Five.
A long time that somehow isn't.
May 13 marks the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death, and today, May 5, marks five years since he suffered a cardiac arrest. So here’s five short essays to mark five years.
Five year trophies and relativity
When I was a kid, five years seemed like an impossibly long stretch.
As a child, my main extracurricular activity was dance. Unlike other sports, where trophies are passed out willy nilly to all who sign up at the end of each year, my dance studio only gave trophies out to dancers every five years. You had to put in your time to earn that hardware.
I began dancing at age three, and my main memories of those early recitals are mostly flashes. I can vividly recall learning about the ghost of Eva, who haunts1 Biddeford’s City Theatre, and being utterly terrified of her.
I have no clue when I learned about the concept of “five year trophies,” but as soon as I did, I was set on getting mine. When I finally did, I remember being unable to take my eyes off of it. It was the first trophy I’d ever received, and for my young self, it might as well have been made from solid gold.
It still sits in my childhood bedroom to this day, roughly 25 years later — next to the 10-year trophy, 15-year plaque, and a smattering of other awards from dance, sports, and other activities. The name plate is a little tarnished, and the wings broke off of the eagle accent thing, but it’s an experience I’ve never forgotten.
Back then, five years seemed like an eternity, and to be fair, it was.
But now? A blip.
It’s been breaking my brain over the last few weeks that it’s been five years that my dad has been gone.
Five years is a kindergartener. Half a decade. My dad has been dead longer than I went to Providence College or Scarborough High School.
None of this seems real, even still.
That tone of voice
Five years ago today, on May 5, 2020, right around 7:15 p.m., I got a phone call that would send my world into a tailspin.
I don’t know how to play poker,2 but from what I know about it, I have a feeling my mother would be terrible. My mother is a lovely, caring, and intelligent woman, but she is utterly incapable at keeping a neutral tone of voice if something is wrong. She has this one tone of voice in particular that means one thing: someone has died or someone is really close to dying.
Thankfully, I have not heard it much, but that voice was what greeted me when I answered the phone as I walked up to the Virginia ABC store in search of tequila.3
As my airpods connected and disconnected on the call, I asked if my great aunt, who at the time was rapidly approaching 90, was who she was talking about.4 No, she said, it was my father.
I did the only rational thing one does after hearing over the phone that their father is either already dead or is otherwise in mortal peril: I hung up.
I shoved the airpods into their case, and talked on the phone the old fashioned way when my mother called back. It was then that I learned my father was not yet dead, but had suffered a massive cardiac arrest, was not conscious, and was at the hospital.
A few hours later, I would get another call from my mom, in a more normal tone, telling me that it was time to buy a flight home. I was on the first flight to Portland the next morning.
I figured I’d be back to DC and back to quarantining and making crafts before too long as we rode out the pandemic. My father would recover, all would be well.
None of that happened.
Well, the crafts did. But there was no recovery to be had. And nothing has been normal since.
Obviously, nobody knows when the exact moment will be that they look at as the one that defines “before” and “after.” It’s weird mine occurred on a hill in Arlington.
Flooded floors and guilt paradoxes
I’ve had my condo for five years this December, and dealt with three whole major flooding issues since then. None of them have been my fault. All of them I had wished for a dad to help me literally and figuratively sort through the aftermath.
Of course, the irony of everything is that had my dad been alive to do that, I certainly would not be living at my house, and I wouldn’t own the 8 pound 7 ounce menace of a calico5 that is currently hell-bent on gnawing my computer screen as I type this.
I don’t have a word to describe the feeling that comes from “everything you have in your life that brings you joy was only made possible by the fact that your father died suddenly and extremely young,” but it’s one that haunts me.
“Guilt” is the obvious, but it doesn’t seem strong enough. As Catholic of Irish heritage, “guilt” might as well be woven into my DNA.6 A chronic, vague, feeling of guilt is a standard-issue emotion for my people.
But this is different. It’s not just the house or my cats. It’s the bed I’m laying in. The laptop I’m typing these essays on. The Apple Watch strapped to my wrist. My car. Looking around my bedroom, pretty much every major thing I’ve acquired after 2020 was done so with either my inheritance or life insurance payouts.
I wouldn’t have any of these things if my father were still alive.
I don’t know how to handle these emotions, so I do the traditional method of “simply filing them away and pretending they don’t exist.”
I love my life. My life is great. My life shouldn’t be like this.
28 years, 11 months and 3 days “on,” five years “off”
My dad was a merchant marine for most of my childhood, and until I was about 17 years old, this meant I never had a 71-day stretch of having my dad at home.
Ten weeks “on,” ten weeks “off” was my norm. Every other Christmas, dance recital, birthday, summer, whatever, he was out to sea at work. I had longtime friends who had never met the curly-haired man in the pictures hanging on the walls at my house.
Back then, FaceTime had not yet been invented, and cell phone service was nonexistent in the middle of the ocean.
When my dad was “out to sea” for those 10 weeks, I could talk to him on the phone the two days he was in port in Jacksonville, and the one day he was in port in San Juan. I could email the chief engineer’s email, which he shared with the other chief, and he’d get them and could reply. That’s it.7
These five years have felt not unlike those 40 days of every 70-day shift where phone contact was impossible. But unlike those times, there simply won’t be a day in port, or an end of a shift. He’s gone. He’s not coming back.
Even though it’s been five years, lately I’ve wanted to text him more than normal.
I need his thoughts on Ivan Demidov and Cole Caufield. On Maine winning Hockey East this year. I bet he’d ask for my Apple TV login to watch Severance. He’d probably spam my phone with pictures of Ruby, and I’d roll my eyes at how much he cared about that doofy yellow lab. We never went to a Frozen Four together. Or to a Habs game in Montreal. I’m genuinely unclear if he ever saw me Irish dance — was he out to sea for those recitals as a kid? I’ll never know.8
There’s so much stuff he already missed from my childhood by virtue of his job, and part of me always assumed I’d have his decades of retirement to make up for it.
Instead, there’s nothing. He didn’t get to go to my wedding or my brother’s wedding, and he won’t meet his grandkids on this side of heaven.
I realize I’m luckier than some. I had a dad until I was almost 29 years old. Our relationship was not perfect, but was improving at the time he died. I know he loved me. Some people don’t have that.
But I just wish I had more time.
‘Pope’s dead.’
Sitting at Family Ice Center in Falmouth, Maine, on April 2, 2005, I had been alternating watching my brother’s spring league hockey games (or possibly a clinic of some sort) with holding a vigil at the arena’s snack bar’s television, watching a broadcast about then-Pope John Paul II’s rapidly declining health.
(For those of you wondering: Yes, I have always been the way that I am.)
At some point, I guess I had decided that the pope was probably going to be okay, and left the television. A short time later, my father came up to my mother and I and let us know that Things Had Changed.
“Pope’s dead,” he said. Very gentle. Very demure, very mindful.
My jaw dropped, and I booked it back to the snack bar to find out more. The pope was, indeed, dead.
As I write this in the early morning hours of April 22, Pope Francis has now been dead for less than 24 hours. I found out about his passing when I woke up on April 21, via text messages from several friends expressing their condolences (and one only asking who the “front runner” is going to be).
Part of me felt a pang that my dad was not one of those texts, because his early hours at his job at the shipyard meant he’d have been awake at the time the AP Alert went out. And he’d want details about who was going to be the next pope, because obviously I’d somehow have those.9
Francis is the second acting pontiff who has died in my lifetime, and while 2005 was “only” 20 years ago, it might as well have been 200 years ago.
I’m not sure the 13-year-old who was glued to the ice rink’s television had any idea that she’d one day grow up to report on the pope in person. That she’d actually achieve her dream of being an “international journalist.” That she’d work for a news network. That she’d leave Maine. That her dad wouldn’t be around for the next one of these.
Conclave will start two days after this email hits your inbox, and will probably have concluded by the time it’s the actual anniversary of my dad’s death on May 13. The end of another era.
One final memory from my first conclave:
During the 2005 conclave, my family was on a vacation going from Montreal10 to Toronto11 to Cooperstown, NY.12 On April 19, when we were in Montreal, we heard on the radio, in French, that there was white smoke. As this was the pre-iPhone era, that was all we knew, and we went about our family trip to the Biodôme.
Eventually, my dad asked someone working there « Qui est le pape? », and the employee replied « Benoît », which is Benedict in French, and then clarified « Ratzinger. » As I had decided early on that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger “looked like a pope,” and was my (extremely informed, obviously) pick for the papacy, I was thrilled my prediction had panned out.
Now, as conclave is set to begin once again, I work for a Catholic media company that’s based in France. I have no earthly idea who is going to be elected to the chair of St. Peter, but part of me does smile knowing that my work could be what comes up when someone Googles « Qui est le nouveau pape? »
Life’s weird, isn’t it?
Allegedly.
I’m a cribbage girlie.
I’ve written before about how THE STORE HAD CLOSED EARLY.
This aunt is still alive, and probably will outlive everyone.
Or her eight pound six ounce sister, an angel.
My ancestors are, of course, the people who invented the “American Wake” right around the time my great-grandparents left Carna for Portland.
As a result, I kind of suck at communicating with people and keeping in regular contact. Which is odd for someone whose job is literally “communicate the story to the public.” But that’s another essay for another day.
Rest assured he did go to many other dance recitals/competitions.
I do not have those.
Sightseeing! My dad flexing his French skills!
Hockey Hall of Fame! The CN Tower! Yankees vs. Blue Jays for way cheaper than it would be at Yankee Stadium!
Baseball Hall of Fame! And it was…on the way back to Maine? I admittedly did not love the Cooperstown stop. I did, however, watch the series finale of Joan of Arcadia (RIP) from the hotel there as it aired.