Happy New Year, Dad! Just Because You're Dead Doesn't Mean You Can't Read This And Celebrate, Right?

One of our last photos together

This was him 30 years ago but can pass for me now minus the bad fashion choices

Baby scoop in dad's

Dad's gravestone - the one I visited Sunday
I like this photo because I cast a shadow on him just as he cast a shadow on me. An editor, for a column about my dad, suggested instead a photo without the distracting shadows!

This is best read the way it was written, with U2's Wide Awake In America EP on repeat (back when they were good) However, you don't have to read it at 5 a.m.at an airport, which is where and when I'm writing this)

Happy New Year, Dad.

We – mom, sis, me and my nieces (your two granddaughters who you, sadly never got to meet) – went to your grave yesterday. While staring at it I felt bad I've not written you lately. I'm not sure what makes me sure you can read Newsvine from Heaven but what can it hurt to try?

Just because I have not written you does not mean you've not been in my thoughts. I thought about you quite a bit when Uncle Ernie died a few months back and mom and I attended his funeral. I'd agonized over whether to visit him earlier and felt awful, as if I'd failed him somehow.

Some of my thoughts were more questions about why you kept our family away from your Michigan relatives – did you need distance from them? Were you embarrassed by them? Did they remind you of part of you that you don't want to think about? We'll never know now, I guess.

Aunt Bonnie invited me to return to Michigan under better circumstances, saying if I spent Thanksgiving with her we could catch up and she'd teach me regional games like Euchre. I took her up on it and visited and improved relations with relatives, learned new card games, got to see the location of the old family business, Butki Saw, and saw for the first time the graveyard where the bodies of grandma, grandpa and other relatives are buried. I also learned that your tradition of teaching us to drive in a cemetery – that way we wouldn't have to worry about killing anyone – predates you as that was how you and others in your family learned too.

This is not to say that I obsess over thoughts of you. Weeks may go by with no thoughts of you than one day I'm thinking about how you, and men like you, made it hard for me to cry I think the last piece I wrote for you was on Father's Day

It's nothing like that. I've found that what has happened over the years, as I moved through the grieving process since you were taken away in 1999, was that I have forgotten – or possibly let go – of bad feelings and memories of you, remembering instead the good times and the positive ways you impacted my life.

I've written before about some of those positive affects, such as our mutual interest in journalism. But there are other things too – for example, I continue your tradition of discouraging people eating together to order the same dish. Why get the same stuff when we can instead explore more new dishes and share? That was part of your overall attitude about exploring new things. I think your tombstone even used that word, "engineer – explorer – dad" It was a fitting choice.

Speaking of exploring do you remember how you'd stop and grab anything you saw by the side of the road, regardless of whether you were running or if we were in the fast lane? You'd come home with everything from Ebony to Jet to Cosmo and be proud of your find? Well, I'm more selective than that but I do grab free newspapers wherever I can, as I wrote about in this piece about why I, as a reader, love airports and airplanes.

I stopping writing at this point. I wasn't sure where I wanted to go with this. About 8 hours later I found myself experiencing some of the emotions and feelings I chronicled in this piece about how sometimes I feel jagged and depressed I wrestled with what that meant. I decided to make that part two of this article

The plane was about three hours out from Washington D.C. and I was staring at clouds below us when it hit me hard. "It" being the blackness, the depression, the loneliness.

Fortunately I'm luckier than many who suffer from depression and anxiety in that I can feel it coming on, like a small wave before the big wave. It's a bit like how when you're drinking too much and you taste a little bit of bile and know that if you don't stop drinking you're going to get really sick. Smart people see that as a warning sign. So it is with my depression – I can usually take steps to deter it from getting bad, by forcing myself into social situations (and the regular medication doesn't hurt.) The trick is to respond to it rather than letting it control you. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Ever wonder why I spend so much time at my local coffeehouse? It's not because of the coffee – heck, I don't even drink coffee – but because I know I'm less likely to feel depressed or lonely if I'm around other people, especially if these are people I know, and not bored.

Like many, I tried staring-down-the-inner-demon thinking if I can figure out what dark thoughts I think that would help me in some way. For example, for a few years I had trouble sleeping on work nights because my mind would seem to be going 200 mph, exploring in vivid detail the worst case scenario of ever story and interview I expected to be working on. I'll mostly skip over the new agey stuff suggested in therapy except to say that I tried yoga, meditation.. and stuff of that type which would make my dad retch.

I think the only residue of my foray into new agey stuff is that I still drink green tea.

I tried to learn to accept that I had these dark thoughts but that I did not need to listen or believe them. I tried that but it did nothing for me. Now when I say "dark thoughts" I'm not talking suicide (When it comes to suicide I think Dorothy Parker nailed it with this poem, which is a fun one to read aloud at open mic nite) but instead talking about, for example, constantly fearing I'm about to get fired from the newspaper I moved from Arkansas to Maryland to join, sweating profusely when a copy editor catches a typo I missed in one of the ten articles I'd write on average each week.

I also tried to distract myself with music. It used to be – as I talked about in my advice to new writers piece – that I'd always write to music. The idea was simple – if my mind was occupied listening to music (or more specifically listening to music lyrics since I'm so word-centric) then I'm not thinking about whatever fears or dark thoughts or worries I may be feeling. The problem with that strategy was that I was only delaying the inevitable and when I'd close my eyes the dark thoughts would still be there. It got to the point where a therapist once ordered me to find something to do with my time that did not involve thinking. And that's one reason I spend some time each day playing online backgammon (it's as close to turning off my brain as I get, I guess. How sad is that?)
. I wanted to find some middle ground – a place where I could appreciate, not fear, the silences, apprehensive about what nightmare scenario my mind would be composing next.

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	Scott, The Enigma (aka Happy New Year, Dad - Part 2)	Scott (Scoop) Butki	Thu Jan 3	23
	2008 list of banished words: LSSU	Lake Superior State University	Wed Jan 2	0