T w e n t y S i d e d

It’s September of 2000. I turned 29 last month. I’m trying to move our family from Boston to Pittsburgh. In the middle of the move, Dad has died.

Funeral

I only ever saw Dad in the context of sitting around his tiny little efficiency apartments while he drank coffee and chain-smoked. He lived alone and only ate meals that could be prepared with one hand. His kitchen table was always a mountain of incoming mail, with a small spot reserved for his plate and utensils. You can tell where his favorite seat was, because it was the one spot on the couch that didn’t release clouds of dust when somebody dropped into it. His seat was surrounded by different eyeglasses, overflowing ashtrays, coffee stains, and open books.

He never discussed his friends. I inferred that he had friends by the fact that he would abruptly get new stuff around Christmas. Sometimes I’d see personal mail mixed in with the overdue bills heaped up on the table. Once in a long while he’d get a phone call during my visit, but the calls were always terse and he never said who had called or why. His life outside of coffee and cigarettes was opaque to me.

Dad’s funeral is… surprising. I can suddenly see that busy other life he lived. That other life was hidden because his friends were mostly fellow members of Alcoholics Anonymous. That was where he invested most of his time and that’s where his heart was. I suppose he was trying to save other people from the fate he’d brought on himself. I meet many of these people at the funeral, and I get a sense that he’d helped a lot of them directly.

We’d never really understood each other. I never saw the very personal work he did sponsoring people as they fought to reclaim their lives from addiction. He never got the whole “computer programmer” thing, and was always jokingly (but also earnestly) a little disappointed that I never became a writer.

After the funeral I return to Boston and begin the long job of dragging my family home to Pittsburgh and finding a permanent place to live.

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Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.