it easier for people to find them. I went on to see if I could find the location of the grave before the visit and -- BAM -- there it was on my screen. A simple VA marker. I could lie and say that I wept at the site, but the reality is that the first thing I did was verify that they spelled his name right.
Being Holy Saturday, when we actually made it to the cemetery, we were far from the only people there to pay respects. Here's the other thing that technology has changed about visiting a grave site. Instead of a map, the websites give the coordinates of the plot that then go on Google Maps to show you where to go. That might work well on a tablet, but on my iPhone in the daylight, trying to find where the hell a tiny blue dot on the screen is in the real world is a pain in the ass.
The art historian that we are staying with in D.C. made the trip to Delaware with us to offer moral support. She was actually the one who eventually found it -- after we figured out that we were on the wrong side of the grounds initially -- and called us over.
Again, I would be lying if I said that I had a big emotional reaction. It's just not my way. I suppose that I could've brought flowers to lay at the site, but that's not really my way either. My way is to just take it in for a moment... look around and remember that the remains of my grandmother and numerous aunts, uncles and cousins are nearby... and then to be done.
For the boys, it was a weird intersection of their family history. Since they were born, the people that the would call their family on my side has been the family that I lived with as a teen. Those are the people that they spend holidays with and whom they call "Grandma and Grandpa." That's the family that they know. When I was working on getting the headstone years ago, I said something about my dad dying, and both boys bolted upright with panicked looks on their faces. It took a second for me to realize what was going on and for me to then reassure them that Grandpa was fine... I was talking about my birth father. But, I understand the confusion, since I call them Mom and Dad, and while the boys are aware on some level that we aren't blood relatives... well, how much does that matter to a kid, really?
I didn't ask them to feel anything really. I'm well aware that the person who's gravesite we were looking at had died more than 30 years before either of them were born. Other than having seem a couple of pictures, they had no concept of the man or of my early life. To them, my life started when I moved to Michigan as a 13-year-old.
Besides, how can I ask them to feel anything when I'm not sure what my own feelings are? How do you reconcile that it is very possible that your life is better because one of your parents died?
What do you do with that?
Personally, I've come to just acknowledge that it's true. As interesting as it might be to think about how my life would be different had my father lived longer, I honestly can't visualize it 40 years later. To do so, would be to imagine a life where I don't have the people that are closest to me -- whether that's my adoptive family, my closest friends, and my sons. Even the pain that came from the divorce is worth it from that standpoint. While I would just as soon never feel anything like that again, I never regret having met my ex-wife and the marriage that followed... and none of it happens without a man's death in 1975.
I have my sunny childhood memories of my father and he now has a headstone marking his final resting place. It might have taken a long time to get there -- both for me and the stone -- but that's just how life goes... death, too, I suppose.
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