When someone passes, you only hear about their positive qualities as the things that defined them. But Dad would have felt like it was an incomplete picture without mentioning his dislikes and quirks. Those were the things that made him who he was too. He hated Disneyland for instance, and had a phobia of shopping malls. But the things he loved made him laugh – until he cried. And he had a specific sense of humor. When I ran over a snowbank, while driving his ashes home, I could have sworn I felt his eyes roll at me.
And he would expose us to the things he loved, even if they were dubiously appropriate. In the interest of providing a more complete picture of my beloved father, here’s some very important details that didn’t make it into the obituary: Like most kids, he clipped his fingernails. But unlike most children he kept a collection of them in a mason jar. He had a science lab in his bedroom. When one of his experiments burst into flames, his dad leaped into action, successfully smothering the blaze with a blanket. And then threw everything out the window.
His stories were filled with all these fun, complicated and messy real-life characters. One of my favorites was “Lizzie the Lifter”, who couldn’t pass up a five finger discount. Lizzie was no light weight. Once she swiped a gallon of Filippo Berio Extra Virgin Olive Oil. Another time she made off with a typewriter hidden under a trench coat, clenched between her thighs.
While we were raised in the leafy suburb of Belmont, my parent’s first apartment was a bit more Bohemian in Boston’s battle-scarred Combat Zone. The staircases in their five story walk up were tilty like a funhouse, and there were mice. The building shook every time a bus drove over the manhole outside. Dad even heard breathing in the wall. Luckily it was no ghost, but someone passed out in the hallway, sleeping it off.
Once he had a family, the colorful characters that populated his stories entered into our home – literally. There was an elderly woman named Eva who wandered around the neighborhood. Because our screen door was unlocked, she would let herself in unannounced. One day she found us painting our faces with water soluble crayons. Eva asked my dad to paint her face too, so he drew a circle around her eye. Worried that it might look like elder abuse, we washed it off, before Eva wandered away into the next house.
Dad knew how to drive, but refused to. Mom – even though it stressed her out – did all the driving. Driving made her a nervous wreck, which she subtly expressed by knicknaming all the features of the road. For example, a run-of-the mill traffic circle on Concord Ave was affectionately known to our family as “Suicide Circle Number 1.”
Marsian De Lellis, drawing of my mom driving my dad, sharpie on paper, 1992.
A lot of you knew my dad as the Chief of Pathology, but to us he was a highly qualified babysitter: Once after Mom came home, she noticed what she thought was water damage on the wallpaper. When she lamented that the stains might be due to winter ice, Dad admitted proudly that they were actually the aftermath of a Category 5 indoor weather event involving water balloons. We played with a styrofoam head named, “Molly the Mannequin.” Molly got all dolled up in my grandma (Ida’s) wigs and makeup. Because Molly was so popular, Dad had to keep her hidden from us in a top secret location – which may have been a paper bag in the basement, because someone found her, kept putting makeup on her, and left her looking quite busted. Sometimes we’d play dress up with Sheba, a German Shepherd collie mix given to us by Auntie Debbie. When my mom left, we’d outfit Sheba in women’s clothes.
I inherited some of my dad’s sense of humor. We connected over John Waters films. When I was 12, he rented Female Trouble in which a juvenile delinquent topples a Christmas tree onto her parents, because they wouldn’t buy her cha cha heels. And then in real life, when I found Dad pinned under a fallen Christmas Tree, he laughed – until he cried.
He wasn’t all that churchy, but he did have his spiritual side. Like Oprah. Sundays were spent in his study, which was his chapel. He would reverently pour over slides of cancer cells which illuminated the room like light filled stained glass windows. Instead of a ceremonial vessel with the pleasing aroma of frankincense and myrrh wafting through the air, there was a sacred ashtray filling his place of worship with the perfume of Carlton 100s. And in place of a choir was a recording of Maria Callas.