This was supposed to be an obituary

My father died yesterday. This is not his obituary.

Joel Schiavone, 1936 - 2024

This was supposed to be an obituary, but I’m bad at writing on demand.

My first book deal was for an art book. In nonfiction, you typically sign the contract before writing the book. I had no idea how to write a book. After delivering a table of contents to my editor, I panicked. I stopped writing, stopped replying to emails, and entered a month-long depressive, insomniac spiral that I barely survived. Finally, I asked my publisher if I could pay the whole advance back and put the project to bed. They said no. I asked for an extension on the deadline. And then I wrote the book.

Fiction is different: you write the book before selling it. My first novel was a breeze, an absolute delight. I wrote it in a few months then sent the manuscript off to agents. Another few months later, I had a book deal. What I’m trying to say is that I enjoy writing but do not respond well to external pressure. What I’m trying to say is that my father died yesterday and it’s my job to write his obituary.

My father and his banjo band on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1967.

If this were an obituary, it would make mention of the fact that my dad was a banjo player who owned an international chain of banjo nightclubs (Time Magazine’s “Nightclub of the 1960s”); he ran for governor of Connecticut and mayor of New Haven (as a Republican, though he later converted to the Democratic party); he owned a hockey team and a wide portfolio of mismanaged businesses; he restored and revitalized downtown New Haven; he ran a series of Jazz festivals; he was inducted into the Banjo Hall of Fame; and perhaps less notably, he was my dad.

Did he raise me? No, not really. I saw him once a month at most. But whether despite or because of his absence, I’d like to think I absorbed the best of him.

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For the last few months of his life, my dad lived in a nursing home. He never really settled in. He didn’t want to be there. He resisted it with all his remaining strength, daily begging to return home. But he had no money for homecare. He died alone in a shared room, destitute and in massive amounts of debt.

When I visited the facility, I could help noticing that other patients’ rooms were decorated with garlands, family photos, cards, paintings from arts and crafts groups. My father’s room was bare except for the TV he requested after losing the ability to read. There were only two things pinned to his bulletin board: an American flag (likely provided by staff) and a gift card to a lowbrow cafe chain.

My father was grand in many respects, but he did not give a shit about food. (He also loathed swearing – sorry, Dad.) Living alone, he subsisted on frozen meals and hot dogs. He did take pleasure in going out to eat, but only because he loved people, loved pomp and circumstance, loved being out in the world. More often than not, he’d order something off-menu and kind of gross, like baked beans or creamed spinach or mac and cheese. His great love was black-and-white milkshakes. In the last few months of his life, he refused almost all food except ice cream. He never drank alcohol (nor do I – thanks, Dad). He subsisted on bad food and fine culture. He was the sort of person to show up at the Metropolitan opera with a stain on his shirt and a stomach full of canned tuna. I really loved him.

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At some point yesterday, in the eerie hours after my father died but before his body was removed, I lost my wallet. The next morning, having no money for food (and feeling very much like my perpetually-broke father), I walked to the cafe bearing my “stolen” gift card. (When I invited my father’s partner along, she replied that she never wanted to eat there again for the rest of her life.) It is indeed a nasty restaurant, but it was my father’s favorite restaurant. He had horrible taste in certain arenas, and exquisite taste in most others. For example, his diverse painting collection bears the mark of an adventurous yet discerning aesthetic sense (trust me, I’m a painter). You might rightly call him a snob. He was an elitist to the core, a graduate of both Yale and Harvard, a proponent of the misguided if not outright offensive idea that the poor and uneducated should just, like, get their act together, fly to France, read some political biographies, listen to early jazz. So I find it darkly charming that this man’s favorite restaurant served processed ham sandwiches on sugar-laced bread.

When I arrived at the cafe today, I ordered a Southwest chicken salad even though I’m vegan. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there were no vegan options. Who cares? I’m in mourning, after all. I’ve decided that I’m going to do a lot of stupid shit while in mourning. You might be thinking that I already lead a pretty stupid life – I’m jobless and perpetually between countries – but now I have official license to do whatever the hell I want. My dad always did whatever the hell he wanted, license or no. Here’s a newspaper quote of his I found while researching the obituary (which I really am going to write later today): “I do things most people think are outrageous. I don’t think they are.”

This really says it all. It speaks both to his actions (outrageous) and his mindset (nothing is outrageous). For better or worse, I’m just like him. My life is outrageous. It’s equal parts fun and messy. And whether or not it’s worth the damage it causes, it’s my only option. Like my father, I am unsuited for regular life. Neither of us could’ve survived a day job. Like him, I am professionally unreliable and fiscally irresponsible and socially erratic; but also like him, I fucking love being alive. I just love it!!! Even when living sucks, it’s incredible. I love waking up in the morning and not knowing what will happen that day. I don’t care how naïve that might sound. I don’t care how dismissive you might be. I think I’ve had a fairly difficult life and I still fucking love being alive. Life, to me and my father both, has always been this big question of What do you want to do? And everyone gets to answer that question in a million different ways as long as they live.

What would it mean to carry on my father’s legacy? It might mean: starting a bunch of businesses and burning them all to the ground (sometimes literally); getting married and divorced three times; making decisions that hurt those closest to me; and just generally fueling my exploits with a surplus of ego and a deficit of empathy and introspection. (I should note that in his final decade he did a lot of reflecting on past mistakes, coming to terms with his role in the dissolution of many close family relationships.) So okay, fine, I’ll try to learn from his mistakes. But I also want to learn from the unbelievable scale of his ambition and vitality, the way he refused to bend to any limits. I think the average person does the opposite, living with these fake self-imposed limits on top of the very real limits we all face as humans in human society. I think the average person is dissatisfied and believes there’s no other option. My father never believed that, not for an instant, not even when his circumstances were beyond repair. He always believed there were things that could be done. Even in the final chapter of his life, unable to do much of anything but talk and sleep, he insisted he would soon regain his health. He insisted he would do stuff like host another jazz festival and “create a new neighborhood” in New Haven (whatever the hell that means). This stubborn insistence was depressing in one sense – might not acceptance have been more comfortable for him? – but ultimately his insistence was what kept him alive so long past his expiration date.

The last photo of us together.

My father seemed to exist on his own special and elevated plane of being. Which is why it came as a surprise to everyone yesterday that he could ever do something so quotidian, so unoriginal as dying. Where was the trademark showmanship, the disregard for convention? Where was the sleight of hand, the wink? (He was famous in his day for going on stage in a backless suit, then turning around to expose his bare behind. He even pulled this stunt at his own [third] wedding.) How could a man like that just go ahead and do what everyone else does: stop breathing and lie perfectly still until the crematorium takes him away? It’s difficult to square such an anticlimactic exit with the nine sparkling decades leading up to it. I am still waiting for more sparkle. Nothing is happening. There’s no sparkle. It’s just me and my stupid free sandwich.

I don’t know if I believe in spirits or even souls, but I do believe in ideas. My father was full of ideas, his most outlandish being that he could outlive death. I like to think that in writing this, I’m proving him right.

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