It’s October So I Guess It’s Time to Wake Up
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Here’s a fun fact about me: Green Day song lyrics and melodies occupy about 37 percent of my brain. Sometimes more depending on my mood and the time of year.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, toward the end of September, what I like to call my Green Day brain percentage ticks up to its annual peak of around 42 percent. I’m sure you’ve heard the song Wake Me Up When September Ends or at least heard of it. If you haven’t, I assume you’ve been asleep for the past two decades. In addition to being the eleventh track on Green Day’s iconic “American Idiot” album, the song was played extensively in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, including at an NFL game in New Orleans and at various benefit concerts. Billie Joe Armstrong played it again during a COVID telethon a few years ago. It has also turned into an annual internet meme.
Wake Me Up When September Ends isn’t one of my top Green Day songs (I promise I won’t subject you to a top Green Day songs list) but it is meaningful to me because it is about fathers and sons. Billie Joe, Green Day’s lead singer and songwriter, wrote the song about his father who died of cancer when Billie Joe was ten years old in the month of… you guessed it… September.
The lyric in the first verse, “Like my fathers come to pass, Seven years has gone so fast,” refers to the time between when Billie Joe’s father died and when Billie Joe moved out of his family home. In the last verse of the song, that lyric changes to “twenty years has gone so fast,” which represents the time between the death of his father and the writing of the song. Side note: I saw Green Day in concert in Miami last year and Billie Joe changed this last lyric to “forty years has gone so fast,” which was a real gut punch. The guy standing beside me who was at the concert alone definitely had tears in his eyes. I almost gave him a fist bump or hug or something but decided to keep staring straight ahead for obvious reasons.
My father died in 2019 right before COVID hit after a long battle with Parkinson’s disease. It was December, not September, but of course, I still thought about the song sometimes. I definitely didn’t adapt it to “wake me up when December ends” or anything because I’m not that much of a weirdo and I was 38 years old at the time, not a child. Additionally, my emotions have also been effectively muted by years of antidepressants, so most life events, even huge ones, tend to be little more than blips on my emotional radar. My father’s death still feels strange to me, like it happened in a different lifetime or that I experienced it in a kind of secondhand way. Like when you’re in a dream and you’re outside your body watching yourself interact in a familiar and playful manner with members of the band boygenius (this is a hypothetical example, of course, not a real dream I have regularly). Maybe that’s how loss always feels. Like all you need is a good, long, preferably dreamless sleep, and everything will go back to normal. Or at least you’ll begin to forget. That’s probably more accurate. You just slowly forget and seek comfort and normalcy in your infinite knowledge of Green Day lyrics.
Anyway, I wrote an essay in early 2020 that was published online in the Washington Post’s parenting section. It’s hard to access now because of the paywall, but I’m proud of it and it’s much more cohesive than my ramblings here. I’m including the text of that essay below because I recently learned that I’m allowed to do that.
You can think of this newsletter as the music video for Wake Me Up When September Ends, which is completely off the rails and probably deserves its own in-depth analysis. In brief, it features recognizable actors (Evan Rachel Wood and Jamie Bell), and instead of being about the loss of a father, it’s about the Iraq War breaking up a young couple. I guess in some ways losing a loved one to war might be similar to losing a loved one to a protracted disease? The worry, the confusion, the sensation of losing parts of a person even when they’re not yet gone. Anyway, here it is if you’re interested.
My old essay that you can read below is, I hope, more like the song than the music video. It’s simple and to the point. Almost like someone else wrote it… or at least another me after a very long nap.
Keep Going, and Other Lessons I Learned While Chasing One Last Rocket Launch with My Dad
Washington Post, January 21, 2020
As I slowed to a walk, I was a bit more out of breath than I might’ve expected after a very short jog.
There was no two ways about it, I needed to get in better shape if I was going to be able to keep up with my dad and his walker.
Of course, this little jog was a bit unexpected so maybe my sudden fatigue was a result of my body not receiving adequate notice that its services were needed. And it was late afternoon in late July in central Florida, so the sun was hot and it felt like I was sucking in warm soup with each breath rather than air.
My dad was on the move again. There was a rocket launch scheduled for 6:24, so he slipped out of his bedroom, out the front door, down the driveway, and around the corner before anyone noticed. When I located him after a few minutes of frantic searching, he was halfway down the next street over. Pushing his gray, four-wheeled walker. Moving quickly, if erratically, at a stumbling and lurching jog.
I chased him down. Stopped a few paces to his right toward the middle of the vacant street, took a few deep breaths, and gave a little wave in his direction.
“Hey there,” I said.
I never knew exactly how to strike up a conversation in these situations. It’s a pretty unique social scenario. What is one supposed to say when chasing down one’s father who has Parkinson’s and shouldn’t be roaming the neighborhood alone?
“Where you heading?”
That seemed like as good an option as any.
“Well, to watch the launch!” my dad replied. His tone suggesting this was a patently ridiculous question.
Where else would he be going?
Verbal communication has never been the bedrock of our father-son relationship and it only got worse has his Parkinson’s deepened.
Once we had established the reason for this fun jaunt, we continued down the street, my dad hunched over, shoving his walker forward at a pace that caused me sufficient cringing, swerving around the edge of the road, splashing through puddles in the gutters left by the afternoon thunderstorms that had swept through an hour before.
We quickly arrived at the end of the street. The neighborhood’s main road left us with two options: left and right. It was not immediately clear which direction would lead us to our desired destination. At least to me it wasn’t clear.
My dad raised his hand in the air. Gesturing vaguely to the right.
“It’ll be that way,” he said.
And off we went. I didn’t see how going anywhere we could possibly reach on foot would result in a better launch view, but who was I to argue. He’s the one who used to work for NASA after all.
I continued cringing constantly as my dad traversed the small, grassy slope from the sidewalk down to the street we had to cross for some reason. I steered him subtly toward the sidewalk ramps that seemed slightly safer, but he eschewed my suggestions—perhaps I was too subtle.
Instead, he continued down the side—or more like middle sometimes—of the main street. It’s not a thoroughfare by any means, but does typically have enough traffic to make one nervous. Particularly when your father is swerving around on his walker, splashing through puddles and continually threatening to crash into mailboxes or cars parked alongside the road.
Finally, at the last street where we could conceivably turn toward home, I convinced him by some combination of magic and luck to turn toward the west. This was counterintuitive—the rocket launches to the east—but I reasoned that we should turn toward home eventually so he wouldn’t run out of steam.
My dad didn’t seem to agree, of course, but he begrudgingly headed in the direction I suggested. Picking up speed until we zoomed past the turn off toward home and continued down the dead-end street toward the swamp.
“There’s nothing but a swamp down there,” I pleaded.
His gait was getting more erratic now and his breathing more labored. I had to spot him constantly, ready to catch.
“Uh huh,” he replied noncommittally.
I made some hand gestures and continued to suggest turning toward home, but to no avail.
We reached the end of the street where three reflective diamond-shaped signs indicated the beginning of the swamp beyond.
My dad dropped to his knees, completely spent. I waited a few minutes before helping him up onto his walker. Fortunately, it was the type that doubled as a seat. After a few more minutes, we started back in the other direction. My dad seated in his walker, pushing himself with his feet while I attempted to push and steer away from the storm drains on the edges.
We managed for the most part—he only wandered off toward the drains a couple times, prompting me to throw my body in front of the walker to stop the momentum. As we reached the end of the street, my mom’s car appeared around the corner. My niece and mom stopped to pick us up and we made the short drive home.
It certainly seemed like a much longer distance just a few minutes before.
Dad spent most of the rest of the evening recovering, but there was some good news. We didn’t miss the launch. It was postponed to the next day. Six o’clock. And now we knew where to go to get a good view.
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Unfortunately, I didn’t make it back to watch the launch the next day. When you have kids and family of your own, sometimes life gets in the way. It was the last launch my dad and I ever chased. He died about five months later from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Because he devoted most of his professional life to the space program, space shuttle and rocket launches were a big part of our shared history. Growing up in Titusville, Florida on the Space Coast meant that launches quickly became somewhat routine. They were something I could always count on being there. Much like my father.
And even though his physical and mental faculties were deteriorating in his last years, his consistency, fortitude, and sheer will to live never wavered. I like to think this outing, one of our last together alone, served as his final lesson to me. Even if it wasn’t one he consciously planned.
No matter how big the obstacles in front of you are in this life, he was telling me, you just have to keep going. Because living each day is worth it. Being present is worth it. Finding that perfect vantage point to see a rocket lift off into the heavens for maybe the five hundredth time in your life is worth it.
Back in July I felt like I needed to put some work in to keep up with my father. I was right. And even though he’s gone now, I have to keep putting that work in. Most importantly, as a father for my three children. Because in many ways, I will always be scrambling to keep up with the man who taught me what it means to be a dad.