In Memoriam – My Dad

Daniel T. (“Father Dan”) Leahy, 21 March 1944 – 6 December 2024

In the space of 24 hours across December 5 and 6, I lost my father to a massive stroke. I won’t share that story right now. It’s still a bit of a train wreck in my memory that’ll probably take a while to shake out. Today I just want to talk about the man I knew.

Growing up a child in a divorced household, I was faced with a paradox: at one point, my parents chose each other as spouses and had two children; then, when I was around 6-7 years old, my mother chose otherwise and then Dad lived apart from us. The choices of adults set the stage for a sometimes-fraught relationship with my father.

Given that brief background, Dad was not much different from any other father I’ve seen or read about or seen in some form of entertainment: however well-meaning our interactions, I often felt like I was disappointing him somehow. He had a critical streak and would inevitably ask about whatever aspect of my life I was screwing up on.

It’s only when I talked with my bonus mom, Marilyn, that I learned how Dad would brag to his brothers or peers about things his son had done. Dad was a Silent Generation type: loud among his brothers or at the bar, quiet in his personal habits, not much on expressing emotion. I had to learn to gauge his thinking by inference. After 30+ years of interacting with him as an adult, I gradually (if reluctantly) learned to accept this dynamic. He was who he was, and I wasn’t going to change that. There are a lot worse alternatives out there.

I would like to talk about Dad at his best. I tried to explain some of this to Robin (my Mrs. Leahy) last night as we shared a hospital room with the husk that was his spiritless body.

I got to know Dad in bars, starting when my sister and I were young and he and Marilyn would take us up to Petite Lake, a smaller part of the Chain o’ Lakes in Northern Illinois. He liked to enjoy a Tanqueray on the rocks (“no fruit!”) and before a very mild stroke a few years ago put a stop to smoking, a few Kent cigarettes outside. When I moved to Florida to get away from the Illinois snow, I moved in with Dad and Marilyn for a few months before getting my own place, giving us the right distance apart. It was also around that time that I got a full-time hotel job at Disney. Dad was a sales and marketing manager for a hotel on International Drive, so we finally had a common frame of reference (English literature and science fiction were not among his interests). I could vent about guests and occasionally get some insights into how or why service industry managers behaved the way they did. Despite his best efforts at encouragement, I never sought a career in management–one of many ways I vexed him as a son.

Through years of those types of after-work meetings in bars or at dinners with Dad and Marilyn at The Palm Restaurant, I got to know Dad as he was and on his own terms. We learned each other’s abilities and limitations. It was from these conversations that I learned I could take a day trip anywhere in Florida and ask him about the location before I went. For any city you cared to name, he could recommend a point/site of interest, a decent restaurant, and a good saloon. He could throw out puns and long-form jokes with panache, a practice I picked up. He also had an encyclopedic knowledge of college football: team colors, mascots, game traditions, etc. I also could count on him to provide grill timing tips for my Weber. Even after retiring, he could recommend the best football games to watch. I will miss that. Hell, I’ll miss all of it.

There were things I did growing up that baffled Dad: As a young kid, I cried easily and was bullied a lot because I was a small, weak kid and couldn’t find it in myself to hit back, even when I tried to learn karate. Where Dad played center for his high school football team for three years, I was terrible at sports. I got an English literature degree. As noted previously, I had–and still have–no interest in managing other people, despite the increased pay. I was inept with dating (my Mrs. Leahy didn’t find me until I was past 50). I quit drinking in 2020.

On the flip side, after years of asking what I got my lowest grades in at school, I had semesters in college and grad school where I got straight As, rendering him speechless. I pursued and earned a master’s degree in technical writing, which he decided was “a good choice.” I started getting more respectable jobs, first in the defense industry and then at NASA. When I got downsized out of Huntsville, Alabama, Dad surprised me for the first time in my life by suggesting I go freelance and move back to Florida. It was one of those rare moments where he offered me a direct compliment by expressing confidence in my ability to pursue work on my own. I kept that email and remained a freelancer for ten years. And after years of watching me struggle in my relations with the fairer sex, he got to see me marry my best friend, as he’d done with Marilyn.

This obituary is starting to wander too much in a Bart-centric direction, and I apologize. In the end, though, what I’ve got from Dad aside from trinkets or emails is my memory of that complex middle ground that is a father-son relationship, which ended much sooner but better than either of us could have imagined. Whatever thoughts he had about that relationship I’ll have to infer from our interactions and whatever he told others. He was too shy or too proud to share with me directly. I’m okay with that. And at this point, I’m going to have to be, aren’t I?