The first year without The Captain

A year ago on Monday, I received a phone call from my cousin that I knew would be coming, yet it didn’t make it any easier to navigate when she spoke the actual words.

“He’s gone,” Jaime said from the other end of a heavy line 110 miles south.

She was speaking of her husband, Bill, who was a part of our close-knit family and my good, personal friend.

We affectionately referred to Bill as “The Captain.” It was a reference dating back to a family photo at our cousin Kerri’s wedding in 2002, when Bill miraculously arrived for a family picture after being passed out in his hotel room for hours. “You can’t have a team picture without the captain,” he slurred[1].

I remember shrugging and thinking that he was right: You can’t have a proper team picture without The Captain.

The nickname stuck.

The Captain was diagnosed with Stage 4 pancreatic cancer in 2019. For those of you familiar with this particularly malignant type of cancer, we knew the prognosis was bleak. But The Captain was one of the toughest sons of bitches I’ve ever met, and he fought it like he fought every mook he’d ever confronted in a parking lot outside a bar, with grit and bloody knuckles.

Last year, on May 8, The Captain lost his fight and left this world.

And here I am, after a year without The Captain, half-expecting him to walk down my basement stairs with a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth and say, “Cut this writing crap, Nate, and let’s get a beer.”

I’ve lost many friends—perhaps more than the average 48-year-old guy—but The Captain’s death has been the most difficult one for me to accept. This final stage of grief continues to elude me.

In my basement, there’s a collage of pictures of The Captain and me that my stepdaughter put together, and from the corner of the frame hangs one of The Captain’s battered baseball hats. Some days, I look at those pictures and that hat and I know that The Captain is never coming back.

Other days, I feel like I can negotiate to get him back.

Sometimes when I’m alone, I’ll have conversations, aloud, with The Captain and I feel like I’m crazy. Other times, it feels as natural as if he were sitting beside me in the passenger seat of my car.

“Captain, do you want to skip the gym today and stop at the bar instead?” I’ll ask him while I’m driving home from work.

“You bet your ass I do,” The Captain will say.

But, mostly, I just miss him, his raucous laugh and his smooth-as-butter vocals singing Elvis. And in case I forget to say it: Cheers to you, Captain!

Above: This is The Captain singing and playing guitar in his shed after his diagnosis. He loved Elvis and he’s doing a cover of an Elvis spiritual cover.

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[1] I told the story in more detail in this piece I wrote last year following The Captain’s passing.