Folks, figuring out what's for dinner is not at the top of anyone's summer activity wish list, but HelloFresh delivers mouth-watering, chef-crafted recipes, and fresh ingredients to your door so you can spend your summer doing whatever you want. Need dinner ready like now? Look for quick and easy recipes on the HelloFresh menu, including fast and fresh options, ready in just 15 minutes or less. HelloFresh is much more convenient than grocery shopping.
It's cheaper, too. It's also 25% less expensive than takeout. I have loved HelloFresh. I'm telling you, I am just usually the kind of a takeout kind of guy, right?
But HelloFresh has made cooking so easy and fun and, you know, much more, I don't know, fresh. So go to hellofresh.com slash risk16 and use the code risk16 for 16 free meals plus free shipping. That's hellofresh.com slash risk16 and use that code risk16 for 16 free meals plus free shipping. Don't forget HelloFresh is America's number one meal kit.
What you watch depends on what kind of major and sometimes you're craving comedies like friends or South Park and sometimes you're more into dramas like HBO's Succession and House of the Dragon. There's also cooking shows like Chopped and Peep Bobby Flay and even movies like The Lord of the Rings and Shazam, Fury of the Gods. Well, Max is the streaming destination that has the best of entertainment for whatever mood you're in anytime and plans start at as little as $9.99 a month. Max, the one to watch.
Subscription required, visit Max.com. Hello folks, this is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison and every Thursday we release these special episodes where we look back at content from the earlier years of the podcast. This week, we are celebrating Father's Day with a little compilation here of four of our favorite classic risk stories about fathers.
In a little bit, we're going to hear from Leona Godin, the author of Their Plant Eyes, a Personal and Cultural History of Blindness. But before that, we're going to hear from Colleen Hindsley, who's currently developing her solo show. That's not how it happened for TV. But before that, we're going to hear from Chris Garcia, who is a co-host with Megan Galey and Kurt Braunholler on a podcast called, I Love My Kid, but, and his other podcast, Scattered, was named one of Time Magazine's podcasts of the year.
So without further ado, here now is Chris Garcia with a story we call, Still Very Much in Love. Excited to be here. I just recently became a father. Yeah.
By which I mean, my father's been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. And I don't feel uncomfortable. He's doing well. He has no insight to his condition.
He's taken care of. He's comfortable, life handed him a lemon, and he's using it as a remote control right now. He's on airplane mode. He's like, he's having a good time.
He's taking off a shirt in public. He's freaking a whole bunch of diet Pepsi and recycling it right into a sock drawer. And I am not ready. I am the same age my father was when I was born.
He's 70. I'm 35 years old. I am not prepared to be a father. I still smoke pot out of apples.
Okay. I am not ready. I cut my hand open the other day with a pair of scissors because I was trying to cut open an avocado to make drunk guacamole at five in the morning. I didn't have a band-aid so I used a ribbon from a Christmas present and I put it on my hand and I sat on it because I don't have insurance so if I get hurt I have to die.
I am not ready for this. But I love my father and he's a great guy and I'm going to do this. And so it's taking everything me and my mom and my sister have to care for my awesome dad. And it's brought us together in such a special way because he really has no insight to it but it really affects my mom and my sister and I and it's brought us together so sweetly and we communicate on a level that we've never talked before.
We process things together we share we listen where each other's rocks and so recently my mother was like so your father and I were getting intimate and I was like no grass yes nope she's like I can't tell people at church about this asshole just fucking listen you know and I was like okay she's like we're getting very steamy and I was like okay continue with not the fucking adjectives okay just lay it on me that was bad word choice too but I was like just let me know okay she's like so your dad and I he gets very aggressive with me he picks me up he smushes me up against the wall and just starts he's like chest to chest and pressing up against me and stops and goes I don't know if I can do this I have a wife and two kids my father tried to cheat on my mom with my mom and he stopped himself his guilt is stronger than dementia and my father has a type four foot eight Cuban ladies is my dad's jam and so we're working together and we're determined to continue as a family and it's beautiful and it's hard and scary so we like take my dad out and we try to pretend we don't pretend something's wrong we're just trying to continue our lives with him and sometimes he's with it and sometimes he's not and so we take him to Walmart one day and he walks right up to an African-American gentleman that works there and he says hey black guy where's the cookies and I'm like holy shit my dad's back everybody this medication is working the dude still got it that's just my pops day every day right there that's how the man works and so that's what we're living with and uh it's my story starts now is that we're lucky enough we found a home that we could afford which is very difficult in this country and we found something for low-income folks and we're lucky to have him there and one day he had a bad reaction to his medication and he pulled down a curtain in one move and punched a woman in the face I know hilarious and so my dad had to be rushed to an ER room and then he was taken to a psych ward in Long Beach California with people that were there for various reasons there was a guy about my age that wore an open robe and he was naked and screamed at the Canadian Embassy for a very long time on a phone that was not in his hand but he was pretending like he was like that uh there's uh it was the day the discovery was landing in Los Angeles it was a very big day in LA there's huge buzz about it it was gonna fly over Long Beach it was very exciting because my dad uh he worked in the aerospace industry and he immigrated from Cuba he had a very tough life in Cuba he was molested as a child abandoned by his parents right around the time he was 20 years old he was anti-communist and so he was taken out of uh out of college and forced to work in a sugar cane plantation where he was in uh he was uh solitary confinement for two years taken away from his wife and his first daughter and he was tortured and he was given electroshock therapy which uh doctors think it's maybe part of the reason he has dementia my uh father left Cuba for Spain with my mom got an education came most Cubans go to Miami so you're supposed to do you're supposed to go to Miami wear some weird jewelry and wear a lot of cologne and my dad was like fuck that I want to work in the aerospace business so he moved to Los Angeles and so he worked uh for like JPL and Rockwell and stuff like that as a machinist uh which is an amazing thing so we're sitting there and the discovery is a huge thing to my father and as soon as he got there he was restrained he was strapped to a bed and he would break through the restraints to the point that he bled it's very tough to see I hope you never have to see your parents go through and so uh they give my dad some uh it's like serial quail or something that just really veges him out he goes zombie face stonide and just is completely blank uh and he's we're sitting in this list like uh community room or whatever and uh there's a uh flat screen showing the discovery and my father's not this is nothing to him and it's such a crazy moment well the discovery starts to fly by Long Beach and so the people working there nurses and doctors and patients will go up to the go to the window or go upstairs and watch as the discovery is flying by and my dad's just like and uh there's a I and everyone left I was stuck in this room with my dad and other psychotic people and I'm just like sitting there watching this thing there's a very big man a large man watching it he sees a discovery uh on the TV the discovery is on top of an airplane and he just looks at and goes it looks like it looks like it's like a little backpack we're there with my dad we're hanging out all day I'm thinking about how crazy this is this is the whole reason my father came here to work on the space program yeah this dream and uh we're sitting there and my father out of the blue snaps out of it and it's beautiful and he sees my mom and he smiles so big it's like a thousand corgi videos adorable it's like every kitten picture you've ever seen on the internet times a billion he brightens up he looks at my mom and he goes uh my tikka my mom's name's like my tikka he takes her hand and it's shaking and he kisses her on the hand and he leans in and he kisses her on the mouth my mom's crying it's so beautiful my sister's crying nurse crying I have I don't know this I had this like human like machismo thing all of a sudden I clearly don't have washes over me in that moment I'm like I can't cry okay sure uh and so I'm trying to be tough I was like my dad would hate it if I cried right now he I'm the sensitive kid and he didn't really like it but I would cry all the time so I'm not gonna cry I'm gonna be tough and I'm just gonna like I lean in and I put my arm around my dad I'm just like give him like a bro pat on his back I just go like that and he looks over to me and he goes uh who's this mexican my dad's still got it everybody uh where I get out of here this is an awesome show by the way this is great that we get to do this I want to play something before I get out of here it's a voicemail for my mother that she recently sent me and uh let's see uh this message in Spanish my me and my parents speak Spanish together I didn't think it was appropriate to like do act outs during my set I mean and then my mom was like uh I did not feel like that was appropriate so I just spoke in my voice I didn't want to bring that into this so my mom goes I'm not perfect I go funny she calls me pop up she's like hey pop up I can tell you something funny okay that's very well he's doing well okay I had to leave because dad wanted to do a quickie oh I'm awesome we're getting through this it's okay my dad still has a boner for my fucking mom that's so amazing his brain's dead and his dick is still hard she goes see you later alligator like she has a fucking catchphrase or some shit it's just his brain but he's still very much in love with me okay I had to get out of there because he he wanted to give me the cannon call back to see you later alligator thanks for listening everybody have a good night my dad and I were sitting together in the waiting room of the clinic where he was receiving radiation treatments for his lung cancer and he was really quiet that day which was unusual for him because he was typically a very gregarious guy but that day he was really quiet and seemed very sad so I of course was doing my best to try to distract him and making small talk and teasing him and trying to get him to laugh and he was having none of it he he wouldn't even look at me let alone smile so we just sat quietly for a few minutes and finally he started to move around a little bit and he he made this gesture with his hand towards throat and he said I can't sing anymore and that was the only time I ever saw him cry it's understandable that he'd be upset he was so sick and he was weak but really because he had always had a beautiful booming baritone voice especially his singing voice and at that point his voice had become a ghost of what it once was it was thinner and bonier even than his body was becoming and I had the feeling that he knew before then that his singing voice was disappearing but I think it was the first time he ever said it out loud and I know that I was the only one that he ever confided that to my dad was a classically trained opera singer he loved poverty and all the opera singers but he also loved popular music like Francinatra he loved you know whatever was on the radio kind of the 60s the rat pack he just loved it all and he was always singing in the house he had a huge record collection and all of us were always singing too we had this big three-story house we were all just yelling up and down the stairs and singing and my dad would say hey listen to this and he put a record on the hi-fi and there'd be some new song that he wanted to listen to so the house was always alive with music all the time and my dad he was the guy who could work a tune into any situation he was known for just busting into song in the middle of a conversation or if you had a name he could musicalize he would do it so if I brought a girlfriend home from school and she'd say hi I'm Katie he would say oh cuckucka Katie beautiful Katie you're the only girl that I adore he was just so charming and he loved an audience my parents owned this great big Irish pub in the suburbs of Philadelphia which was back in the days when the Irish bar was not America's favorite franchise it was really a unique thing the name of the place was Fiddler's Green but we all just called it the place every Friday and Saturday night at the place he would go on a show he would have a piano player and drummer sometimes a singing partner and people would come from all over to hear him sing it really would and he had this knack for remembering people especially their names and if you didn't have an Irish last name he would have to give you one so he'd be on the stage and a guy would walk in and he would yell out from the stage Dave O'Boldstein thank god you're here we've been waiting for you have a seat have a seat and he just included everybody in the show everybody felt like they were part of the family and because it was of course an Irish place the repertoire was mostly Irish music and there were a million songs there were fighting songs and drinking songs there were love songs there were songs about the famine and the troubles there were these gut-wrenching sad songs about wrongful imprisonment and long separations from your family but there were also these songs about petty crimes like who threw the overalls in mrs murphy's chowder and these were the songs the crowd loved the sing along songs but my dad his favorite his passion was Broadway show tunes it ain't too early and it ain't too late starting as a farmer with a brand new wife soon be living in a brand new state brand new state go to reach a brand who loved them all he loved everything from cats to Camelot the king and I carousel you name it he loved it he would always try to work as many as he could into his show and in fact the big crowd pleaser was usually the Oklahoma medley which you can imagine you're doing fine Oklahoma Oklahoma OK LA H O M A every time seriously the crowd just loved it he would also do a patriotic medley which would have songs like God Bless America and Yankee Doodle Dandy and he would just get the crowd on their feet and we'd be marching around the place my eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord the whole bar on their feet parading around the bar he just had everybody like I said everybody was part of the show as for me I was the only one of his six kids that he could ever coax up on to the stage with him to sing and when I was little all he needed to say was here's our Colleen and I would come running eagerly up to the stage just to sing a few bars with whatever he was singing but usually he would just start singing the Sun will come out and I would run up and just sing tomorrow because that was my favorite song for my favorite musical Annie and it was very cute and we love to sing together and I was so little I was 35 or 6 and as I got a little older I started to get shier partially because I started to recognize that my dad had this beautiful singing voice and maybe I wasn't such a great singer because I was eight but also I kind of started to realize at that time that I wasn't the cutest kid on the block I was kind of unfortunate looking as a kid I started to be really shy about that so if my dad realized that I was being resistant to coming up on the stage he would just look at me and say sing out kid sing out and I would I would get up and I would sing out because that's what he told me to do and that's what we did so over the years we continued to sing together and when I was finally old enough to legally work in the bar we really started to sing all the time together and we started to settle into what would become our signature duet and it was called you're never fully dressed without a smile and it was also from the musical Annie every Friday and Saturday night we would sing the song he would start hey hobo man hey dapper Dan then I joined in you've both got your styles together but brother y'all never fully dressed without a smile every weekend we sang the song we must have done that song together more than 200 times in my life and we knew it all down pat we knew every point where we could riff and wink each other and smile and do our little patter and it was really great the audience loved it they asked for it every week and I had some mixed feelings about it though I remember having mixed feelings because on the one hand I idolized my dad I loved singing with him and I also loved the idea that he wanted to sing with me and he was proud of me he liked to sing with me but on the other hand by the time I got into my 20s I was really into rock and roll and pop music I really was not into Broadway tunes and so secretly I thought the song was a little lame and I had that feeling going in and the other thing is that I was a waitress and a bartender at the place but at time my dad would get around to saying here's our Colleen and we could do our duet the dinner rush would be over I would be sweating and disheveled wearing a dirty apron reading of cigarette smoke and French dressing and old dollar bills and I'd have to go up there and sing with my six-foot tall dapper dad and his sport coat with his baritone and I just felt a little out of place and sometimes I was embarrassed but I always did it I always sang out because that's what we did eventually I'm left Philadelphia and I moved to New York New York New York a hell of a town the Bronx is up in the batteries down which my father would sing to me every time I saw him I continued to sing on my own not professionally but for myself and although I was very happy sort of secretly happy that the opportunities to sing our signature song became fewer and farther between but now I can't remember the last time we sang together I can't remember the time when we sang you're never fully dressed without a smile I mean obviously it was before my parents retired and sold the bar it was before the place became a sports bar called before my dad's cancer and thinking about that day in the waiting room I had been thinking that my father was feeling so terrible because the treatments that were meant to make him better were actually making him feel worse but really the absolute worst thing for him about being so sick was losing his voice was not being able to sing our whole family at that time we were all still optimistic we really believed that he was going to be the cancer that he was going to get past us and we were encouraging him to keep up with his treatments we were taking him to the clinic we were trying to keep his spirits up but that day to me he said it's gone and it's never coming back and I wish that I could say that that day in that moment that I sang to him that I sang for him but I couldn't all I could do was sit there and hold his hand silently and in the weeks to come which would be his last weeks I still couldn't sing right when my father was losing his voice at a time when I could have and probably should have filled the house with music and singing I lost my voice too in fact we all did music left our home entirely we didn't have a week we didn't sing at the funeral there wasn't a band at the lunch after the funeral which for an Irish funeral is completely unheard of and even for a Heinzley party not having a band not having even someone burst into a round of on the way to Cape May or take me back to Manoyunk or Danny Boy we just lost it all after my father passed away in those next months that next year all I can remember is quiet I can't remember a moment where I felt happy where I felt music where I felt like singing it was completely silent in my memory almost like someone hit the mute button on my life and it took me a long time to get back to it it took me probably more than a year before I was able to even sing in the shower or in the car but finally I did I started to sing again little by little with friends finally in a band and that felt amazing that felt like I have found music again like I found my voice and I was so happy and so relieved that that happened and now it's been about four years since dad passed away and the musical Annie came back to Broadway I went to see it recently with some friends and honestly I was dreading it because I had this fear that hearing that music again hearing our song would bring back all of that regret and that guilt that I'd been carrying about sending my father so silently into his death I was afraid that it would reach up and steal my voice again but sitting in the theater from the time that the opening strains of the music started all the way through to when those orphans were singing you're never fully dressed without an SMI healthy I just felt nothing but joy and happiness and it was as if finally I understood that even though I didn't get to send my father off I didn't get to sing him out of this life he would be so thrilled and proud to know that I continue to sing through my own but I continue to sing out and I am I am singing out and so I was 19 years old and I was planning a three and a half month long backpacking tour with my best friend indigo when my relatives began to ask if I was going to get in touch with my father in europe and I was like probably not um indigo and I had big plans of like hanging out in cd youth hostels and chasing after european hotties and you're probably like wait is she really blind like what does she mean by hot exactly well two things one we have our ways to back then when I was 19 I was just a little bit blind like just a little bit blind so I didn't use a cane or a dog or anything and um I could walk around just fine and um I couldn't see details very well like people's faces so that's where indigo would come in handy and she'd be like he's cute he's looking at you go get him and I would so so these are the kinds of things these are the kinds of things I was thinking about not getting in touch with my estranged father he said I didn't know my dad growing up and my parents got divorced when I was three and my dad was in the military and so he lived all over the world in Turkey and Italy and Thailand and now Germany and I grew up in San Francisco with my mother and I hadn't even seen him since I was like 10 years old and he had returned to San Francisco for his mother's funeral and and he was with his new wife and it was around that time around the age of 10 that I was diagnosed with my degenerative eye disease that very very very slowly like I cannot say very enough times to tell you how slow the generation was while I moved from being a visually impaired person to being blind so I hadn't even corresponded with my father since maybe five years when I was 15 and I was kind of sick of these cards that I would get for my birthday and for Christmas that had a check for 25 bucks and they said love daddy and I wrote him and I said you know I don't know who this daddy character is if you want to have a real relationship with me wonderful but if not then just don't bother and he didn't so yeah I was not real keen on getting another rejection from him so we we uh my best friend calls me and the night before we're to set out on our three and a half month long back by me toward Europe and she says I hurt my knee and it would turn out that she'd actually torn a ligament in her knee but we did not know that so we blindly take off for Europe and we arrive in Frankfurt in the early morning hours and there's like porn stores and the airport and and I'm wheeling indigo around in a wheelchair the airport gave to us because they saw that we were struggling and I began to think that maybe hotties and hostels are a little out of our league and I decided to take my mom's very sound advice before I left and she said you might want to use your military dependent card and go to the v-spot in military hotel and so we do this week at our room and indigo promptly passes out from pain and pain pills and so I decided to try to go out on the town by myself and this is decades before my trusty talking iPhone gave me access to like GPS and maps and endless you know travel guides and what have you so I just go out and I get lost and it starts its brutal German raining on top of me and I and I somehow managed to flag a taxi and I get back to the hotel I'm defeated and I start to think about calling my dad and it's not a boredom and frustration but I also start to think that maybe my dad and his nurse practitioner wife might be able to help us get our trip started and uh back then if I wrote in like really big sharpie letters I could I could read using my peripheral vision so I had written my my dad's number and I and I held it in a trembling hand and I smoked furiously with my other hand and I and I was like I was like you're gonna fucking trick me again is it gonna hang up on me? I don't know but I had to try so I dial I dial the number and I hear that that foreign ringing and then and then my dad's voice picks up and my dad has a very particular voice like he sounds exactly like like Nick Charles of The Thin Man you know that novel by Dachshal Hammett or there's just like Nick and Nor and there are these glamorous people who just lays around their Manhattan apartment drinking cocktails and solving murders all day long and maybe you're wondering like how does your dad sound like a character in a novel and I tell you what he sounds exactly like the audible version of the narrator who reads The Thin Man and I'm not even getting paid by audible to say that and his attitude is right right along these lines too like my favorite line in this book was like um you know Nick is telling the story of the crime so far and he's like oh I'm parched you bring me a drink which is kind of how I feel like right now but um and Nor says well shouldn't you have breakfast first and Nick is like oh it's too early for breakfast so that's my dad like sort of blase and decadent right so I didn't know that at the time but I heard his voice and he said hello and I said hi dad this is your daughter I'm in the neighborhood and thought I'd give you a call and he said no hi kiddo what neighborhood I said I'm in your neighborhood I'm in v-spot it and he said oh do you have plans for dinner this evening I look over at Indigo and I'm like no I'm pretty free and he said okay I'll pick you up at six I would turn out that my dad and his nurse practitioner wife would indeed get us a brace for Indigo and we'd be able to get back on our on our trek after just a little bit of a delay but this night it was all about me and my dad on our on our first father daughter daily we we had this beautiful dinner and we talked and we had wine and then we had appetizers and then we pulled out our packs of cigarettes and we got to smoke at the table like good old days I'm just kidding I'm totally kidding and it was around that time like maybe just before just after the entree when my dad said to me how did you get to be so much like your old man I was like I don't know I guess it tastes for the good life is in the jeans and then after dinner we walked through the misty streets of East Baden holding hands and my dad perhaps ironically has never been much of a thin man so his hand was a little bit fudgy but strong and gentle and we got to the hotel and he said I'm glad you called kiddo I love you and I said I love you too dad and I will never forget the exuberant bounding I did down this enormous chandelier dripping hallway that was made for international delegations but would set that moment empty except for me and my joy of finding a dad a couple years later my dad and his wife moved back to the states and first they moved to a california gold country where my dad becomes mayor of the bustling metropolis of imidor city population 52 and then they finally make their way back to his hometown of san francisco and during all this time I moved from san francisco to new orleans to new orleans to new york where I lived for many years and then just recently here to denver and during that time we kept in touch we would have our weekly cocktail hour and we would talk about politics and all the musicals he's seen because my dad loves his musicals but as one gene I did not inherit from him and during all this time I moved from being a visually impaired person to being a blind person and my dad moved from being an able-bodied person to being a disabled person he degenerated neuropathy had moved from the bottoms of his feet to his knees and from his fingertips to his elbows leaving his hands like mittens his feet like blocks when he stopped being able to feel the pedals of his jeep he had to stop driving and he and his wife had been accustomed to doing these marvelous vacations they'd been all over the world over a hundred countries all seven continents and now his wife started doing these without him and he was left at home more and more and he would say to me all the time he would say I'm not going to stop her if I could still be doing the same thing I'd still be doing it you know my dad was such a lover of the good life that he would never stop anybody that he loved from enjoying it he began to get these terrible wounds in his feet that wouldn't heal because he couldn't feel at the bottoms of his feet he couldn't feel anything and then he got these infections and the infections became light-knit threatening and then a couple years ago he called and he said they want to chop up my feet and I was like dad that is really terrible but it sounds like a kind of an obvious choice it sounds like it's either your feet or your life and he said I know I know but how many do the things that I still can do like take a shower and I was like dad they're doing amazing things with prosthetics these days you know people are climbing mountains and shit but he didn't bring himself to that level of disability it scared him he would say to me shit I I don't even know why I'm complaining to you you're blind and I was like but I'm okay I've been going I've been moving into this disability thing my whole life and and I'm okay with it I'm actually kind of proud to be part of a marginalized group on the rise is the new diversity I'll have you know but it wasn't for my dad and he died on August 19th and I miss him like crazy but I still feel like I could call him at any minute and hear his voice you know he's still so present to me and he's never been more present than during one of our last meals together you know one in five Americans has a disability one in five and most of them are older people one in five of you out there sitting there either has or will have a disability so I don't understand why we all cling to this mythical potent able-bodied self you know we're all precariously able we're all precariously able and when we learn this we have a chance of accepting our end-of-life situations you know but at best we have moments of intimacy as disabled people that able-bodied people can only imagine I'm standing in the kitchen my dad's kitchen and his wheelchair can't fit in there I'm holding a handle of beef and his wine glass because the wine glass is the last thing he can pick up with just one hand he can put his hand around it and lift the glass no feeling necessary and he's sitting at his at the dining room table and I'm holding it up and I say hold tell me when dad and he's like more and more and more stop and then I pick up my very sturdy tumbler that I'm not going to be up to knock over and I stick my finger in it as all self-respecting bind people do when pouring booze and I pour myself a healthy portion of gin and then I very carefully make my way through the like african masks and googoo clocks all this shit I mean like really nice really nice a brick-a-brack that's that they've collected over there years of travel and I get to the dining room table and then I go back to the kitchen through the skill and purpose of brick-a-brack and then and I'm in the kitchen I'm like what's for snacks dad and he says okay in the turn like turn like okay in the corner over there feel around and there should be a box of crackers and I'm feeling around and I'm like here these and he says no those are cookies and I pick up another box and he says okay those are the crackers and so in this way we assemble our snacks prosciutto and patte and cookies and crackers and I make my way back through and then he he says okay open up that presciutto and all I got is a butter knife so I'm sort of hacking at this trader Joe's package and I'm like muttering my my difficulties I'm like oh man this is really hard as if he can't see me perfectly well and this is all very discomforting because my dad amongst all of his wonderful trades that happen to have been an amateur gourmet chef who would like whip up eight course meals for ten or twelve intimates for fun so this like fumbling with food in front of him is a little a little uncomfortable but anyways I get the presciutto open and I slap a slimy stack of presciutto on his plate and I slap a slimy stack on tried to sing that eight times on my plate and then he says take a take a breadstick okay give me a breadstick and he says you're going to roll the presciutto around the breadstick like flesh over bone and I'm like no problem this is like totally tacked I always hear they're rolling a joint and so I roll up the breadstick and then and then but for my dad I hear my dad go shit and then like a delicate snap and the breadstick falls to the floor and I'm like dad do you want me to roll you up one and he says yeah and so I roll him up one and I give it to him and he's like roll myself and I'm good and we do this a bunch of times and then uh and then I'm like wait what's with the paté dad because I love my paté and he said okay you're gonna take a cracker but a little paté on there and then a little dollop of de jon so okay and I do it and I try and hand it to him but not being able to see I can't really put it into his hand and not being able to feel he can't take it without snapping it in two and so after a few frustrating attempts and a lot of paté lost in the effort we hit him on the expediency of me holding the cracker out sort of in the direction of his face where upon he grusps my wrist with his hand and he shows the cracker along with my fingers into his mouth and he's like mmm that's good and I make myself one and I'm like mmm that is good and we do this over and over and over again and the gin helps us to forget the rather unsanitary way in which I'm putting the knife into the paté and then into the de jon and then sort of pushing the toppings over back onto the crackers with my fingers but at nine times out of ten mid in my dad's mouth and I know that I will never ever forget this moment that my dad let me help him at least for a little while enjoy one of his last tastes of the good life thanks a lot guys it's just after midnight I'm in a nursing home in Cleveland, Ohio at the bedside of my 94 year old father who is dying you can probably hear him breathing here in the background he's not dying from coronavirus by the way he's got end stage congestive heart failure in bad timing I guess but we're at the pardons care where we're just trying to keep him comfortable it's the end of day two I'm going into day three and then that whole time he's been awake maybe for two minutes and every time his eyes open my three sisters and I rush over and we tell him that we love him we hold his hand and we tell him it's okay to go go be with our mom who he misses so dearly who died six years ago from cancer his afternoon he woke up for a bit and he hugged each of us and he didn't say anything then he looked at the TV and the president was on and he made a sour face and he went ugh Trump and for a couple hours after that I was scared to death that was going to be his last words but it wasn't a little bit after dinner time my sisters were preparing to leave and taking the night shift to be with him tonight and out of nowhere he opened his eyes but he found his voice for the first time in a couple of days and he said hey hey there's a table on the corner and it's only ten bucks and we rushed over to his bedside and I was about to ask about the table when my sister Marty goes we got the table I bought it for you we've got it and my other sister is like it's a great table and then they held his hands and he cried and we said you can go see mom it's okay to let go bring her the table it's a nice one but he was back to sleep just like that and then my sisters were putting their coats on I leaned down to my dad's ear and I shouted hey I paid for half that table just so you know and three of us laughed tired laughs look at laughs and that's about it it's 12 15 now it's just t and i in the room and listening to his ragged breath wondering and then it's gonna happen I love you dad and it's okay to go she's waiting for you and she's gonna love the table that was peep brown we just heard from and that is all for our father's day compilation folks father's days the day take a risk this week on his turkey high eaters join our top panel comedians as we take us okay are you still in the bath yes i'm listening to my podcast cannot come in oh just need to grab the claw clippers don't worry i'll cover my eyes what whoa look at the phone i'm still not looking and i'm not listening to my podcast don't warm but it me I can't it symbols