Over the past six years, people have been kind enough to ask my mother and me if we’re doing OK in light of my father’s death. It’s a question I never know how to respond to in the moment.
What is the definition of “OK”? I couldn’t really tell you.
But I do know I still find ways to bond with my father, even after his passing. My father died in 2020, but not from COVID-19 — from esophageal cancer. We had six months with him between his diagnosis in late 2019 and when he went into hospice. Losing a parent is hard no matter when it happens, but facing his death during a worldwide pandemic compounded my grief and loss.
A year after my father died, I raided his cabinet in my parents’ living room. It was full of records I hadn’t seen in years. On a sunny Monday about a month later, I wistfully went into Target and bought the last record player I found perched on a shelf. I wanted to listen to music from my father’s time.
I was familiar with my dad’s musical tastes long before opening the cabinet. He was a teacher and a lifelong studier of facts and historical figures, but his favorite artists were often the popular performers of his time.
I have deep and distinct memories of my dad listening to Bob Seger in the evenings while I was on the couch. He would retire to his favorite deep-blue recliner and rest his eyes before going to bed for the evening. While in his recliner, he would usually play The Beatles, the Stones and the other giants of the ’60s. I remember he took his records and a portable record player to his classroom, sharing his love of music with his students.
My father taught ACT prep at Franklin County High School in Winchester, Tenn., and some of his students told my mother and me at his visitation how much they enjoyed his musical tastes. Even at his sickest, he would maneuver his smartphone — a device he loathed but nevertheless used — to stream music loudly from YouTube while reclining in a chair at the oncologist’s office.
In his later years, he often kept classic country music blaring, thanks to his rediscovery of the genre following Ken Burns’ 2019 documentary series Country Music. At the time, I secretly wished he would turn it down. But Barry was hard of hearing, so he had only one setting: loud.
On a recent February morning, I sat with the windows open, spinning Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” from The Beatles’ White Album. I was reading in the kitchen, where for years my dad would read local news from The Tennessean and the Chattanooga Times Free Press. He would regularly spread the paper across the kitchen island, resting on his elbows as he scanned the sports and opinion sections before eventually getting to the hard news.
So how am I doing? I’m taking my broken wings and learning to fly — and playing the music loudly enough for my father to hear.
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