I’ve been trying to write the story of my father since his general diagnosis of Lewy Body Dementia, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
We got the news, and I knew that I wanted to write to share his story. I wanted to share what he had taught me, either directly, or indirectly, and share it with those who might not have known who he was.
That was nearly 3 years ago.
Often I found myself stopping in spots where I would cry, or felt lost in my prose and unable to continue in a way that felt right.
Sometimes I would forget to save these drafts and it felt like my thoughts had been lost to history.
Sometimes it just all feels like too much. Or irrelevant. Or if I write it, the story ends.
Now, as I write this, my father has passed.
We, as a family, have a perfectly good, standardized obituary out that we feel proud of and all have contributed to.
Yet still I feel like I need to attempt to give more to those who may not know who he was to achieve my closure.
I feel like I have a certain way with words that I would like to give tribute to my father from my perspective and without the feeling that I’m speaking for my whole family.
This isn’t perfect. There is always so much more. But time is short, and it’s a better glimpse into who I believe my father to be, and how it affected me and my own journey.
So, with that small introduction, please read the story of my father, Bruce Dale Baney from the perspective of his son.
The Beginning
I don’t know the first real memory of my father. I have general thoughts about the start of things but, almost none if feels particularly real, now that I’m 42 and trying to remember 35 plus years ago seems monumentally difficult.
I do, however remember the first, and likely most important thing he ever taught me.
That everything, will pass.
Before telling me this, I remember crying uncontrollably in my bedroom. Over what, I have no idea, but I know that it was one of the first times that my emotions swept me out to sea. I was so emotional that it was painful. The kind of crying that I find myself doing now, where my eyelids seemed to flex past the limits of my orbital bones. The reason could have been anything, but almost certainly over something I perceived as unjust, or unfair. I believe I lashed out at my parents saying they didn’t love me.
I do not know what I was crying over but I know that it felt like my world was ending, and that no one, not even my parents, could understand me.
However, it was in that moment, that he told me that I was not alone, that things were going to be okay, and that things would work out.
And that, certainly, and always, I was loved.
In this moment, he explained his own life and why I didn’t have grandparents on his side of our family. He told me about his parents throwing knives at each other. Of the tobacco, alcohol and domestic abuse. How it led to their early deaths in their 40’s and how it forced a young twenty-year-old to grow up faster and help his siblings.
This, as you might imagine, stuck with me. The idea that one set of grandparents hated one another so much that they were willing to throw knives made me feel sad for my father, and happy to know that was so far from my environment.
It also made me resent my grandparents on that side.
The purpose, however, was not to traumatize me into good behavior, but rather,
to understand some of my father’s history.
To understand there are other things beyond whatever it was that I was
upset about.
And that, at some point, there will be a time where it ends.
At this point, I had stopped crying, and begun, for the first time, to think beyond myself, and beyond the moment of pain and discomfort that I was currently in. Instead, looking at pain and emotion as a thing that, over time and experience, could be controlled.
This “everything will pass” mantra helped me in multiple emotional situations, including his own passing.
It helped inform me as to the son he wanted me to be. One who understood that pain was relative, and all of life, is temporary.
Adolescence
Growing up in the late ’80 and ‘90s becomes the bulk of the memories of my
father.
Of course he would take me places.
Hershey Park. The Philadelphia
Zoo. The Football and Baseball Hall of
Fames. Eat N’ Park.
I think he did this in part because of the sacrifices he was making while
working at Hoy Transfer that required him to often be out on the road and
missing time with his family.
However, I still remember him as being extremely present when he was home, and someone
who fostered all of my loves, to the best that he could.
I grew up looking to find alternative paths than my father. In many ways, my father pushed me away from
the idea of working manual labor as a career.
He didn’t want me to admire his career as much as he wanted me to admire
his work ethic and willingness to sacrifice.
I think, when he was in his late 30’s and early 40’s, he was so determined to
make sure my youth was nothing like his, and was willing to sacrifice to give
me every opportunity that his father never gave him.
He was going to let me chase whatever dreams I had.
However, sometimes my dreaming often overtook my desire to work and actually
attain my dreams.
In these moments, my father would remind me that although I might feel talented and confident, and maybe that I even had a right to be, there were many others who were just as good, and the difference was going to be how willing I was to work, and how respectful I was towards others.
So many fathers have ideas about where they want their sons
to go. My father had ideas of who he
wanted his son to be. It was far more important
that I learn how to balance school, athletics, and a social life, than it ever
was to ever be just one thing.
It was far more important to be a good person.
At some point, around age 7, I would see a psychologist, and overtime be diagnosed with clinical depression and prescribed different psychiatric medicine, eventually settling on Zoloft.
This made a huge difference as I headed into my High School years as I felt better about myself and found routines to help me with my areas of study that I didn’t like or find important at the time.
Some fathers might not have believed in the Science of psychiatric drugs or therapy. Thankfully, mine did.
Also, due to the nature of his parents’ death, I rarely, if
ever, saw him drink. If he had anything, it was always just beer. To my knowledge, he never used tobacco.
This all helped keep me on a straight and sober path in the cultural environment
of State College, where underage drinking and drug use is common with parents
who also may either use or abuse substances.
Think about that for just a moment.
My grandfather, Jack, was an alcoholic, gambling addicted, domestic abuser. Betty was not much better. Yet my father became the opposite of those
people and was showing me how to be a better person.
He was showing me how to be a man.
Young Adulthood
No one is perfect. We are all human. Certainly, that is something I think my father tried to tell me and try to make sure I understood.
In the late ‘90s and early 2000’s I experienced a rise and fall in my life while my father seemed to experience a fall and rise.
Time, work, and pain were catching up to my father. He had put in over 25 years of hard physical labor at Hoy Transfer and his body, as blessed as he may have been, was starting to fail.
His knees and shoulders would need replaced. He could no longer do the things he used to do. On top of this, the person who used to be his boss was gone, and his new boss did not seem to be as honorable or straight with him in terms of taking care of him.
He left Hoy Transfer with bitterness as they failed him in the end, and he would need to try and pivot in an unnatural way in his 50’s. He found work helping in the local school districts, but I have distinct memories of the way this all made him feel depressed, and at times, inadequate.
At home, I had started to come into my own as an athlete and was finding my confidence and self-esteem within athletics. I also had found that I had a desire and love for storytelling and writing, which I felt was a far more likely career path if athletics didn’t work out.
While I had teenage angst surrounding girls and my inability to socialize beyond being an athlete, I mostly look back fondly at this time of life.
Because even though my father was struggling professionally, I knew he was so proud of the man I was becoming, and I was confident that I was going to be a beacon of pride for our family.
I had no interest in drugs or alcohol. I was confident, but I don’t think that I was overtly arrogant. I had gotten into several schools, including Penn State, and I understood the ideals that he had stood for, and they were ones that I have always tried to replicate. I knew that my weaknesses included academics, and that I wasn’t a 5-star athlete, but I felt like I could compete with anyone, at anything (except maybe math).
As I started college, I would achieve a dream of becoming part of a Division I College Football team. I had successfully walked-on to the team after trying out during early fall try-outs.
This filled both myself, and my father with incredible pride. I think it really lifted him in his transition and allowed him to have more peace feeling that his son achieved such a high achievement in the world of athletics. He would later tell me, one of the things he hoped my being on the team would allow for would be more resources for academic support and things of that nature.
Unfortunately, little did he know that when I reached out about the possibility for a tutor, it felt like I was a bother to the PSU football advisors, who bluntly said, “Hey, you’re a walk-on, you need to figure it out. We are here for the scholarship guys”.
Which brings me to my own entwinement with college.
While I look at my late high school years fondly, my time at college wavered between the euphoria of exploration and the deepest depressions as dreams died.
As I mentioned, I was a walk-on at Penn State in 2002. The program had achieved 2 championships in the ‘80s and went undefeated in ’94. It was coached by Joe Paterno, who had seeming blended being an everyday, tough, gritty football coach with an empathetic, humanities education-based scholar.
I had been raised to be an education first person. That my education and mind will always take precedent to my athletic pursuits. I believe in that value.
So, when I began to struggle as a freshman in both football and basketball, I really had to make some choices.
My first year of college, was overwhelming. I wanted everything, yet everything felt so big. I wanted to be better at football. I wanted to be better and to understand the material in my classes. I wanted to fall in love and go to the parties I had heard so much about.
And finally, I was curious about the drugs and alcohol that seemed to keep appearing more and more often around me as I left the confines of my parents’ house.
Eventually, I made the decision to leave the team before the Blue White game on April 1st, 2003. I was flunking Spanish; I had a D in a math class. While I had been making strides within the team, I had no illusion that I was anywhere near contributing to justify my grades.
I wanted to leave. I wanted to quit.
I felt like I was a failure.
My dad was there to assure me that I was not.
My father recognized I was overwhelmed, and while he may have wished that I would have remained with the team, he completely supported my decision to leave and focus on the other areas of my life that I felt were more important.
I cried in front of my family like few other times when I said I was going to quit. It felt like giving up on my childhood dream. Over the next few years, I needed to pivot and create an identity beyond football.
My dad’s pivot to retirement helped me with my own.
Adulthood
I graduated with my degree in Journalism from Penn State in 2006. However, the world was not exactly great to be a journalist at the time, nor was I in the mood to be a full-time journalist. I’m not sure I even really knew how. I could write in the compelling and rhetorical way, but I was bad at being confrontational and asking questions for the purpose of a story. On top of that, my anxiety about my writing at times could result in half-written essays and stories that would be thrown away.
My interest in alcohol and drugs began to become more apparent and eventually I lost my original sobriety.
The difficulty and confusion of whether or not I liked the socialization or the drugs was always a bit of a mix, and I always had in the back of my mind the idea that Jack and Betty died in part due to the their alcoholism.
Did my enjoying of alcohol and marijuana make me more at risk for disease? Of course it did. But it also it felt like it excited my brain in new and exciting ways that I hadn’t felt before.
Eventually I got a job at one of the college bars (Bill Pickle’s Tap Room) as a doorman, and that group took me in as one of their own.
This is not where either myself or my father thought I would be.
I was still, in many ways, a laborer with a college degree that felt misplaced.
Yet….
I was truly happy. By 2016, I was the manager of one of the most successful bars in State College. I was marrying the love of my life, and he was there to witness it all.
I was giving back and literally serving my community. I was doing the right things and being there for the right people.
As I got approached my 40’s, I would find a new purpose within the community and finding a new way to serve the area by becoming a study coordinator within a Nutrition Lab at Penn State.
My career has now become one of my greatest drives and one of the things that I take great pride in.
My father was so proud and happy that I had found something else.
Likewise, my father had also found his purpose in retirement.
He became the person I could talk to about the world. The person who enjoyed talking about sports, wrestling, and of course, golf.
He no longer had anything to prove to anyone; he just had a life to live. And he lived it.
He would vacation with his wife, spend time at the New
Jersey beach with my sister and her husband.
Even later, as he saw the world split apart politically, no one could mistake
him for anything other than what he was.
One of the kindest and most passionate people the world has ever
seen. Simple in his humility and
mannerisms, but underneath, a complex human being.
He never gave into the cruelty of the world, no matter how cruel the world was
to him. He gave dignity to others until there
was nothing left of himself to give.
He was the strongest man I’ve ever known.
My best friend who saw me and helped me.
My dad.
I will miss him forever.
Epilogue
One of the best things I’ve loved about the idea of America is the idea of
freedom of religion, and the freedom of expression.
My father, to me, never really expressed either as a way to influence me in one
direction or another.
He instead guided me by preaching principles that transcend across humanity.
Treat others as equals. Be kind. Give. Help. Love.
These are not things that only he could do.
They are values that any of us can implement within our lives. They are universal.
They were the things he was the best at.
It’s what I will continue to strive to be.
