9 Years Without My Dad: A Tribute to the Man Who Always Showed Up ❤️‍🩹

Five memories of a classic rock loving dad, the completion of a nine-year cycle and learning to find the universe exactly where you are.

It genuinely feels like yesterday that I wrote a tribute on the eighth anniversary of my dad’s sudden passing. It also genuinely feels like yesterday that a clear line in the sand was drawn where one moment he was here and the next, a police officer was calling to let me know he had been found dead.

No matter how many years pass every single detail of that day is permanently etched into the fiber of my body. I detailed the raw anatomy of that grief last year, an if you want to read it it’s linked above but consider this your broad trigger warning for the sudden loss of a parent.

The short version is that a few weeks before his death he came down with what felt like a standard flu. He went to urgent care where the doctor presumed the same and told him to go home and sleep it off. Unfortunately that genius advice sealed his fate and erased any remaining chance of life saving medical intervention. Because that “flu” was actually bacterial meningitis.

Now we are nine years out. In numerology the number 9 represents the ultimate point of completion. It’s the final stage of a massive cycle before the cycle resets and represents the end of an era, a deep integration of everything that has been learned and the final transition of turning raw agonizing experience into wisdom. Nine years means you have walked through an entire evolutionary cycle of grief and you have lived through the shattering, rebuilding and the quiet realization that the person you lost is now woven entirely into the blueprint of who you are.

To honor the completion of this nine-year cycle, I didn’t want to just write about the day he left, I wanted to write about how he lived.

So, I’m sharing five distinct stories that describe him (and his astrological placements) to an absolute T. He was a deeply practical slightly stressed but very mellow and fiercely protective Virgo Sun, Capricorn Moon and Scorpio rising who showed up with 100% reliability and love.

Pour yourself a drink and let’s get into the archive of the man who always showed up.

1 - The Jonas Brothers Era

Like many zillenials I had a full-blown Jonas Brothers phase as a tween. During their peak (2007–2010), I’d buy single tickets to their shows because you had a much better chance at scoring a floor seat in the first 10 rows versus trying to buy two or more tickets seated together. Most venues wouldn’t allow you in without a parent if you were under 14, so my practical ass Virgo Sun / Capricorn Moon dad would buy a cheap nosebleed ticket just so he could legally walk me in then peace out.

But one time I begged him, “Dad, please just sit in your seat and watch the show. You’ll love them! You’ll totally become a Jonas Brothers fan!” (Yes, I was fully convinced my 40 something classic rock loving father was about to fall head over heels for three teenage boys from the Disney Channel. Pisces Venus delulu in full effect.) He gave me his signature Virgo dad eye roll and said “Alright already!! Fine. Jeez. I’ll watch the show.” So he goes to his assigned seat and and immediately clocks the energy in the section. He looked around, looked at himself, looked back at the sea of 12 year old girls and immediately realized this was perhaps the worst possible seating arrangement in human history. Moms were side-eyeing him, Dads were rolling up their sleeves and he said he felt like he was two seconds away from getting tackled by venue security or ending up on some federal list. He muttered to himself “Absolutely the fuck not,” and did what any self-respecting Virgo/Capricorn combo would do … walked laps around the entire Izod Center for the duration of the concert.

He did peek into the show a few times and eventually admitted “The bushy-haired one (Nick) is talented.” That’s about the highest praise I ever got out of him regarding the Jonas Brothers. But hidden inside that era was the beginning of an entirely different obsession. … Queen. During the Jonas Brothers’ earlier tours, when the lights went off right before they came on stage the song that played every single time was “We Will Rock You.” Everybody knows that song as it’s built into the DNA of anyone at this point, so of course I knew it. But I didn’t really know Queen or Freddie Mercury. After one of those concerts that he had painstakingly sat through (or walked laps around the venue for) he said “You wanna hear some real music? You know that song that always comes on right before your Jonas Boys? That’s Queen. That’s what the kids my age listened to. Give them a listen.”

2 - The Secret Swiftie Dad

While he never became a certified Jonas Fan Dad, I think he may have been a secret Swiftie. To start, he stood in line at Macy’s in Manhattan at 2 a.m. so I could meet Taylor later that day (the first 150 people to buy her perfume got a meet and greet pass; he was number 133). After getting my pass he went to a half-day at work then drove an hour to pick me up from school. His car overheated on the way but his Virgo ass somehow fixed it and he got us back into the city, made sure I met Taylor and then got me home and himself to work early the next morning. Then there was Taylor Swift’s Speak Now Tour. He lovingly drove me through NYC to Newark traffic hell (iykyk) four times in one week so I could see her. On his freshly minted Twitter account, where he was desperately trying to be hip and with the times, he tweeted “Four Taylor Swift shows in a week? Jeez. She ain’t the Ramones, but what the hell, she’s talented. Not loving all the driving from Queens to Newark though.” He posted that from a bar across the street while nursing a Bud Light or two, knowing he had to drive me home but also knowing two fucking Bud Lights weren’t nearly enough to cope with my teenage Taylor obsession. He’d be in there watching the Mets game, sighing groaning and rubbing his forehead as his beloved team continued to break his heart. He never complained to me about it. He just showed up … every single time.

3 - The day I got him permanently banned from Venmo

So my dad was the kind of Virgo who resisted new technology until the last possible moment. He kept spiral notebooks, used pens down to their skeletal plastic frames and somehow managed to live in NYC for decades without ever adopting a single financial app. But even the most analog Virgo reaches a breaking point, and my dad’s breaking point was having to walk five blocks to TD Bank every time he needed to transfer money to me. At some point practicality overruled caution and efficiency beat tradition. So he got with the times and downloaded Venmo.

He wasn’t incompetent with tech, he just didn’t trust it. Every new update felt like an invitation for disaster, so when he opened Venmo for the first time he treated it like he was defusing a bomb. I walked him through the setup step by step, we got his profile created, he added his bank and he stared at the screen like it was going to bite him. Finally he said “Okay. Send me a test transaction ” Normal people when asked for a test transaction send $1, maybe $5, and something labeled “test” or “checking if this works”.

But I am not normal. So naturally… I requested $100,000 from my father. In the memo line, I typed “cocaine” and I hit submit. Within SECONDS my phone buzzed with a frantic string of texts written in a tone my father NEVER used. The Virgo precision was gone, the calm was gone and the man had entered full existential crisis. His messages, which I will include a screenshot of below, basically read:

“WHAT THE FUCK??? You just requested $100,000 for C O C A I N E ??? My account was just shut down!!!!!!!!!!!???’“

I’m pretty sure he was convinced deep in his Virgo bones that federal agents were already launching out of helicopters. To me it was obviously a joke. No one buys cocaine on Venmo. Surely a Venmo employee would see this and think “Oh, someone is messing with their dad” but apparently not.

And that is the official story of how my father opened Venmo, used Venmo and got permanently banned from Venmo all within approximately three hours.

4 - Where Did the Nuance Come From?

If you’ve ever read my writing and noticed how I try my absolute best to look at all sides of a situation or how I naturally seek out the contrarian point of view even if I ultimately disagree with it, you can thank my dad for instilling that framework into me. Growing up, my mother would routinely shut down any questions against the status quo with a blunt “Because I said so.” But my dad took the exact opposite approach. He would actively engage with me, listen to my arguments, respectfully challenge my positions and push me to think past my initial emotional reactions. Even when we didn’t see eye to eye, we were always able to hold immense respect for each other’s views. He taught me that intellectual disagreement didn’t have to equal emotional disconnection.

When it came to politics he and I agreed on many core issues as we were both fiercely pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ+ rights and aligned on many major social issues. If you had to put us in boxes, he sat slightly center-right while I am firmly center-left. But he never once defined himself by a rigid label like “Democrat” or “Republican.” He deeply despised blind partisanship and his lifelong motto was simple: “I vote the person, not the party.” He wasn’t just talking the talk either, as his voting record was a wild unpredictable roadmap of independent thought. Over the years he went from voting for Bill Clinton, to George W. Bush, to John Kerry, to John McCain, to Gary Johnson and eventually to Hillary Clinton. He embodied his motto to an absolute T.

I’ll never forget the 2012 election where I was about six months shy of turning eighteen and deeply upset I couldn’t vote. I was passionately Team Obama, while he was firmly Team “Obama and Romney are both fucking terrible.” Instead of just picking the standard “lesser of two evils”, he turned the entire election into a masterclass in critical thinking. He spent the day with me researching every single candidate on the ballot. We didn’t just look at the two mainstream options; we dug into the platforms of every third-party candidate running and mapped out everyone’s pros and cons on a level playing field. My dad ultimately went to the polls and voted for the Libertarian candidate, Gary Johnson. He showed me that your vote belongs to your principles and not to a political machine. That lesson stuck with me so deeply that four years later during the 2016 election, I went on to actively volunteer for Johnson’s presidential campaign.

My dad gave me the ultimate gift a writer could ask for, that being a brain that refuses to accept lazy black and-white narratives. He taught me how to think, not what to think.

5- The Underage Four Lokos

Let’s rewind to high school when I was underage (probably 15) and a friend used her fake ID to get us Four Lokos. My dad later found one in my backpack by accident. He had no clue what it was so I nervously explained the concept of a high caffeine high sugar high alcohol drink. Instead of blowing a fuse like my mother would have, he stayed completely calm and asked how I got it. After explaining, he sat me down for a grounded and entirely non shaming conversation about alcohol, drunk driving, safety and boundaries. He told me he’d rather I came to him if I was curious and wanted to try a drink in a safe controlled environment at home, though pragmatically admitted that he knew at my age I “probably wouldn’t listen to him,” but that I could always call him with zero judgment no matter what I’d taken or how late it was, if I ever needed help or a ride home. I admitted to him that I hadn’t even tried the Four Loko yet and decided to say fuck it and ask “Do you want to sample one with me?” I’m sure he figured “how bad could this be?” He took one single sip and then immediately bolted across the room to the kitchen sink seconds away from violently vomiting. After recovering, he said “I take back what I said. Do not drink this shit. I cannot help you if you do. No one on earth could. Jesus, this is absolutely disgusting. This is what you kids drink nowadays????????”

Nine years without him feels like a lifetime and a single breath all at once. Loss changes its physical shape over time but the gratitude for having a father who walked Izod Center laps, stood in perfume lines at 2:00 a.m. and almost threw up over a Four Loko never fades. He was my absolute safe harbor, my intellectual anchor and the blueprint for how I walk through a chaotic world without losing my footing. I miss his eye-rolls, his fierce protection and his quiet reliability every single day.

As this nine-year cycle draws to its close, the lesson he left behind is clearer than ever … showing up isn’t about being perfect, but being solid and anchoring the people you love when the sky starts falling.

So today, wherever you are, raise a glass. To the analog hearts, the independent thinkers and the ones who show up every single time.

Rest easy Dad. We’re still rocking. 🥃🕊️