Beneath the Skyline

Neither a Saint nor a Celebrity

Deborah Good

In 2004, Dad sent me a card for my twenty-fourth birthday. “Thank you for being there for me,” it read, “and for us as parents. . . . I’m looking forward to being with you this weekend. Might you stay awhile?”

At the time, I could have found it funny that he would thank me for “being there” for him when usually he was taking care of me, not the other way around. We had no way of knowing that our roles would change significantly just a few months later, and that by the time my twenty-fifth birthday came around, he would be gone.

My dad, Nelson Weaver Good, born and raised on a farm in Mennonite Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, had lived in Washington, D.C. for more than thirty-five years when he was diagnosed with adrenocortical cancer at the end of January 2005. His back had been hurting for about two weeks—his first real symptom. After many doctor’s visits and several diagnoses, we learned the horrifying reason for his pain.

I was standing beside Dad’s stretcher at Washington Hospital Center when his assigned doctor approached us with the news. She said that the CT-scan taken two hours earlier showed a large mass on his left adrenal gland, and spots in his lungs and liver. It was, we would learn, a rare and aggressive cancer that had silently spread from his left adrenal gland to his lungs, liver, and bones.

After decades of do-ing and planning, it was quite an adjustment for Dad to be significantly disabled by his illness and capable of so little. Over the next five months, we would spend hours together, talking. Occasionally, we would place a tape recorder between us as he reflected back on his years in Washington.

Thoughtful conversations with my dad were nothing new for me. From a young age, I remember riding back from soccer games or church retreats, and reflecting out loud with Dad about social dynamics—how groups of people related to each other, how girl athletes were treated differently from boys, how kids at school divided themselves along race lines.

Through these conversations, Dad taught me to not only participate in the world, but to observe and analyze it.

In the months and years following Dad’s death, waves of grief came and passed. I found myself reflecting on this man who had known me since birth, whose genes lived on in my DNA, and whose story was and will always be inextricably intertwined with mine. I found myself writing about him. I listened to his voice in our tape-recorded conversations, I transcribed and edited his words, and, eventually, a book emerged.

My dad was a realist. He made all his decisions very carefully, never on a whim. I still cannot leave my Philadelphia home on a dark, urban night without his voice in my head. “Never take unnecessary risks,” he liked to remind me. “Never take unnecessary risks.”

I also can’t look at the basketball hoop hanging in the alley behind my childhood home in D.C. without thinking about Dad and his head full of risk-calculation. Ever since he built the backboard out of old floorboards and braced it to our garage roof, he insisted that we keep it locked up between games. This involves wrapping a chain diagonally across the rim and locking it in place with a padlock, so no basketball can fit through.

“Dad, I don’t understand why we have to keep the hoop locked,” I remember saying insistently. “It seems so selfish. Why do you act like we’re better than other people?” I was an adolescent with a lot of answers. I also went to school with kids in the neighborhood who knew about the chain, and I was embarrassed.

“Have you seen what happened to other hoops in the neighborhood? How long have they lasted?” Dad would respond impatiently. We’d had this conversation before. He went on to list them: the hoop down the alley that was there about a month when it got dunked on and broken. Another one that drew so many complaints from neighbors, they had to take it down. “If we leave our hoop unlocked,” he continued, “and kids start hanging out in our alley, making noise, maybe even bringing drugs.”

That was a complete sentence, because I could guess how it ended. The neighbors would complain, the cops might get involved, we’d have to take the hoop down, and then we would never be able to play basketball in our alley again.

“I still think it’s selfish,” I said again, stubbornly, and turned to go upstairs.

“Deborah, I didn’t move to the city yesterday.” Apparently he wasn’t done. “I have spent years in the inner city, and trying to create safe places for fun to happen. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I do, and I understand how these things work.”

I am not convinced that Dad’s answers were all exactly right, but he always had a thorough explanation for why he did what he did. And he was convinced it was this intentionality and moderation that kept him in the city year after year—nearly forty in all.

My dad was neither a saint nor a celebrity, and he knew this about himself. His humility was part of what made him so easy to love. Throughout his life, Dad consciously nurtured the communities to which he belonged. He understood that goodhearted people don’t simply decide to up and change the world by themselves. He believed that when we intentionally bring people together, we create the space for ideas to grow, for groups to decide to do radical things—like start schools for troubled kids in inner-city D.C. or retreat centers in mountainous West Virginia—and then provide support for each other when things get rough.

And when things got rough, my parents’ communities—who by extension became my own—brought us meals, researched alternative treatments, sent countless cards and emails, surrounded us with love and desperate prayers. It was a gift that changed me forever.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is a Master of Social Work student at Temple University. This essay was adapted from excerpts of her recent book, Long After I’m Gone: A Father-Daughter Memoir (DreamSeeker Books imprint of Cascadia Publishing House, 2009), in which she intertwines her reflections with the voice of her late father, Nelson Good. Deborah can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.