Dear Dad

A master’s degree in music education seemed to fall short of mother’s dreams of having a wildly successful daughter in music. I produced little for her to brag about, and perhaps I misread her expectations of my success as solely based on attaining celebrity status. Yet the program of study fulfilled crucially fundamental needs for me. The disciplined work facilitated a healing re-set of  cognitive wiring damaged through drugs and alcohol. The academic routine of attending classes and rehearsals structured my days. A focused study of music learning tasks brought a sense of order to my pickled brain. In learning specific teaching methods, aligning tasks with age-appropriate musical repertoire and skills, I created new foundational neural networks that also regulated my daily life. Slowly but surely, I was figuring out the routine of living as a sober person.

Unlike my mother’s drive to become something else, something better, I felt driven to simply be normal. Driven too, to make up for all that I had failed to learn as an undergraduate. From Dave’s example of self-discipline I planned regular practice and study sessions. I emulated his manner of deferential professionalism when speaking to our teachers. Daily AA meetings taught me ways to curb my impulses to wallow in “stinking thinking.”

By the time I finished my masters coursework, both my physical and cognitive stability showed remarkable improvement. Dave felt heartened at these signs of progress too. He made a special fuss when I secured work teaching elementary music as a long-term substitute at a local school. The job boosted my confidence, provided a much-needed item of “experience” on my resume, and brought home a paycheck for a couple months.

My parents were thrilled that I finally had a job. Mom sewed me some new outfits and brought them up to Ann Arbor on a weekend visit with Dad.  Before heading back home, Dad pressed a twenty-dollar bill into my hand and hugged me. Whispering into my ear he encouraged me, “Now, you two go out for a nice dinner to celebrate.”

During his final term of graduate studies, Dave applied to college jobs. His resume and reference portfolio was very strong, and a master’s degree at that time were suitable qualifications for a college teaching position. I had been invited to return to the elementary school on a full year’s contract from my substitute job. However, there was nothing for Dave in that small community.

Summer Orchestra Gig

With our schooling in Michigan was done, we skipped graduation ceremonies (oh, but Mother was cross with us for that!) in order to take a summer orchestra gig out in Breckenridge, Colorado. Before heading west, we drove home with our meager belongings and stored them in the basement of Dave’s sister’s house.

Our road trip to this summer orchestra gig led us to a destination that seemed otherworldly to me. I had never seen mountains. We hiked the summits of Peaks 8, 9, and 10 with other orchestra musicians on our days off. The rigors of exercising and making music in the thin mountain air invigorated my lungs. For the first time since sobriety, I felt real hope of belonging to music once more.The orchestra was full of young professionals like us, and we made fast friends with other couples.

The job in Breckenridge had secured summer employment after graduate school. It was our very first professional symphony gig, and our earnings included free lodging in one of the condominiums in the resort town. Stopping back home to store most of our belongings with family, we talked excitedly about the opportunity to make music in the mountains. Our job prospects beyond summer were as yet uncertain, and my father took care to lavish paternal attention upon Dave. Calling him “son,” he listened to Dave talk through his resume and interview strategies.

Dad’s emphysema prevented him from coming to hear us perform in the summer orchestra. The thin mountain air would have been disastrous for his weak lungs. Tearfully, he put Mom on a plane to Denver and arranged for a cab to drive her to Breckenridge, mourning that his days on earth were numbered. Into her suitcase, he packed a parcel for me: Fresh ears of corn from the garden. Also, a twenty-dollar bill.

During a break in our schedule, Dave flew out to a job interview in Minnesota. On the ride back to the airport, he was offered the job to teach studio percussion and jazz at the Duluth campus of the University of Minnesota. On impulse, I sent my resume to the chair of the department and was hired to teach lessons. We were moving to Minnesota as soon as the orchestra season finished. Dad chortled over the phone, “You’re on your way, kids!” Sobriety was bringing rewards that seemed nothing short of miraculous to me.

Substitute College Teaching Job

An unexpected teaching opportunity for me came soon after. It marked a significant advance rebuilding the cognitive damage wrought by alcoholism. Duluth, a port town, connects to a twin port town of Superior, Wisconsin. Soon after we had moved to Duluth, the department chair of the music department at the University of Wisconsin Superior called me. The horn professor had sustained a heart attack, and the department needed a substitute teacher immediately for rest of the fall term to cover his course load. Would I be able to drive over to Superior for a quick interview?

I left a voicemail for Dave at his office to let him know I was driving across the bridge to Superior. Then I called my father for help.

“Dad, what do I do, what do I say?”

“Oh come on, Sal, you can do this.”

“I’m so nervous though!”

“Now listen, honey, take this advice from your old man. Wear a dress. You need to look like a professional. None of your ripped up jeans. Get some makeup on, carry a briefcase even if it’s empty. Lie if you have to, but tell them confidently that you can teach anything they ask!”

“What if I can’t teach those things?”

“Don’t worry, you can figure out how to teach that stuff on the job. Now get going, hold your head high and look them in the eye when you say yes.”

In no time, it seemed, I was driving back home across the bridge with my first college job. It was Friday afternoon, and my new job started on Monday morning. As soon as I was home I called both Dave and Dad, and cranked the stereo to my favorite tunes as I started supper.

Dad was so proud of me. I put on the stereo the very first record he gave me: A collection of Broadway hits covered by Louis Armstrong. “Hello, Dolly” had been our favorite tune from when I was a little girl dancing with Daddy. Often times he would shuffle into the house after a long day’s work, and immediately brighten up and greet me “hello, dolly!” when I came running to greet him. Playing it to celebrate my launch into college teaching, I felt grateful to have a father who believed in me.

That weekend, I prepared myself for what Dave called “baptism by fire,” because the teacher recovering from the heart attack left no lesson plans. Having taught for many years, he lectured completely from memory. I was hired to teach all of his courses: Studio brass, Conducting, Brass Pedagogy, and Music History. Most days, I was only one lesson plan ahead of my students. Karma seemed to come calling in the form of the music history course.

As a drunken undergraduate I skipped nearly a month of classes in Music History, because the topic of study was opera. I felt certain that opera had nothing to do with future as a hornist. Now here was my new department chair, handing me the next unit of study scheduled for the ailing professor’s course in music history: Opera. Ruefully, I set about learning a subject that I had so foolishly dismissed.

I checked in with Dad a few times over the phone, both of us lighting up our cigarettes as we chatted.

“Dad, how do you know if you are doing things the right way?”

“Oh, you don’t half the time. You just barrel through.”

“What? Well when do you get to where you know what you are doing, that you are sure?”

“Honey, I’m still waiting for that to happen! There are some days that I think I don’t know a damn thing, that I am a fool and everyone knows it when I lose a case. But I have to get up and go back in the next day and look everyone in the eye and keep my head up.”

“This is hard work, Daddy.”

“Oh come on now, you and Dave aren’t afraid of hard work. You’re both out there making your way which is what you are supposed to do as a young couple. Now buck up, and buy yourself a nice outfit to wear for Dave with your paycheck every now and then.”

“Daaaad, don’t tell me what to wear!”

“You three girls, so hard headed about your jeans and your independence.”

           “Don’t tell me I’m old fashioned, it’s just the way things are. You girls have to…”

“Goodbye Dad, love you…”

One day in my office, it dawned on me that I had been studying for nearly three hours without a break. The office was hazy with cigarette smoke and dirty coffee cups. But my reading attention span had once been limited to a mere fifteen minutes when I first stopped drinking. Dickensian tears of joy, like Scrooge exulting on Christmas Day, “it’s still here!” filled my eyes.  Also, it turned out that I actually liked opera.

During my sub job at that college, the conductor of the Duluth-Superior Symphony heard me play in a department concert. He immediately hired me to substitute for the ailing horn professor, who was also the Principal Horn of the symphony.

Smoker’s Tragic Ending

This time, Dad got on a plane, determined not to miss another milestone in his daughter’s life. He and Mom, along with Dave’s mom, flew out from Columbus to Duluth in the spring. All three were pleased, proud parents. But I could tell that my father was struggling mightily to breathe. A lifelong smoker, his punishment was emphysema. He should have been hooked up to an oxygen tank for the visit, but he refused to bring it along. He didn’t want to look feeble in front of his daughter proudly introducing him to her new colleagues and friends.

Proud of David as a true son, my dad patted him on the shoulder with fatherly support. Dad asked him about details of his job teaching percussion and jazz band. He admired tremendously my husband, ever aware of how tough it had been for Dave to lose his dad when he was only twenty.

The first major test of my sobriety came over a year later. My father committed suicide, desperate to be free from his illness. Every breath had become both a miracle and a curse. I knew he wanted out, but I could not ease his suffering.

A week beforehand, I had flown from Minnesota to visit my father in hospital. He told anyone who listened that he wanted to check out. The rest of the family tried to calm him away from such thoughts, assuring him that his suffering wasn’t that bad, that his condition would improve.

Although I recognized in my father the warning signs of suicide, I could neither prevent it nor convince the rest of the family of it. Living in Minnesota, I was an outsider who hadn’t tended to his illness like they had.  Relegated, too, to the status the baby of the family, I bore no credibility of an adult perspective. I was scolded that I didn’t understand such matters.

This made it all the more difficult when Dad turned to me, after the others had gone, and asked me for help. He directed me to go home and bring back various bottles of pills in the pockets of his suits in the bedroom closet. I went home and collected all the bottles, but I put them in a bag and stuffed it under the clean shirts in my mother’s ironing basket.

I will forever remember his expectant look of hope that fell when he saw that I had returned to his hospital room empty-handed.

“Did you bring me my pills?”

“No, Dad, I didn’t.

(Silence)

“I’m sorry, Daddy, but I can’t help you do this.”

(Slumping disappointment, more silence)

“I have to go to the airport now, but I’m coming back in a couple weeks with Dave”

“Well, so then, I guess I won’t see you anymore…”

“No, Daddy, we’ll be back at Christmas. You’ll be home then.”

My father then peered into my eyes for a very, very long time. Finally, he turned away and began crying as I left the room. The next time I saw him was in the morgue.

Five days before Christmas, he shot himself in the chest to escape the slow suffocating death of emphysema. He was home as promised, with my mother busily preparing for a family gathering that afternoon. Summoning his last bit of strength, he first called my sister Tressie and told her to come out immediately to help Mother with the cleaning and cooking. Then he shuffled all the way to the other end of the house and, reaching up to the shelf above his suits, located the loaded pistol tucked under his folded shirts. His exit, so desperately violent, broke my heart.

A week before, Finch and Tressie had rebuked me for my insistence that Dad was planning a suicide. They chastised me as being negative when they learned that I had sent him a goodbye letter when his condition had begun to deteriorate months beforehand.  It was my “just in case” letter, written to let him know how much I loved him if I didn’t get the chance to be there when he died. I have the treasure of his loving letter in response, dated 3 October, 1989:

“My Dear Sadie,

Thank you for that beautiful letter.  You are so articulate and so smart.

Mother and I have made an agreement that in the future either of us are hospitalized, even for an ingrown toenail we will call the family together, so there will be no shock.

I am so proud that you are my daughter.

Love, Dad”

I felt no satisfaction of being right about what happened. I am glad, however, to have risked the ire of my sisters to connect with my father on my terms.

Lee and I clung to each other as we entered the morgue to view our dead father. My big brother, so often my ally in defense against the verbal tirades of his twin sister Tressie, was now just as torn asunder as I was. At the funeral home, a dear woman with many years’ sobriety made a beeline for the two of us. She said something private to Lee, then held me fiercely and commanded me to stay sober no matter what. I promised her, and myself, to face the tragedy fully sober.

A welcome distraction came in the form of a request from the funeral director, who inquired about Dad’s favorite music. Someone – perhaps Dave – assembled a playlist of his favorite tunes for music prior to the service.  Various Chopin tunes my father played (more like wrestled with) were on the playlist. So was “Hello Dolly.” Hearing Louis Armstrong’s voice wafting through the church sanctuary rafters made me smile. The song my father loved to sing to me would ever remind me that I was loved.

On the first anniversary of the suicide, I visited my father’s grave with my horn. I played his favorite Chopin piano etude. I could not bring myself to play our tune, “Hello Dolly.” I never returned to the cemetery. My mother and my siblings arrived at their own interpretations of the suicide, none of which agreed with mine. We would never have a frank conversation together about it, nor would we ever discuss his brother’s suicide or any of the family stories too tragic to mention unless they were contorted into funny anecdotes. My appetite for poking fun at that stuff evaporated when Daddy pulled the trigger.

I felt strong for mourning my father without relapsing into drinking or drugs. By then, I could readily admit that reaching for liquor and dope to solve problems was a bad idea. Yet I remained reluctant to claim “problems” as the reason I drank.

A horrible dread of unfinished business simmered within me, questioning the other blackouts I’d experienced before discovering pot and alcohol. But I pushed the howling aside again, focusing instead on my newfound resilience as a gainfully employed and functional adult. My friends in A.A. were genuinely and authentically caring people, and their fellowship provided a safe haven for me to grow up. My music colleagues seemed to value my contributions to both the local symphony as well as to our students.

Everything in my life finally appeared stable, save for a feeling of manic running that stirred beneath my consciousness, churning constantly. Its nagging, inward hum became increasingly discordant and at odds with everything I was striving to do as a healthy, sober adult. At the edges of the hum I sometimes heard distant howling that woke me up in the middle of the night. What, I wondered, was so wrong with me to be sounding like this?  And why did I sense, at the edge of the sinister howl, my mother’s eyes glaring evilly at me?

I was terrified of waking up. To what, I hadn’t a clue.

EXTRA: For a short supplemental anecdote with musical excerpts related to this chapter, click this link: Hello, Dolly!