And so a new decade is upon us. We call them decades and give them weight because someone decided that 10 years was the right amount of years to bunch together and deem significant. I think it began with Pythagoras. His followers started a cult that worshipped numbers, and believe it or not, they actually prayed to the number 10. So now we go with it, as we do with so many other things. We measure our lives by decades, taking stock when they begin and end. Some of us only get a few of them. Some of us don’t even get one.
I was 10 years old and approaching the end of my first decade of life when my father gave me his best attempt at the “Birds and the Bees” talk. He made a big production of out it, announcing it to me ahead of time, telling me he was going to do it at Hampton Beach and that we’d go to McDonald’s afterwards to “celebrate.” I think he needed that cold sea air to clear his head because this was one of the few times that he didn’t default a Deep Life Talk to my mother, who was way better at it. Dad wasn’t going to give this one up though. This was something that fathers did with their sons, and dagnabit, he would be damned if he wasn’t going to handle this one himself.
My Dad did his best. He scared the fuck out of me. This wasn’t a balanced discussion of how babies get made, a scientific breakdown of exactly how human genitalia work and the mechanics of procreation. No, no, this TED talk quickly descended into a clumsy discussion of how easily one’s dick could fall off if one wasn’t careful with what one did with it, and more precisely, where one chose to put it. To be clear, this applied to ALL dicks. Ten year-old dicks. 25 year-old dicks. 50 year old dicks. This was a life-long STD cross that all men had to bear. 41 years later, all I remember are the words “venereal disease” and the catchphrases “Use a prophylactic” and “Always carry a rubber with you”. Those sage words continued to ring in my traumatized ears as I choked down a Big Mac during our celebratory trip to McDonald’s.
He tried, God bless him. My mother cleaned up his mess later, laughing her ass off at the worried look on my face. I had questions I was too proud to ask my father during his accidental Cotton Mather Soliloquy: “What’s a prophylactic?” “What’s a rubber?” “Where am I supposed to carry it so I’m ready?” “Can you treat syphilis with over the counter medication?” My mother patiently clarified it all for me, fully enjoying the ego trip of one-upping my father on this debacle.
I was 10 years old, and as ridiculous as it may sound, after our Scared Straight VD/Always Wear A Rubber talk, I felt like an adult for the first time in my life. As if the doors to a great secret (albeit a fucking scary one) had been opened to me, and I was now a part of the clan. Native Americans had their male coming-of-age rituals: sonorous drumbeats in a circle, white facepaint, and a first hunt. I had Dad, Hampton Beach, and a newfound fear of syphilis and gonorrhea. Almost the same!
Ten has always been an important number to me, that’s my point. Like a member of that Pythagorean cult, the number 10 represents completeness, wisdom, and perfection to me. It’s also clean, tidy, and fresh, which appeals to my Virgo sensibilities. So when October 10, 2010 appeared on the calendar a decade ago, I couldn’t let that fortuitous day pass by without taking the greatest and most profound leap of my life: proposing to Ex on a beautiful, sunny day in Central Park. I’d been contemplating proposing for weeks and this clean, symmetrical, auspicious day — 10/10/10 — seemed too perfect to let it pass. (Narrator: It wasn’t!) And so I planned the whole thing out and made it happen that day. (Many times since I have considered how my life might have been different had I felt more strongly about the number 13 instead.)
Like my sentimental father, on December 31st of every year, I feel the passage of time deep within me. Until he got sick, Dad always celebrated each birthday, anniversary, and New Year’s Eve with a child-like energy and all the feels. On New Year’s Eve, he’d let me stay up to watch the ball drop. I remember his smile, hugs, and clinking glasses (“Oh, let him have a nip of champagne – who cares!”). This is a legacy that he has passed on to me. Like him, I don’t just celebrate these life markers, I experience them.
When it’s a decade that’s about to pass, I feel it even more powerfully. I don’t just take stock of one year, I take stock of 10 years. Where I’ve been. All that’s happened. What I’ve learned. What I’ve gained and lost. I think ahead to what the next 10 years will bring if I’m still alive. IF I’m still alive. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned during the past decade — throughout my life really — it’s that we are not guaranteed a fucking thing. I lost two of my best childhood friends young, one of them at the age of 23, the other in his 30s. One of my favorite uncles died when he was 48. I’ve known for a long time how short life is, how it can change in a second, how everything is normal one day, and totally fucked up the next. When you lose people you love at a young age, you feel the passage of time acutely and perpetually. It’s a curse, really. Something I am still working on: how to just live and be present and in the moment. Easier said than done.
“Be where you are. Otherwise you will miss your life.”
— Buddha
So, here’s 2020. A nice, even, clean, symmetrical number. A tabula rasa. Another decade to evolve spiritually as a carbon-based form, to learn, live, and love before I die. To have more happy moments than sad. To be a good father, brother, son, and friend. To let go of the past and be present. To find that true, lasting life partner who has eluded me my entire life, or to embrace a journey of solitude while enjoying the people I meet and learn from along the way. To plan for that beach apartment in Calabria. I like 2020 already, and I have high hopes. But I can’t start this new decade without taking an honest look at the most painful, chaotic, beautiful, powerful, emotional, loss-filled, and personal growth-imposed cramdown decade of my entire life. The one that is about to end.
So take my hand and enjoy the ride. WE’RE GONNA PLAY ALLLLLL THE HITS!
In the past 10 years, I took risks, many out-of-character risks that largely dictated how the past decade went for me, in positive and negative ways. When it began, I moved in with someone for the first time, got engaged, and then got married shortly thereafter. I sacrificed a neighborhood, city life, and an apartment I loved for a person I loved more and a future that held promise. I left New York City, a place I’d lived for 18 years, and bought my first house, which had all the suburban trappings that I used to mock: four bedrooms, a two-acre yard full of grass and trees, a garden and pool in the backyard, and all the quiet and privacy an introverted, middle-aged Virgo needs, in a town I had only visited a few times.
What can I say? I did it for love. I took a risk. I went ALL. IN. on something and someone, and I started a new life. Anyone who knows me knows that this kind of massive life change is not something I do often and certainly not easily. I was 42 when I got married. I had a long (and relatively fulfilling) bachelorhood. At some point though, that life started to feel empty, and I knew that I was ready for something more. So I opened my m ind and started looking for it. I didn’t get married recklessly, totally blind to reality, or because I was “settling”, as some of my friends are wont to believe (and oh, how they don’t mind conveying their powers of precognition to me now). No, I married for love, based on the hope and belief that I had met someone with whom I could build a life. All relationships have issues of course. But I believed that ours, which were not a secret to either of us, would improve with time, not get worse. So I chose a new direction and a new life that I thought would make me happy. Alas, with perfect 20/20 hindsight, a decade later, it turns out I was (mostly) wrong about this.
In the past 10 years, I (we) took another risk and adopted a troubled 4 year-old French Bulldog from a rescue agency on a whim. This was a little over a year after we got married. We got him home that night, let him roam around his new residence, and then we tried to pet him, and he almost bit us both. We looked at each other like “What the fuck did we just do?” Initially, this dog was so reactive and jump, I never thought I would be able to pet, hug, or bathe him. But over time, after we built a little trust and learned what some of his reactions meant, he let us do those things. I fed him, walked him, bathed him, picked up his shit, and made him my companion. He never lost all of his snappy behaviors, but he did evolve, and this made me fall in love with him and accept all of his flaws. He returned his love to me during some difficult days. When my marriage was freezing over, and I’d come home from work at night, he would run to me as soon as I opened the door. He was a small island of unconditional love and affection in a very big, very cold ocean.
In the past 10 years, this same troubled French Bulldog became a fixture in my life in ways both good and bad. It’s a stressful thing keeping a newborn baby away from an unpredictable dog that you don’t completely trust. It’s a stressful thing having to shut an unpredictable dog in a bedroom with a closed door when you have birthday parties or anyone visiting the house, especially with young children because you’re worried about what might happen. It’s a stressful thing listening to that loud and very pissed off dog bark and bang into the door the entire time you have people visiting you because he’s in a room he can’t get out of, and you’re wondering if you just fucked yourself and set back all of his progress by doing this to him. (So you stop having people over so often.) It’s a stressful thing not being able to go away with your new wife as much as you’d like because you’re worried that this dog you love might bite a dogsitter and you’ll get your ass sued, and you don’t want to kennel him because it may make his behavior worse when you return. (So you go away less often.) It’s a stressful thing knowing that if you give this dog away to someone else just to make your life easier, he’ll probably be put down within a month because he’ll bite someone else just as he has nipped you both, and no one will have the patience and tolerance that you and your wife have for him. Not to mention that you love the bastard and it would hurt like hell to give up and let him go to an uncertain fate. (So you keep him.) He took a toll.
In the past 10 years, I watched this troubled French Bulldog I loved, who evolved more than most human beings in the four years we had him, let us pet and hug and bathe him, and show us the limits of his trust. Then, four years after we adopted him, I watched him have multiple seizures while Ex was away on vacation (which we had begun doing separately at this point). All of a sudden, he started flopping around on the ground right in front of me like a suffocating fish on a boat, with his oversized head whacking the hard, cold, ceramic tile in the kitchen over and over again. Then he peed on the floor, which he never did before.
I was in shock and felt totally helpless. I watched him stand up slowly, dazed and confused, and begin walking in a circle over and over. I cried as I tried to console him, both of us stunned by what just happened. I stayed up all night with him, praying and hoping it wouldn’t happen again. I woke up to him seizing again at 2 in the morning. I took him to the vet the next day and was told it was probably a brain tumor, common in the species, and this was likely the reason his left eye had been bulging so much for so long. I left him to be evaluated overnight, while Ex flew home with our daughter. Both of us then made the awful, painful, and final decision to put him to sleep — to affirmatively end his life — because he kept having seizures and the vet told us that his condition would not improve, even with thousands of dollars of surgery, and we ran the risk of him dying alone while we were at work. At most, we would buy a few months. These were not acceptable options.
Ex and I took him to the vet one last time, sick to our stomachs. Once there, we were taken to a back room where we wrapped him in his favorite blanket and fed him as much string cheese and as many treats as he wanted, trying to cram all of our love for him into a few final minutes. We stroked his head and ears as the vet gave him the shot that would kill him. I remember his final exhale, which came faster than I expected. Fucking. Brutal. I cried more about this dog dying than I had ever cried about anything. For days and weeks and months after, there was a painful silence in the house. No snores and barks. An empty clamshell in the living room that looked Tiny Tim’s empty chair during Scrooge’s visit with the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. No one to walk in the morning. No one running to me when I came home. A huge empty hole. I still feel all of this, even as I type these words. His ashes are in a tin can behind me.
In the past 10 years, I watched my marriage disintegrate, like a slow moving car crash, or one of those Halloween movies where you’re waving your hands, wanting to scream at the stupid victim on the screen to leave the house, make a fucking phone call, or pick up a knife before it’s too late. A hopeless, cliche plot where you see what’s coming way ahead of time, but you just can’t stop it. Plagued by the delusional, stubborn, and fear-driven hope that something, anything, would change the inevitable trajectory of the relationship, I tried to stave off what I saw coming while not knowing what to do to fix it all. It was like trying to speak Chinese to someone who speaks Russian, if you’re bothering to speak at all. Then choosing to accept a daily apathy, an emotional distance, and basically a zombie way of life as Normal and Fine, because it was easier and surely, addressing issues head-on would lead to a worse alternative: divorce, destruction of a family, instability for our young daughter, a custody battle, a house surrender, legal fees (basically lighting money on fire), and a financial blow-out after all of the saving and financial security I’d worked my whole life to achieve. I really did not want to push the red button unless it was absolutely necessary. Finally, the cold reality of half-hearted and far-too-late marriage counseling revealed that things were way worse than I thought, and this implosion was years in the making. We had a relationship beyond salvage. So we pushed the red button.
In the past 10 years, I got separated, watched my 4 year-old daughter scream and cry for me when I would leave her mother’s apartment, and then scream and cry for her mother when she was with me. Brutal. Gutting. Infuriating that we were causing her this pain. In the past 10 years, I experienced guilt, pain, fury, sadness, and regret. Really bad thoughts that I didn’t think I had in me. A sincere wish for a time-travel machine.
In the past 10 years, I watched all of those things that I had gone ALL. IN. on blow up in my face, evaporate like a mirage, punchline my sorry ass like a cosmic joke. For months, I woke up thinking it was all a bad dream and then immediately I’d realize that no, no, it wasn’t a bad dream. It was quite real. This shit is actually happening, my dude. My head spun in unreality and disbelief for two years. My mind was caught in a perpetual, involuntary relationship autopsy loop about who fucked up the marriage, how, when, and why. Whose fault it was. What might have changed if X, Y, Z had happened. Wondering why the fuck I stuck around so long and what that said about me. Oh, and trying to stay employed through all of this in a demanding profession that only rewards the billable hour and collected dollars.
Then we sped towards rock bottom. A house sale. Negotiations. Endless negotiations. Angry texts. Triggered conversations. Miscommunications. Avoidance. One step forward, two steps back. Depleted savings accounts. Perpetual worry over the impact on my daughter. Trying to minimize it as much as possible. A slow-moving, mood-driven divorce that mimicked the slow-moving, mood-driven implosion of everything that preceded it. Blown up dreams. But ultimately, mercifully, there was finality.
In the past 10 years, I got divorced, moved back into an apartment, and started my life over at the age of 50. I ate a fucking life grenade. I do nothing easily. Everything is hard.
In the past 10 years, I lost my father to dementia, after watching him slowly have his capacity stolen from him during the prior five years. I visited him in two assisted living facilities, tried to talk him out of escaping through the back door of the first place he was in, which for some unknown reason was alarmed but not locked. He got out three times before they forced him to a more secure facility, where he belonged in the first place. I felt his angst, his insecurity and confusion as to why he was there. It wasn’t his home or where he felt comfortable. I felt what he felt. I put myself in his shoes and imagined how I would feel in his place: trapped, confused, disoriented, angry, and upset. I hope I never have to experience any of this myself. But let’s be honest, the prospect that I will is at least 50/50.
I put myself in my mother’s shoes too. She kept him home as long as she could, too long in fact, until his occasional hallucinations started becoming dangerous, and other aspects of a 68 year-old woman caring for someone in his deteriorating condition became overwhelming. My sisters and I pushed for her to find a better place for him, and she finally did. But it wasn’t easy for him or for her. There was guilt and sadness over her lost years with him and a retirement they would never share. This was a new reality for all of us, and we all knew the clock was ticking.
In the past 10 years, I introduced my father to my one year-old daughter. He held her and walked her in a stroller at my mother’s house. They looked at each other and smiled. He touched her face and she touched his. I watched and took it in. I didn’t take enough pictures of them, not nearly enough, and the ones I took are fuzzy. They are all I have. At least I have them. She only met him twice.
My father was the best man in my wedding. If there was one positive to getting married, apart from the major one of being blessed with my daughter, it’s that my father and I got to share that one night together, side by side in tuxedos at the altar. He got to see me get married. He got to participate while he was still capable. He got to experience a pretty good fucking party, one of his last. He saw me happy and hopeful and looking forward to the future.
In the past 10 years, my sisters, mother and I sat with my father in his hospice room for four days, waiting for him to pass from this world, holding his hand, brushing his forehead, comforting him while he was unconscious, reminiscing and laughing, eating pizza, joking around, and getting buzzed on the alcohol that my sister, in all her foresight, bought for us to take the edge off. We also argued about all the shit that had happened in our family because (a) we couldn’t help ourselves; and (b) we sure as fuck weren’t going to send my Dad off without a final, solid dose of our life, our reality, our family, for better and worse. I’ve told people this: I have never felt closer to my family, the love of my family, than in those four days. It was incredible. A final gift from him.
He had nothing to say of course. He just took it all in. We all slept in his room, alternating nights, afraid to leave in case he died when we weren’t there. My daughter came to the hospice one day to cheer us all up. My sisters played with her in a separate room. I have a video of this that I will cherish. Watching them together, my head spun at the surreality of being a young father to this laughing, full-of-life two year-old who was dancing and playing in one room, while my father was dying on a bed just a few feet away.
My father died on my birthday. The very same day he wrote on the top right-hand corner of so many of my birthday cards growing up. My first phone call was to his twin brother, my uncle. His emotional reaction to this expected, yet painful, news still brings tears to my eyes. The year before, he, my cousin and I visited my father together and took him to Daytona Beach. The day after, we celebrated the twins’ 74th birthday together in the assisted living facility, along with my sisters and mother, and a dozen or so of his co-residents. It wasn’t my father’s best birthday. It probably wasn’t even in his top 73. But it was his last one, and we were all there.
In the past 10 years, my mother and I shopped for a coffin for my father. You pick a color and style that you think he’d like, which is kind of absurd because he’s not alive anymore, so you’re sort of picking a color that YOU like, even though it’s not your own coffin. You have to buy a nice one. You don’t want to scrimp on his final resting bed. You see him lying in it at his wake. You watch your cousins carry it into the church and then, after the funeral, into the waiting hearse. You see it surrounded by your friends and family during his military honors at the cemetery. You see it lowered into the ground with fresh roses placed on top of it. And then you never see it again. Two days.
Not long after we chose his coffin, I eulogized my father in a speech that I barely got through. He was buried in the cemetery he used to take me to when I was young, the same cemetery where his father and mother are buried. There was a lot more green then. It seemed a lot bigger too.
In the past 10 years, I became a father in the most unexpected of ways, through adoption. For all of the loss and pain I’ve experienced the past 10 years, becoming a father is a joy that eclipsed them all. Adoption is an uncertain ride and its own form of labor. You commit to raising a child born to someone you don’t know at all. You commit to not ever having a biological child. There is serious mental and emotional adaptation involved, an alternate reality to surrender, and a new one to accept. A thousand unknowns. At times during the process of adoption, almost up until the day we brought her home, I literally did not know what I was doing, what was best and what wasn’t. I was just riding the Fate Train and hoping for the best.
Now this six year-old is the center of my life and someone I would trade my own life for in a millisecond. All those sleepless nights of her infancy — the cradling and singing and rocking her in the middle of the night, the half-awake trips to her bedroom to change her diaper and put her back to sleep, being puked on twice, once in the dark with no power in the house. And now, watching her daily discoveries, her mind working things out, teaching her right from wrong, reliving my young Christmases, introducing her to Star Wars, Spiderman, Wonder Woman, Scooby-Doo, and the Raiders, seeing how eager she is to indulge me and please me (for now), letting her paint my nails purple, playing with Barbies, fantasizing about getting a unicorn tattoo, experiencing the world as a girl for the first time, and marveling (so far, knock on wood) at how well she’s handled all the turmoil in her young life, from her stay in the NICU, to that plane ride home when she was only 8 days old, to being told she is adopted and what that means (an ongoing process), to adapting to living in two houses and seeing Mommy and Daddy on different days….
I can’t capture the bittersweet beauty of all of this in words. I experienced it all in the past 10 years and will continue to until she’s a teenager and starts telling me I don’t know anything, that I embarrass her, that she wants to wear X, and go to Y, and date Z, and generally makes my (60 year-old!) life way more challenging than it is right now. She makes me wear my heart outside my body every single day. By far, she is the best thing that happened to me in the past decade, the past four, actually. Unexpected and incredible.
In the past 10 years, I grew into someone who has never been more comfortable with who he is, what he believes, and what he wants. I grew into someone whose instincts and wisdom have been tested and sharpened by his life experience. I discovered that contrary to all of the fear that held me back and made me live a mediocre life, I can take a fucking punch. Several, actually. Yes, I know more are coming. But I’m more prepared for them than I was 10 years ago.
I also discovered that the biggest and most profound changes in my life during the past decade — and the growth they created — happened because I took risks and made myself vulnerable. Doing so was not easy for me. It’s not in my nature to take risks. I hate doing it, honestly. There were plenty of moments during the past decade when I felt despondent, as if my life was spiraling out of my control, and I had no clue what I was doing. I still feel that way sometimes. It’s unsettling for someone like me who hates being disappointed and keeps his expectations on the floor 99% of the time. I wouldn’t wish a divorce on my worst enemy. Going all in on someone and having it blow up in your face was fucking hard, not gonna lie. Especially for a risk-averse guy like me.
But I’m learning that standing pat and accepting the status quo isn’t a good way to go through life. Taking risks is something that I need to keep doing, even if I’m uncomfortable and get whacked in the face sometimes. Because so much good, so much growth, comes from taking risks. And the thing about being whacked in the face by your worst fears is that you learn you can survive it and that’s pretty empowering.
Yes, all of this may require swallowing a massive shit sandwich from time to time. A big, stinking poop sandwich that may take years to chew on and digest, maybe even an entire decade. But eventually — EVENTUALLY — if you keep your wits and sense of humor about you and don’t jump out a window, life’s sewage will wash away, and you can be this guy:
On the other side of the long, putrid, Shit Tunnel, a cleansing rain awaits. Redemption. Freedom. Choice. Rebirth. Escape from prison. A new inner strength that only survivors possess. It’s far better to live one’s best life (okay, better life) than it is to sleepwalk through a loveless, mediocre, miserable, half-assed, fear-driven existence because it’s easier to do nothing and accept the status quo.
I’m not fully there yet. I’m getting there though, and that’s a pretty solid way to start a new decade.
Hello, 2020.
