I’ve been thinking about my dad alot.  He died many years ago.  It’s like that seen in Beaches, I can’t find a picture of him and I want to see his face.  Do we look alike.  I miss him, dispite of everything.  In the wake of all the discussion of health care reform, I’m reminded of how often we blame those who become sick.  My father had no health insurance, since he had not worked for years.  He received help, and he was no one’s model client.  Either am I.

My father was forty-nine years old when he found out that he had cancer.  It would kill him before he reached fifty-two years of age.  He spent the last year in a hospital bed in the middle of a crowded living room in a dirty apartment barely managed by my overworked mother and my two brothers.  He couldn’t  recognized them or his home in the end.  He lay like a cadaver for most of his final months, a constant reminder of his upcoming and sought for death.  

And I stayed away.  I never saw my father in that state.  I never lived in that home.  I had moved away several years before the family moved there allowing them to save money by renting one less bedroom.  I did see him when he was very ill.  I remember him sitting on the couch, a bald and skinny man, looking decades older than he really was.  He was smoking a cigarette.  I didn’t smoke at that time, being consumed in my walk with Jesus.  How could he do that, I thought?  

In his death sentence, my father did find freedom.  He was a stronger man, perhaps unburdened by the pain of the failures he must have felt.  An alcoholic man who hadn’t worked more than a few hours a week in at least ten years, he never met the promise of his early life.  Smart, attractive, and funny, he was a successful businessman who brought to his family a lovely life in a bedroom suburb of New York City on the beaches of Connecticut.  But he couldn’t put down the bottle.  The bottle that ruled every moment of our family’s life.  And he wanted to put that bottle down, but it always beckoned and he always answered.  

Yet he found his freedom.  Knowing he was to die, and hoping it would be soon, he no longer cared about the vices that controlled him.  He gave into them completely.  And he was happy in a way I had never seen him before.  He became free with words of love and tears of joy, not regret.  He sat on that ratty couch and smoked because it no longer mattered.  Because he was no longer the bottle or the cigarette.  He was a man, a father, a husband, and his time was short.  Nothing else mattered.  

His death did not come quickly and I couldn’t watch.  I had long ago separated myself from the family of my birth.  I was gay, fat, poor, and awkward.  And they were my mirror.  And that pain was too deep to share with them, to watch in their eyes. It was happening to some other family.  I could not watch my father’s demons at last vanquished by his death, as he was no longer able to reach for the bottle or the smoke, no longer able to fail the expectations of those who loved him, no longer anything but the dying man.  I chose to remember him as being his best in the end, unburdened by any expectation except that he die well.

I was forty-eight when I found out I had cancer.  Renal clear cell carcinoma.  A rare cancer and fortunately caught early and very treatable, even curable.  At least, I thought, it was not lung cancer or some other sort of cancer for which I could blame myself, for which I deserved.  I had already been very ill in my life.  My intestines exploded inside of me and nearly killed me 10 years ago.  Last year I found that I had diabetes.  I have been tired and sick for most of the last two years.  And yet, I still smoke and drink buckets of Coke everyday.  And of course, with a little more research, I discovered that kidney cancer does have a relationship to smoking and obesity.  And the cigarettes and the sugar and the lost expectations beckon, and I always succumb.  I always answer.  

Is this my father’s legacy?  Does one generation of great potential destroyed by self-destruction lead to another?  Am I now the man I swore I never would be?

Many years ago, during my time in the church, I sang “Lay Your Burden Down” with tears running down my cheeks.  I’ll never know my father’s burdens.  He never seemed happy, never seemed to be living the life he wanted to be living.  In retrospect he seems to have always had a dark cloud over him, or more like a haunting shadow.  I still don’t know how to lay burdens down.  I still don’t know why I hold expectations for myself that I constantly fail to meet.  

Time is running out for all of us.  And when someone looks back at my life I don’t want them to remember the dignity of my death.  I want to live life now.  Does history repeat itself, or can I at last unleash these ghosts and let the sun break through my own shadow?  I wish my Dad were here to help me figure it out.  Perhaps he is, perhaps I will.  Come on, Dad. We can do it.

Wow, what a day.  Pete Wilson is a local news anchor on KGO-TV in San Francisco.  He also hosted a radio opinion program.  He died today at age 62 of a massive heart attack following hip replacement surgery.  

He was widely criticized in the Bay Area for some truly unfortunate comments he made about Bevan Dufty and his decision to have a baby with his friend Rebecca.  At the time, I joined a large number of people who thought that Pete’s comments were out of line.   I, however, did not call for him to be fired.  We progressives need to ensure that people have an opportunity to speak what they think, no matter how offensive they may be.  I know we will win the battle of ideas.

I appeared on his radio show for the entire hour to discuss this issue.  I think we made some progress.  He never quite understood how offensive he was.  But he gave me a shot, and treated me with great respect.

So hopefully for the last time today, good bye and my best wishes to all those that love Pete.  

Update:  My public statement regarding Pete Wilson:

Like nearly everyone else in our community, I was shocked when I first heard the comments that Pete Wilson made regarding my friend Bevan and his co-parent Rebecca.  Particularly puzzling was that Mr Wilson had been generally supportive of LGBT issues including marriage equality rights.  I sent an email to him immediately, and to my surprise his program responded the next day.  Pete invited me to be on his radio program for a full hour to discuss why so many of us were offended by his comments.  In person he had a big presence.  He was a very tall man and his personality filled the studio.  We had a lively conversation and made some progress in finding areas of agreement.  He was absolutely wrong in what he said.  He knew he had said it badly and felt he was speaking more broadly about what he perceived was happening to the american “family.”  He lumped in Hollywood starlets and their horrible parenting skills with a general sense of thoughtless planning on rearing children.  Of course no two people plan as completely as LGBT people need to when it comes to children.  It became pretty clear that he was a man of different generation, who was only still discovering what supporting gay issues could mean.  He struggled with some of it.  But I will say that despite our strongly different points of view, he treated me with tremendous respect and gave me an opportunity to use his own program to explain why he was wrong.  We continued our talk off the air and when I left the studio, I did so thinking that he was not a bad guy.  I liked him.  I wish we had more opportunities to debate, I think he really was trying to understand and change.