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My father died last night.


Brisketexan

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Sorry for your loss. My dad died about five years ago and, like you, my strongest connection with him was through time we spent together fishing. Although to be honest, my dad didn't really give a crap about actually fishing, he'd just prop up his pole and read the paper, or enjoy a Michelob. He wasn't doing it for himself, he just did it to spend time with me.

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I’m really sorry for your loss. We are dealing with the loss of both of my wife’s parents. All I can say is be patient, be kind to yourself and your family, and just put one foot in front of the other. I know it gets better but don’t ask me to be a witness to that, too soon, and I know it will take time. Celebrate his life and love and for the love of all that is good and right - including your dad - get your ass out there and fish. 

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I'm sorry for your loss, Brisket. We're coming up on 10 years this May that mdleast and I lost our dad to cancer. I miss the talks we would have sitting on his front porch and the wisdom he would try to impart on me even if I wasn't ready or open to listen. I don't think I really felt like an adult until my dad passed. I realized I was on my own on how to be a man and a dad. What I wouldn't give to get to have another talk with him and catch him up on the past 10 years. 

Please give yourself time to grieve. There's a strange rush of planning and getting affairs in order that sometimes you just need to sit down and have a good cry about it.

Edited by mdmost
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Man that is tough. I lost my father at 18 and don't think I will ever be over it. Great reflection and tribute.  You are lucky to have had him for the time you did, despite anything that may have caused friction. You know as a father that he did his best. RIP. I hope you and your family can find peace. 

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1 hour ago, Brisketexan said:

My father died last night.  He was 87 years old.  It was his time.  He was ready.  I wasn’t.  But then, I suspect that we never are.  We only have one father in our lives and, if we’re lucky, he’s a good one.  Mine was.

My heart is broken.  My parents are now both gone.  My children are devastated by loss.  My wife is my rock, a guide and pillar for me as I grieve.

And I am lucky.  I am so goddamned lucky.

I am sorry for your loss, Brisket.  I lost my dad in 2005 and my mom in 2022.  It's very, very weird being parentless.  To not have those giants in your corner any more, and to think it is now your responsibility to somehow fill their void in the world.  I can't say anything to make it easier.  I would just urge you to not rush whatever grieving process you need to go through.  And I would think about a fishing trip for next Father's Day, someplace in solitude, so you can be alone with your dad.

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I'm confused - did he or did he not go to A&M?

Jesting aside (because I'm an asshole) sorry to hear but 87 is a pretty damn good number to hit. My dad's dad is turning 94 this year and at that point it's just a matter of time (although I come from good genes on that side - he may live past 100). My mom's parents are both in poor health - her mother especially - and it's been a fucking drain on all of us. Sometimes you're never ready, sometimes you're ready LONG before they do kick it.

I'm sure a lot of us can relate to being at odds with our fathers during our teenage years. Even now if I ever have a difficult conversation with my dad it without fail ends with a few minutes shooting the shit about Texas football or basketball or the Spurs. That's just how men operate - it's flawed but it's the best we can do sometimes. The best we know how to do, frankly. 

I don't think anyone ever sits on their death bed wishing they had worked more or spent more time being an asshole or being at odds with their family. From your kids' reaction it sounds like those bridges had been mended and you did about the best you could while he was here. 

Great words and thanks for sharing - looks like you have 80% of your eulogy down already. 

🤘

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I'm sorry for your loss, Brisket.  I wish I felt the same way about my dad.  He's still around (so is mom), but we've all been quasi-estranged for years now.  I see them each a couple times a year and almost never talk to them on the phone.  Kinda like they're gone already.

You had a good run with your dad.  Think back fondly on the memories and about how much he loved you.

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Sorry for your loss.  Story really hits close to home because that's pretty much my relationship with my now 20 year old son.  We've caught literally thousands of fish together.  From the time he was 4 to about 13, he'd come wake me up at 5 am every Saturday during the summer.  There were plenty of days I just wanted to sleep in but I never did and am damn glad I have those memories.  Because he's a little self absorbed shit now (much like I was at that age), though I hold out hope he'll one day be drafting a similar post many years from now.

 

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Sorry for your loss, Brisket. It's a beautiful tribute and it sounds like he was a great father and husband.  

Damnit, now you've got me misty-eyed. I lost my dad unexpectedly when I was 18 (he was 65).  It's been awhile now, but it's still rare for a day to go by without me thinking at some point there's something I wish I could talk with him about, and it's never really important. Just what he thinks the Horns' chances are gonna be the next year, or whether he thinks the Stros' bullpen is going to still be reliable, what he thought about the new Mustangs, whatever. I just wish I'd been able to get to know him in my own adulthood for awhile and I wish he'd been able to get to know me. Then again, I might be a very different person if he hadn't died when he did.

I like to think we'll all get to see our loved ones again in heaven or some sort of afterlife. But even if not, I believe we honor their memory by living with the type of character they raised us to have as best we can, and in that way they live on through us.

...If your dad is looking down on you from here on out though, you should probably do him (and us) a kindness and hire an editor.

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Sorry man. I won’t insult you with “God’s plan”nonsense that folks often feel compelled to offer. I will say, as a guy who lost both of my parents to cancer in college, that I’m thankful you had a long life together. Feel the pain. Good on you for sharing it here. I’m certain your pops was very proud of you.

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2 hours ago, Brisketexan said:

My father died last night.  He was 87 years old.  It was his time.  He was ready.  I wasn’t.  But then, I suspect that we never are.  We only have one father in our lives and, if we’re lucky, he’s a good one.  Mine was.

I can’t think of my father without thinking of fishing.  I love to fish, he taught me to fish, and I passed that along to my kids.  But the most meaningful fish of my life is a fish I never caught.  Now, anyone who has ever fished with me knows that the world is full of fish I’ve never caught (why, the laws of physics may even be bent; I may have not caught more fish than have ever existed).  But the fish I’m talking about was a flounder in the summer of 1984 or so.  I was a teen.  Being that age, I had a particularly difficult relationship with my father at that time.  As I grew into myself and worked on figuring out who I was, a good part of that exercise was me pushing back on everything my father was, everything he wanted, everything he said, everything he even thought.  I was….an unpleasant adolescent.  And my father did not bend to my will.  He pushed back.  He loved me enough to stand fast, and to make me hate him, because he wasn’t going to stop being my father, even if that required standing strong and letting there be conflict. 

There was a great distance between us – the greatest it had ever been and ever would be.  We had functionally nothing in common.  We could go weeks without meaningful conversation.  But we had one thing – ONE THING – that we still shared; we loved to fish, and we still liked to do it together.  So, reaching out to me, to try to hold on to that last, tenuous thread holding father and son together, he suggested we go on a fishing trip to south Texas, to the bay house of dear family friends where we’d had so many great trips before.  I agreed, because hey, I loved fishing.

We had a great trip.  We ate giant chicken fried steaks at the Brush Country Inn.  We fished from a lighted pier all night long, every night for three days.  And we caught fish, mostly speckled trout.  But one night, I hooked into something big.  My rod was bowed, it was a fight to get whatever it was to the dock.  We were going to need the landing net.  As I fought the fish close enough for us to finally get a glimpse, we saw that it was a beautiful, enormous flounder.  Truly, the biggest flounder I’ve ever had on the line.  I maneuvered him to the pier, my father laid out on his stomach with the landing net so he could reach as far out as possible to net the fish.  As he lowered the net into the water, the flounder turned, shook his head once, and swam off.  I felt in an instant when he threw the hook.  My father flailed with the net, trying to scoop the fish before he got away.  No dice.  I was laughing – because of COURSE the best fish of the trip just shook the hook and swam away.  That is the way of fishing with me.  But what struck me was my dad’s reaction.  He flailed with the net, and had a look of real anguish on his face.  Anguish that the fish he wanted me to catch got away.  Disappointment FOR me.  Not IN me, but for me.  He cared.  In spite of all I’d put him through, how much I had alienated him, what mattered most to him was seeing ME have success.  After all that had come between us – and still WAS standing between us – he loved me.  Totally.  Completely.  Unconditionally.  It still took us a long time to heal, and grow back together, but as we did so, I always remembered that fish, and how much he cared. 

Through everything, my father’s love was an anchor.  His love for me.  His love for my mother – oh, how he loved my mother.  His love for my wife – a relationship that was far from easy, but was bound up in that same complicated love that I experienced for a time.  A relationship that drew upon her pastoral strength and presence, which when he needed it, at the very end – it was there.  Given freely, with grace, and with a connection to the divine that, well if you know wife, you know from which it flows.  And love for his grandkids.  To a person, everyone I’ve talked to about my dad since his passing has mentioned how he adored them.  How proud he was of them.  How they reminded him of my mother, my wife, me, and sometimes even of him.  To the end, he talked about how his love for them was what kept him going.  What he loved the most about each of them was their kindness – their intelligence and their achievements mattered, but when he spoke of them, he always spoke of how good and decent they are.

Which makes sense, as his kindness was his enduring feature.  There are things I knew of and saw along the way.  When a family member was in a bind, how money was sent to solve the problem, no questions asked, and no expectation of repayment.  And mind you, we were not a family of any great means.  There also are things I didn’t know of before – how they opened their home to a young man as he started his cancer treatments in Houston and needed a safe place to stay.  Again, no questions asked – just sharing of what they had, being kind because – well, why wouldn’t you be?

My father was a child of the border, and all that entails.  Some of it was hard; he was separated from his parents often at a young age, because they weren’t going to send him to school in the crappy little Mexican ranching town they lived in.  So he grew up mostly in Eagle Pass, with family.  He found opportunity in education – a high school teacher told him and so many of his classmates that they could go to college, driving them to A&M – yes, A&M – in the local school bus to see the campus and watch a football game.  He got that education, which let him live a life that took him on adventures around the world – his years working in Argentina, living in Buenos Aires with my mother, the two of them together living a life of dreams, was one of the highlights of his life.

Indeed, my father’s story cannot be told – not even a little bit – without talking about my mother.  The best things in this world are love stories, the real love stories, the stories of a love that is tied to your very being.  Theirs was that kind of love story. 

My father was a freewheeling young man living in the valley, working in the oil patch.  My mother was a striking beauty, but the product of a hard life of fleeing an alcoholic father, abuse, poverty, and betrayal.  She desperately wanted a man who would be kind to her, and who could someday provide her the life she barely dared to dream of.  They met.  My father couldn’t believe that he’d met the beauty he'd seen only from a distance.  And my mother couldn’t believe that she’d met a man who was so kind, and so devoted.  They married having dated for only a few weeks.  And they were together for decades after that.  He gave her the life she dreamed of – a son, a home, safety and security – until she died three years ago.

He was her rock.  She was his love, his adoration, his heart.  And dear God, did he miss her so.  Every day.

In the end, he was ready to go.  So he went.  On his terms.  He was ready to see her again.  I hope that is a thing, that we do see each other again in some beyond.  In our last conversation – which I knew was our last – we talked of the universe, and stardust.  And how we are at once insignificant pieces of coalesced stardust in a universe of trillions of galaxies….but that same infinite, incomprehensible universe cannot have its story told without speaking of the time that some coalesced stardust was my father.  And some other coalesced stardust was my mother.  And together, they found and fostered a love fitting for an infinite universe.  We are in awe of the universe, but the universe itself should be in awe of love.  We matter.  Love matters.

My heart is broken.  My parents are now both gone.  My children are devastated by loss.  My wife is my rock, a guide and pillar for me as I grieve.

And I am lucky.  I am so goddamned lucky.

Great obit, friendo.  Sympathies.

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Brisket, your dad and my dad may not have much in common, and our relationships with our respective fathers may be very different. But one of the best things I can also say about my own dad is that he taught me how to fish.  And for a father and son with a strained and distant relationship for most of my childhood until I left for college, it was one of the greatest things he’s ever done for me.

I think the best way to deal with grief is gratitude. Keep doing that.

 

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