It seems like yesterday that I sat with you in your final moments of life. I struggled then as I do now to watch you leave me. The loss hasn't gotten any easier and I miss you each day. I remember growing up and having the belief that Dads don't die, and especially not mine. But with maturity, some semblance of reasoning, and a lot of understanding, I came to realize that death comes to all...even Dads and more so-mine. It was a bittersweet realization for me. If you remember my words to you as I delivered your eulogy Oct. 1, 1976, "I had a love-hate relationship with my Dad, I loved to hate him". It was a myriad of emotions that flooded me for a good portion of my life with you. I never understood your alcoholism and certainly my response to it. It evoked anger, frustration, sorrow, grief, despair, and above all loss. For I lost those years with you. I was angry with you for "going away" from me. I was frustrated that my Dad couldn't act around my friends like all the other Dads. It saddened me to see your sorrow in allowing this dreaded disease control you, destroy our family, and hasten the end to your life. It's a loss that I still miss to this day. It would be "easy" to sit at this keyboard and recall those late nights when I sat at the window in our second story flat watching, waiting, longing for your car to pull into the driveway, knowing you had safely arrived home after a night of bar tending. I'd like to forget those nights when you'd awake in the middle of the night causing havoc to Mom as lie sleeping. Instead, I want to fondly remember the days you'd have catch me in the driveway, or all the Cards games you took my best friend Danny and me to watch at the old Sportsman's Park; or how you taught me to drive a stick shift in your 49' Willy's Jeep. And probably the greatest knowledge I came to know very late in my life which was actually after you had gone was the story my other "Dad" told me. Dad Doerr, my forever baseball mentor and coach relayed the story to me of how you used to come and watch me pitch and as you stood out of sight behind the school wall so as not to "make me nervous". He told me that story several years ago as he himself lay in critical condition after suffering 3 heart attacks in one day. "If you build it, he will come"....the words of Ray Kinsella ring in my ears.
Hey Dad, you wanna have catch?
I remember Dan Fogelberg saying as he began singing this song one night, "If I been allowed to write only one song in my lifetime, it would have been this one," So, Paul, this one's for you.
