Are you interested in angels, demons, spirits, ghosts, and monsters? Are you curious about the origin, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, sit back, relax, and welcome to Seven Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.
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Hello all. This is JJ and welcome back to another episode of Southern Demonology. In this episode, I want to wrestle with death. In previous talks, we have gone through how the ancients could envision titanic forces as entities in their own right. We can look at Psalm 91 for an example, whether that is Kateb, Annihilation, Deber, Plague. All of these things could be construed as these horrendous forces that arrayed against humanity. And if you look at death in particular, then you can find quite a few references in the Hebrew Bible that go through its strength, its power.
You even have um, you know, the the term Salimoeth, uh death shadows that can crop up. But today I'm not gonna be talking about the ancients, and I'm not gonna be talking about the thonic gods. Rather, this is gonna be a a much more personal grappling, and this is gonna be part thought exercise, part self-therapy session, part tribute to an extent, but all of it is likely to be depressing. So if you've had your fill with the way that the world currently is, I completely understand, but this is something I've gotta get off my chest, and I hope you all bear with me as I attempt to do that.
So on Tuesday, I received a text message upon waking up. And I'm gonna read it to you right now. I'm sorry to say that your father passed away last evening. If you have any questions, please call blank. Yeah. Couldn't even be bothered to give me a call. Rather, I was coldly told over a text message that my father had died. And this is pretty typical of our relationship, I guess you could say. And the news actually hit me a lot harder than I expected. And I'm sure that there are those out there who had a wonderful connection to your dad.
And you're wondering and wondering why I am not reduced to a ball of goo. And the answer is kinda simple. I never met the man. Never met the man once. So my mom is exactly twenty years older than I am. And I believe my dad was twenty-one years older. She met him while he was an MP at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Where I am where my hometown is. Uh it's situated about thirty minutes away from Clarksville, which is right on the border uh of Kentucky. And Fort Campbell is the nearest big city close to that.
So she met him in Clarksville, and lo and behold, fell in love, and she agreed to pack up and move with him back to Washington State. And I I think the marriage lasted two plus years, something like that. So after being married, my mom got pregnant. That pregnancy uh was not successful, and what would have been an older brother uh was never born, but then a short while later I popped out. And I think two months after I was born, my dad began cheating with another woman.
So my mom called my aunt and they packed up and moved me uh and themselves back to Tennessee, where I, you know, proceeded to be raised um until I went away from college. And I I have to give my mom credit on this one. No, I have to give her credit for a shitload of stuff. She's one of the most remarkable people I ever met in my life. She never once badmouthed a man. If there came a time when I was curious and I had questions, and it didn't happen nearly as often as what you would think it would, then I would have received, you know, matter-of-fact answers.
But never once was there a condemnation or, you know, oh I hate that bastard, blah blah blah. It was just very straight to the matter. And that's the way it persisted for 16 years. And I remember this day so vividly. I was playing Shining Force 2 on the Genesis. Yes, that dates me quite a bit. And suddenly my mom peeked her head in my room and told me that I had a phone call. And her face was had an expression on it I just really could not place. And so I took it and I said hello and this strange voice on the other end proceeded to tell me that I'm your father.
And he then used the next thirty minutes to quiz me an attempt to prove how much more intelligent he was. So my very first experience talking to this man was an eminently negative one. However, I didn't really let that anger get in the way. Um I mean I I'd been curious about this person for my entire life up to that point, and so I did use this experience to try to pump him full of as much, you know, as many questions as I possibly could to learn more about him. Because I had no idea. And I got some information, but a lot of it was sidestepping.
But anyway, the conversation ended, and I decided, well, if this man had the brass balls to try to initiate a conversation after this long, then I was going to try to keep it going. Because I did want to learn more about this person. And so I bought him a Christmas present. Pretty sure it was a wallet if memory serves. And sent it off to him. And Christmas came and went, never heard anything, so I'm like, okay, one last shot. And so I decided to call. And I did not get him, but I got my grandmother on his side. First time I ever talked to her as well. Rose Ikalaka. She was not a fan of me.
When I was the entire time and I didn't speak to her long, all I essentially asked was, you know, is my father there? And there was so much contempt in her voice when she said no. So I followed up. Do you know when he'll be there? Can you you know she's again gave no information. So I left a message with my phone number, which of course he already bloody ass knew. And I never heard anything since. Now again, this did n nothing to me. Because besides fill me with a great bit of animosity.
And then, you know, I was able to go to college, then I was able to go to grad school, and I was filled with a burning desire to rub in his face that I went to Harvard. Just as objective proof of how much smarter I was than this piece of shit person who had no part of my life, in fact, didn't even attempt to further my life in any way, shape, or form. He was required to pay child support, never saw a dime. So it was my mom who raised me and helped take care of my grandmother. My grandmother was a phenomenal woman.
I learned in fact to this day I am so eminently grateful that I was raised by both my mom and my grandmother because they taught me the ways of being a gentleman, they taught me responsibility, they taught me the value of my own intelligence, and they brought me up to just be a good person. And you know, when my mom moved back in with my grandmother, she at the time was working, um, but then my grandmother developed a very rare skin condition.
It's it's a type of scleroderma, in which these pockets of bone would appear on her fingertips, and they would be so horrifically painful to touch that she had no choice but to retire from the factory that she was working in. So it was my mom who was working as a customer service representative for Bell South. Well, at the time it was South South Central Bell, something like that, uh, but then of course rebranded to Bell South. But she was, you know, taking care of the our entire household just on her salary.
And she took every night shift that she possibly could because, of course, irregular shifts mean more money. She took as much overtime as she possibly could. She was always working. And this bastard did not help at all. So, flash forward, got out of college, got out of grad school, and I I just wanted to wave my education in his face. But then I kind of forgot about it.
I didn't bother looking them up. It wasn't really worth that much of an effort. And started working, moved up to DC, uh, advanced my web development career by leaps and bounds, moved back to Tennessee, and then was got the opportunity to go to Japan, live there for two years, and it was after coming back from Japan, I received a friend request, and it was from my father. And by this point, whatever animosity I have had ever had had just been worn away with time. And so I started talking to him. And I still remember it it was such a surreal conversation.
Uh you know, I I called his cell phone number, he picked up, he was living in Arizona, he called me son, asked about his life, he asked about my life, and then he finished the conversation with I love you, son. And I did not say it back. And that is unusual for me. I mean if you know me in real life, I am extremely fond of saying I love you at every opportunity. That's the way I was brought up. That's you know, on a given conversation, you know, with the family member, I'll say it a few times, they'll say it back.
In fact, my my wife's family, who, you know Chinese and Japanese culture is eminently more reserved. I mean, in fact, the the strongest way of saying I love you in Japanese, which is you know, eichteru. It's kind of that eternal love. And in general, you never say that unless you're getting married, you're proposing, or you're on your deathbed. It's just never ever said, except for maybe once every few years.
I mean in fact, I mean there's a famous phrase in which there was a novel that was uh being translated into Japanese, and when the translator ran across the phrase, I love you, he instead translated it as the moon is beautiful, isn't it? That's just goes to show, you know, you you just never say this kind of stuff, and yet, you know, I I say it to my f my uh father-in-law and my mother-in-law, 'cause they're phenomenal people. And they've gotten used to it, but it it's taking a while.
So to be confronted with those words, and they're words that spill so easily from my lips and I I simply said nothing. I couldn't. All I said was, Well, I gotta go. I'll talk to you later. And since then we've talked probably a dozen times, maybe up to twenty, but no more than that throughout the years. In fact, the last phone call I had from him was probably a few months ago, where he had informed me that he was having some respiratory issues and he was in the had been in the hospital for a while trying to get them uh taken care of. So I've had no hatred in my heart toward this man.
He is just a regular person. I've had no animosity toward him. But neither have I had any positive emotion whatsoever. There was just a complete lack of emotion. And so, you know, everyone has the thought experiment of, oh, what would happen? How would you feel if this person passed away? And honestly, I just kind of thought that it would be another piece of news and I would go about my day. But when I got that text message, it really took me I mean, not just the surprise and the shock. But it was like someone had punched me in the gut.
And so I worked up the nerve and I called the number that was listed in the text message. And it was from the woman that he had been living with out in Arizona. And she informed me that, yeah, um, she was sorry that, you know, she had to send it by text message, but she, you know, she didn't have the money to call um on her phone. And essentially what had happened was the previous evening he had collapsed and he couldn't get back up. He stopped breathing. And though an ambulance was called and the EMTs attempted to resuscitate him for up to thirty minutes, it was not successful.
And again, I'm having to take all of this with a grain of salt because I'm hearing it secondhand. And of course she was really choked up. She couldn't really communicate any more details than what I had. And so I simply told her, Well, you know, if you hear of any services or anything, please let me know. There's no way I was going to go. Because with the pandemic and the risk of getting on a plane, it was just too great. And I couldn't I I could not fathom even, you know, introducing even in the most remote sense something back to my family here.
Just uh for a funeral for someone that I had never even met in person, uh that would not be comprehended. But then I learned, and this is even more typical of our relationship, uh I learned that you know, even though I have some theoretical uncles out there and a whole bunch of half siblings that I I've heard about but have no direct contact, have never had direct contact with, don't even know names, situations, anything like that.
This woman then proceeded to latch onto me and sent me an email saying, Oh hey, you can get his retirement funds here, and you know, feel free to to pay for the funeral however you want. So, in other words, she wasn't just being nice and informing me about my father's passing away. No, there was the ulterior motive of passing off the final bill to me. And I will tell you right now, it would be a cold day in hell before I took care of his funeral. He did not help us in life. I cannot in good conscience help him in death. And that's where it lies.
But so I really have been thinking about why this impacted me. And it really did impact me. You know, it for the next few days my brain was just completely discombobulated. I was making routine mistakes at work, uh, had to have people I I'm a release manager, um, as one of my many various duties in addition to being like a solutions architect and a DevOps developer and all this other stuff. Um, and I had to have people double and triple check my work because I did not feel safe, you know, in releasing very precise changes. It it really left me floored.
But I didn't feel any sadness in my heart. And it took me a while of introspection until I finally realized it's not that I'm grieving for his passing, I'm grieving for the senselessness of it all. Here it is a relationship that by all accounts and measures should be one of the most important of your life that between a father and his son. And instead it wound up equating to nothing. And I don't know if in my heart I was simply holding on to the remote possibility that maybe there would be more.
Maybe there would be something that would justify the years of silence and absence and suddenly something could be salvaged from all this, but no. At the end all there was was the sound of a door booming closed and nothing being left behind. And that's what I was grieving about. It wasn't the man it was the fact that something that could have been so powerful wound up equating to nothing. I apologize if this episode has had a lot of pauses in it. I've I've just been working through everything in my head, so I I promise we're gonna get on to some much more exciting topics.
In fact, I have been working on and going to continue to finish up a really exciting series that was proposed by members of our Discord, and I I think it's gonna be high impact, really interesting, and I really hope that everyone tunes in uh and enjoys it. In fact, I may throw some money at this in order to get a small advertising blitz just to try to build up the community a little bit more. And um I do want to say I really appreciate the members of my Discord. I I appreciate all of you listening more than I can ever tell you.
But you know, the the Discord members, we've had some really interesting conversations, and if you haven't joined and you're interested in doing so, I highly recommend it. Uh, you can find the link at the top of the website, southerndemonology.com. If you don't want to talk, you don't have to. If you just want to read about the conversations that we're having, you're more than welcome to do that as well. Um, we're few in number, but everyone there is awesome, and we've had some fantastic talks, and it's been one of the things that helped that's helped me get through some of these past days.
But um yeah, so I'm gonna leave it here. Thank you all for listening. I really do appreciate it. Please visit us on Facebook at facebook.com slash southerndemonology or on our website at southerndemonology.com. Um there you will find links to all of the previous episodes, uh, along with uh some uh announcements and other tidbits, and plus you can always contact me through either one of those platforms. Uh and in terms of this podcast, if you would be so kind, please feel free to to give it a like or a heart or a rate it, whatever you can do, um I would thoroughly appreciate it.
So, once again, thank you for listening. This is JJ, and I hope you're staying safe out there, and we will see you next time.
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When the cartridge is full, you just grab the no-mess tab, throw it in the trash, pop in a new cartridge, and then you're done. It's quick, easy, and you never have to touch a single bug. Plug in a Zevo Flying Insect trap so you can work smarter, not harder, and enjoy your time at home with 24-7 bug protection.