How I’m Finding My Way To A Better Place

A father reflects on the loss of a son — and his father

Ted Gup,

AARP

Comments

Published April 10, 2025

Ted Gup as a boy with his father, Theodore Stern Gup, in 1957

The author as a boy with his father, Theodore Stern Gup, in 1957.

Courtesy Ted Gup

It’s that time again to write Michael Collins a check to mow and weed my father’s grave. I pay him $250 a year.

My father was felled by a heart attack 51 years ago. He was 50; I was 23. It still gives me something of a start to climb that hill in Canton, Ohio’s West Lawn Cemetery and come upon his grave. To see his name — my name, Theodore Gup — etched into the granite, reminds me of that scene in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol when Scrooge stands before his own grave. A wave of regrets washes over him, and he resolves to mend his selfish ways. Only in fiction is such a redo possible; real life offers few mulligans.

I am now 74 and rounding the final turn myself. Death, once so remote and abstract, is now neither.

Early on, I knew that our family’s Jewish tradition forbade a child from being named after a living parent. I was told it was out of fear that the Angel of Death would take the child out of turn. My father’s defiance tempted fate.

I am no more religious than my father was. Still, my wife and I did not name our firstborn Theodore. Instead, we called him David. It means “beloved,” and beloved he surely was. But at 21, David was snatched away by a drug overdose, and I was condemned to carry on. I lived that cliché — “No parent should have to bury a child” — and for years, I knew that was how others saw me: the bereft and broken father, the embodiment of unspoken fears.

In all things, David colored outside the lines. For that, others were drawn to him as to a magnet. And he was smart. He could barely pass his own exams, but at the end of each semester, signing in as one friend or another, he would take their exams for them and ace them. Among the papers found at the foot of his bed, I came across an interview between David and a friend of mine, a best-selling author. It vividly captured her personality and made me proud. There was so much promise there. Years later, I discovered he had never spoken with her.

Most Popular

After he had partied his way through four years of college without graduating, David spent a summer in Honduras, working with the poor. He was, I believed, at last on the right path and out of peril. But I felt it was time for him to buckle down. When I took him back to college that fall, my parting words to David, shaking hands on the sidewalk outside his apartment, were “finish strong.”

Two days later came the call from the coroner.

I remember being handed his ashes. The funeral director cautioned my wife that the cremated remains were heavy, as if to prepare her for the impossible weight. In one sense, the funeral director was right — they were heavy, heavier than expected. But then compared to our son, they were unfathomably light — a preposterous exchange for the man-boy in whom we had invested our hopes and dreams.

We never scattered David’s ashes. But recently, I have been thinking of finding a place for them in the woods beside our cabin in Maine — he liked it there — where we might put a bench and some plantings and reflect upon David and upon the days we might have before us and what we should make of them. I have never been able to believe that David is “in a better place” now than when he was here with us. But I would at least be able to say he’s in a better place than the shelf where his ashes are now. I think he would appreciate the sarcasm.

In one sense, I no longer grieve for either my father or my son. Yes, I miss their company, but I am no longer consumed by the unfairness of their passing.

I imagine them urging me to live. Each time I say or write my name, I invoke my father’s spirit. And every day the memory of my David returns to me, full of mischief and guile and irrepressible joy.

I suppose I, too, am now in a better place.

AARP essays share a point of view in the author’s voice, drawn from expertise or experience, and do not necessarily reflect the views of AARP.

%{postComment}%