So long, Pop.

My dad died last week. He’s been sick for years with COPD and Parkinson’s and even had a relatively fresh dementia diagnosis. He was already in the hospital to have surgery on a perforated ulcer and the surgery just proved to be too much for him. I got the call from my mom, and was in Florida at her doorstep that night.

Stephen David Brown / 1948 - 2023

My dad and I didn’t get along. That’s the nicest possible way of saying it.

He was an addict and an alcoholic. His father was the same. His father also used to beat the living shit out of him, and one thing I can say for my old man is that he never raised a hand to us. So scared of becoming his own father, he steered well clear of that. It’s one lesson I’m glad he learned, and when I think about my dad now it’s something I give him credit for. I try to be better about that…giving him credit. It’s so easy to focus tightly on just the bad, so I try hard not to dismiss it but to fairly acknowledge that he wasn’t a monster, he was just a complicated, fucked up human being who never became the best version of himself.

I’ve written and deleted so many things about him already. I don’t want to just list terrible things about him so that everyone will agree with why we didn’t get along. I don’t want to whitewash him by lamely posting a few sweet memories and leaving it there. I had a grand plan to go full Speaker for the Dead and do a complete reckoning of his life but the more I thought about it the less I wanted to spend that much time thinking about him.

He and my mom sure did love each other. Fiercely, and recklessly, with that kind of all-encompassing focus usually reserved for teen movies or shitty romance novels…they were absolutely each others entire worlds, for better or worse. It definitely veered into unhealthy territory at times…I remember my dad throwing fits and wanting my mom to quit jobs because he didn’t like the way other men looked at her. But they were married for 45 years and raised four kids together and that’s no small feat. Credit where credit is due, right?

He painted houses, did landscaping, hung sheetrock, sold cars, DJ’d karaoke nights…he worked harder instead of smarter but even though his temper was constantly getting him out of jobs, he was never out of one for long. He busted his ass. Credit where it’s due.

And he loved me. Didn’t know what to do with me, didn’t understand me at all, wasn’t there for me in any of the ways I needed him to be, but he loved me. Credit.

I remember the moment when I knew there would be no reconciliation between us. It was the summer of 2019…I was visiting because my mom was in the hospital recovering from a ruptured AVM, which is a lot like a stroke. I was doing my best to help get through paperwork, get them set up with living wills, all that stuff you try and panic-complete during a time like this. My dad was in over his head and was angry and hostile at my insistence on helping. My youngest brother, 15 years my junior, was there and for whatever reason my dad launched into a self-aggrandizing story about how well-respected he was when he was in prison.

When he got arrested and went away for a while, it was probably the worst moment of my childhood. I don’t think he was gone that long, but it was long enough. The shame of it, how hard it wore on my mother, the way she lied about what was happening to try and protect us from it...I already didn’t like him or trust him when that happened but that sealed it. He couldn’t be counted on, in my head. He was too wild, too selfish.

So he launches into this story about how everyone there respected him and my brother, who wasn’t around for any of this, is eating it up as One of Dad’s Great Stories™. And me, I’m just watching this man gloat and brag about the worst thing that ever happened to me and realizing that he’ll never understand, he’ll never apologize, he’s just not capable of even comprehending how much this hurt me. And that was when I finally let go.

And now he’s gone. It’s one thing to tell yourself that you’re over something while it’s still in play, while there are still things that can change or be done and decisions that can be made. You’re still making that choice. But now he’s gone and there are no other choices or options, just that one final decision that now, for better or worse, is mine to live with.

I talked to my mom before hospice put him under for the last time. I told her to tell him that I loved him. She did. I was able to gift him that one last moment of peace and reconciliation that he could never give me. I’ll have to find my own somewhere else, I suppose, and hopefully I will.