A week before his death, my Dad bought tickets to come see me in New Orleans. I forgot about it until the day rolled around that he was supposed to arrive: May 18th. When the doorbell rang, I nearly jumped out of my skin. No one ever rings my doorbell. Also, who gets mail anymore anyway?
But I just had this weird feeling. When I opened the door, there it was: a box that read in large red block letters: Cremated Remains. He was, above all else, ALWAYS true to his word.
My Dad would have liked that story. That was his sense of humor (as I’m sure many of you know). As you can imagine, it was a source of tremendous anguish and shame for me as a kid. (No Dad, please don’t make the incest joke around my 7th grade English teacher thanks). But of course, I turned out to be like him in every single way, including this one. With time I came to deeply appreciate his sincerity and brazenness. Rare are those who really tell the truth, and nothing but the truth. He was one of those.
I admired that man like crazy. As you may know, that wasn’t always the case. There was a time in our lives when we were chasing each other around the house with kitchen knives. I moved out when I was fifteen and didn’t see or really speak to him for four years. And then, he went to AA. He not only regained some of the wonderful qualities I remembered him having in my childhood, he outright became a different person. He found a sort of peace and serenity in the Kevin chaos that I never thought was possible. He became expressively vulnerable and loving. He began to really ask for help and rely on others- which I think is the bravest act in the world. His sense of humor flourished.
On those grounds we built a new relationship. We tip-toed around one another for one or two years. He bought me groceries. I went there sometimes for dinner.
He knew I was in trouble- his friends in AA told me that he would share about it- but he never pushed me into treatment. We learn in AA that it’s about attraction rather than promotion. Live your program and life fully and others will follow when they’re ready. So at 23, extremely sick and tired of being sick and tired, I called him and asked for help.
That was the beginning of the most beautiful relationship of my life. He came to Tennessee, only to fly back with me to New Orleans (everyone knows how much I love mini airline bottles of vodka). He held my hand the whole way. He brought me to my first AA meeting and said HI IM KEVIN THIS IS MY DAUGHTER CAMILLE SHE’S A TEACHER IN NEW ORLEANS. So of course I followed that with HI IM CAMILLE THIS IS MY DAD KEVIN HE’S A LAWYER IN NEW YORK. Screw anonymity right?
He didn’t believe in anonymity anyway. He told everyone everything about himself. That’s just one wonderful thing I learned from him. Here are a few others:
Courage is not the absence of fear but persevering despite the fear
Honesty is the only way.
You can’t fake things. It will make you sick.
Asking for help is the bravest thing a person can do.
Accepting help is equally important (even when you didn’t ask for it)
Don’t listen to other people’s bullshit. It’s mostly bullshit.
Nature heals everything.
Happiness is having a boundless curiosity and an unyielding desire to learn about oneself and the world
Forgiveness is the greatest gift that life has to offer us.
He also taught me a few lessons in death. Here they are:
There is something beyond life. What it is, I do not know. But it’s there.
I don’t have to fear my own death. I can prepare for it like anything else.
I can handle pretty much anything.
No one will ever hurt me this much again.
I do actually have a higher power. I thought I didn't but I do. Dad always said this in AA: that the difference between God and Kevin is that God doesn’t go around pretending to be Kevin. Because i’ve always had a hard time with the higher power thing, I’ve started praying to Kevin. So Kevin is, effectively, my higher power. Now you KNOW he would get a kick out of that.
I don’t know how to sum up this loss. It is immense, it is vast, and it is terrifying. He was my father, but even more so, he was my best friend, my confidante, my protector, my advisor. We spoke for an hour on the phone every single day. He encouraged me through the writing of my first book and was helping me to find a publisher. He put me through college, through grad school. He loved me unconditionally, even when I didn’t- couldn’t- love myself. What we had transcended a father-daughter relationship. We were kindred spirits, twin flames. We understood one another in a way no one else did. I also happen to think that independently of all of those things, he was a truly special human being. I have never met anyone like him, but the great no est gift he ever gave me is that we turned out to be exactly alike.
He liked to say that he was an atheist, an anti-theist even. But then he would abruptly change his mind, as he was wont to do. Consider the following phone call, received some two months before his death:
“Hey Camille. I need to tell you about this crow.”
“Oh yeah? Go ahead.” This should be interesting.
“It has been sitting here for four days just watching me. And I can’t help but think: do you think it’s a human trapped in a crow’s body. Do you think it’s….your mom!?”
“Uh maybe?” I am multitasking as I often did when on the phone with my Dad (sorry Dad, I really regret that now).
“Maybe I’ll come back as a crow.”
I probably said something like: stop talking about dying, which he did every time we were on the phone. My boyfriend says now that he was trying to prepare me, which I like to think is true. But now, of course, I see crows everywhere. Did you know that crows recognize human faces? That they can solve puzzles and communicate?
So maybe he wasn’t an anti-theist after all.
So there are the crows. There’s the box of ashes arriving on my doorstep the day he was supposed to get there. I don’t know what I believe, but I know that I believed every damn word that came out of my Dad’s mouth. And my Dad always told me that he would never leave me alone. He told me “Papa revient toujours,” or “Daddy always returns.” So I have to believe that too.
I don’t know much about life after death, or about angels. But I do know that my father was my angel in life. He showed me the way to a better world. He gave me a second chance at this thing, he gave me the miracle of sobriety. So joke’s on you Dad: maybe you have more in common with God than you think.
