Thoughts About My Father

from Some Guy Says

In thinking about what I wanted to post for this Fathers’ Day, I revisited this piece from a year ago. I had shared it with you as a remembrance of my father’s passing on May 19, 2012.

Truth to tell, I don’t think I have much to add or to take away from it, so I am re-running it today.As you shall see or recall, my dad was accomplished and complicated. It was never going to be easy being his son. As my dad himself might have said, “I never signed up for this!”

By this point in your journey with Some Guy Says, you’ve read a lot about my parents and family life. My folks were very important to me. At the end of the day, I was very lucky. Looking ahead, I am very grateful, and I am learning more and more about anger, forgiveness, and love.

May is tough.

If I ever lost anything, anything I treasured, it was in the month of May: pets, partners, pursuits both professional and personal...you name it.

It was also the month when, in 2012, I lost both my parents.

— I’m put in mind of this line of Oscar Wilde’s: “To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness.” —

See, in my family, we say that Dad probably lived four months past his Use-By Date. He got caught between the protocols of hospitals which are meant to keep you going and hospices which are meant to help move you on along.

It was tedious.

And the thing was, the strain of being his caretaker in those four months overwhelmed my mother.

I suppose there was a kind of carelessness in letting that go on too long for the both of them.

That’s the easy answer, anyway. Looking back, I think it was much more complicated and nuanced and existential than that. Mom was part of that generation, you know? She was Mrs. Robert White. If there were no Robert White, then who was she? Now it occurs to me that, when Dad really started to sink, she must have thought about this a lot.

I think she set an intention.

Dad passed 13 years ago today, and Mom died 10 days later. As Dad himself said, and as has been reported here, there were just too many things that were wrong with him that could not be fixed.

Within days prior to his passing, my tearful mother told me they’d found that Dad had prostate cancer. My careless response: Are you fucking kidding me? Really?

He also had Parkinson’s, diabetes, and — the worst by far and away — macular degeneration.

This particular type of blindness combined with his Parkinson’s to lead to a kind of dementia. It’s what happens when your brain attempts to decipher the things that your eyes no longer can. Sometimes, his brain would tell him that he was surrounded by 24 robbers. Other times, there would be 24 children or kittens or swarms of butterflies or floaty things that even his brilliant mind could not fathom.

At first, he was able to reason his way out of his trouble. How could there be 24 robbers in their high-security, upper floor, senior living compound? Well, there couldn’t. What about those kittens? As he reached to scoop one up, it evaporated and another one was there, but, like, over there. And the floaty things? How many times did I catch him flailing at the air trying to catch at one.

And this happened All the Time.

As soon as he told himself that there couldn’t possibly be 24 robbers in the house, there would be 24 more. It wore him out and down and, beyond a certain point, he started living in this place where robbers and kids and kittens and butterflies and floaty things would suddenly and constantly appear.

It must have been frightening. It was certainly aggravating.

The even bigger problem was my mother. She had no patience for any of it: “Robert! You KNOW there are no robbers in this house!”

I wanted her to be kinder, more patient. Now it seems that my father’s living with all this disorder meant that she lived in it, too, and she simply could not ward or will any of it away for him. She was powerless.

That must have been frightening. It was certainly aggravating.

Although my parents were raised far apart from one another — Dad in Dothan, Alabama and Mother mostly in Hickory, North Carolina — they shared many salient points of connection. They were both Depression babies. Both born into huge families – Dad was the eighth of ten children, and Mom was the eighth of eight. Both had violent, unruly, alcoholic fathers incapable of holding down jobs or providing for families or even taking care of themselves.

Somehow in all of this, my parents held on to the faith of their mothers. It was a miracle of that faith, I suppose, that they found each other. And it was a practical and perfect point of this kind of spirituality that they pretty much died together.

Once, I heard Mom say that she couldn’t wait “to be in Heaven together forever with Robert.”

Like the good Navy man he was, Dad said, “No, Mary, no. Til death do us part. That’s all I signed up for.”

Dad grew up in a family of 12 in a two-room house. I cannot imagine what must have gone on in there. Even so, Dad was — as will sometimes happen for children of alcoholics — astounding. He excelled in everything he did. He was a straight A student, captain of the basketball team, editor of the school paper, president of the junior class, and there’s probably more I don’t know about.

Toward the end of his senior year, about a year before the end of WWII, he had an opportunity to join the Navy. He grabbed at that chance and high tailed it out of Dothan. His school arranged for his early graduation. The trade-off was that, rather than fulfilling his dream of becoming class valedictorian, he graduated as salutatorian.

It didn’t matter – he was out of there! He was off to adventures! He had bigger dreams to chase!

See, someone had deeded him a plot of land right there where I-10 now runs through Dothan. Dad’s Big Dream was to use that plot in combination with his GI bill to finance a big deal education at a big deal school in the Northeast and land a big deal career as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue in New York City!

My dad, a Mad Man. I mean…can you even?!

Doesn’t matter. That dream did not come true.

When he got out of the Navy and went back home, he discovered that somehow his father had gotten ahold of his land and drank it all away, and that broke Dad’s heart clean in two. I do not believe he ever healed. Instead, he went back into the Navy determined to get as far away as he could from Dothan, Alabama, and to my knowledge he never saw his father again.

In the Navy, Dad, true to form, bested everything he set his mind to. He rose quickly through the ranks, and in doing so he caught the attention of Admiral Arleigh Burke who was the Commander in Chief of US Naval Operations. Admiral Burke was impressed with Dad’s communication skills, in particular his way with the written word. I am sure Admiral Burke also filled a mighty hole in my dad’s heart. He was someone Dad really needed. Their relationship was profound.

— The admiral was also a full-on hero of WWII and the Korean War, and you can read about him here: Admiral Arleigh Burke —

Dad was stationed at the Pentagon in DC when he was assigned to the admiral’s team. It was his job, then, to train his replacement.

That person turned out to become my mother.

I mean it. Train my mother. As if.

Anyway, that’s how they met.

And not too long after that, they married. And 11 months later I was born and given Arleigh as my middle name. There is a kind of irony in that because, as my father groused, by the time he came along his family couldn’t afford fancy things like indoor plumbing and middle names.

For the record, I love my name.

— This puts me in mind of Eudora Welty’s comment that, after the Civil War, Southerners, Black and white, were so poor they could ONLY give their children beautiful names. —

Working for the admiral landed us in Naples, Italy in 1958. After that, Dad did a stint on the USS Kitty Hawk. During this time, we lived around the corner from my mammaw in Lenoir, NC. Then Dad was sent back to the Pentagon, so we moved again to DC. From there, he became the Naval Attaché to Norway. From Oslo we moved to Winter Park, Florida where Dad helped open a brand-new navy base, one that has since closed because...let’s face it...I am that old.

BTW, in Norway, we lived across the street from the Dutch embassy and around the corner from the King’s Palace. It was as close to living inside a fairytale as anything you can imagine. In Winter Park, base housing hadn’t been built, so the Navy arranged for us to live in a trailer park in the middle of an orange grove...pre-Disney.

The view from my bedroom window at 26b Oscarsgate. That’s the Dutch Embassy on the left.

…requires no explanation

From there it was back to DC for a scant few months, and then Dad was transferred to Honolulu to serve on the staff of Admiral John S. McCain, the senator’s father. This was right after General William Westmoreland was retired, and the admiral took over running the war in Viet Nam while his son was being held there as a prisoner of war.

It was a tense time for our country and in our home. Admiral McCain took to drinking heavily, and it fell to Dad to hold things together. And he brought all that home.

The good news was that, as long as I made good grades I pretty much had run of the island. So I did that.

At the beginning of my senior year, Dad was transferred to become the Chief Executive Officer of the Navy Base in Mayport, Florida, just outside of Jacksonville. I was supposed to stay behind to finish up high school, but at the last minute those plans fell through. It was May when my island life was upended, and we moved to Florida.

This move may have been the one and only time I know for sure that my dad lied to me: “It will be just like Hawai’i! You’ll see! They have beaches and surfing and all the fun things you love! It will be great!”

It was not.

For the record, Jacksonville touts itself as a Great Place to Live, Work and Play. That may be. But this one thing is sure: Jacksonville is no Honolulu.

Think of it like this:

How many people in Jacksonville do you suppose save up their whole lives to be able to spend two weeks in Hawai’i?

How many Hawai’ians do you think do the same thing to spend any kind of time anywhere in Florida?

See what I mean?

It didn’t help that I needed a half credit of PE and a half credit of this heinous thing called “Americanism vs Communism” to graduate from Duncan Upshaw Fletcher Senior High School in Neptune Beach, Florida. I went to school for half a day for half the year and blew out of Florida as fast as I could.

While my experience of living at home was nothing like my Dad’s, it is not lost on me that, echoing his journey, I left home at 17 with straight As, too, to go as far away as I could.

It wasn’t easy to be his son. I was never going to hit those same marks. Ever. It was…not possible.

Still, unlike Dad, I was leaving a mostly perfect situation. And…I came back home and stayed there for 44 years.

To be clear: my life would have been impossible anywhere else. Jacksonville gave me everything I have and all that I am.

It took a lot out of me, too, and that’s all right. Near as I can tell, it’s all about balance anyway. On the whole, I am very grateful.

Fast forward to 2008. That was the election cycle featuring Senators John McCain and Barack Obama. Dad’s health was in obvious decline. We took away his keys.

Even though he could hardly see it, Dad sat in front of the TV and watched the news all day long. He and I often watched it together. That was something I loved to do with him, especially if the stories were political.

On this particular night, John McCain was blathering on about some damn thing or another when Dad said: Look at him! He has the temperament of a torpedo, you can’t believe a word he says, and he makes John Kennedy look like a Sunday School teacher!

Me: Oh wow! So are you going to vote for Barack Obama?

Dad [looking at me as if I’d turned into 24 robbers]: Of course not! I cannot imagine telling Roberta [the senator’s mother] that I didn’t vote for Johnny [because in actual real life, that was what Dad called the senator]!

Two weeks later. Same scenario. Only this time, we were watching Barack Obama.

Dad: Look at him! He really knows what he is talking about! He’s even-Steven, steady-as-she-goes! I think he’s a good person!

Me: So you’re going to vote for him?

Dad: Certainly not!

Me: Because…what?

Dad: Because! [Almost a whisper…] Your mother would know!

Me: Oh come on – when you are in that voting booth, it’s just you and Jesus and…

Dad: Your mother will know!

And it’s true. Over the course of their lives, they melded into one another. By this time they leaned on each other for everything. They were needed, and there was comfort in that dependency.

Very near the end of their lives, when he was totally blind and she was practically deaf, he liked to joke, “Well, Mary, I guess it takes two of us to make a whole person now.”

Then, just that fast, by the end of May in that year, they were gone.

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Some Guy Says is written by Robert Arleigh White and distributed via Substack twice a month…give or take.

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