Fall 1986As My Dad Lay Dying
Author: Ken Homer Issue: 2025-01-01
Fall 1986–As My Dad Lay Dying
by Ken Homer
I heard a story from a cousin of mine. You need to know that my dad was 42 when I was born. And his dad was 42 when he was born. So, all my first cousins are a generation older than me. I suspect that my dad was an oopsie baby. This story adds weight to that theory.
My dad had an alcohol problem. A big one. He came by it honestly if that is fair to say. His dad had the same problem. And his father before him. And all their brothers. And all my male cousins on my dad’s side. All of them succumbed to the allure of ethanol. Their dispiritedness turned them to distilled spirits in a fruitless search for a healing balm for the ills of their souls.
The story goes like this: One day, my cousin had to pick up my dad at a bar. He was too drunk to drive and to his credit he knew it. And he called my cousin for a ride. My dad was in his forties when this happened. So, my dad gets into my cousin’s car, and he’s drunk but coherent. When they reach my aunt’s house something happened. My cousin says it was like a switch got thrown. My aunt came up to my father and started to slap him. She was yelling at him and telling him to get out. “Nobody wants you here. We never wanted you. Nobody wants you. Go away! Get out!” My dad suddenly starts to act far drunker than he was. And he’s crying and sobbing and apologizing. But my aunt keeps telling him to get out. And he walks out into the cold winter night–alone.
It was many years before I put two and two together. I realized that my sister telling me to leave her house on Christmas day so that they could have a family Christmas dinner was the same family pattern being enacted again some 40 years later. Only this time with different players.
Somehow this eases the pain of that memory a little.
But it makes me so much sadder that the darkness that’s lurking in the hearts of the men born into paternal line hasn’t often been effectively faced. There’s a trail of broken men with suffering wives and kids in my tribe. Nobody wants to talk about that. And so, the pattern continues unabated and I’m powerless to stop it.
Ken Homer • Jan 2024
Related: