ten years later.
On June 10th, 2012….
…I was just a 22 year old kid, with very little idea of what the world truly felt like. I had my friends, a band and a relationship. To me, those 3 things were everything, my little bubble, in my little place on this earth, at that particular period of time in the history of the universe. On June 9th, I was at the beach with my friends, enjoying the thrill of doing nothing with very little responsibility, a concept that now sounds like a wild dream. I remember my dad sent me a text while I was away saying “have a great time.” I most likely didn’t respond because I was bad at texting (and still bad at texting). At the beach, we drank, played games and lived our lives in the little cosmos we had created together.
Little did I know the next day would be the most dreadful day of my life.
I won’t get into details about the day and trauma that filled my brain for years to come or why I can’t listen to the song “Call Me Maybe” anymore (story for another day) but what I will say is there is nothing that will rip you out of your youth faster than seeing your father passed away in your own backyard. This is not a detail I want to share but it’s important to my story. That moment in time both ruined me and saved me. (more on that later) I lost my father that day for whatever reason. Maybe it was the heat, maybe it was his heart, maybe it was just his time to go? We will never know the answer. All I do know is that I lost such an important piece of my soul, a piece that only becomes more obvious the older and wiser I get.
In the days, weeks and months following, like any loss, time continues to move, people continue to forget and wounds begin to heal. You start to feel less and less like you can’t move on and start to find ways to crawl until you can walk again. You can look at photos again and listen to music again. You can laugh and then cry and then laugh again. Turns out, humans are pretty resilient but it also helps having a strong network of supportive family and friends to be your guides. You know who you are and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
There are true and tangible lessons from the loss of a loved one.
Here is what I’ve learned over the last ten years.
1. Never, ever take life for granted. We only get one of these things, so try your best to use it for what you want to do. Try to navigate and work hard to carve out the things that make you happy. My dad was a good mentor for this concept. He had this real lust for finding the things that made him happy. He loved his wife and kids so much. That made him happy. He loved music, concerts and art. That made him happy. He loved to work with his hands, creating projects around the house to make life better for his family, a concept I completely understand now that I have a wife and a home of my own. The older you get the more life starts to push you down towards the earth and the battle becomes how to keep your head above water. Ten years later I am still young, but I am no longer young, vulnerable and stupid. I’ve learned to appreciate life and all of its many, many twists and turns. I don’t have kids yet but I understand the concept of being a father so clearly in the years that I haven’t had one. The goal is simple, to pass on knowledge and life skills to the next generation, so that they can have life and attempt to find the things that make them happy. It all makes sense. Go find your happy.
2. Listen, learn, and be patient. Life moves so fast it’s not even fair. You blink and ten years flies by without even knowing how it happened and all you have are the memories to hold on to. When I was a kid I was lucky enough to have 21 years of great memories with my family. Family vacations, concerts, small moments sitting around the table laughing. Some of these memories are so ingrained in my head, I can recall them as if they happened yesterday. That’s a beautiful thing to me. My parents raised me to be a listener and to be patient, two skill sets that I’m so grateful for as I get older. The true power of these skills comes down to how you absorb the wisdom of others. I am now 32 years old, with a beautiful wife and a dream home in Allentown, PA. I am curious and hands-on, creating projects of my own and learning how my new home works. An overwhelming task for sure, but that’s where my patience kicks in. My dad trained me for this, he made sure I was there to see him work on the house, take care of the yard and give me tasks that would give me hands-on experience and be rewarded with tangible results. The time I spent with him in this setting is turning out to be extremely valuable the older I get.
3. Listen to music always and often. I owe every bit of my love of music to my family. There was so much support for music in the house, from learning new instruments, hosting band practices 2 times a week, attending countless concerts and playing so many albums from so many different genres. Music was everything. My dad would attempt to learn to play different instruments just to know the basics but it didn’t matter to him if he was good or not. He understood that music was a language and boy did he understand that language. My brother and I understood the language from a young age, Dan went on to go to music college and I went on to be a multi-instrumentalist and play in a bunch of bands. At a young age, my dad would ask us questions about how certain music would make us feel or how we felt certain rhythms. He was curious and he was making sure we were also curious. Curiosity is what fuels creativity and that creativity is what eventually would lead me to a career in art. Music is that thing that just pulls people together. On one side of music you have the audience that is listening, vibing and connecting with the artist. The audience has memories built around music, putting them in a time and place when they connected with a song. On the other side you have the artist that creates special bonds with other artists while they create pure magic through their instruments, speaking a language that only some people can speak. I feel lucky that I can be on both sides of the spectrum of music. It allows me to feel emotions towards a song and also understand the struggles and emotion of the artist who creates the music. I owe this all to my dad for making this a true pillar of our family. It’s so wildly important to me and is only getting more important as I get older.
Here is a playlist of songs that my dad loved that I’ll often put on to spin up memories of him.
4. “have a great time.” Earlier, I told a story about what may be the last text my dad sent me. “have a great time” The more that sentence resonates in my head the more it has broader meaning to me. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day minutiae of life. Work sucks, politics suck, climate change sucks, gun-violence sucks. There is a lot that just, sucks. We don’t have a lot of time here. We don’t know when it’s our time to go so why not try to “have a great time” while we are here. Losing my dad also sucked, obviously. It came at a point in my life where I had no direction. I was confused as most 22 year old kids are. How are you supposed to make a choice about the rest of your life so early? Who made that rule? It’s stupid. On June 10th, 2012 when everything changed, I could literally feel my youth fall out of my body and seep into the floor. It was like my dads soul left his body and a little piece of it stayed with me. I felt the need to step up and take care of things around the house, be strong for my mom and figure out who I was. Now, granted I was still young and stupid so I made a lot of mistakes along the way, but for the most part, this forced me to grow up a lot. It forced me to focus on school, work really hard and land a job that changed my life in so many ways. When I said earlier that losing my dad both ruined me and saved me, the saving part was that I found direction. I was able to course correct my life and navigate through all of the stages of grief by working really hard. While I didn’t have a “normal” 20's experience, I did manage to “have a great time.” I built restaurant brands, helped revitalize a dying city, won awards, climbed tall mountains, fell in love with my dream girl and married her, met so many important people, played shows, made art, bought a house, found friends, lost friends, traveled (a lot), went to countless concerts and tried to be happy, look on the bright side of life and remain patient though all of the many ebbs and flows of the last ten years.
