Hey Dad - It's me. I forget to tell you something

Thing of what hurts you the most, what bothers you, what you have no power over. Marinate in it. Cry in it. Visualize it.. Just for a second.

Now by the end of this, remember to let it go.

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It was late 2019, right around Christmas when I got the news.

I remember the day I got the call. My entire world was shaken.

I couldn’t believe what I heard.

My older sister Sarina called “Ant, I’m sorry but Daddy past away.”

I feel the same emotions typing that today as the day I heard the news nearly five years ago now.

I sat on my couch for days in the living room, not blinking, not breathing, just sitting. I was married at the time and my then wife was belligerent that I wasn’t paying attention to her. Safe to say things didn’t work out. I had just left my corporate job at the beginning of the world shutting down because of COVID. I was moving into a literal shed to hide from the world not long after to decompress for a year or so.

But this isn’t a story about loss and sadness. It’s a fools game to garner pity from people and to not act conciliatory. My dad wouldn’t be happy that’s how I decided to share. It’s a story of our own strength, our resiliency. It’s letting our pain teach us a thing or two. That’s the beauty of our short time here on Earth.

We can laugh it off, that doesn’t make it not serious. It’s just how decide to digest it.

The story for all of our lives is anything has the potential to become less than satisfactory and to the contrary, that doesn’t mean things aren’t working out. I hope from reading this you see that there is a higher cost in holding onto how you think things should be, rather than trusting how beautiful they can turn out to be.

I know that’s been a journey for me these last few years.

I was so hurt and I didn’t know how I was suppose to ever go on with myself. It turned my entire world upside down and I felt utterly helpless.

I didn’t have a good relationship with him growing up. I think we were so much alike that it was hard to see eye to eye. It was tough and I struggled because of it into my earlier twenties. I never learned how to be confident. I never learned how to stand on my own two feet because I felt so disconnected from him. I didn’t know what a healthy relationship looked like. There was so much I didn’t know, how was I gonna figure it out without him!

But I was wrong. Dead wrong actually.

It’s talking about him that refuels me. It’s the “even though the world is scary and life can be a real bummer, it’s okay to let it out.” There will be hard days accompanied by loss, wallow, and malice. I think it’s important to frequent the adversity we all face, it reminds us that we are finite and fragile and honestly, what the fuck is wrong with that? Everyone is so wrapped up in themselves these days and has penalized so many of us for ….. wait for it….. being ourselves.

When I met Mary years ago over Tik Tok, Mary was just a follower. She had reached out for a few months to connect and I just didn’t have an interest in connecting with anyone at the time. It didn’t help that once people see you gaining some little platform of power, suddenly everyone can do something for you. I was very selective with whom I let into my circle. Now it’s years later and Mary has been my personal assistant tending to anything I need, anything I ask, and all of the things in between I don’t think of that the best assistant could provide. She is top tier. The relationship is fickle in ways since she lives across the world in the UK and I’m here in New Jersey. It makes connecting quite the endeavor!

If you know Mary, she is a die hard Christ follower. Mary, what’s the terminology here? Is that accurate?

She knows to correct me. Somewhere in a comment section. Whatever.

She’s quite the boss too running a huge church across the pond. (Always space for UK jokes here.) She’s turned out to not just be a great business partner who has been a trailblazer in all of our pursuits the last couple years but a confidante and a friend.

I’ve never considered myself much of a religious person. I’ve always felt guided by my heart and my trust in more of a spiritual element. I’m a spiritual guy, not a religious guy. I may come around one day and decide otherwise but today, that’s how I feel about it. I’m not an atheist, I believe in God, I just have trust issues and can’t put all my faith in any one thing.

That’s just one thing that you could say “separates” Mary and I. Our religion.

You could say it’s the vast Atlantic Ocean that “separates” us. Our environment.

There’s been plenty of opportunities where things didn’t make sense, but we both found the purpose in those pockets of doubt.

Our challenges. Our fundamentals.

Our challenges are rare opportunities to reframe our reality. Remember that the story you tell yourself could be a sad one or a great one, an outstanding one.

There’s not much that makes sense about our relationship other than it works, and it works really well. Not just a friend, an assistant, even a second Mum. She is always keeping my best interest’s in mind. Even if she’s got an agenda in her playbook. (Mary is the queen of having a game plan, always). Theres no denying the age gap, theres no doubt we believe in different things, but that’s the beauty of it not always “adding up” to whatever we type into our metaphorical calculators in our brain.

Everything is anything, and anything is everything.

Got that?

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I knew my Dad loved me, but like any kid, the whirlwind of emotions during adolescence makes it hard to reconcile with what’s real and what’s not. It’s all raw emotion and I was never short on feelings. We had that in common. But I’ve always been hyper sensitive to people, especially him.

He was a feeler. It was passionate, it was charged, it was visceral. There was no second guessing where you stood with that man. He shot you straight and the rest didn’t matter. He was going home at the end of the day with a smile on his face, even if he was pretty cranky from dealing with people. He was just himself. Like any man, he had his faults. All of those feelings didn’t come without a cost.

A burden only men understand I think.

The world around him didn’t matter as long as the ones he loved were taken care of. I’m sure if you left that discussion up to him and my mom, they would have their own feelings on what it meant to be taken care of. Which to me is a moot point because he was my dad and I loved him.

(Love ya ma - Michael is trying to do a gravy this weekend, can you pick up some San Marzanos from the store? I’ll apple pay you. I might invite Jesse and the kids. Love you)

I always felt slighted. I always felt like I never got enough love, enough attention, enough of this or that. Eventually, I really believed it. The story we tell ourselves….

Then he past away and I was devastated.

You see, he taught me how to ride a bike.

A bike that he never showed me how to use the breaks on.

Was it because life for him was always go go go or did him and my brother just think it would be funny to watch me crash-out? Was that him telling me I needed to stand up like a man? There was no sense in stopping for that man.. Of course my first go at it, I busted my ass nearly flying directly into a pond. At that age, it was more like a lake since I was a punny child. Adjacent to my brother and Dad was an unsuspecting Don Vito doppelganger who watched the whole event go down. He ran towards where I crashed my bike in obvious disarray of watching me fly into the bushes and nearly into the water. Screaming, flailing his arms, poor guy probably had a heart attack that day.

How did my dad react? His reaction is imbedded in my memory forever.

He was in total hysterics, hardly breathing him and my brother were cackling so hard.

Our Don Vito lookalike was terrified.

Not my Dad. Unphased. Almost pleased with the whole experience. Laughing his brains out. His face bright red, cheeks full.

It was an unfrogettable expereince.

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He told my brother and I horrific stories of getting into fights growing up. Times when he was beat senseless. Really brutal stuff. I won’t get into the particulars but just real raunchy stuff, that you probably shouldn’t of told a kid. Did that matter to him though? Nope. There wasn’t all of this thinking involved like in today’s world. He was just him.

“You never back down from someone.” he’d say to me.

But in the same breath; “There’s always someone bigger and better, don’t forget that son.”

It was one of those things that was instilled in me that there is always someone bigger, someone better. He was like Popeye. His forearms wide and hard as steel. He loved my siblings and I more than anything. That was it. He lived in a small town for years Upstate NY. He was a contractor and landscaper, usually doing great work but other times rolling off roofs and breaking his legs. He was a rugged as they came and in my eyes, invincible.

If he was saying there’s someone bigger and better, that must’ve been a clear sign to heed to his advice.

I didn’t hear him though.

His tiny oasis in Greenwood Lake NY had all that you could ask for of a “small town” vibe. I’ve talked about this place pretty regularly in past blogs. The town has one traffic light, a couple pizza spots and no shortage of bars. Everyone knew him by name. Not many didn’t know the Cassese last name. Which meant everyone knew my brother and I.

Everyone… He set the bar high for being likeable. Because everyone loved him.

It was a real headache sometimes being known. More specifically when my friends and I would break into the Mc’Callisters backyard Tiki Bar and steal three lukewarm wine coolers leftover from one of their recent shindigs.

Ahh, the best times of my life. I didn’t realize how good I had it. I must’ve been 13 years old secretly choking down a nasty Mike’s Hard lemonade with my buddies in some random forest. Only to run home half cross eyed in time for dinner.

Guess who would be there to greet me?

“Pauly saw you acting like an idiot in town.” My dad would lay his first jab into me upon arrival. Followed by multiple other piercing words that I’m sure he’d hope I heard but of course I didn’t.

I’d say “I know, I know.”

There was the day I went with him to get coffee at the local convenience store and he filled his coffee cup up with milk instead of coffee because he had coffee at home but didn’t want to pay full price for milk so he was rung up for the .99 cent coffee.

I just stood there like a scarecrow in a the middle of a field blowing in the wind. I couldn’t believe the logic here.

Genius? I don’t know. The man was in a league of his own. He was like a modern day caveman. Just wondering through his days working hard and getting by. But that didn’t stop him from expecting the best that I could be.

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I like talking about my memories of him, mostly when I feel sad. Isn’t that funny?

When were good, we don’t even realize all the time that passes. You don’t even realize that at some point, you start standing on your own two feet. And not just doing it, but doing it boldly and proudly. I finally understand that there is someone bigger and better, and that person is the man I am a year from now, five years from now. I’m still becoming him and I know the jumps from my present to get to that man.

My mindset has shifted over the years from feeling cheated on my time with him to appreciating all that he was leaving me with. Even if the moments were confusing, heartbreaking at times, and fueled with emotion. I do my best to put into practice all the silly stories you just read and often wonder how I can reframe the meaning behind it all. I think of this frequently. I enjoy it because it lets me rewrite the script instead of being polluted with the hurt I always felt.

It’s not easy out here. It’s hard losing your parent and I hope that as long as you live, you find the meaning behind the hurt that keeps you stuck and and sometimes even in reverse. It’s the joy of his laughter when I went zero gravity on my bike that day that reminds me “Keep it LIGHT ANT.”

It’s not that serious!

I find that these days the weeks are long, and their usually followed by additional longer weeks. It’s impossible sometimes and for me, things really bum me out because I feel so much and taken so much of the burden on my own. I hate when things don’t go my way. Isn’t that annoying???? It use to drive me insane that people misunderstood me but I learned who I was through the man who was so misunderstood at times. Theres a quality experience that a man can offer in this world when he’s able to put his problems aside and do his best, to do his best.

So often we put the responsibility of our destiny in the hands of the unknowing, the unwilling. When things in our life go awry, when love fades between our partner, we can’t connect with our boss, our kids are rotten, it’s so easy to put the finger to the world. It’s through people like Mary that remind me to love people who are nothing like me, and not to shy away from new things. It’s when it all goes wrong and everything is a “fly ball” so to speak, what do you do?

It’s the tendency of anyone to avoid someone who’s different, to hide away when we feel empty, to shy from the new.

All the crap my Dad gave me, and all the crap I dished back, I have learned that I have all that I need. When I feel I don’t or something doesn’t happen the way I want it to, I trust.

THAT, that’s how it’s suppose to be. THAT when it doesn’t work out, that’s it working out.

It’s stories like these that remind me, everyone is working within their capacity for awareness, wether unconscious or consciously. We will spend our lives putting our finger to the outsides challenges, placing blame, avoiding accountability, and destroying the people that love us.

But, the BIG but in between; if we see how finite we are, everyone around you is just a mirror of yourself. To show you, to teach you, for you to learn something. May that be the most salient point of them all in this.

Always try to be better. Thanks Daddy. Love ya.