“My dad died about thirty years ago.

When I was growing up, he had what I would call a well-managed relationship with alcohol. He got drunk, but never at times or places where it would interfere with work or family. He generally had a highball or a beer after work, maybe one or two watching football. He wasn’t the kind of guy who got mean or sloppy when drunk. He was fairly typical of dads of that era, I think. Not a monster, nor a saint. Just a guy getting along.

Dad had not done well after he and my mom divorced. He did not do well living alone, and his second wife...had issues. She didn’t stick around after he was diagnosed with cancer.

He lost a leg due to side effects from chemotherapy, and the whole experience put him into a tailspin that he never recovered from. The deterioration of his mental health made it harder to take care of his physical health, and the decline of his physical health made his mental health problems worse. In the end, it killed him after ten years of slow decline.

My sister and I had to clean out his apartment. It was a sad job, made sadder by the evidence of what his life had been like laid out around us.

The apartment was FULL of junk, the sort of junk advertised on late-night TV and QVC. A fair amount had never been taken out of the boxes. There was a path from the bedroom, to the recliner in the living room in front of the big screen TV, to the kitchen. If you were to do this scene in modern times, it would be junk from Amazon.

Junk, and liquor bottles – the plastic ones cheap whiskey came in, and 7Up bottles. He evidently never lost his taste in cocktails.

This being the days of videotape, a significant part of the junk was VHS tapes. Some of it was popular movies, but a lot of it was porn, and about half of it gay porn. If my dad was bisexual, I had no idea of it growing up, though his generation never would have let on, and I don’t think he was any different.”