The Death of my Father

The death of the father is the most important event, the most poignant loss, of a man's life.
Sigmund Freud

The dream shows the inner truth and reality of the patient as it really is: not as I conjecture it to be, and not as he would like it to be, but as it is.
Carl Jung


It started out to be the kind of day like any other day. At the time I was managing a large nightclub in Chicago, making good money, and living a hedonistic, carefree life living in the city. I had been doing this for a while and was pretty content if not a little bored.

I had fallen into managing nightclubs almost entirely by accident. I had moved to Chicago to become a comic, and often worked as a bartender to actually pay the bills. I was so bad as a bartender that eventually they just kind of made me a manager, and soon I had given up my dream of being a comic and instead spent the majority of my time doing various chores running a bar.

Something was nagging at me though and I didn’t totally know what it was at the time. I knew I wanted more out of life than what I was doing, but I had gotten very comfortable and at the time I couldn’t see too many other options than to continue to do what I was doing. I had developed an interest in Psychology, and had taken to analyzing my dreams in pursuit of this interest.

One night I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. I had dreamed that my brother and I were wandering through the woods in ragged clothing, terribly impoverished, and searching for our father. I woke up with a tremendous sense of loss, foreboding, and pending doom. I opened one of my books on dream interpretation and found a passage interpreting a dream similar to the one I just had. It said this kind of dream may be indicative that one would be called to a deathbed soon. I dismissed this interpretation as fatalistic. One hour later my mother called, informing me my dad had died during the night.

At my father’s funeral the priest read from the book Tuesdays with Morrie. Sitting in that church and hearing those words about loss and regret, I vowed to change my life. Upon my return home I enrolled in school and began my personal journey towards being a Psychologist. And my first assignment in my first class? Read the book Tuesdays with Morrie and relate the concepts in the book to a loss in my own life.

I could have simply dismissed all of these events as coincidences, but I knew from my experiences that the universe had just hit me with a thunderbolt, and that I had better begin paying attention.

So years later I’m a therapist. It’s an incredibly gratifying job and one that I feel totally energized doing. I get lazy all the time and forget to listen to the signs that surround me. I’ve become convinced that everyday the universe is trying to tell you SOMETHING… Most days I miss the sign. Jung said one of the fundamental drives of human beings is to be lazy, and I am as guilty of that as anyone. But when a person has experienced these kinds of things in their lives they start to pay a lot more attention, and right now, I can say, in this period of my life, I’m awake…