I Love You Dad.

By: Greg Fawcett

Trigger warning: the following story contains depictions of suicide and self harm.

This story is meant to celebrate all fathers. I want to share my origin story with all those going through it. When reading my story, I would like to emphasize how people can make it through challenging situations.

My grandfather took his own life in front of my father when he was seven by slitting his wrists and bleeding to death in a bathtub.

My father was institutionalized for clinical depression when I was in high school. He asked for and received electroshock therapy to treat his depression. When my mother and I visited him in the hospital, it always felt like a scene from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.” Just not the funny parts.

My father fell out of bed one night and broke his ribs. The hospital did x-rays to diagnose him with multiple fractures.

But they should have caught something else.

My father recovered and left the Methodist church where he had been a minister since he left the seminary as a young man to find his true calling as a junior high school teacher at a public school in Brooklyn. He continued his teaching at the United Nations International School (UNIS), where he had an important relationship that freed him.

Next, he began working in education at the City University of New York (CUNY) with a few colleagues of Bill Lynch, Vivian Jackson, Hetrick Martin, and the Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC).

He had been given the gift of a tremendous zest for life.

One day he called me at City Hall. He was weeping uncontrollably as he had just been diagnosed with lung cancer. His oncologist discovered that one of his lungs had metastasized entirely. My father’s diagnosis was terminal, just as his zest for life had returned.

I held it together for the call and told him I would meet him wherever he wanted to meet. He told me he had to tell mom and would then call me back. After hanging up the phone, I walked into the Mayor’s office, and I collapsed on the couch in tears. Diana came in first to comfort me, followed by Miriam. All I could say was, “I have so much to do.”

My dad had a pneumonectomy to remove the metastasized lung a few days later. He began treatment immediately with what was, at that time, a novel treatment combining chemo and radiation to destroy any remaining cancerous tissue.

The hospital had a landmark program that allowed families of patients to live in an apartment on the oncology ward while their family member was receiving treatment. Mom and I moved in.

A short time later, the radiation destroyed the drainage system around his remaining lung, and he began to drown. Mom and I slept in his hospital room bedside him for weeks on end.

One night when mom was out of the room, he whispered that he had two things to ask me: first, he wanted me to increase his morphine drip gradually as he was drowning and suffering unbearable pain; next, he wanted me to get his brother on the phone.

Mom and I took one night of rest and returned to our apartments about a week later. The hospital called me in the morning to tell me that he had passed in the night.

A woman named Betsy Gotbaum arranged a beautiful service in the Brooklyn Botanical Japanese Garden Pond, which was my dad’s favorite place to meditate. While he visited, he studied at the foot of the garden rosarian to become a rosarian because that’s what Eldridge Neal Fawcett had done.

Many wonderful individuals were there.

The service was presided by the rector of St. Thomas Church, where I had been a choir boy from grades 5 through 9. The Mayor gave the eulogy and blessed my dad with his lifelong mantra for the dearly departed “service to others is the rent we pay for our time on earth, Neal Fawcett has left this life paid in full.”

I sang and cried, “PS, I Love You.” It was a song Rob Lamb had taught me.

After the service, mom, Patrice, Tauriac, and I went to the rose garden to spread my dad’s ashes. We sat on the marble bench across from the bed, where we spread his ashes on a plaque dedicated to my dad. It reads, “the only gift is a portion of thyself- Ralph Waldo Emerson.”

In 2016 I was placed on a 5150 hold in the hospital three times in the period of six weeks. I had completely lost confidence. I also clearly needed to have my own “cuckoo’s nest” experience. One of my closest friends at the hospital was a man who had taken five bottles of pain killers, anti-depressants, and sleeping pills with as much of a gallon of vodka as he could consume before he fell face forward and broke both of his orbital bones. He had organized Californians to support leftists in Central America through Liberation Theology.

The other was a woman in her 20s who had played in the WNBA, had fallen on hard times, slit her wrists before her lover found her, and took her to the emergency room. Her insurance ran out while she was in the locked-down ward, and she was transferred to a public facility where she was hunted by predators every waking moment of the night. She would always call us at the big house when she was being threatened so that we could talk her through it.

I would have been institutionalized much longer if I didn’t figure out the system by channeling Randle McMurphy. I had not healed. I realized that I wasn’t going to heal in that hospital.

When I first entered the hospital, a friend of mine remarked to my wife, “this just doesn’t make sense; Greg believes that anything is possible.”

It saddened me because my reality was that nothing could be further from the truth.

Today, I not only believe it again, but I live every waking second making sure it’s true. I used to hate most in life when people said that God has a plan when faced with adversity. I always saw it as cruel and delusional.

Until yesterday.

I realized that I wanted to live my life to be there for any struggling person. I still am, but I am living proof that you will make it through.