Tuesday, July 29, 2025
8:00 AM PDT
Hi Dad!
I’ve had a great deal on my mind recently, so I wanted to stop by this morning and have a talk. If I’m going to be truthful, what I really want to do is unload some baggage that I’ve grown more than just a little weary of carrying around.
I don’t know if you knew this, but Mom expended an enormous amount of time and effort trying to make me understand that the man I grew up with was not the man she married. Years. Decades. I don’t think I was ever able to convince her that I did understand.
You see, I never met the man my Mother married - not in any real sense of the word. Oh, he showed up a couple of times, but I never got to know him. Instead, I grew up with an abusive drunk. (I know the proper term is ‘alcoholic’ - mostly because I’m a recovering alcoholic myself, but, still, you’ll always just be an abusive drunk that plagued my youth.)
There’s a song out there by a group called Mike and the Mechanics that got me to thinking about where you and I stand after all these years. I’m going to quote here for you the relevant lyrics that led to this:
In The Living Years
Mike and the Mechanics
The Living Years
[Verse 1]
Every generation
Blames the one before
And all of their frustrations
Come beating on your door
I know that I’m a prisoner to all my father held so dear
I know that I’m a hostage, to all his hopes and fears
I just wish I could have told him in the living years
Crumpled bits of paper
Filled with imperfect thought
Stilted conversations
I’m afraid that’s all we’ve got
…
[Verse 3]
I wasn’t there that morning
When my father passed away
I didn’t get to tell him
All the things I had to say
…
[Chorus]
Say it loud (say it loud)
Say it clear (say it clear)
You can listen as well as you hear
It’s too late (It’s too late)
When we die (oh, when we die)
To admit we don’t see eye to eye
I have a few good memories of our time together. The weekend you took us fishing at Christmas Meadows in the Uinta Mountains. That morning we spent building the rock planter box for Mom in front of our house in Kearns (except that in the afternoon, you got drunk and decided that I wasn’t much help anymore, and sent me to my room). Then there’s that one time we played catch in the backyard. But I wasn’t very good at throwing the ball yet, so you jumped over the back fence and played catch with the neighbor kid and left me standing there wondering what just happened.
And then there was Thayne, WY. We’ll always have Thayne, won’t we? You remember, it was 1965 - You and Mom were having problems. You thought you could fix things by getting back to your roots. Doing something you knew you were good at:. So you leased a full-service gas station on one of the busiest highways leading to Yellowstone National Park. And you did well there - so well in fact, that Mom decided that I should spend the summer with you. I arrived on Memorial Day. We opened the station every day at 7:00 AM, closed at 9:00 PM, seven days a week. You taught me everything - how to pump gas, check oil and tires, clean windshields, make change - you even taught me how to do the daily and weekly books and make the deposit at the bank.
I started out helping at the station four or five days a week. Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays because they were the busiest days, and Thursdays and Mondays because they were also fairly busy. Lunch at the Star Valley Cheese Factory. Dinner at Dad’s Bar, then off to bed at Mrs. Osmond’s Boarding House. I got to do some haying, horseback riding, and I got to meet the Osmond Brothers before they were a thing.
But let us be honest, the only reason you were doing so well with that station was that you also got away from your mother. All good things come to an end, right? Your mother, Gracie, showed up on July 24th. You crawled back into the bottle on July 25th and left your twelve-year-old son to run the station. You were blind-staggering drunk by 8:00 AM every morning, passed out by 10:00 AM, and I took you to the bar for dinner and poured you into bed every night. Luckily, you had trained me well. I frequently got compliments on my service. People were amazed that I was working there by myself without supervision.
Mom never found out about what was going on, but eventually, customers contacted the company that leased you the station, and when they found out that a twelve-year-old kid was operating their station, they canceled the lease and kicked you out. August 29th. You got me back home in SLC just in time to start Sixth Grade. But we had a time there, didn’t we?
And that’s the sum-total of my good(?) memories with you.
But, have you any idea what I remember most about my youth? Drunken rampaging. I remember that if you didn’t like how I was eating my food, my food became the dog’s food. And drunken rampaging. I learned to eat fast. Very fast. I developed one hell of an eating disorder. And the drunken rampaging. I remember the knock-down, drag-out fights with my mother and sisters. (That’s probably not an entirely accurate description, though - you never laid a hand on me in anger, and I don’t remember you being physically abusive with my sisters. I do, however, remember several times that you struck my mother, and the one time I tried to stand up to protect her - I remember the leaded-glass ashtray you threw at my head - I still have that in a disused cupboard around here somewhere.)
No, you were primarily all about verbal and psychological abuse. Karen, your firstborn, hated you. Wrong word - Loathed. Your middle child, Kathy, adored you, despite the abuse (something I’ve never understood). I, third in line and always “the baby”, never had any significant feelings about you one way or the other until Thayne. I did listen to my Mother. I searched for the man she married, hunted him, sincerely hoping beyond hope that I could connect with that man, or even someone who remembered him, but I never found any trace of that man.
And then, in December of 1971, I found myself sitting in your studio apartment - with the broken man that was my father, and Gracie came in and dropped off two bottles of bourbon. I asked, “Is that how it is going to be?” You shook your head in the affirmative. I stood and walked out without a word, never saw or spoke to you again. You died in August 1978. Complications of Alcoholism. I still don’t know why I bothered attending your funeral. Maybe to support my sister. On maybe Mom. In any event, Gracie turned it into a circus that Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey would have been jealous of.
Over the years since you died, I have frequently searched for the man my mother married. What I finally found was this:
You are a good and honest man at heart. I know that because in your more lucid moments, you taught me how to be the man I am today. I remember those lessons, and I am passing them on to my grandson. I’m not at all certain why you couldn’t find the strength to turn your life around. Once I discovered that I had a serious problem, it took me just a few months to turn myself around and crawl out of that bottle. I remain a work in progress, but I’ve been clean, dry, and sober for 44 years, 6 months, and 26 days as of the time I’m writing this. Give me a few and I can get that down to hours and minutes.
However, we are quite different men.
You had a handicap that I did not: you were cowed by your mother, bullied into a place where you were terrified even to attempt to break away from her clutches. Gracie destroyed your life, your marriage, and any semblance of a meaningful relationship with your children. She took away your humanity, your self-esteem, and your will to live.
AND, in my view, which admittedly is imperfect at best, YOU ALLOWED HER TO DO THAT. When it came to Gracie, you were a coward. What words would you have used? “A fucking yellow-bellied stinking pissant coward.” I can forgive you everything else, but I never once witnessed any effort on your part to stand up to Gracie, to break her hold, to get her the fuck out of our lives - and for that, I can never forgive you.
I want to be clear about this: I do not hate you. I do not love you, either. My feelings toward you are very nearly neutral. Having spent a few years quite literally in your skin, I know all too well what drove your verbal and emotional abuse of those around you. When I finally had that lucid moment and came to the realization on the morning of January 3, 1981, that I had become my father, THAT scared the ever-loving shit out of me. Luckily, ironically, my father had taught me how to fix my problem. It is unfortunate that you never learned to apply that lesson to yourself.
And do you know what I just realized? I, too, am a coward. I never had the balls to say what I’ve said here today while you were still alive - only now, some fifty years after it might have made a difference. That makes me “A fucking yellow-bellied stinking pissant coward” as well. Maybe, just maybe, we’re not so different after all …
And so, here we are, two broken men, each of us with monsters residing within us. Mom’s gone now. Karen and Kathy, too. And I’m sitting here, alone, having a ‘conversation’ with a ghost.
Your monster’s name was Grace. You lost your battle to her in 1978 at age 61.
And I, at age 71, am still trying desperately to fight my monster, with only the most infinitesimal notion of what that monster actually is.
Lucy