Transcript

Thirty Days · After the Signal

0:04
SPEAKER_00: I'm Thomas Calder.
0:05
SPEAKER_00: This is After the Signal.
0:07
SPEAKER_00: Let's go a little farther down the road.
0:10
SPEAKER_00: Last time, I told you about my oldest son, Chad.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: About a football game.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: About authority.
0:15
SPEAKER_00: About the moment a father decides someone no longer has permission to treat his son
0:20
SPEAKER_00: a certain way.
0:21
SPEAKER_00: And I told you that this week, I wanted to tell you about my father.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: This story is harder.
0:26
SPEAKER_00: Because next Monday will be 30 years since my wedding.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: October 19th.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: My father was my best man.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Four years later, he was gone.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: My father lived in Chicago.
0:38
SPEAKER_00: At the time, my wife Allie and I were living in the Tampa Bay area.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: Our oldest son, Chad, had been born in 1999.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: My father met him once.
0:47
SPEAKER_00: Just once.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: That's difficult for me to say even now.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: Not because they should have had some particular relationship I can imagine perfectly.
0:56
SPEAKER_00: That's one of the traps of grief.
0:58
SPEAKER_00: We invent the years people didn't get.
1:00
SPEAKER_00: The Christmas mornings,
1:02
SPEAKER_00: the birthdays, the baseball games, the conversations, the ordinary Tuesdays.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: We build an entire life out of things that never happened.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: What I know is simpler.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: My father met his grandson.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Once.
1:17
SPEAKER_00: And then, in May of 2000, we learned that my father was sick.
1:21
SPEAKER_00: Very sick.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: My sister and I went to Chicago almost immediately.
1:26
SPEAKER_00: We spent about a week there.
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Thirty days after his diagnosis, my father was dead.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: Thirty days.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: There are phrases you can say quickly that contain an entire rearrangement of a life.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: That's one of them.
1:39
SPEAKER_00: But something happened the day I arrived in Chicago.
1:42
SPEAKER_00: Something I have never forgotten.
1:44
SPEAKER_00: I learned that Allie was pregnant.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: We were going to have another baby.
1:48
SPEAKER_00: So I was able to tell my father before he died that there would be at least one more grandchild.
1:54
SPEAKER_00: He would never meet him, but he knew.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: That child is Ben.
1:59
SPEAKER_00: He's 25 years old now.
2:00
SPEAKER_00: And I am profoundly grateful that my father lived long enough for me to tell him Ben was coming.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: Think about that for a moment.
2:08
SPEAKER_00: My father never heard Ben laugh.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Never held him.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Never watched him take a first step.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: Never saw the person he became.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: Ben never heard my father's voice directed at him.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: Never sat across a table from him.
2:22
SPEAKER_00: Never asked him a question.
2:24
SPEAKER_00: They never occupied the same room.
2:27
SPEAKER_00: And yet they are connected.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: Because families don't begin and end with the people who happen to be alive at the same time.
2:34
SPEAKER_00: We reach backward.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: We reach forward.
2:37
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes without knowing we're doing either.
2:40
SPEAKER_00: I've been thinking about that a great deal as I've written the Executor series.
2:44
SPEAKER_00: The books are about inheritance.
2:46
SPEAKER_00: But increasingly, I'm not sure inheritance is the right word.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: At least not if we hear it only as something handed from one person to another.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: Because so much of what we received was never deliberately given.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: My father didn't sit me down and say, here are the things I want you to carry after I'm gone.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: There was no list,
3:06
SPEAKER_00: no final lecture,
3:07
SPEAKER_00: no perfectly constructed scene in which a dying father explained his life
3:11
SPEAKER_00: to his son.
3:13
SPEAKER_00: Real life is rarely that cooperative.
3:15
SPEAKER_00: People leave unfinished.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: Questions remain unanswered.
3:19
SPEAKER_00: Things that should have been said aren't.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: Things that seemed unimportant turn out, years later, to have mattered enormously.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: And somehow we inherit those too, the unfinished things.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: That became important when I wrote Thomas Ward.
3:35
SPEAKER_00: Readers of The Executor's Silence know that Thomas leaves his son Elias much more
3:40
SPEAKER_00: than an estate.
3:41
SPEAKER_00: But I think there's a danger in reading a story like that
3:44
SPEAKER_00: and imagining Thomas knew exactly what he was doing.
3:47
SPEAKER_00: That he had everything planned.
3:50
SPEAKER_00: That every object was placed perfectly.
3:52
SPEAKER_00: Every lesson delivered.
3:54
SPEAKER_00: Every consequence anticipated.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: I've been working very hard on the executor's discovery to resist that.
4:01
SPEAKER_00: Because fathers aren't architects standing above their children's lives.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: We're inside the building too.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: We make decisions with incomplete information.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: Here's something the internet is particularly bad at.
4:12
SPEAKER_00: Uncertainty.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Internet culture rewards certainty.
4:32
SPEAKER_00: Hot takes.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: Instant conclusions.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: Heroes.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Villains.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Who was right?
4:37
SPEAKER_00: Who was wrong?
4:39
SPEAKER_00: Whose fault was it?
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Which side are you on?
4:42
SPEAKER_00: Maybe this is where the boomer influencer earns his keep.
4:45
SPEAKER_00: Because age has made me less certain about a lot of things I once knew absolutely.
4:50
SPEAKER_00: Not less principled.
4:52
SPEAKER_00: Less certain.
4:53
SPEAKER_00: Those are different.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: At 25, I could tell you exactly what I would do in situations I had never experienced.
5:00
SPEAKER_00: At 60-something, I've experienced enough of them to know how much I didn't know.
5:05
SPEAKER_00: Maybe wisdom isn't accumulating answers.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: Maybe some of it is learning which answers deserve a little humility.
5:12
SPEAKER_00: I don't know everything my father intended to teach me.
5:16
SPEAKER_00: I don't know which parts of him I inherited deliberately and
5:19
SPEAKER_00: which simply accumulated through years of being his son.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how much of him is in the way I raise Chad and Ben.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: I know some, probably less than I think, and probably more than I realize.
5:32
SPEAKER_00: But I know this.
5:34
SPEAKER_00: The day I arrived in Chicago,
5:36
SPEAKER_00: believing I was going there to begin saying goodbye to my father,
5:39
SPEAKER_00: I learned another son was coming.
5:42
SPEAKER_00: One life nearing its end, another life just beginning.
5:46
SPEAKER_00: And for a brief period of time,
5:48
SPEAKER_00: my father knew about the grandson who would outlive him by decades.
5:52
SPEAKER_00: There was something on the other side of 30 days.
5:55
SPEAKER_00: He wouldn't see it, but it was coming.
5:58
SPEAKER_00: No.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: Next week, two days following the release of After the Signal, Chad is getting married.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: My oldest son.
6:06
SPEAKER_00: The little boy my father met once.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: The seven-year-old whose football team I coached.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: The high school quarterback I told you about last week.
6:14
SPEAKER_00: He's asked me to officiate his wedding.
6:17
SPEAKER_00: And that brings us back to October 19th.
6:20
SPEAKER_00: Thirty years ago, my father stood beside me when I married Allie.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: He wasn't merely at the wedding.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: He was my best man.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: Next Thursday, two days before Chad gets married, I want to talk about that.
6:33
SPEAKER_00: About fathers, sons, marriage.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: What survives.
6:38
SPEAKER_00: And what it means to stand in a place once occupied by someone who isn't there anymore.
6:43
SPEAKER_00: I've joked about the Lion King's circle of life.
6:46
SPEAKER_00: And yes, I know that's dangerously close to becoming sentimental.
6:50
SPEAKER_00: But sometimes the obvious metaphor is obvious because it's true.
6:55
SPEAKER_00: My father stood beside me.
6:57
SPEAKER_00: Now I will stand in front of my son.
7:00
SPEAKER_00: And somewhere between those two moments are 30 years of marriage,
7:04
SPEAKER_00: two sons, loss,
7:06
SPEAKER_00: mistakes, laughter, work, grief, stories, and a life my father never got to see.
7:15
SPEAKER_00: Maybe inheritance isn't a straight line.
7:18
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's a circle we don't recognize until we've traveled far enough around it
7:23
SPEAKER_00: to see where we started.
7:25
SPEAKER_00: I'm Thomas Calder.
7:26
SPEAKER_00: This is After the Signal.
7:28
SPEAKER_00: Until next time, strengthen the things that remain.