Our Gussie

My father was a gentleman, in every sense of the word. More than just holding doors for people and picking up things that someone dropped, my father set an example in our house that not every family, especially today, has.  In the 46 years that I was blessed to have him, I never heard my father curse or call me or my sister a name.  Not stupid, not dummy, not dumbass, certainly not the F-word, not shit, not even a curse word in Italian.  As a result, he didn’t allow any foul language from us. And we wouldn’t have dared.  Even when my father was angry with us, he never name-called or cursed, and he definitely never took God’s name in vain.

This is not to say that my father did not use such words in anger among men-I’m sure he did- but not around his wife or daughters.  In fact, if someone used such language around any of us, my father would ask him to stop.  This got him into some heated arguments in restaurants and once at a Phillies game.  He just didn’t see the need for it, and he didn’t want his wife and daughters to hear it. Maybe that was over the top, but I find myself squirming in the same type of awkward situations nowadays when a stranger throws an F bomb in public when I am with my daughters.

In a generation where lazy English speakers employ variations of the F word as adjectives and nouns in place of perfectly good words, I cringe when I hear this and other off-color words tossed around. It’s one thing to hurl an epithet when you’re angry, but quite another when you’re just too crass or lazy to substitute something better for foul language.

More importantly, as a teacher I hear stories of what teenagers’ parents call them and the choice of words they use to them or in front of them.  And I cringe. My father’s fuse was long to burn but even when it reached its end, his temper was metered. There were no insults: not in anger and not in frustration. Perhaps this was a lesson learned by my father, whose stepfather routinely called him stupid growing up and made him feel as though he couldn’t do anything right.  His own father, while stopping short of name-calling and using foul language when my dad was young, still found ways to express his disappointment to my father. Little kids internalize that message and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In the case of my father, he may never have called his children stupid, but he surely referred to himself as such whenever he made a mistake. That always broke my heart.  It was only as an adult that I learned why he was so self-deprecating, and although his step-father is long gone, I resent him for that damage that he did to my dad. Such a seemingly insignificant word, yet so powerful and destructive.

The thing is, I always thought, and still do, that my father was the smartest man I knew. He didn’t have the sharpest business acumen, but that’s because his calling was helping others as a police officer, a path away from which he was steered. However, he sure could speak about a huge range of subjects, and what he knew well he knew exceptionally well. Growing up I rarely needed to consult an encyclopedia, I just asked my dad.  A voracious reader and lover of words, he had me doing the Reader’s Digest Word Power quizzes with him when I was 11 years old. I attribute my love of languages and words in general, to him.  In fact, I am such a language fiend that I belong to several etymology groups because I crave knowing and love discussing the origins of words.  (I know, get a life.)

Parents who call their children “loser,” “disappointment,” “fatso,” “failure,” or words, especially preceded by an epithet, might be trying to vent their frustration at the situation, but really, it’s just bullying.  As the most powerful source of approval in a child’s life, a parent who calls his or child a name or curses conveys so much more than a fleeting moment of anger. Feelings of being unloved, unwanted or socially unacceptable (if your parents don’t seem to accept you, who will?) can play a devastating part in a child’s development.  And parents who employ this method of “discipline,” if you will, should not be surprised if their children turn the tables and begin to address them the way they address their children.  Or that they continue the cycle by speaking to their own families that way. It’s a cruel and vicious cycle that most parents don’t give a lot of thought to. Cursing to and in front of your children it undermines your desire to have their respect.

So yesterday when one of my students mentioned how her mother speaks to her, I couldn’t help but think about the effect that it would have on that teen now and years from now.  I thought of my father and how many times I frustrated him and yet he never resorted to cursing at me.  Then I thought of how he was spoken to as a little kid and how it doesn’t take much effort to reprimand a child without using harmful words or street language. And then I thought how lucky I am that when I reminisce about my dad, that I have good memories of how he treated me and how much of a gentleman he was and the example he set for me.

Another little lesson I never considered until now.

Last night, the Philadelphia Eagles won their first Super Bowl.  I am only a little ashamed to say that I cried.  I didn’t mean to, but I felt like 38 years of hoping and wishing for that moment finally happened and I was overwhelmed with emotion.

Silly, isn’t it? Not to Philadelphians. It’s something Philadelphia has been waiting for for 52 years. And while I was born into a Philly sports family, I’ve really only been waiting 38 of my 49 years.  I’ll explain in a second.

You see, there were several levels of emotion that came into play last night.  Besides the obvious jubilance of my favorite, and hometown, team finally winning the coveted Lombardi Trophy, and besides the fact that revenge against the Patriots for the 2005 loss had finally been exacted, a lot of my tears were for my father.

When I was in sixth grade, the sports fan in me was born.  I don’t know what prompted it to happen that particular year, but when it hit me, it hit me hard. My father was a die-hard Philly sports fan: football, baseball, hockey and basketball- in that order.  (That order is coincidentally my order of preference, except I have no interest in professional basketball whatsoever.  I digress.) I watched every Philly sports game that was on tv that year; most sitting side by side with my dad. I asked him for the sports page at breakfast in the mornings to read the highlights for any game I didn’t stay awake through, and to check the players’ stats. I knew the batting averages for my favorite Phillies (Manny Trillo and Larry Bowa), how many touchdowns Ron Jaworski threw that year (27) and all the standings in the Patrick Division of the NHL.  I also was on top of stats for Dr. J. and Steve Mix.  At breakfast, I was able to talk to my father about whatever game we had watched or one that was upcoming.  I remember feeling badly at that age that my father only had daughters and no sons.  I felt sad that he didn’t have a boy to play sports with or watch play- I was not an athlete by any stretch, so taking an interest in the Philly sports scene was a way I could try to be a “son” to my dad.

Gussie, South Philadelphia (Southern) high school football team

My dad never asked me to take an interest in sports or play sports or anything like that.  Maybe it was my weird guilt for not having been born a boy as they expected me to be or just sadness that my mom got to do girlie things with me and my sister and my dad was relegated to a few father-daughter camping trips when we were Girl Scouts that made me want to throw myself into sports. I remember talking about the previous night’s hockey game with my dad one morning and my mother admonishing him: “Stop indulging her! We’re not raising a tomboy!” Tomboy? I couldn’t even do a layup! And with that my passion for Philly sports grew even more.  I wasn’t going to give up watching sports because it wasn’t “for girls.”

My first Eagles game- 1983. Dallas crushed them. 😦

I used to love the fights in hockey (something I cannot stand to watch now) and if I had gone up to bed before a game was over and a fight broke out, my dad (knowing it took me an hour to actually go to sleep) would thump on the ceiling-at my request- so I could go back downstairs and cheer for the fighting Flyer.  (That’s a little weird, I realize.)

Baseball was boring for some people but not for me. I learned the rules, the jargon and in high school I was the team manager, learning to keep score in the big, unwieldy book and call the newspapers to give them the stats.  I watched every Phillies game on tv. My grandfather, an avid baseball fan, had season tickets and took me to Phillies games. This was sometimes surprising to my father who thought he was going only to find out that I would be in the other seat instead of him). In fact, when Larry Bowa was traded to the Cubs, I was so upset that my grandfather bought more tickets for the Cubs series and took me to the games so I could see Bowa play.

So, having spent every Sunday in the 1979-80 and 1980-81 seasons watching the Eagles with my father and feeling the excitement after a win and the sadness after a loss, I was giddy when the Eagles made it to the Super Bowl. My father and I talked about the possibility all season, with me continually offering my suggestion to send Dick Vermeil a letter to ask him to put my favorite play in the repertoire: the Flea Flicker. (I had seen Jaworski and Louie Giammona do this once and I thought it was the most exciting thing in football.) I never sent that letter but as that Eagles gained momentum that season, my excitement- and my father’s- grew.  “They could win the Super Bowl,” he told me.  I believed they could, too.

Eagles’ logo in 1980’s

But Oakland had a different plan for Philly that year and they handed the birds a loss in their only Super Bowl championship appearance to date.  I felt crushed. My father and everyone at the party were sullen. The sadness I felt over a football game was new and weird to me. I cried a little that night and I felt stupid for doing so.  I couldn’t explain why that game, played by a bunch of men I didn’t know, was so important to me at 12 years old. But inexplicably, it was. I asked my father if he was sad, too. He said he was and I asked why.  I’ll never forget his answer:  “Because Philadelphia deserved this.”  I thought maybe that was why I was sad.  I was proud to be from Philadelphia, and I took the loss personally. Maybe that was it?

Years would go by and the Eagles would not get close to the Super Bowl.  My father and I held steadfastly on to the hope that our team would make it to the championship again. We didn’t jump ship when they had losing seasons- that was unthinkable.  We just kept hoping. I remember asking my father why they were so bad one particular year (13th place, I believe, the year of the strike).  He said “Well, somebody has to be the worst- it’s our turn this year.” I mulled that over for a few minutes then asked him in a way that only a  kid could do: “So, when do we get to the be the best?” He laughed and said “I don’t know. Soon, I hope.”  It’s strange how some conversations stick in your head so many years later.

Fast forward to 2018. I had seen the Phillies win the World Series twice and had the Flyers break my heart too many times to count.  I no longer cared about basketball and I stopped keeping stats on most players (just my favorites). The Eagles had lost to the Patriots in the 2005 Super Bowl and this time both my father and I were livid.  No tears, no sadness, just anger.  Not enough anger to ditch our hometown team, of course. The following two seasons I watched half-heartedly, trying not to get my little green heart broken, and acting like I didn’t care if they won or lost.  My father, however, held on to that Super Bowl dream for both of us every year.

Over the past 9 years I have gone to training camps, games and watched every game intently, often calling my dad after the game to get his thoughts.  As the Parkinson’s Disease closed in on him, however, he was less and less able to watch a game and by 2014 he didn’t even know when the games were on.  I felt compelled to watch the games for both of us and report to him what happened. While he was still lucid, he appreciated those reports.  But by 2015 he no longer knew what football was, or baseball either for that matter.  But the passion I had for those sports was still alive and well in me and I was determined to keep them that way because it was what linked me and my dad together from the time I was 11 years old.

So when Nick Foles saved the season-and the day-last night, when Brady’s last chance went up in smoke and I realized the Eagles had won, I started to bawl-out of happiness and out of sadness.  My father, the man who taught me about the game- about all games- wasn’t around to celebrate the one big day he had wanted to experience. I couldn’t call him and yell “THEY DID IT!” or share my tears of  happiness with him. So part of those tears were for the past 38 years that I had waited for since the first Super Bowl I watched and also for the past 3 years I have lived without my father to share all things sports with and everything else. So yes, I cried.  I cried for Nick Foles the underdog and that Philly Special; I cried for Doug Pederson for bringing triumph to our city, and I cried for my dad, who didn’t get to be a part of the most exciting Super Bowl anyone has ever seen and the one that took Tom Brady down several pegs to where he belongs- with the mortals.

Dad, I  hope you have a satellite dish in heaven, because that was one hell of a game!

I remember when I was about 9 or 10 years old my father coming home late for dinner one day.  He had his sleeve rolled up and a big bandage on his arm. I asked him what happened and he said a little boy from the neighborhood where he worked had leukemia and he donated bone marrow to him to help him get better.  Sadly, I already knew what leukemia was: one of my cousins had died from it when I was in 3rd grade when she just four years old.  The last time I had seen her she had recently had her little head shaved and was wearing some type of shower cap.  She was running around and playing that day so when my mom told me she had died about a year later, I clearly remember locking myself in the upstairs bathroom of our house and crying.

So my reaction to the news that my dad had donated bone marrow was to ask “Is he going to die like Lisa?” My dad, who was used to some difficult questions from me (my favorite: “Do flies get married by fly priests?”) told me he would get better.  I don’t remember if the little boy got better or not.  And I don’t even know if he didn’t get better if my father would have told me because he didn’t want to upset me.  But what I held onto from that day was that my dad tried to save someone’s life.  When I was a little older, my mom’s aunt was sick in the hospital and needed blood and my father was her blood type.  He went in and donated to her.  In fact, she needed it a few more times and eventually she told him that he had become her actual nephew because she had so much of his blood in her body.  From then on he got called frequently to donate blood.  I would see the messages my mom took for him on the fridge that it was time to donate.  I asked him why he did it so much.  Couldn’t someone else give their blood? I was afraid they would take too much and he would get sick. He said, and I remember his exact words, “Maybe my blood will save someone’s life this time, you never know.” I thought my dad was so brave to get blood removed from his body and give it to someone.  I had no idea how the process worked. My dad said they put a tube in his arm and the blood went into the tube. He never said it hurt but I somehow thought it was terribly painful to remove the blood and put it into another person.  I envisioned him lying on a table with a giant hose pulling blood from his body and getting slurped out and pumped right into the person on the other bed who was waiting for it.  I pictured him squeezing his face tight from the pain and the other person smiling as his body filled up with the nice, new blood.  And I didn’t want any part of it.

Fast forward to 2008.  I had never donated bone marrow, or blood for that matter. I had had enough blood drawn when I was pregnant to know that I never wanted to have a pint of blood taken from me. One nurse had collapsed my vein, another one had missed a vein, it hurt, and because I was pregnant,  the drama was magnified each time.  Nope.  No blood donation for me. I still had the image I had conjured up in my brain from childhood about how blood donation worked.

But in 2008 the Eagles were at training camp at Lehigh University and they were sponsoring a blood drive. They needed 1,200 donors. Anyone who donated got FREE EAGLES GEAR and could get VIP passes to get on the field that day. As soon as I found out, I went on line and signed up. I didn’t think about being afraid or squeamish. And I didn’t give it a second thought until that day.  I just wanted the gear and to get on the field. I got the family on board, dressed in our Eagles gear, and we set off.  I had hydrated, eaten my leafy greens and was so nervous I was shaking.  My daughters, then 7 and 12, stayed with me while I was on the table and held my hand. The older one was fascinated by the process. The younger one distracted me with her chatter.  I couldn’t look at the tube or the bag, I knew I would get sick if I did. But ten minutes after the needle went in, I was finished.  I had done it.  I was so proud of myself.  At the snack area, three people around us fainted within minutes of each other.  My kids were scared, and I was hoping I wasn’t next.  I made out without passing out- SUCCESS! I was so wrapped up in the blood donating that I never got over to the field. I called my dad when I got home and told him I had donated blood. I hadn’t said anything before in case I chickened out. He  congratulated me and said he was shocked but very happy, even if my reasons weren’t purely humanitarian.

I donated a few times since then when there was a special need or there was a local blood drive, but not with any regularity.  But in June the position of Red Cross Club advisor at my school became available. When I read the email I heard a voice inside my head (not one of my usual ones) and it just said “Do it.” I don’t know if it was my conscience, or my father, or the voice from my habit of biting off more than I can chew, but I typed “I’ll do it.” and hit SEND within seconds of reading the email.  I am no stranger to organizing community service events and it is very rewarding to work with students who believe in helping out people in need.  So, I was looking forward to it.

The club’s two biggest events are blood drives. Our first one was yesterday. We had a goal set for us to sign up 74 people.  Sign ups were slow. I started to worry.  Previous years’ turnouts were great so I didn’t want to be the advisor whose club’s drive didn’t get enough sign-ups and let the Red Cross down- that blood was crucial to the local blood supply. The hospitals were down to 4 days’ worth on the shelves. Death and destruction from the three hurricanes motivated people to donate in September and the supplies increased a bit. Then the horrific shootings in Las Vegas happened and adults who I had previously tried to encourage to donate but were too scared now decided to sign up.  Our numbers climbed, and in the midst of this, news that our local Red Cross had rushed 400 pints of blood to Las Vegas suddenly made the tragedy more personal. The images of people lying in blood were everywhere and the students couldn’t escape them. That tragedy and news of the 6 to 8 hour long lines to donate blood in Vegas touched a lot of our students.

By yesterday morning we had to turn students away who walked in to donate. The turnout was beyond my expectations. Our new principal was the first one on the table, cementing her new title of “leader.” I had signed up but was afraid if I donated and something happened to me I wouldn’t be able to supervise.  But how could I recruit all of these people and then not put my money where my mouth is? Or my tourniquet where my arm is.  I’m no hypocrite. Anyway… I donated without incident before the crowd showed up.  Seven more teachers and staff took time out of their jam-packed schedules to donate. Twenty of my own students had signed up and I felt so proud. A number of students had to be deferred (iron levels, medications, piercings, etc) so not everyone who signed up was able to give blood, but what touched me was the bravery of the kids who did it. They just stuck their arm out and filled the bag while they Snap Chatted with the other arm. Like it was nothing. My teenage self, with a father who had a frequent bleeder card (as I called it) and set that wonderful example for me to emulate, would have never done that.  Right then I wish I could have smacked my teenage self in the head.

When I asked some of the students why they decided to do it, most of them just said “It’s a good thing to do.” Just like that. It made me think of Gussie. Just matter of fact, no overthinking, just something he needed to do. Someone needs blood?  He had some.  Bone marrow- here you go.  I got goosebumps several times yesterday watching 16 and 17 year olds do something so grown-up and selfless, but the most goosebump-inducing moment came during the last minutes of the drive.  A student who I didn’t know had just successfully donated.  He was eating his snacks and suddenly grabbed a trashcan and got violently sick. I called the EMT over and he tended to him until he felt better. He had broken out in a sweat and the color drained from his face. I thought “well, that’s a heck of a way to associate your first blood donation.” I surely wouldn’t do it again if I knew I had to publicly and violently vomit afterwards. But a few minutes later I went back over to check on him. Still pale as a ghost, he said he was fine and asked me when the next blood drive was.

Want to save a life? Find a donation center near you HERE.

Have you ever stopped to think about what your father has taught you? Something so small like how to hold the club the right way at miniature golf to something as significant as how to get through adversity with my head held high are part of the huge gamut of lessons I learned from my dad, including those he didn’t set out specifically to teach me.

The list, I believe, is infinite.  From my earliest lesson that it’s okay to cry when your pet goldfish dies, to the last lesson he inadvertently taught me, to not live with regrets, I sometimes wonder if I have taught anything significant to my children, besides how to tie their shoes and cut their food.  The task of parenting is undoubtedly the single-most important one that anyone can have.  It’s at times thankless, rewarding, heart-breaking and joyful-and all of those can be on one day.  It’s the proverbial “box of chocolates.”  One minute I can be enjoying a chocolate peanut butter candy and the next it might be one of those gooey unidentifiable flavors you took a chance on because it looked good. But my father handled parenting as if he was put on earth to do it- and I believe he was. There are many things I can do because of his tutelage and his example. His humility was his greatest virtue, and if he could see this list I know he would shake his head and probably tear up. But regardless, I know what I know, and I know why I know it.  And this is not to say that I haven’t learned an equally infinite number of lessons from my mom, (Can something even be equally infinite? I digress.) these are just SOME of the lessons I learned from my dad.

Because of my father, I can:

• appreciate the outdoors
• be a humanitarian
• drive a car
• take photos
• speak more than one language
• throw a decent punch
• understand my heritage and defend it
• watch a football game and know (most of) what’s going on
• shoot a gun
• not be afraid to delete toxic people from my life
• have faith in God, even when I think I can’t
• forgive my children easily
• show affection to my children (even when they think it’s not cool)
• appreciate the arts
• show unconditional love
• convey my anger without screaming (usually)
• hold my children to high standards
• bowl
• value dinner time with my family
• fly a kite
• get back up after a setback
• dream.

Today, when I began to think of specific things I can do because of my dad, I was both happy and sad.  Sad because he is not here to teach me something new or reinforce something I already know. Then happy because I often realize that I know something because of him but had I had never thought about before.  And that’s like a brand new lesson that he has taught me, and for that I am grateful.

Has there ever been someone in your life who would (or does) frequently give you advice? In most cases it’s a parent whose duty it is to offer advice- solicited or unsolicited, or maybe a revered grandparent whose sage advice you trust because of his or her age. Sometimes it’s an older sibling who doesn’t want to see you make the same mistakes he just recently made. Regardless of who gives you the advice you didn’t ask for, most teenagers and young adults, I would venture to say, don’t heed this advice. It’s not that they flat out reject it, they just absorb the advice and then do their own thing. At that age, people are headstrong, know more than everyone else (or so they think) and are convinced that things won’t turn out “that” way for them. I attribute it to the fact that the human brain is not fully developed until age 25. (source: Mental Health Daily) Until that point (and for some people even longer), teens and young adults have issues with impulse behavior, making decisions, and are still susceptible to peer pressure.  It appears normal, then, for parents and grandparents to step in and give advice to us at that age because they are being protective of us and want to fill in the gaps for us while our prefrontal cortex is finishing its development.

For me, that purveyor of advice was my father. If you’ve been reading my posts since 2015, you already know that my dad lived several lifetimes within the one he was given. He saw more heartache in 82 years than anyone else I know.  And as a result he had somewhat of a gift to almost predict what was going to happen in his children’s lives.  When he was doling out this advice to me, I didn’t appreciate it.  I didn’t even want it sometimes, and I rarely, if ever, followed it.  It’s not that I did not think my dad was smart-because he was the smartest man I knew.  It’s not that I didn’t trust him-there was nobody on earth I trusted more. And it’s not because I doubted where his heart was-I knew he wanted me to avoid mistakes he had made.  It was simply because I thought I knew all the answers.

When I was in my twenties, I told my parents I wanted to get married- to someone from another country.  My mom didn’t oppose it very much but my father did.  He ticked off a list of reasons the marriage wouldn’t work, stating, “Marriage is hard enough when you have similar backgrounds, but when you try to merge two totally different cultures, you are asking for problems.”  I respected his opinion but I got married anyway. And accurate to the last detail of what he had foreseen as problems in an intercultural marriage, my dad’s advice was spot on.  Yet, I had ignored it.  When I made my decision to get a divorce, it was telling my dad that I dreaded the most.  He was not happy about it- and I waited for him to tell me “I told you so.”  But he never did.  Instead, I told him I was sorry for not having followed his advice. And in discussing this with him, in my mind a slide show of sorts played, of every big piece of good advice he gave me-and I ignored. Advice, that, had I followed it, would have spared me a lot of heartache and emotional upheaval and wasted time with friends I should never have let get close to me, with certain career choices I made or didn’t make, and with relationships with guys he said weren’t right for me.  But I had to find out the hard way, because I never took that advice and never appreciated it until after the situations blew up in my face.

And so, on the day I told my dad I was getting a divorce and admitted to him that the issues he foresaw were the very ones that drove my ex-husband and me apart,  I also told him that I was sorry I had dismissed all of his other advice that he tried to give me. He said he wasn’t offended, and that kids always think they know more than parents.  I assured him that wasn’t the reason, but that I just thought I could make the result different if I did it myself.  “How did that turn out for you?” he said.  “Well, of about 8 pieces of major advice you gave me over the years, that I did not follow, you were correct on 8 of them.”  My dad didn’t think he had a record that good, so I read off a list of these 8 items and how he was right and I was wrong.  He smiled at me and said “I always tell you what I feel is best for you.  You have the option not to follow  what I advise. That’s part of growing up.” “Yeah, but Daddy,” I remember saying, “you’re batting 1000.  I’ll never go against your advice again. Who gets it right that many times?”  He thought about it for a second and said “Someone who has messed up that many times and more because HE thought he could change the result his own way.”

A cycle of messing up? A generation or two of stubborn Italians? Or a daughter who just didn’t appreciate the prescience of her father’s words and chose to fumble her way through adulthood?  Call it what you will, but I never rejected a piece of advice my father gave me after that.  Now  that my own child is in that young adult phase, I find her balking at  my advice and I wish I could have her see into the future, or at least be able to watch the past and see what I did wrong so she can choose avoid the same pain if she wants to.  In lieu of all of that, maybe a this photo of a girl’s brain- blue representing areas that are mature- teens still have a way to go and even at 20 it’s not completely mature.

The option, of course, would be to just follow Harry S. Truman’s advice: “I have found the best way to give advice to your children is to find out what they want and then advise them to do it.”

365 days ago today, well, 366 with leap year, my life was forever changed, and not for the better.

My best friend, my rock, my biggest fan…my father, was taken from me after a very long, painful and dignity-robbing struggle from complications of Parkinson’s Disease.  He deserved a better and more dignified end to his life and I spent a good 6 of the past 12 months very angry about that.

So for me, it has been a long, difficult year to adjust to life without him. There have been a lot of things to learn.

• I have had to learn to not pick up the phone every night out of habit to say good night to him.  Sometimes I still reach for it.

• I have had to learn how to not expect to see him at his house when I visit my mother.  Sometimes I think I feel him there.

• I have had to learn to acknowledge strange and inexplicable noises and occurrences in my home and say “hi Dad!”

• I have had to adjust to not seeking out his advice when dealing with my two new stepsons- my dad was a stepson and his advice was always spot on and from the other point of view.

• I have had to learn how to indulge my daughters through their sadness while struggling with my own when they ask me questions about my dad, or look at photos and videos. I have had to learn to put their sadness before mine when they want to remember something about my father and to enjoy the memories instead of cry. I have had to allow them to look through the old photos and admire how handsome he was and remember how present he always was in their lives, even though we didn’t live around the corner from him anymore.

• I have had to take consolation in little things like wearing his flannel hunting shirts and his Eagles jacket and his ever-present Italian horn to keep him close to me.

• I have had to learn to talk to him out loud to make sure he can hear me and ask him for a sign to show me that he heard.  I have always gotten one.  You don’t believe? You don’t need to.  I do.

• I have had to learn to open my mind in order to rely on a fantastic medium who allows me to communicate with my father through her gift. Each time I’ve talked to her, I felt more at peace knowing that he is exactly where he wants to be, surrounded by his family and his loyal dog- often on his boat.  The advice he gives me is always specific, and through her mediumship, he comforts me as if he were here.

• I have had to learn that I need to be like a duck when people tell me their unsolicited opinion on the amount of weeks, months, etc. that are sufficient to end my grief. In reality, the sadness never goes away. The number of people offering advice on how long this process should take has been really mind-boggling. Grief abides by its own timetable. I would never be so presumptuous as to dictate someone’s mourning based on how long it takes me. So, instead of getting upset, I don’t talk about my awesome dad to these people- they don’t care anyway. I have learned to do what my father would always tell me- make like a duck and let it roll off my back.

• I have had to learn to be stronger for my daughters, who, in short order, lost three grandparents, just two months apart each, and remind them that it’s ok to miss them and that it’s ok to cry when they need to.

• I have had to learn to rely on my husband for emotional strength, something I don’t do well.  Having been through his own loss years ago and not having ever fully recovered from it, he helped me work through the stages of pain and reminds me all that time that one never gets “past” this loss, that my reality will simply change to to one without my father.

•  I have had to learn to reach out to and reconnect with family members I have not seen in a while for no other reason than because life gets in the way.

• I have had to mend some fences strictly because my father believed in not being on the outs with people close to you and I wanted to do right by what he taught me.

• But most of all I have had to learn to be my father’s daughter.  The one he always told me he was proud of, the one he believed could do anything I set my mind to, the one he believed “gets stuff done,” the one brave enough to make changes in my life when change is due.  This is what he instilled in me.  This is what he counted on me to do. This is what he knew I could do, even when I didn’t know myself. Nobody believed in me as much as my dad, although my mom now carries that torch for him.  I promised him several things right before he passed away, and making improvements in my life the best I could was one of these things.

His passing has renewed my focus, and although I miss his advice terribly: the sound of his voice on the phone, his hugs and kisses and his corny jokes, his tempered silliness that always made me laugh and, of course, his antipasto at holiday dinners, I have used all that he wanted for me to push myself to try to become that person that would not disappoint him. So this year has been so hard to live without him, but also eye-opening for that very reason.

I hope I am making Gussie proud because it has turned into my priority- to become a better person for my husband, my children and my family, and a better teacher for my students.

I love my father and I miss him every single day of my life. I know he knew I adored him and that he was my hero.  I have no regrets because I made sure he knew this was how I felt, even though he didn’t think that highly of himself. To me, there was no kinder, smarter, funnier man. He was the gold standard of dads.

Today is Gussie’s birthday. He would be 83 this year. I have dreaded this day all year, worrying about how sad this day would be. But as it got closer, I started to try to convince myself to do the opposite-to celebrate his life, not dwell on his death. Those who know me know that it’s not a easy feat for me, for as much as his life and lessons have shaped my life, his death has forever changed it.

My family has a few traditions that my father was big on maintaining, either for the sake of family tradition or just out of habit and preference. One such tradition was the birthday cake we all were presented with every year- the Italian cream cake. Rum-soaked vanilla cake with a chocolate pudding-like cream in between layers and adorned with slivered almonds or chopped peanuts on the frosting, this cake was, to the best of my knowledge as a child, the only birthday cake in existence. I have to admit, I never liked it much. Once I was married and my birthday celebrations were not left up to my parents, I deviated from the traditional Italian cream cake but would occasionally get one for my father’s birthday. The last time we had one was 2010- this is it:

So, with June 11 looming, I decided I would not spend the day crying or lamenting my father’s passing. Instead, I was determined to find the resolve to think of the beautiful memories I have of him, and how happy and vibrant and pain-free he is in heaven today. So, I bought an Italian cream cake, some Rolling Rock (his favorite beer- read here) and drank one with lunch and then I sang “Happy Birthday” in my full Water Rinaldi voice (a bad version of a local opera buff who used to sing Happy Birthday at the Newtown Squire restaurant as if he were Pavarotti) which my father used to also do, but better, because my father also knew how to sing.   I imagined him there, closing his ears and shaking his head at my version, which is what he always did, pretending (?) he couldn’t wait until it was over, and that made me smile. My mother laughed and we all had some really good Italian cream cake. I have to say, after years of not appreciating it, I thought it was delicious today. My dad would have loved it.

Happy Birthday to my father. I hope this birthday was the best he ever had.