In loving memory of my father, David Francis Yanolatos

My father has passed away.  His eighty five year old heart stopped beating on Monday afternoon. We will bury him on Friday. Truth be told, I believe we buried the heart of the man eight and a half years ago on a warm spring day, the day we buried my mother. They were married for fifty five years. He never came back from that. If he were made of normal stuff, he’d probably have passed on quickly, as so many older surviving spouses do. Not my father though, he was tough. I mean really tough.

He was a rock, and at times I thought his powers were almost mythical. I had a bad car accident when I was nineteen. Months later when I recovered, my dad insisted I get back behind the wheel. He rode with me as I drove back to school for the first time. I became terrified on the parkway. I tensed up and almost started to cry. He simply put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Relax baby. Daddy’s here. You know nothing bad can ever happen to you when Daddy’s here.” And I believed. Back then I knew, that while there was a breath in his body, nothing bad could ever happen to me if my dad was there. Just like that, my fear was gone. Such was my faith in my father and his super human abilities. Every child should grow with such deep rooted faith in their fathers, and their ability to love and protect us. I warn you though, it makes the adult discovery that he’s only human a harder pill to swallow.

He’d survived three heart attacks, a quadruple bypass, an aortic aneurism, prostate cancer, metastic cancer, congestive heart failure and emphysema. He succumbed in the end to pneumonia.

He had his first heart attack thirty five years ago. He was younger then than my husband is now. He was coming home from a particularly nasty work day. His heart attack began in the car.  He was a New York City Police detective and he’d gone through the mill at central booking that day.

There was a “kid” that was getting a really hard time from some of the other officers and the sergeant in charge. I never learned the circumstances of his arrest. All I knew was that my father said he “wasn’t right.” He berated the others and told them to lay off of the kid, because he clearly wasn’t capable of understanding what was going on. His true reward surely lies in heaven, but on that day, it was having the Sergeant make the simple booking process a nightmare of “up the stairs and down the stairs,” red tape, and frustration.  

Another time he got a letter from a man he sent to prison. The man thanked him. He said my father was the only man in his whole ordeal that treated him like a person worthy of compassion or respect.

I tell those stories because that’s how he was, and I find myself needing to be reminded of it. I thought he became very bitter when my Mom got sick, and it only got worse after she passed. When he was living, for some reason, I couldn’t cut him any slack for that. But in the two short days since he’s been gone, I suddenly have found the insight and compassion for my own father that he would have shown a kid he didn’t know from Adam. I knew I would have regrets, and I do. He had just become too difficult.

Difficult. Difficult is caring for my mother, his wife, as her mind slipped away from dementia. Difficult is repeatedly calming the love of his life when she was screaming at him to get away from her, because she thought he was some strange man. Difficult is going along with his new identity as “the boss” when he simply became that, and nothing more in her mind. One day, when she could still talk, my mom said, “He’s very nice, but God help him when Dave comes back and finds him here trying to be cutesy with me.” All of our hearts broke when it came to the point where she couldn’t even recognize herself in the mirror. But for my father, my fierce, fearless, tough as nails, strong as an ox father, it was his undoing.

That man’s myriad adventures included taking part in The French Connection (the real story, not the movie), and guarding Frank Serpico (who he did not like, but was not going to let anyone harm). He had fist fights and gun fights and he was the man who put the bullet hole in the marquis above the Gramercy Park Hotel.

He was a Radioman in the Navy, and a “gymnast, pool hustler, brawler, and bum” for the year after he got out. That was one of the best years of his life, he’d say. He was part of the 52/20 Club. When you got out after the war, you got $20 a week for 52 weeks. My father took his twenty down to the pool hall and parlayed it into five times that. He was living “the life.” Then he met my Mom, and turned his life in a new direction.

My grandfather, my mom’s dad, took him from the pool hall and taught him a trade. If he was going to marry my mother, he was going to have to mend his ways. My grandfather put the tile and slate roofs on many of the historic buildings that went up in New York City in the first half of the last century. He was an artisan really, from Germany.  I never met him but my father loved him dearly and respected him like no one else.

A bum no more, my parents got married and started a family. We were Bronx Irish Catholic and they proved it with the size of our family. They had six children together, who would have sixteen grandchildren and two great grandchildren (so far). 

Though he began a career in the service of New York City, he always worked two jobs. He continued to ply the trade my grandfather taught him on his days off from the City job. He and my uncle Carl did it together, and my brothers were recruited in as well as they grew older.  

He started working for New York City at the Sanitation department and then moved to the police department’s Emergency Service Division, on to beat cop, then detective, finally ending his career amongst New York City’s Finest as a second grade detective. I would tease him that he never made it out of the second grade. If the heart attack didn’t get in his way, I’m sure he would have made it to first grade, and then I really could have had some fun!

He was a good provider and none of us six children lacked for anything we needed, or most of what we wanted.  He was always working, so I would say we did miss out on something important, spending time with him. He wasn’t out throwing the ball around with us, or sitting helping with homework, he didn’t really have the time for that.  When he did take a day off for family stuff, he would pile us all into the station wagon for day trips, with –you’re not going to believe this - two or three of us in the way back with no seat belts!  As you can imagine, we didn’t take very many big family vacations with our very large family, but we had a great time right at home.

Our house was “the place to be” on our block, and our friends were always there. Our big old house in the Bronx had a big old yard to go with it. We had swings, a basketball court, and a pool with a slide. We had dogs, cats, ducks, fish, snakes, lizards, hamsters and at times even chickens! My mother called it a menagerie, and it was, for a house in The Bronx.  There wasn’t a stray anything that my mother wouldn’t take in, be it a pet, a wild animal or a person. My father would shake his head like he didn’t want to do it, but he always went along.  

He didn’t like credit cards. He always carried a huge wad of cash, and God help the unsuspecting mugger who tried to take it from him (even at eighty plus)!  

He always voted in every election, all of them. Rain, shine, snow or sickness, he showed up and voted. For most of his life he voted Republican, and was proud of it.

He and my mom would take me with them to the voting booths when I was young. They didn’t have to, they had built in babysitters in my older brothers, but they did. My mom would close the curtain and pull the levers. When I was able to read, she said “we don’t tell anyone who we vote for in here, especially Daddy, okay?” You see, Mom was secretly a Democrat.

In recent years, he found himself leaning more with the Democrats as well, but mainly he was disgusted with all of them. He said they were all crooks. The only difference was the extent of the thievery. He said “the Democrats just steal a little less.” I don’t know how he figured the math on that, but hey, he’s entitled to his opinions, and he had many!

Though he wasn’t a regular church goer, he was a righteous man, who always tried to do the right thing.  His idea of the right thing might be at odds with some, but he was from a different generation, a different world really. Socially, economically, technologically, and he had seen a lot of things in life that most of us never will.

When he’d have his friends from the police department over and they’d reminisce about their cases, telling war stories about crime in NYC, it was better than going to the movies! I remember him laughing at the end of one of them, saying “yeah, those were the good old days, before Miranda!”  I think he was only half kidding. Sometimes when one of his friends began a story, my father would stop him and say, “Anna (that’s what he called me back then), you have to leave for this.” Those of course, were the stories that I really wanted to hear!

He was a great lover of children and animals. One year my mom got a lamb from a farm for Easter dinner.  She actually picked it out. My father wouldn’t get out of the car. He sat in the car and yelled “Murderer” from the window. My mom was a great cook, but it was hard to enjoy the leg of lamb that year.

My mother always cooked for a crowd, and there always was one. Our place was “Grand Central Station,” as Mom would say, and it was. She and my father wouldn’t have it any other way. Thinking back now, it’s hard to believe he went from the man who welcomed everyone, who loved a good laugh and having everyone around, to the man who tried to drive everyone away in the end.

My father was a hard, impatient man. He demanded you do the right thing, and Lord help you if you didn’t.  He had a lot of goodness and kindness in him, but he was a hard man. Growing up I never thought he appreciated my mother properly. His word was law, and we all were to do as he told us, including my mother. I’m not sure I felt he was worthy enough of my mother.

When she got sick, he was transformed. He never left her side. He became infinitely patient, explaining the same things over and over. Feeding her, dressing her, taking her for the long drives that seemed to soothe her. She was slipping away and he didn’t know what to do to stop it. It broke him when he finally had to admit that he couldn’t take care of her at home any longer.

Even though she didn’t know who he was, he was there at the home to feed her every day. He wouldn’t go anywhere because he had to be there to feed her himself. When I tried to do it, he said I didn’t do it right. It was in his role as caretaker that I finally saw what had been true my whole life. He loved her to a breadth and depth that was impossible to measure.

When I was a young adult he once told me not to go on the endless search for perpetual happiness. He said people ruined their lives and the lives of others trying to hold on to it. Happiness, he said, was just a state of mind that would come and go throughout my lifetime. He told me to instead strive for contentment. “If you work hard, and do the right thing, you’ll be content with periods of happiness thrown in.” Like I said, I was young at the time, and I thought that was a very sad way to grab a hold of life, but as I’ve grown, I don’t think he could have given me any wiser words to get me through life’s hiccups.

I guess that’s what made him bitter. I see it now, all of the love he felt for her, and all of the regrets he had. After all, he had worked hard. He had done the right thing. He had muscled through life’s disappointments, been there for his friends and his family, and still the fates, or God, or simply a mass of plaques and tangles ate away at the mind of the love of his life and he lost her.

He never got over that. 

I hope he’s with her now, because I know that’s all he’s wanted since we lost her.

My father was many things. Hard, complex, stubborn, unforgiving, difficult, and flawed. But he was also funny, compassionate, righteous, loyal, honest, passionate and loving.

In the end, he was just a man, but he loved, and he was loved.