I Hate Tony Coan

I’ve been telling myself that it’ll pass in time.

That time has come and it hasn’t passed, it’s been ten years.

After my dad died and a moment had come and gone, the flowers had wilted and the phone calls had stopped, someone described to me grief, how it ebbs and flows like the waves of the ocean, and how when you think you’re drowning you just need to keep swimming, to get through the waves. I never expected to be swimming forever.

I still find myself blindsided by it on a random Saturday afternoon, seeing a dad with his son on his shoulders on the boardwalk. I still get uneasy when I have to talk about it to someone who is oblivious to the loss, just like in the third grade when James Conklin told me to have his mom call my mom so we could go trick or treating together, and instead I sat inside on Halloween, uncertain how to approach the conversation. I’m still unsure if I should feel bad for not having parents, especially when people talk about heading home to their families for the holidays, and in return asked about my upcoming plans and having to feign plans or switch the subject altogether. I still listen to that podcast on the day you died, about the Japanese tsunami survivors and how they go to a farm on the coast and que up to a inoperable payphone to try to speak with their departed loved ones (I cry almost every time). I still wonder what it would be like had it been different, or if I could speak with you one last time, and what I would say to try to alleviate the grief.

But now that it has been so long, I feel like I should be over it.

But this isn’t about me. Hemmingway once said “Every man has two deaths, when he is buried in the ground and the last time someone says his name” and for the life of me, I'm not ready to bury my dad, John A Coan Jr, again just yet.

So here is a eulogy to him, not meant to praise a man, but to celebrate the human experience of his lifetime.

My dad, John A Coan Jr, was born August 2nd, 1948 to two loving parents, John Coan Sr and Agnes (The former passed away in my father’s mid 20’s and I have since drawn a lot of comparisons in our own lives because of that) He had a younger sister, my aunt, Gina. (Who was a natural brunette, but has had blonde hair my entire life a confusing moment when looking at old photographs). He was a child of the post World War 2 baby boom, with his parents settling in suburban New Jersey, growing up in close proximity to many loved cousins whom share warm thoughts about my Dad whenever we continue to cross paths.

My dad had a first word and a first step and a first kiss, but I never learned about these things, so I can only speculate. I imagine his first word was cookie, because as children we used to steal the soft chocolate chip cookies he would keep under his bed, and I imagine his first step was on the hardwood floor of his parents home in South Amboy, New Jersey, and I picture his first kiss being in the playground that was up the street, under the looming water tower that reminds me of a George Tice photo. A playground that was still there when his own mother passed away, and we packed away the contents of his musty childhood home into boxes and the family mini van when I was eight. (The contents of which would sit idly in our basement, until my dad passed away, and we were tasked with separating the memories between his childhood and my own)

He attended Christian Brothers Academy, a private all boys high school (he asked me in the 7th grade if I wanted to try to attend the prestigious school and I was immediately opposed to it by name, Christian Brothers, sounded like a lot of god talk). He attended LaSalle University in Philadelphia, (en route to my first days as a freshman in college, also in Philadelphia, my dad intending to drop me off, got completely lost in the city he briefly called home, became incredibly frustrated, was cut off in traffic and I heard him use the N word for the only time in my life, we didn't talk for the rest of the ride) I’m unsure what his college experience was like, but I recall him talking about being in college in Army ROTC during the Vietnam war, and fighting with his best friend who was joining the peace corps, about the war and the idea of joining the military, but a free ride to colllege was a hard thing to pass up. I always assumed here is where he started drinking, but as I write this, I recall my dad talking about taking the family car from South Amboy to Staten Island to be able to take advantage of the lower drinking age in New York. It is on one of these nights that he told me about a time that he and his friends stole a carful of wooden police barriers and blocked off an entire intersection of Route 35 and Route 9, and as he fled the police showed, and in the rearview he watched a cop get out of his car torn between chasing down the kids and clearing the intersection of the half a dozen sawhorses that blocked any passage. (I wont go into detail about my own teenage delinquencies, but at least its nice to know its a common theme amongst generations)

Long after my dad passed away, my aunt told a story of a woman at her college, also in Philadelphia, who had been dating my dad. The woman cornered her in middle of the campus quad to question her as to why my dad hadn’t been calling her back (Another poorly drawn parallel). But thats all I know about my dad’s dating life, and I always wonder if as woven into our beings as our former partners are, how quickly they fall into the realm of non existence, as if speaking about them takes away from the love you give your current partner.

After college he joined the army as he was contracted to do, and was stationed throughout Germany and Spain, he had missed the Vietnam war by a year, and was stuck doing the menial tasks of a post-war soldier. (This is when he started drinking black coffee, a habit I found disgusting as a child, and cannot escape from everyday in my adult life) At some point while in the army, he took a trip to see tall ships in Canada, I only know this because it was documented in a photo album I remember peering at when I was a kid. It had vaguely had something to do with the bi-centennial. The album was leather bound and heavy and was full of Polaroids of unfamiliar faces and distant ships in a harbor. I brief snap into the spring time of my dad’s life, I never got to ask who the people were, or why going to Quebec to see ships was of any interest. There aren’t a lot of pictures or stories I have from him for this time.

When he got out of the army, I don’t know what he did. I never asked. From what I can gather, he drank a lot. It doesn't seem like he traveled. (Other than a trip to Disney with my sisters as a kid, I don’t know if my dad ever made it to the west coast.) I don’t know if he ever road tripped across the country, listening to The Beach Boys ‘Surfing Safari’ on repeat. But I can assume he didn't, maybe he would've told me. I know on my first road trip across the country, a year after he passed away, and spurred by being unable to grieve, I spent an afternoon crying and listening to a podcast about how suffering over someone’s death is the final way to love them. I didnt put on The Beach Boys. Maybe he backpacked across Europe? Maybe he spent weekends hiking the AT? I hope he did the things he enjoyed though.

At some point in the late 70’s or early 80’s he moved to Lacey township, the town I called home for the first 18 years of my life. I know he was ambitious in his post army career, and was hoping to work with the US State Dept, but that never came to fruition. He was hired as the tax accessor for the town, he apparently got drunk on the steps of the town hall and got fired. I don’t know if that’s true. It actually may have been political slander from his brief foray into local politics, (the only slight memory from my childhood that involves both my parents was my dad renting a trolley to drive around town in, trying to garner political support for his democratic run at town council, in an oddly staunch conservative area.) He recalled to me later in life about being dragged through the political mud by the local republican mayor, a man who had such disdain for my family, that he actively fought my mother in putting up a “Slow Children At Play” sign on our block.

After he moved to Lacey, I’m entirely unsure what his life was like. This was the early 80’s. He once told me and a childhood friend of mine that he had cross country ski’d across the Barnegat bay one winter. (I never saw a pair of XC skis, nor did he ever mention skiing again). But at this point, my dad was about the age I am now. He was probably single, probably gainfully employed, and with his own vices. The vice in particular, drinking, he would occasionally allude to his proclivity to be his most successful hobby, which in turn isn’t the best hobby for longevity. Eventually he joined a program, I imagine this was court ordered, but I honestly don’t know. I haven’t hit rock bottom but can commiserate with the fact that he was my age when he did. Fortunately in this program is where he met my mom, also a recovering alcoholic. I don’t know what the timeline was like between becoming sober and meeting my mom but soon enough after meeting they got married and birthed my brother. They had a cute house. They had my sister. They had me. They built a house down the street. They had my little sister. My mom got cancer. She refused chemo. She died. I was four years old, their marriage had only last eight.

My dad then spent the next 22 years being the best possible father he could be, to four kids, without a partner. This isn’t speculation like the previous parts of this essay. I was there, he tried with all his might and a generosity that landed him financially bankrupt. (I find my disdain for hoarding wealth and an overly magnanimous worldview the two traits I have taken from him, that and weak ankles) He coached baseball and soccer and basketball, he held in his regret as I quit all of them in succession. He let us watch the Simpsons at dinner. He bought pizza every single friday, usually from Bella Capri, his favorite years were when Chad, our neighbors son, would deliver them and he would be able to tip him well. He tried to date, but partners to a widower are hard to find and harder to hold, we made this increasingly difficult as pre adolescent siblings unable to understand that our dad also deserved happiness. He listened to Dr. Norman Vincent Peale in the family van, the power of positive thinking. He saw Dan, a therapist, who had curly hair and looked vaguely like Richard Simmons, from the late night infomercials. I didn’t like Dan, but my dad made me go a couple times, he put me on don’t kill yourself pills (it backfired, Paxil notably has the opposite of the desired effect on a kid in the sixth grade, i wasn’t suicidal til the medicine hit). Even through that, my dad was just trying to help. I am completely able to realize as I continue to watch my friends as they become parents, that we all are just making it up as it comes, and I find that he just wanted to help and would grasp at straws as we all would.

As different as my dad and I are in reality, I can still credit one tiny thing that has grown to help define my life to him. Growing up, he would take us to the video store to rent tapes, usually whatever children’s movie was new and exciting to the four of us, but he would also get a tape for himself. Almost bi weekly, he would get the Bruce Brown film, The Endless Summer. I always remember fondly watching this with him in his bed, on a tiny 13” TV, and falling in love with surfing and the ocean. Now as all people are, my dad was sometimes seemingly at odds with himself, because in my whole life he never willingly went to the beach, and even when I started surfing at the age of twelve, as much as he supported the idea, he never came to hang out and watch.

As pre adolescence turned into full blown adolescence, with four children all within 8 years of each other, my dad’s once hands on parenting style faded. Or maybe we were just able ease the grip. Our humble single parent home was often a basecamp for endless antics, with or without my dad’s blessing (or knowledge). As the rose tint comes to light in my glasses I am able to hope that this was a conscious decision, a safer place to explore minor adulthood, and discover the trials and tribulations of teenage life without an overbearing hand guiding us. (I often think of how moderately well adjusted I was/am thanks to the idea that I would have to discover and figure things out for myself at a moderately young age) But I also reminisce about how different it was, to have a completely open door policy, often without a curfew or question of where you had been or who you had been with. Late night basement parties that my sister would throw, borrowing my bothers car when I was 15 to go to Wawa for snacks, getting brought back by the cops at 3am for trying to ride my bike to the girls house who I had been on the phone with all night. All easily pulled off, but as my aunt loves to put it, despite it all, we all managed to avoid teen pregnancy.

The one thing I can say that I gleaned from my dad during these years was sobriety. In a time when the moment comes to start to steal a beer from your family fridge I remember vividly on New Year’s Eve while still in high school, searching for my him so I could borrow a lighter to light off a bunch of fireworks somewhere deep in the woods that surrounded the town. My dad, aware of my age, unaware of why I was asking for a lighter, told me something that always stuck with me. He said “it’s New Year’s Eve right? Make sure to be careful out there tonight, you know what your mom and I used to call this night right?”

I thought for a moment and had no idea where this was going, he then stepped in and said…

“amateur night”

… and gave a hearty laugh and a smile. Owing to the amount of times he had gotten back from the bar with maybe more than a few under his belt, and possibly maybe a few Dewey’s to his name. That was the most we ever spoke about his struggles with alcohol abuse. But it was enough. Growing up in a home without alcohol, finding punk music and straight edge, and knowing how good I would be at drunk driving, I chose to follow another parallel to my dads life, but with skipping a small step.

As we all began to file out of our childhood home, toward college and adulthood, my own relationship with my dad splintered. I will never be able to pinpoint the moment, or the reason, but space grew and grew. I can only speculate. Eventually he retired, I was in college, I feel like there was something about him claiming disability and on the verge of getting fired, so instead he took his state pension and began to try to enjoy the next chapter.

He intended that chapter to be like this, winters in Florida, growing out a beard and sending poor quality selfies. The rest of the year, he told me on many occasions, he hoped to get an RV, and drive to each of his children’s homes and spoil his grandchildren rotten. He had always said that my mom’s parents, who after my mom had passed away moved into a small addition they had put on our home, had consistently spoiled us. I think they toed a fine line, between caring grandparents and overly generous. Unfortunately his idea of owning an RV never came to fruition and my dad never lived to see a grandchild.

The last few months of my dad’s life were a whirlwind. I was in my mid 20’s, fresh out of a stinging breakup, and a bit oblivious to the finality that I was about to presented with. It all started with him driving through the front door of his chiropractors office. I remember him calling me to talk about it, I was driving home over the Verrazano bridge, and he said “ya know tone, I don’t know what happened, I just blacked out and all of a sudden I was in the waiting room still in my car” they luckily got him out, safe and sound and sat him on the curb. Before the EMT’s could arrive the receptionist from the chiropractor’s office tried to offer him something, anything to help ease the stress of the situation “and ya know tone I looked at her, and just said, I could use a coffee, just black, no cream”

He thought that was the funniest thing he had ever said.

After that they discovered a cancer that was eating at his brain, a holdover from the cigarettes, or maybe the lead paint that caused his father’s cancer. I don’t know for sure but love to speculate. I mean I don’t even know if it started in his lungs, I was always too scared to ask. Metastasis is a word I was vaguely aware of before he was diagnosed, and a word I used often after he diagnosed, in hopes it would explain something I couldn’t understand. But my siblings who were closer were dealing with the in’s and out’s and I was still busy a ninety miles away dealing with my own life as this all came to reality.

I honestly didn’t take it seriously because I couldn’t imagine the loss, it would all surely work out. We had surf and turf dinner before he started radiation, it was late June and we ate on the back porch of home we had all always shared, but it was the first time we had done this all together in a very long time. He was bright and hopeful and excited to be surrounded by all four of his kids, him and I got matching hats because I knew he would be soon losing his hair. I went back to the city to work on a dumb movie. I remember getting yelled at by my boss at the time, and absolutely losing it. I ran away having to have my friend Troy cover me, as I sobbed in the camera truck. Later that night, I confronted my boss, telling him what was happening, and he took me aside to make sure that I knew, that all of this movie stuff, all of this work we do everyday, is bullshit. It was the first time I was open about the possibility that this wasn’t going to end well.

The next time I saw my dad was the beginning of August, my whole family got together for his birthday. At this point a month had passed since he had began radiation, and he had lost all of his hair. But more importantly he had began to lose a lot of his cognitive function, he was weak and couldn’t stand, and you could tell he was having trouble speaking, having to suck on these foam lollipops so that he could attempt to alleviate his insensate dry mouth. As the family ate birthday cake, I snuck away to the bathroom and sobbed.

Soon after that, he began what is called palliative care. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t really know what hospice was. We moved him back home, where he was assigned a health aide, and a bed that tilted up and down. I remember visiting and having to help him get into the shower using what can only be described as a medieval torture device. He was quickly deteriorating, and I was quickly realizing that end of life care was only there to make him comfortable while the doctors had resigned their scope of practice to patients with a more optimistic diagnosis.

This is when I would finally realize I needed to talk to my dad.

He would softly respond in single words or gestures to questions I would ask.

“Why did you and mom get married?”

He gestured toward my eldest brother.

“Which one of us is your favorite?”

A sly smile toward me.

Sooner than imagined the time had come. I remember my brother calling me on a Saturday morning, saying not much more than I should drive home. I played a song on repeat the entire drive, it was The Mountain Goats “Mathew 25:21”, in which John Darnielle sings, “you were a precense full of light upon this earth, and I am a witness to your life and ton its worth.” By the time I got there, it was already too late. I sat in my truck as the funeral director came to wheel his body out of our home, I watched as a black bag was placed in the back of a hearse, unable to piece together how different it would all be.

I have repeated this to friends as the pass through similar situations, but time speeds and slows in these moments. It’s not like a wedding where you are too busy to really give the time to everyone who deserves it, but the moments surrounded by people who loved the deceased play in fast forward, while the moments alone with your thoughts linger as long as years. I remember sitting down to eat with my best friend and his eventual wife and ordering a plate of food which went untouched, I remember buying my first suit, and the kind woman at JCrew, seeing the sadness in my face when I asking the reason for buying it, that she gave me whatever discount she could. I remember losing it during the funeral in a giant church and insisting that we carry the casket out, instead of rolling it on some stupid cart, I remember it rained as we lowered his casket, and thinking that if I was going to cry, it was nice to know that the earth was crying with me.

I searched and searched for a reason to write this and to share this, separate from the catharsis that I feel in putting it all out there. And in the long late night drives that I constantly endure, I’ve come to one realization, that like how there will always be movies set in the high school era, because we all experience those moments, there will also be the death of your parents. For everyone except a select few, there will be that. Despite your relationship with those who were either by nature or by nurture your guardian during your formative years, they will inevitably grow old, they will whither, and however hurried or unhurried the process occurs, they will no longer be with you.

And with that I wish that you fill in the blanks that I consistently left unfilled, and now will never be able to fill. If a lifetime is defined in first and lasts, I hope that you discover the moments that defined them, and in realizing that, the moments that also help to define you. In hindsight I can draw a lot of parallels between my father’s life and my own, between our faults and our strengths, and had I discovered these earlier I would’ve been able to do something. I don’t know what, but something.

Finally, as somber as this has been, let me offer the fact that the memories I have of my dad consistently make me smile, the intricacies that made him and interesting and fulfilling person are that of lore, he was imperfect and I feel like that was shared here, but he also had a heart made of solid gold and would give the shirt off of his back to anyone that needed it, completely to a fault. With that please don’t take the death of a parent or a friend, and the tenuous moments that follow as a muzzle to prevent you from speaking about them or asking about them. Death is a part of life, and we should avoid burying our loved ones a second time by never speaking their name.