When Father’s Day Doesn’t Feel “Happy”

Father’s Day is one of those days on the calendar I’ve come to dread, and I know I’m not alone here. For those of you who have lost your own dad, or if, like me, you’ve lost a child, this one is for you. On a weekend when the entire world seems to be saying “Happy Father’s Day,” know that I see you. Your story is important, and if you get anything out of reading this, know you’re not alone. It’s for you – and for me – that I’m sharing my story.

I lost my daughter, Rivena – the person who first made me a dad – and my own dad in the span of about two weeks. I say “about” because the reality is I don’t actually know the timeline off the top of my head. We lost Rivena to suicide on January 28, 2018. That event, on that date, turned the world as I knew it upside down.

It should come as no surprise then, that I don’t remember the exact date my dad died. I know it was about two weeks after Rivena. And I know it was complicated.

My relationship with my dad was an interesting one. There were so many things he did so well, and there were some things that left much to be desired. Before I say anything more, let me point out the fact that none of us is perfect – I am certainly far from it. Writing something like this after his death means only my perspective gets told, and I want to acknowledge that. But this is my story, and mine alone to tell.

I’ve written before about how we all will experience loss at some point. Up until Rivena’s death, however, I would say I’d been fortunate, having lost my grandparents (who I loved dearly) and a few acquaintances, but nobody in my immediate orbit. In any other circumstance, I think losing Dad would have felt overwhelming. But the reality is I was almost numb to it then, and if I’m honest with myself, I haven’t really dealt with his loss in the years since. This is my attempt, five years later, to unpack some of it.

Back to My Beginning

I was born while my dad was flying a mission in Vietnam on Thanksgiving Day in 1969. He was deployed as a forward air controller in the US Air Force, flying a small twin-turboprop OV-10 at treetop level to help coordinate air strikes. We didn’t get to see each other for the first time until I was a few months old, when he was given a few days R&R to meet my mom and me in Hawaii.

Obviously, I have no memory of that first interaction, or for that matter of Dad’s eventual return home from Vietnam a few months after that. But I know from talking to my mom and a few family members that the person who came home from Vietnam was a changed man. Because I only knew the ‘after’ version, I have nothing to compare.  And here’s the thing… as a family, we didn’t talk about this kind of stuff. Ever. It clearly influenced me as an adult and in the interactions I’ve had with my own family, as Rivena’s descriptions of me in her journals repeatedly reference my stoicism. Holding things in just seemed normal – I think that’s a big reason I haven’t really dealt with the dual loss of Dad and Rivena in the years since.

 

Dad went on to serve a total of 27 years in the Air Force before his retirement as a full Colonel in the mid-80’s. And I can say without any hesitation that I wanted to be just like him growing up. Despite moving every few years, I embraced the life of a kid in a military family. Having a hotshot pilot as your dad, well, that was just cool to me. When other kids shadowed a parent at work, they usually went to an office somewhere. When my brother and I got to tag along to Dad’s ‘office,’ it meant we would be climbing up the nose gear of a KC-135 Stratotanker to get up into the cockpit. It meant we could lie down in the boom operator’s position in the tail and imagine we were flying the boom into a pretend fighter jet below. Or we may have been out with Dad checking the runway and taxiway lights while an entire squadron of B-52s rumbled to life and shook into the air right next to us.

It was awesome to grow up around that. Of course, as a kid I was oblivious to the realities of what so many people like my dad carried with them every day.

War Took a Toll

I’ve come to learn and see firsthand in many friends through the years that the tolls of combat duty can have profound effects on so many of the men and women who bravely serve in our armed forces. As a civilian, I won’t pretend to be able to understand what they’ve been through. What I can do is offer my gratitude and a willingness to sit with them in whatever way they need.

My dad was a man of very few words when it came to expressing anything he needed. It wasn’t until later in his life that my brother and I began to get a full grasp on what kind of demons had been summoned through his experience in Vietnam. As he told the story – just one time to me and one time to my brother Greg, which the two of us subsequently spliced together – Dad’s mission on the same day I was born was the one that ended up tormenting him for years.

As a pilot, Dad was typically given a bird’s eye view of combat. For the most part, he stayed above the horrific realities that were taking place at ground level. But because he was a FAC (Forward Air Controller), his role was to stay down low and use white phosphorus rockets to mark precise targets on the ground for the big bombers up high to hit, and to occasionally provide close air support for the Army’s 1^st Division to which his Air Force unit was assigned. On my actual birthday, Dad was down low trying to provide cover for Army troops as they were being chased across a clearing by the Viet Cong. On one pass, he said he spotted a VC soldier emerge from the tree line and take aim at a group of US Army soldiers pinned down at short range. Dad did what he was trained to do – he opened up the cannon on his aircraft and witnessed as the Vietnamese soldier literally exploded into nothing.

It was the first time Dad had seen at close range the full impact of his actions, and the first time he had, with no doubt whatsoever, taken the life of another human being. Yes, this is a reality of war. Yes, this is something so many of our service members experience and are trained specifically to do. Dad ended up flying a total of 390 combat missions in Vietnam, crash landed twice, and yet it was this short-field image of taking another life that haunted him.  As we learned from him just a few years before his death, Dad came back from Vietnam and made a promise to himself that he would never again fly an aircraft that carried either guns or bombs. And sure enough, his remaining flying years in the Air Force were spent in a KC-135 tanker, doing mid-air refueling.

Why did I decide to tell this story? Well, because it helps me to attempt to understand and empathize a bit when it comes to the parts of Dad that I wish had been different. Here’s the reality I grew up with: my dad loved us, and I loved him. He was a dedicated father, who coached our soccer teams and led our Boy Scout troop. He showed up at band concerts and sporting events and had an amazing knack for gardening and landscaping. He was also an alcoholic. He had a temper that could easily spill into rage. He could be verbally abusive, and as a teenager who pushed the lines I learned the hard way that he could every so often could get physical when that rage emerged. And the older he got, the more he sought refuge and escape through isolation and booze.

Perhaps the one thing that stands out above all else for me today, however, is the simple fact that Dad was the only person close to me – including all family and friends – who did not so much as reach out to me after Rivena died.

A Step Too Far

We all imagine the movie script version of losing our parents. You know, the one where, despite whatever trials and tribulations life throws at you, you end up mending fences and getting to say peaceful goodbyes in a spirit of love and affection. But that’s not how real life works. The truth is that over the last few years of Dad’s life (and Rivena’s), he and I had become quite estranged.

I should mention that despite wanting to be just like him as a kid, I did not in fact end up becoming a pilot in the Air Force. The truth is, I gave up a full-ride ROTC scholarship when it became clear that I would not have been able to get into pilot training. Nonetheless, I always sought approval from Dad in my career. And it felt great to know just how proud he was when I earned my first VP title at a big company. It doesn’t matter how old you get… that affirmation from your parents (and grandparents) is priceless.

That’s why, when he lashed out at Rivena for withdrawing from the Colorado School of Mines in 2012, I was stunned. Without knowing Rivena had been struggling with a massive bout of depression, Dad chose to send a truly nasty email to her, expressing his disappointment in her for – in his words, not mine – tarnishing the family’s name and reputation.  In his own words, which I hesitate to quote here, “People and schools have invested in your success and you have proven all of them wrong. As a consequence, there will be no future investors in you; your collection of ‘F’ grades has shown that you are not worth the time and effort and the investment because you just blow it all away.”

What kind of grandparent says this to a grandchild? The job of a grandparent is to love unconditionally. Even if I chose to believe his message to Rivena was fueled by Jim Beam (which was a safe bet), the excessive vitriol Dad spewed (which went way beyond the mild quote above) put me in the very uncomfortable position of either being a good father to Rivena or turning the other cheek to the destructively massive overstep on his part. The choice was a brutally hard no-brainer; I cut him off from any contact with my family.

This was not something I took lightly. It broke my heart to know – and see in black and white – the language he had used toward his first-born grandchild. Rivena was an especially sensitive soul. She had been so shaken by it, and yet so desperately wanted to protect me from knowing about it, that I only learned of Dad’s email about 6 months after the fact when Rivena happened to mention something about it to Kim. And it broke my heart even more to cause Madison to lose contact with her grandpa, who had by all accounts remained very loving toward her. But as a parent in full protective mode, I had no choice but to put that barrier up to protect Rivena.

After I cut off ties, Dad and I really didn’t have any communication for about three years. I got an occasional update from my brother, but otherwise had no knowledge of how Dad was. About 6 months before Rivena died, I started trying to rebuild a bridge and reopen ties. We exchanged a few short, somewhat strained conversations about the weather, and we did manage to have one real conversation about Rivena’s coming out. To his credit, I think Dad truly worked to accept Rivena for who she was, going so far as to write her a (mostly) kind letter shortly before what was to become that final Christmas for both of them. As it turned out, my last ever conversation with Dad was on Christmas day in 2017, just hours before I took my last ever picture of Rivena.

A Complicated Ending

I mentioned earlier that Dad was the only person close to me I never heard from after Rivena died. Yes, there were certainly circumstances that fed into that. Namely, just before Dad died doctors discovered advanced signs of lung cancer that had attacked numerous other areas of his body, including his brain. And yet, I know Dad was one of the few people who learned of his granddaughter’s death before we made the news public. My brother, ironically, had stayed in our house in Colorado the night Rivena died (Kim and I were in NY with Madison), and he was on his way to see Dad in Maine the next day as part of a work trip to the east coast. Greg was one of the first people we told about Rivena’s death, and he then had the unenviable job of breaking the news to Dad in person.

So, we know he knew. We know he processed it, and it registered, based on what Greg relayed to us. And we did in fact hear condolences from his wife. But never a word from Dad. No card. No email. No phone call. He didn’t have a cell phone, so no text. Nothing but deafening silence. And then he died.

Dad’s death in the midst of that silence remains a basic fact that no amount of revisionist history can change. Like I mentioned earlier, it was complicated. To know just how much damage Dad had done to Rivena during a difficult period while she battled depression, and then for Rivena to ultimately succumb to that depression when she took her own life years later remains incredibly hard for me to reconcile. Unfortunately, that’s how our story ended, and there are no do-overs.

I loved my dad, and I hated him. Even as I write this, I’m still so incredibly angry… and sad… and hurt. I also miss him dearly, and he will forever be the dad I looked up to for so many years. It’s now on me to let go and move forward.

Losing either Rivena or Dad would have been (and was) hard enough. Losing them both in a matter of weeks, when my relationship with one was inextricably linked to the other, was more than I could handle. It’s no surprise, then, that Father’s Day during these past five years has been a day for me to metaphorically bury my head in the sand. It’s not a day I like to celebrate. And yet I could not be any more proud to be Madison’s dad. I owe it to her to deal with the hard emotions around this day and continue to be present in her life both now and into the future. Thank you for coming along as I work to get there through these words.

Postscript

On what turned out to be my last Father’s Day while both Rivena and my own dad were alive, I spent the day coaching a cross-country cycling team, riding a bicycle with a bunch of college kids along the margins of Death Valley in the Mojave Desert in 112-degree heat. I remember being splayed out in a shady spot on the ground after our 90-mile ride that day, talking to Rivena and Madison over FaceTime while they enjoyed a pool day with my in-laws in Colorado. There was laughter and lightness, and I’d give anything to go back to those happy voices on the other end of the line. And to get to spend another day with them both, together.

There are two things I offer as takeaways if you’ve managed to read to the end:

First, understand that your words have weight, especially as a parent or grandparent. Know the power you have to influence thoughts and actions… both good and bad. And by all means, choose words that uplift instead of tear down.

Second, recognize that life is short. We get one shot at this. Don’t take for granted the time you have with those you love. Hug your kids and your parents. Mend those fences. Say the things that go unsaid. Use love and kindness as your guideposts, and more than anything, be kind to yourself.

I wish you a good Father’s Day. Happy, sad, or anywhere in between.