My dad and Elliott Smith both died on an October 21st. They both made me cry, but I loved them unconditionally. Not that I ever knew Elliott Smith. I remember lying in my dorm room bed junior year cycling through his discs in order, tears dripping. I saw him in concert fall of 2000 and got sad at the end because he was sloppy drunk with his bottle of Bushmills. He kept screwing up on guitar then stopping to apologize profusely to the audience. A chorus of “We love you Elliott’s” would rise from the audience interspersed with Beatles requests. I hadn’t had alcohol for two and a half years at that point, when I was 22.
My dad made me cry that day he picked me up at my apartment sophomore year a few days after my 20th anniversary of being alive. We went to a chinese restaurant and felt on the brink of tears the whole dinner. I was still hung over from two days before and I’d stopped going to the community college I’d sunk to after nearly failing out of the big school freshman year. I felt like a failure that had let his dad down. But he didn’t really harp on that stuff. He was asking me about how I was doing. At the end he told me he’d heard from some of my friends and they were concerned about me. Worried I might hurt myself and that I was drinking all the time. That launched a heavy downfall of tears. Thankfully he waited until the bill was paid to drop the bomb on me.
Back in the car he pulled out a folder with information on the rehab place he’d called and arranged to have me go to. We stopped back at the apartment to pack a bag on the way. Before letting me out of the car to navigate the next phase of my life on my own, he gave me a hug across the middle console, cried, and told me how much he loved me. Similar to when I bent down to hug him in his wheelchair the last time I saw him before October 21st came along. It’s the saddest day of my year.
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