Life without a Dad

I last saw my father at my 8^th grade elementary school graduation. Seaview Hospital, a TB sanitarium on Staten Island, had given him a pass just for the day. As I sat on the stage, I saw him enter the auditorium. In a brown leather jack and gray slacks, he looked healthy; he looked handsome. How he could look so good and be so sick, I wondered. After the ceremony, Dad took Mom and me out to lunch, but it was short. He had to return to the hospital by late afternoon. “Be good, study hard,” he said, hugging and kissing me. I nodded, trying to keep back the tears. That was June. I never saw my father again. He died in the hospital that December, hemorrhaging from surgery. He was 46. I was 13.

Last year, while visiting my oldest cousin, Jessie, now 95, and my only remaining relative that knew my father, I asked her about him. “Your dad was my favorite uncle,” she said. “He loved to laugh and be with people,” she said. “He taught me how to do crossword puzzles and I still thank him for that today.”  

I remember him, seated next to the radio console, pencil in hand, figuring out the puzzle in the Daily News. When his favorite radio show came on, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons, he’d put down the pencil to listen, and then return to the puzzle when the program ended.

“Your dad was a smart man,” Jessie said, “he’d gone to college for a year, which is more education than any of his siblings had had. “Let’s go ask John-Joe, we would say. That’s what everyone called him—short for John Joseph—as if it were one word. He would take you and me to the Laff movie theater on 42^nd street?” Jessie recalled. “That’s where I learned to love Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, and then he’d take us for lunch at Horn & Hardart’s. How I wished he’d lived longer, Jessie.”

“Me, too”, I said.

Had he lived, I might have gone to college with my peers.

Had he lived, I might not have had to get married to leave home.

Had he lived, Mom might have had an easier life.

Had he lived, I might not have had to feel so responsible for my mother’s well-being.

Had he lived, Mom might not have had to be so dependent on me. For everything.

Had he lived, I might not have had to hear Mom keep telling me, “Don’t work too hard; you’ll make yourself sick…just like Daddy.”

Jessie recently died, and there’s so much more I wanted to ask her. How much of me is like my father? His love of learning? His sense of humor? His passion for people? Now that’s Jessie’s passed, I will never know.