From 2007 through 2009, I was living between New York and Boston — finally “living the dream.” I’d left Maine to become a writer, and I was finally writing for magazines and working for organizations and startups. I even managed to be a contestant on the game show “Cash Cab.” For this kid from Maine, things were beyond exciting.
But then it became evident that it was time to go home. I was 26. My father was entering what was definitively his last year. That dream was no more.
This scenario had hung over me for more than half my life. I was groomed for it.
My father was a generation older than my friends’ fathers, and he had been dealing with one terminal illness or another throughout my teenage years. He kept small bundles of cash hidden around the house and told me where I could find it “when I die.”
“When I die, here are the numbers to call.”
“When I die” was sometimes as popular an expression as “How was your day?”
So I returned to Maine and eventually came to live in what was once the laundry room. With some much appreciated help from my sister Margaret, who had her hands full with her own family in New Hampshire, I took care of my father until he died.
My dad and I didn’t get along when I was a kid. When I was 12, my parents separated, and because I preferred living in Maine, I went to live with my father. He suddenly had this new 12-year-old, and we had to figure out how to live together. It wasn’t always easy. Often it was like “The Odd Couple” meets “Mad Max.”
That dream I’d been living was over.
I wasn’t writing for these great magazines anymore or for great organizations. I wasn’t making any money, really, and I was going into debt. I was surrounded by death, and I felt incredibly lonely all of the time.
I don’t resent it because it was wonderful in the way those opportunities are. As complicated as it was, I got a chance to know my father better — to hear about his life and his stories and his time in Korea. I got to know the man rather than the father. It was difficult, but it was a privilege and a luxury at the same time.
In my father’s vulnerability and consequently in my own I didn’t only get to know my father better. Our relationship fundamentally changed. I was lucky to get better acquainted with his sense of humor in a way that hadn’t really been on the table when I was a kid.
He’d fart really loudly while we were at the pharmacy because it mortified me, and what did he care?
He was dying and didn’t have a care to give about what people thought. His fingernail fell off one day — the whole thing — and he put it in an envelope with my name on it. In it was a note that said, “A gift from your morbid father.” One time, as he was filling out paperwork in a crowded doctor’s office and I was checking him in at the window, he yelled across the room, “They’re urologists! See if they can help you with your erectile dysfunction!” Then, he laughed until he couldn’t breathe.
The teenage me might not believe that the adult me is writing this, but this was a gift — a complicated, daunting, sad, stressful, disorienting and occasionally hilarious gift.
I told this story at The Corner, a monthly storytelling event in Lewiston. The theme of the event was “in sickness and in health,” and I was joined by a number of other storytellers who’d been daunted in one way or another by the inevitability of entropy. Topics included lymphoma, polar bear attacks, overseas adventures halted by sickness, mystery illnesses intervening in new love and more.
In that way the night was so heavy, but it also was a reminder of this other side of humanity we typically don’t think about unless it hoists itself into our existence. In every story, I was reminded that we survive. It’s not always pretty, and it’s not always possible, but we fight like hell. And when we share that with each other and bond over that vulnerability, this can be as beautiful as it is terrifying.
It is in our vulnerability that we can be our most honest, our clearest, and even our funniest selves. Reminded and refreshed, I left that event nourished.
Alex Steed has written about and engaged in politics since he was a teenager. He’s an owner-partner of a Portland-based content production company and lives with his family, dogs and garden in Cornish.
