Today marks 10 years since my dad died. 120 months. 3652 days (leap years). I could say 10 long years, but it also feels impossible that it has been that long. So much has happened, so much anger and sadness, but also so many celebrations, so much joy.

I can feel his smile when Molly is belting out parts of Piece of My Heart. Though she probably doesn’t know who Janice is out of context.

Molly thinks coffee is disgusting, but I’m confident she’ll still learn about the need for the afternoon cup, as is tradition.

He would have loved watching Molly play softball, and would appreciate the growth in my abilities to cut the umps some slack.

I’ve had periods of waking up early over the last 10 years, most lasting a few days or a few weeks, before returning to a more reasonable time to wake. But for the last several months, 4:40-5:20am has been the new normal. Maybe I should bring back the afternoon coffee. When Molly was younger she was stuck on rising at 6am, and I’d regularly be woken up by her yelling to us from bed that it was time to get up. Now she sleeps until 8, 8:30, 9 on days she doesn’t have school, something my dad would definitely recognize from my earlier years.

I don’t remember now if he was naturally an early riser, or if his body clock ebbed and flowed throughout our time together. I know both my parents would be up early with me during high school. A long bus ride meant an early drive to the bus stop a few towns over. Therefore alarms set early, to eat, drink coffee, and shower, only to then spend more time than I actually had on the computer, while my dad waited in the idling car and my mom kept prodding that I was running out of time. In his later years, after I was no longer in the house full time, I do remember he would often sleep later, sometimes getting up and then returning to bed.

I spend that time in the quiet early morning alone, reading and writing, perhaps having a conscious or subconscious conversation or debate with him, or the memory of him. Our interests aligned around technology and around the fact that where you were born, or the parents you were born to, had far too much influence on your quality of life and your ability to succeed. I think we agreed, in the time he was alive, that technology had been an overwhelming force for good. But the introduction of the Tech Billionaire Broligarch in these last ten years has soured me on technology, and I believe it would have soured him as well. At least to the extent that tech chooses to subserviate itself to the drives of capitalism and militarism. Two of King’s Three Evils(video), and you don’t have to look any further than a typical tech conference or board room to see racism trailing closely behind.

Claire has pointed out, and I think she’s 100 percent right, that he probably would have thought AI was really cool, warts and all. He would have been vibe coding little things to play with, to serve some super niche purpose, annoyed when they broke, running up against token limits, but ultimately, continuing to be curious. Wondering what would be the next leap in the exponential technology curve he didn’t just live through, but kept him alive.

His diabetes diagnosis as a teen was supposed to be a sentence of early death. But he, giving a lot of credit to medicine and science, pushed that out. Multiple hospital stays, lost little toes on each foot, and early adoption of a new technological innovation, an insulin pump, kept him going. Later, attempts to save his leg meant another long hospital stay, including hours in a hyperbaric chamber, in the hope that high pressure oxygen could overcome a circulatory system choked by decades of diabetic stress and strain. Then a fancy prosthetic, which kept him mostly mobile, at least enough for 2-year-old Molly to include him when choreographing dances. He marveled at the fact that they could have fitted him for a mountain climbing specific leg, if he was climbing mountains in his 60s, or ever for that matter. Maybe he should start, he quipped.

He would probably make fun of how long winded I can be sometimes. Encourage me to get my message across more quickly. I’d argue some of this is writing for writing’s sake. Though who didn’t want Moby Dick to be shorter. Maybe he would have had a point. He’d definitely recognize my procrastination leading to me finishing this the morning of, even though I’d been writing it on and off for months.

Whether I missed it due to my disinterest in school, or it was a failure of my education, I don’t remember reading James Baldwin. But if there was a single thing I’ve found since my dad died 10 years ago that represents everything I had come to know about him it is a Baldwin quote from Notes on the House of Bondage:

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

Written 3 years before I was born, and not read (or at least remembered) by me until 35 years later, 5-ish years after he died. Yet today it’s a sentence that I want to quote constantly and aligns with, or maybe more honestly, shapes, my entire worldview. At the same time it captures him so perfectly it seems impossible he didn’t quote it to me himself. Maybe he did and I’ve just forgotten. I’d pay so much to be able to talk to him about Baldwin now. I came to Baldwin too late to be able to know his thoughts on that particular quote, or the America that Baldwin shows those who have lived in the skin of the marginalizer not the marginalized.

Both my parents taught me a responsibility to others. But my dad, usually stoic and measured, had a particular empathy for the suffering of children. Children carry an extra innocence, they are even more subject to circumstance, they bear the pain of decisions they haven’t made, consequences they don’t deserve. I almost said he had a weak spot, but it’s not a weakness to care for others. If anything, being able to feel the pain of others is a super power. It’s unfortunate that ability isn’t much more widespread. The world would be a much better place if that ability was so common as to be rendered unremarkable.

I hate the idea that you have to be a parent to care about children, or to have a daughter or wife or sister to care about women. That feels like an excuse or a cop out. But I think it’s inarguable that when you’re a parent, shit affecting kids hits different. It’s not necessary to see other’s humanity, but it certainly intensifies things. I’m not much for celebrations or holidays generally, but certainly seeing the sentiment “There’s no Father’s Day in Gaza” moves from a gut punch to a sledgehammer to the chest within the context of being a father. Which is worse, I now wonder, it not being Father’s Day because I was killed in a genocidal rampage, or because my daughter was? Worse for me, worse for her, worse for the world, worse for our humanity?

Where is the morality in punishing a trans kid for trying to live as themself? For wanting to play a sport with their friends. For them having the moral audacity to not want to take their own life, and instead try to thrive. Where is the morality in believing that you can keep a 5-year-old in a cage while trying to ship them across a border to a country they’ve never seen? Where is the morality in your lack of outrage at another Black child dying mysteriously surrounded by white “friends” or found swinging from a tree in an “apparent suicide?” What is moral about a political class that’s more interested in protecting predators than protecting child victims? Maybe some of you need to better evaluate your own morality before casting aspersions on the morality of others.

But Baldwin wasn’t done yet. The quote continues.

“Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is what they have seen in us–or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.”

Baldwin could have written “parents” but he didn’t. “Elders” means something different. Elders are a much wider, more inclusive group. It includes found families, found parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, mentors, leaders. So it’s not just that all the children are our children, it’s that all of us owe something to those children. Those children are learning from all of us. We are teaching them, maybe more so when it’s not intentional, or we’re not aware of it, as when we sit them down to teach them something.

That is the legacy my dad was leaving me before we lost him. Always teaching, even when not teaching, even while silent. That’s what I strive to match in raising my own child, and what we owe all the children. Because we can’t teach them everything, run through every scenario, pre-program every response. But we have to send them out into the world, their world, anyway. They are not just copies of us, but they do learn from us, all of us.

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality. Or, I am saying, in other words, that we, the elders, are the only models children have. What we see in the children is what they have seen in us–or, more accurately perhaps, what they see in us.”

Thank you, James.
Thank you, Dad.