Regret - The First Story

The Loss That is Forever

I first remember hearing the song “My Way” sometime after my ninth birthday. It played on the radio of my new stepfather’s Buick Electra as he drove with the car windows rolled up puffing Amphora tobacco on a black walnut pipe that jutted from the corner of his clenched teeth. I sat hunched on the passenger side of the wide back seat as far from him as possible, sickened by the movement of the car, the blue cloud and cloying odor of smoke, the stench of his cheap cologne and the vinyl off-gassing of the hot white upholstery. My left hand was balled into a tight fist in my lap and the other rested on the door handle ready to jump out at a moment’s notice. I was in a perpetual fight-or-flight mode.

I never trusted or liked Wayne. His six-foot four-inch frame and his square jawed slick good looks intimidated me. He wore flared denim jeans and a wide lapel shirt that was a little too open at the collar. He sneered more than smiled, and he chewed Dentyne - The smell of cinnamon chewing gum triggers me to this day.

I have always wondered why this man left a wife and four children for a widow with three young children. It was obvious he didn’t like children - he barely tolerated us. My mother met him less than a year after my father’s death and married him a few months after that. I was angry at her for moving on so quickly. Although he was never physically abusive, he was psychologically cruel, and I was afraid of him. My young mother, was either incapable of standing up to him, or, still traumatized by the recent death of her husband, was so invested in her own search for happiness and stability that she could not see the deleterious effect he had on us.

There were so many instances of his maltreatment of me. Shortly after they married, I returned from a trip to my grandparents in West Virginia to find our Basset Hound missing. She was the dog that my father had brought home when I was five and had been mauled by a German Shepherd named Razor, a guard dog of our neighbor. I was seriously injured and had to have many stitches and my torn ear repaired in the emergency room.

As a result, I was terrified of dogs. Many weeks later, after I had physically recovered from the attack and had the many sutures from my back, neck and ear removed, my father adopted one of the most gentle and harmless dogs imaginable – a floppy eared, sad-eyed Basset Hound we named Prudence.

I don’t know why, but my new stepfather hated that dog. Maybe, because she wasn’t perfectly house-trained, or because she always smelled like a wet dog, or maybe because she was a living reminder of my dead father? I will never know why, but the day we returned from vacation, we discovered Prudence was gone.

Had she run away or been hit by a car?

Had she been given to another family?

We cried and cried to no avail.

Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, and probably because he was tired of hearing us cry, he casually told us that he threw her off a bridge – and he specified the bridge, the one we crossed every day on our way to school. He told us in such a way that we could vividly imagine it. And then he smiled - like a villain from Batman, the TV show I watched every week. It was not a warm smile, and to this day, while I am certain he was lying, I still don’t know what happened to Prudence. We were never told.

But I am getting ahead of the story, and I want to tell you how it started.

The events that led to my drastic change in fortune occurred on February 13, 1968 - the day my life turned inside out. A happy, secure childhood suddenly ended. My dad, a perpetually smiling physician and Lieutenant Commander in the United States Navy, a son, a brother, a husband and father of three children died when he was just 34 years old, and I was seven. One evening while asleep, he unexpectedly suffered a burst cerebral aneurysm of the anterior communicating artery, a small blood vessel in the eponymously named Circle of Willis, deep in his brain. He never woke up.

My memories of that time have crystallized and taken on a surreal quality as if they belong to someone else. It was a sunny but bitterly cold winter morning in late January of 1968. My mother was making breakfast in the kitchen, and I can still conjure the smell of bacon and coffee that drifted into the den, where I sat in front of our black-and-white TV watching Sunday morning cartoons.

When she was done setting the table, she called to me to wake up my father who had returned very late the prior evening from a call shift at the hospital where he worked. I remember bounding upstairs, taking two steps at a time and heading down the hall, my fingers tracing the wall past my sister’s bedroom, then my brother’s and mine, past the bathroom that was still damp and warm from a shower my mother had taken that morning. I reached out for the brass doorknob of my parent’s room at the end of the hall and turned it, only to find the door wouldn’t open. This caught me by surprise. Their door was never locked. I twisted the knob right and left, knocked, and knocked again, then rattled and banged on the door, shouting for my dad to wake up. He didn’t answer.

I do remember my mom thinking at first it was funny, that he was playing a joke on us. She then became annoyed, and angrily came upstairs and began slapping, then pounding on a door that would not open. Her anger was replaced by panic. She ran back downstairs and called the neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Best, who quickly came over. They called the firemen who arrived in their red engine with the flashing lights and wailing siren. They in turn called the ambulance after breaking through the door and finding him in bed, unresponsive. I can still hear my mom screaming his name, pleading with him to wake up.

Then, he was wheeled down the hall on a metal stretcher, past my bedroom, his head lolling from side to side like a drunkard. He was carried down the narrow stairs, out our front door and into the back of the white ambulance. The doors closed, and I never saw him again. Two weeks later, after a craniotomy and attempted repair of the burst blood vessel, he died alone late at night in the small intensive care room of Glen Cove Hospital.

The months and then years after this were hard on me. We moved to a new house just down the street that my father had proudly purchased just before he died. My mother quickly sold the 1965 red convertible Volkswagen Beetle in which we rode with the top down to the Duck Pond in Roslyn Harbor, or Jones Beach or even as far away as Montauk to fly kites and picnic on the dunes. She didn’t know how to drive a stick shift, so, For Six-Hundred-Fifty dollars it became a memory.

Most of his possessions - his white Navy uniform, his suits and ties, and even the large Lionel O-gauge train set in our basement which he had built for me on a large green platform complete with a tunnel and little painted figures, were given away or ended up in a few boxes in the attic. The American flag, neatly folded into a tight triangle that draped his coffin before he was lowered into the ground at the Holy Rood Cemetery in Old Westbury, Long Island, stayed on a table for a while and then disappeared like everything else.

I remember those years as lonely ones. I was the eldest son, already a little shy and small for my age. I had friends for sure, but the experience of such loss, at such a critical age for a boy was isolating, and I was inconsolable.

My mother was no help. She was a young widow with three small children and new worries of her own, and had an immature, somewhat narcissistic personality. A remarkably beautiful woman, with a fiery temperament, she had always been difficult, even as a child. She was the eldest girl of three sisters in an Italian American family from a small northeast Pennsylvania mining town called Old Forge. She grew up escaping to the movie theatre that was only a few blocks down from her house on North Main Street as often as she could, taking in every small detail of high style and dress on the silver screen, imagining and then realizing a life far different and more glamorous than the one in which she was raised.

Her father, Henry, arrived from Naples on the S.S. Gallia, a four-ton transatlantic liner in 1901 via Ellis Island as an infant, accompanied by his father, Francisco, a stone mason, and his mother, Lucrezia, a “domestic” crossed out with “wife” written over it, as noted in precise cursive script on the ship’s manifest. Later, as a child of no more than nine or ten years old, he worked as a “breaker-boy” picking slag-rock from the coal chutes on the tall, wooden, dusty and deafeningly noisy coal breakers that were scattered across the anthracite seamed hills near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. When he was old enough, he became a miner, descending pitch-black vertical shafts, far from the light of day dynamiting large chunks of coal from the surrounding shale. Despite obtaining no more than an eighth-grade education, he was smart and gifted with the ability to understand complex mining technology and worked his way up to become a mine foreman.

Through hard work, and a brief but profitable detour making illegal side money from the liquor business during Prohibition, he was able to invest in a mine that flooded and was considered non-recoverable. With his extensive knowledge and experience, he knew otherwise, and with his two partners, struck it rich by reclaiming and mining one of the largest seams of anthracite coal in the region. He expanded the business to include construction and road building, insurance and even cable television. A man of few words, and a lover of boxing, baseball and the community in which he was raised, he lived into his mid seventies eventually succumbing to congestive heart failure, made worse by his many myocardial infarctions and “black lung” pulmonary fibrosis caused by the fine anthracite coal dust that covered everything.

My mother Lucretia, named after her grandmother, grew up in the same small house she was born in, that her father bought as a young miner and never upgraded despite his wealth. She was a “poor” little rich girl, and he doted on and spoiled her, buying her whatever she asked for and giving in to every tantrum she threw. She was nicknamed “tempesta” - translated from Italian, it means “storm.”

He once bought her a Steinway baby grand piano when she was a young girl, but she hated the discipline of taking lessons. To his credit, and on one of the few occasions he punished her, he gave the piano away to a poor family that lived down the street. Their daughter practiced.

Now, widowed at thirty-three at the peak of her good looks, she was a potent attractant for a variety of men who seemed to appear like the yellow jackets that plagued our backyard as spring turned to summer of 1968. They buzzed around us as we ate our meals poolside on the slate patio in the backyard of the tidy single-level mid-century modern home that my father never had a chance to enjoy.

I mostly ignored these men, except when I couldn’t. One evening when I answered a knock on our front door, I was surprised to find my gym teacher, Mr. Jacobsen, all dressed up in a suit and tie with flowers in his hand asking for my mother. Other than my ability to quickly climb ropes during gym class, or my skill at avoiding being bounced out in dodgeball, I was pretty average at sports and was just okay at baseball, touch football or lacrosse. Though I was never the captain or even among the first few picks for the team, Mr. J, sporting a smile cheesier than his plaid jacket and wide tie, was treating me like his best athlete. I went straight to my room and shut the door.

I stayed in my room a lot that year making plastic Testor models of hot rods and sailing ships and listening to dad’s Frank Sinatra records on his Fisher 500 Hi-Fi system, one of the few possessions I was able to keep and knew how to set up and operate. They reminded me of him. And I needed that reminder, as the rest of my childhood, adolescence and teenage years was dominated by a man I never loved and who was incapable of loving me.

I don’t want to leave the impression that it was terrible all the time, however. Wayne was a brilliant engineer, a savvy businessman and investor, and he had an excellent eye for real estate. The next house we lived in, he constructed on the lot next door to the one my father bought. Wayne was a builder, and a good carpenter, electrician, and overall handyman. He was skilled with his hands, and I learned a lot by simply watching him. He made no effort to teach me any of these things, but to be fair I was also not an easy or agreeable stepson. My younger brother, who barely knew my father, as he was only three when he died, was much more forgiving of Wayne than I was, and lived with him longer, benefitting from him in ways that I could not.

And now, it’s fifty-seven years later and I have recently turned sixty-four. A few days have passed since my cover-stealing dog and late-night insomnia episode. I find myself contemplating the long and fulfilling life I have had since that cold winter day. Nearly twice as old as my father ever lived, I am the one getting closer to facing the “final curtain”. It’s a gloomy winter afternoon and the wind is whipping through the branches of the redwood trees that surround my house and sheets of rain from an atmospheric river lash the windowpanes.

I feel far from the old red-brick carriage house on Long Island Sound. A lifetime has passed – a far longer and more complete life than the one my dad lived. In an odd twist of fate, and maybe partially by design, I picked up where he prematurely left off. I followed his footsteps into my career as an anesthesiologist. Six dogs, one black cat, many moves, one marriage, college, medical school, residency, fellowship, academic and private practice, and three children now raised to adulthood later, there is a lot to reflect on. I watch the ice melt in a glass of bourbon in my hand and am listening once again to “My Way.”

Originally written in 1967 by Jacques Revaux, Gilles Thibaut and Claude François, and first titled “Comme d’habitude”, the song topped the French charts in February of 1968, the month my dad died.

Paul Anka on vacation in the South of France heard the song, and loved it, acquiring its rights for one dollar plus a percentage of revenue for any future version. Upon returning to New York, he rewrote it, slightly altering the melodic structure and penning the English lyrics specifically with Sinatra in mind, “Hey, I can write it, but I'm not the guy to sing it.” It was for Frank…and no one else.

But now, alone in this dark living room of my house in the redwoods, it’s for me, and I am feeling melancholy.

Regrets, I've had a few
But then again, too few to mention…

Like the salty tide that brought the horseshoe crabs tangled in briny seaweed high up onto the shore of Mott’s Cove, down the path to the beach where I walked tagging behind my dad so many years ago, my memories flood in. They transport me back to those early magical years of my life, and then to the empty void the tide leaves as it washes out again. I think of all the people that I have known and loved that will never be coming back, of regrets for a childhood interrupted. Regrets for the way that my siblings and I were treated, and regrets for being too young and powerless to do anything about it.

I regret that I never went camping with my dad or heard stories of his days as an Eagle Scout. I would have welcomed help with my math homework, or college applications, or advice about girls. I regret that he did not see me at my happiest at my wedding, or at the birth of my children. I wish he could have proudly watched me graduate when I became a doctor and then like him, an anesthesiologist.

Mostly I have regrets that such a vibrant young man - an excellent physician, a kind and loving father and husband, was taken abruptly from the world at the prime of his life. And even though there is no way that a boy of such a young age could have had the wisdom and insight to understand or even forgive my stepfather’s faults, or to wonder how he became the broken man that he was, I regret that I never tried to reach out and communicate with him, even all these years later.

My mom and Wayne divorced the year that I started medical school in 1985, and I have not spoken to him since. He is over ninety-one years old now, the same age my father would have been had he lived, and I can’t but help feel that maybe there was something I could have done differently, some different way I could have been to relieve myself now of this awful feeling of regret.

They were vastly different people, my father and Wayne, and to compare them seems almost sacrilegious. But the illogical truth is that I am angry at both of them. My father did not choose to leave me, but he did. And I did not choose my stepfather, but he chose me. They were both young men at that time, and I would give anything to somehow transport myself as I am now, back to then, with all the experience and knowledge I have gained, and forgive each of them for what happened.

But most importantly, I would take that small boy by the hand, and walk him down to the beach to marvel at the scuttling crabs, the blue sky and the way the warm sun falls on our faces and tell him that none of this was his fault, and that he was, and always will be… loved.

Larkspur - February 13, 2025

Postscript: The title of this piece is taken from, “The Loss That Is Forever” by Maxine Harris, Ph.D. It is one of the most profound and helpful books I have read on childhood and adolescent loss of a parent. The death of a parent is heart wrenching at any age, whether one is seven or seventy. But it is devastating to lose a parent at such a vulnerable and developing age and the psychological effects of it ripple throughout one’s life. I encourage anyone who has had, or knows someone who has had, this experience to read the book.