I was hesitant to write anything about
the recent death of my father. After all, the topic of the death of a
parent in the long form just seems like such a heavily covered topic
that has become one of the great banalities of the modern novel or
New York Times-baiting work
of creative nonfiction. Furthermore, it's such an intensely personal
topic that to write about it at length seems somewhat dishonest, with
the danger of turning the intense complexities of human life into a
lame biography filled with platitudes. Conversely, to write a
short-form reminiscence, while a seemingly more appropriate and
universal expression of grief, just isn't me. I don't do brevity
well.
And yet writing was
the thing I did that my late father seemed proudest of, and to not
cover the subject of his death – and I want to say death, not that
horrifically deceptive term “passing” – would be a sin of
omission, a failure to act when I was perhaps most obligated to do
so.
So who was the late
Giles Fowler? I could mention the inevitable boxes to be ticked –
father, aesthete, professor, journalist, jazz lover, travel junkie,
Southern gentleman – but all of these social roles come off as
hollow, prepackaged tropes.
As his son, I saw
everything through a son's eyes, the kind that start as fawning
admiration, turn into a brief “fuck you” at some point in
adolescence, before mellowing into something more nuanced. He wasn't
a particularly closed-off man, and as anyone who knew him would tell
you, he was always at the ready with a witty story from his long and
varied life. But what I see still has an angle, an angle made up of
personal memories, of old photos, of narratives told, of bits I
wasn't supposed to see but saw anyway.
At
some point, I picked up a dog-eared and forgotten book about Middle
American culture written when Middle America was at its Keynesian
peak, a kind of book we don't see too much of anymore – too
functionalist or structuralist or old-school humanist in its
analysis, too many claims to metanarratives, not enough pathos to
find a mainstream publisher, not enough Foucauldian (on one side) or
evo-psych (on the other) analysis to find an academic publisher. My
answer as to why it was even there was a line I remember describing
my old man as “Giles Fowler, one of America's young, hip, dangerous
film critics.” And all I could think was him?
The man shining his shoes in his sweatpants yelling “That fucking
Rumsfeld!” at 60 Minutes.
All I
can think of is the scene in the first season of Six Feet
Under where Nate, reeling from
the death of his father and trying to settle his accounts, smokes his
late father's weed in his late father's secret man cave above an
Indian restaurant, imagining his dad ripping bongs with bikers,
getting a beej from a hooker, firing a sniper rifle from the windows
as the Amboy Dukes' “Journey to the Center of the Mind” plays on
an old record player, wondering who his dad was when his dad wasn't
being a dad.
But of
course there were the stories I knew of my dad as my dad, the sorts
that will live on fondly, that I'll tell other people, and while I'll
probably never have children of my own, they are the sorts of stories
I would tell them. Of him telling me the difference between a classic
dry and a Gibson martini while he gave me a bath. Or how Hemingway's
writing was like a Cézanne
painting on the way to school. Or asking me as a college freshman if
PCP-laced weed was still a thing, with the honest, non-judgmental
curiosity of a man who had seen the beats, the hippies, and the punks all come and go, and assumed the bohemianism of my own generation
would, like any other, have its own linguistic, sartorial, aesthetic,
and narcotic standards, which he had been around the block too many
times to be shocked by.
And
last of all, of springing him for the night from the rehabilitation
facility where he was, we thought, recovering from a nasty full-body
infection, a faux-colonial building by the side of Highway 69 where
ancient men in baseball caps watched reruns of Everybody
Loves Raymond
in a stupor in a lounge that smelled of instant mashed potatoes, to
get him back to the world of the living and lift up his spirits, to
take him out for a hanger steak and an illicit cognac sidecar. He
talked about his prognosis, which was then looking quite positive,
about his delight that he wasn't too ill to submit an absentee ballot
against Steve King, about how glad he was that his two eldest sons,
both of whom lived in other countries, could be back at the same time
for a visit.
I
flew out the next day, and a week later he was gone.
I'm
now left with my memories, a fair bit of the sort of haze that comes
in the wake of a loss, and I'm listening to a Coltrane album he
loved, drinking Bulleit – a personal favorite of his – and I find
one of his last emails, mentioning a trip he had just taken to see
the homes and graves of his ancestors in Pettis County, Missouri,
where his people come from:
“A
lot of ghosts in that town – men in straw hats and white suits and
women in filmy finery drinking highballs on the Staffords' lawn
across the street from Granddad's. Strange that I was alive
there.”
I'll
miss you, Dad.
