When Dad Took My Hand

Grief, Goodbyes, and of Course, The Work

David C. Roberson’s Maladjusted Multiverse #27

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Hi!
I hope everything is going well for all of you malcontents out there! You are steadily gaining in number, and for that I remain forever grateful! Thank you so much for being here!

At the moment I am overwhelmed, broken, and quite sad. So let’s get into it.

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Since We Last Spoke…

Photo by Susanne Moberg

A lot can happen in nineteen days.

In my last issue on May 12, I explained that Dad agreed to cancer treatments, which would buy him 12-18 months.

Dad was supposed to begin chemotherapy on the 18th, but he instead wound up being admitted to the hospital with an infection. He hadn’t been eating, and he’d been exhibiting increasingly erratic behavior due to pain medication and high calcium levels.

He was deemed too weak to withstand treatment.

I had my own important doctors’ appointments that week, but left town immediately after on the 20th. When I got to the hospital, my sister Ashley met me in the lobby to walk me up and prepare me for how bad it was.

The cancer had taken his voice. His breath sounded like a coffee pot brewing. Standard death rattle, I’m told. He was a thin wisp of the man I once knew. Shrunken with sunken cheeks. Skin and bones, but with swollen limbs.

At 5, I saw an anti-smoking announcement on television. Dad smoked. I began sobbing. To get me to stop, he decided to make me feel small. He called me Shatner, said I was being melodramatic. I choked to mom, “I just don’t want Dad to die.”

When Dad saw me enter his hospital room, his eyes lit up. There was recognition. There was love, fear, and regret. He struggled to free his hand from his covers, but once we got it out, he took my hand, and I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time that happened. Not since I was little and needed him to. Maybe I always needed him to.

Something else happened when my soft, work-from-home writer’s hand became engulfed in his rough, meaty elevator mechanic’s mitt: I felt 42 years of anger melt away. All the misunderstandings, miscommunications, willful ignorance, abuse disguised as discipline, and myriad other problems that seemed to take up the bulk of our relationship got compartmentalized and shut away so that I could hug him and say how sorry I was. For what was happening to him, yes, but also for all the ways we failed to be what the other needed.

In that moment he finally did what I wanted him to all those years back. He comforted me. As I cried, he squeezed my hand tighter. Thirty seven years, and I found myself right back to that simple truth: “I just don’t want Dad to die.”

But he did.

And it turns out the anger that melted away had also been my shield the last two months.

I wrote this on Facebook on the 25th:

The reality won’t stick. It just hovers above me, dampening every good or restful moment. Every time I laugh or hug my wife or go to the kitchen for a bite, there’s an unheard whisper in the back of my mind that says, “Dad is dead. He’s gone forever.” I run through all of the regrets, all of the arguments, every time we left things in anger, and all the good times we’ll never have again:

Peanut butter and honey toast, Saturday morning cartoons followed by Kung Fu Action Theater... Star Trek, Sightings, The X-Files...

watching him get angry at dirty jokes on Family Guy and Saturday Night Live...

We rarely agreed, and in hindsight we both took our differences too personally. Nothing we can do about that now.

Dad, I will love and miss you forever. It’s so, so weird that you’re gone.

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It remains so fucking weird.

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As you may have surmised, there hasn’t been much in the way of creative endeavors happening, but I did manage a few things. I think that would have made Dad happy. He liked to whip up strange, funny poems. I also got my natural drawing proclivities from him. So here’s some stuff:

Writing

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Podcasts

DC on SCREEN

Star Trek Universe Podcast

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A Bit of Fun

If you didn’t know, on Substack notes, I post a Song of the Day! Since the songs of May have all been posted officially, I can share the playlist for May 2026! Don’t worry, they’re just Youtube playlists.

May 2026 | David C. Roberson’s Maladjusted Multiverse Playlist

And if you missed it, here’s the playlist for April:

April 2026 | David C. Roberson’s Maladjusted Multiverse Playlist

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Coming Soon

All the things. Poems, short stories, essays, photography, podcasts, toy reviews. It’s all coming. I promise.