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I'd rather not write any more obituaries, but...
Well, 2024 is going to go down as a rough year for me. My father died this morning. John David Greer—that's him on the left—was born in 1938 in Aberdeen, Washington, a fishing and lumber port on the Pacific coast. (You might remember it as Kurt Cobain’s birthplace.) He had a rough childhood, with physical abuse a constant feature; my grandfather was a bitter old man by the time he was thirty, long story there, and beat his children savagely. Like me, Dad was autistic; unlike me, he didn’t have motor dyskinesia (aka fumblefingered clumsiness, one of the less useful habits of my nervous system) and turned out to be gifted at sports, which I never was. His time playing basketball on high school and junior college teams gave him confidence and some of his favorite memories.
Since he didn’t want to be drafted—older friends of his got blown to bits in the Korean War—he went to college right out of high school and got an education degree, as teaching was an exempt profession in those days. To his lasting regret, he also married my mother, about whom the less said the better; she popped two kids, got him to pay her way through college, and then dumped him like a bag of old clothes and completed the metaphor by taking him to the cleaner in the divorce courts. He recovered after a while, and married my stepmother, Michiko (aka Marian) Fukai, a much nicer person. Despite more than occasional problems—my father was a difficult person at the best of times—they remained married and relatively close until his death. (That's the two of them below on the right.)
He and I were never particularly close. Partly that was because of his job—when he got home from a day at school he was sick of dealing with children, and while I can certainly sympathize, it didn’t make things easy for me. Partly, though, it was because we were far too much alike to get along easily. He managed not to follow in his father’s trajectory, and he never beat me or my sister, though I suspect he had to white-knuckle it at times; we were frankly just as difficult as he was. During my teen years and twenties we were constantly at each other’s throats. I couldn’t visit him at all without having him pick a fight. It was only decades later that I found out why. His father had wanted to be an architect, convinced himself that he couldn’t hack it, and became a firefighter instead. Dad got sucked into the same drama, wanted to be an architect, convinced himself he couldn’t hack it, and became a schoolteacher instead. I wanted to become a writer. Dad was waiting for me to crumple and make the same kind of choice he and his father did, and all his own self-hatred and pain came boiling up as a result. Then I did the one thing he never expected and succeeded instead, becoming a published author. Once that happened our quarrels stopped cold. Thereafter we got along tolerably well, though it helped that by then we were a few thousand miles apart.
His health was fairly robust, though he did his level best to ruin it with a two pack a day cigarette habit—he stopped about ten years ago, when he started coughing up blood from the emphysema—and a habit of guzzling cheap boxed wine. The medical industry contributed mightily by pushing him into heart surgery he probably didn’t need; the wound got infected with S. aureus, one of many microbes that run riot in US hospitals these days. The infection nearly killed him twice, and though they finally got rid of it with huge doses of toxic antibiotics, he was a huddled shadow of his former self afterwards. He still somehow made it to 86, which is pretty impressive under the circumstances.
As for me—well, I don’t think I really needed a reminder of what the Elizabethans called “mutabilitie,” the temporary and fragile nature of all things human. It showed up in my inbox this morning anyway, one more reminder that the universe has its own agenda and doesn’t concern itself with ours. Dad being the kind of man he was, by his request, there will be no memorial service and no funeral: just fading photographs and dim memories, traces of a life no more extraordinary than anyone else’s, which had an impact on a few other people and then was over.
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