(On principle I’m usually opposed to photographing sunrises & sunsets. But this one came about on the morning of the last day I knew I would ever see my father. Couldn’t sleep for some reason, and then I realzed the sun was rising and I hadn’t seen a sunrise in too long to remember… and the camera just followed me there.)<\/em><\/p>\nMy oldest brother Charlie, lived with our father the past 17 or so years. Going through our father’s things, he found a stack of cards and letters to our father, from me. Dating back to when I was 10 years old. Our father never took time off from work to vacation. So every family trip we took, I sent him a postcard or a letter. Nothing too sentimental. Just documenting our travels for him. And I did this up to and including my moves (now well into my adult years) to San Francisco, Melbourne (Australia), London, and back to San Francisco. I never even realized that’s what I was doing. But I did — and he saved every one, in order.<\/p>\n
And so I read them all, in order. And each detail in each one jarred my memory. I’d forgotten much, but it came right back when I read it. Which made me wonder: how much other stuff have I forgotten for good, because I didn’t write it down?<\/span><\/p>\nAnd there I was at his bedside, still documenting away.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd that got me to thinking about those emails I was drafting, and those notes and pictures I was taking while my father was dying: I was capturing the things I wanted<\/em><\/span> to remember. Not the full picture. Busted! I’d written to my dad the stuff I thought he’d want to hear, or at least the stuff I thought worth hearing at the time. I was now doing the same, both content-wise and stylistically. I was choosing what to document and using my best voice, tweaking sentences, rearranging paragraphs, grasping for obscure modifiers. To prove to readers (and myself, when I look back): “I can write”. Or maybe “I was cool”, or “I was smart” “clever” “sensitive”. I’m not sure. Kinda like what people do today on Blogs, on Facebook, and in Photoshop. But I digress…<\/span><\/p>\nMy brothers, on the other hand, don’t seem to remember a goddamn thing. I don’t know if it’s because they didn’t keep a diary as I always did as a kid, or they just don’t reflect much. But I went back to see them several months later to do a little more digging, for ideas for the male characters in the show. And I found that any bonding that my brothers and I were ever going to do in our lifetimes was that month of our father dying. I had my chance, it’s gone. They had nothing. I recalled to them memories I had of things that happened TO THEM when we were kids that I thought affected them for life. No recollection.<\/span><\/p>\nSo as you know, he died. My brother Michael had left the room 15 minutes earlier. I\u2019d left to return to San Francisco 6 days earlier. My brothers phoned me everyday from his room, and would put him on the phone. You could tell he was between 2 worlds: the present and some shaken snowglobe of life memories. He sounded weak yet abstractly optimistic? There\u2019s no other way to describe it. That final call was a relief. No more \u201ctake me god take me god.\u201d No more \u201cOh Christ, I\u2019m still here?\u201d Yeah, honestly, but the time the call came, relief.<\/span><\/p>\nAnd then the family reunion that was his funeral. He wanted to be buried in the family plot in New York. We have a family plot?<\/em><\/span> Who knew? So we 4 (my 10 year old nephew Nicholas came along for the ride) flew back east, and saw all our Big Fat Greek Cousins we haven\u2019t seen in many, many years. It was good. It was sad, sure. But it was really good. And of course, the family name is misspelled on the mausoleum. Which couldn\u2019t be a more perfect ending. Hey, It Is What It Is.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>The misspelling makes it perfect.<\/p><\/div>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
My father died in the spring of 2007. I wrote a play about it, It Is What It Is, an abreviated version of which premiered at the 2008 San Francisco Fringe Festival. Below is a bit about the real events that inspired (and were later fictionalized) in the play. There\u2019s a lot of multimedia stuff: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[34],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":128,"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions\/128"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/myadultland.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}