A Eulogy for (only) a Superhero

Tonight’s undertaking isn’t a funny anecdote about my children and their poop habits, so feel free to scroll on by if you are in the mood for something light. If you’ve lost a toxic parent, however, or if you’ve loved and lost an addict, this one’s for you.  Or maybe you just love someone who has, maybe you love someone like me, and hopefully here’s a pile of words that can help you understand a little better how very complicated it is to mourn the loss of Dr. Jekyll.

When my Daddy ODed two years ago no one was surprised except my mom.  She wasn’t even really surprised, she had just blamed everyone else for everything for so long that it had become knee-jerk.  Reflexive.  COVID, which would claim my mom just 6 months later was still a few weeks away, but in my mind and heart Daddy’s death was some kind of catalyst.  The first in a series of losses and sacrifices and changes and tragedies, the beginning of a chapter that hasn’t quite wrapped up yet.  I think in reality, when it came to Daddy’s death we were all kind of surprised that it hadn’t happened sooner, that’ he had made it to 71.

Every person on this earth has their little cartoon angel and their little cartoon devil on their shoulder, whispering in their ear.  We all get pulled in both directions and hope that we land somewhere on the good side.  Every choice we make nudges us one way or another.  But for Daddy it was never nudge – it was always more like a cannon blast and his little angel and devil didn’t whisper, they shrieked.  He spent very little time in the muted middle ground, just a bit over the neutral line into “good” where most adults hang out.  Instead, Dad yoyoed dramatically from superhero (he quite literally saved several lives) to monster, so quickly it left child-me dizzy, so violently that it left adult-me scarred.   

At the time of his death, I’d stopped talking to him maybe a decade before, and hadn’t seen him since he arrived late and probably drunk to my Grandmom’s funeral, literally driving up to her grave on the grass.  My Mother would sometimes message me over the years (I didn’t talk to her either, but she would track me down), to tell me how Daddy was old and sick and blind and didn’t have much time left, a bluff for attention or whatever.  She’s a whole ‘nother story that I don’t have the spoons or space for tonight.  When she would message me, I would sometimes consider the inevitable, what it would actually be like to lose them.  I knew it would be hard in a way very different than losing a normal parent but all that I imagined was just a hint at what it was actually like. Nothing can prepare you for the death of a toxic parent.  It is its own unique trauma.

There’s the relief and the guilt about the relief, which you expect.  And then you start to remember both of the people who are now gone.  All at once you have to confront and bury the monster that you know killed the superhero, and maybe that slaughter happened a long time ago leaving only the monster.  Maybe that parent was already “dead to you.” But even if you didn’t realize it, you still hoped the superhero was hanging on. So, with the monster, you bury the secret hope for reconciliation and catharsis and you open every old wound.  You bury the superhero with monster.  And then, because all little girls love their Daddies, you sit down and write a eulogy for JUST the superhero. 

So that’s what I did.  I wrote about the mythic, larger than life, wonderful man that was only about half of my father. And in doing so I mourned not only losing him, but the lost decade when he was alive but inaccessible because of the other half.  And here it is, the eulogy for half my dad. 

“Thank you all for being here today.  I wanted to start out with a small but important announcement.  That $20 dad was supposed to give you back next Thursday?  Well… I hate to tell you, but you’re probably not going to see it on this side of the River Styx. 

I’m going to ask you to do something for me.  I want you to close your eyes and imagine my dad about 30 years ago.  The soda bottle glasses, the big hair, and or course the thousand-watt smile.  That’s when we’re going to be today – circa 1990.  This pub is probably exactly where we’d be as a family too and the sandwiches and snapper soup haven’t changed a bit.

You know my 90’s dad as the life of the party – for better or worse.  The guy with a gift – when you were with my dad you were his best friend.  You were the most interesting person in the room.  You were his favorite kid.  You were special.  He had endless charisma.  And oh god, most of all, he was FUN!

When I’m done blathering on, I would love to hear some stories about this Steve – Steve-a-Reno.  But first I need to pull the curtain back on another part of dad.  My dad had something that not too many parents have.  He had the eyes of a child.  He played with reckless abandon.  He believed in magic – he made magic. I’m going to take you through a little bit of that right now.

My dad LOVED holidays.  This rooted itself in me hard and lives on with my kids.  I remember the fireworks on the 4rth of July.  Pulling up late, because we were always late, but still getting a great seat because we could squish in one of dad’s best friends.  He wasn’t taking the kids to the fireworks, he loved them just as much, if not more than we did.  And this made it a different experience for us, because we were all a part of it.  It wasn’t FOR us, it was WITH us.  And that year some idiot gave MY dad a bag of dynamite.   Half sticks or quarter sticks or some such nonsense.  Obviously, something Steve shouldn’t be trusted with.  Little Ryan had the great idea to blow the trash can lids into the air.  Most dads would have realized… what am I saying, most dads wouldn’t have been playing with dynamite with a 7-year-old and a 5-year-old.  But MY dad… well, this was the best idea he’d heard in months!  I think there’s still holes in the driveway.  Mom was pissed! But oh man how we laughed.  That was dad.  All the sense god gave a 7-year-old.  But all the wonder too.

And don’t get me started on trick-or-treating.  We needed pillow cases because anything else was just too flimsy.  I didn’t care that I was getting a little big for my dad to go to the door with me, because neither did anyone else.  Like I said, he was fun.  And my friends and I LOVED it, loved him.  And you KNOW it wasn’t just the treats.  He taught us the BEST tricks too. 

On Dad’s birthday we had to find the PERFECT Christmas tree. I feel like in retrospect his friends Chuck and Jeamie may have actually owned a tree farm, but at the time it felt like we had access to our own magical forest.  We’d trek out into the night and spend what felt like hours looking at every single tree before we’d cut one down – too big for our house.  Only a blue spruce, the only kind strong enough to hold up the antique bubble lights that somehow never caught our house on fire.  And sometime around then he transformed into Santa.  I’ll betcha didn’t know that.  That daddy dressed up as Santa for Coventry Manor – the “old folks home”.    I went with him one year.  I don’t think it was that year.  It was a couple years later, near the end of this chapter. Those old ladies… they loved my dad.  He flirted SHAMELESSLY.  He was downright lecherous.  “Come on Dorris, sit on my lap, and give Santa a little kiss.  You know you’re on the naughty list.”  He pinched 90-year-old butts and tucked candy canes in hospital gowns.  And I saw playfulness and joy.   They giggled like little girls- like kids. 

My dad never grew up.  I don’t know what happened.  Maybe the world expected him to grow up more than he could.  Maybe it erased the best parts of him.  But if we look back, we can look at this Steve who everyone loved.  I remember the Coventry fair, yard work that felt like play, tractor rides around the “neighborhood”, Sitting in his lap to steer the car, getting woken up in the middle of the night for milkshakes and donuts fried in butter.  I remember jumping waves at the beach. I remember.  I hope you to do to. 

Thank you for coming today.  May you live and remember him.”  

For a moment it felt like lies, though every word was true.  I felt cheated out of my pain to remember him this way.  To only address the good.  But I kept it, and I read it and people cried.  People who hadn’t spoken to him in years because he wasn’t that Steve anymore.  But that was the Steve they remembered, and that was the Steve we all needed to bury and all needed to mourn and all needed to remember.  In coming back to it two years later, without naming the monster, without sharing the other Steve, but acknowledging him, I’m making it ok. It’s ok to find some catharsis in the partial truth, and in a life so torn between yes and no, good and bad I’m burying him on the good side of the line. Now that he’s gone, the battle between the superhero and the monster can be over, and I can choose how to remember him and how the story ends.  I’m writing the eulogy for ONLY the superhero.  His life was an epic battle, and in my memory and in the memories of those who heard the words, the superhero won.