May 13, 2025

Cut off

I got a haircut not too long ago, and not for the first time I looked at my hairline and wondered if I might go bald someday. My dad hadn’t lost his hair by the time he was my age now, but it was starting to look thinner.

I’ll never know if that was because of age, or because he was dying.

Going bald was never really a concern for me growing up, or even now. As far as I know, there isn’t any baldness in my family, but that’s complicated by unknown grandfathers and other twists in the branches of the family tree. But none of my grandmother’s brothers had shiny domes, so I don’t worry about it. Besides, I’m not that vain — the dignity of a shaved head is fine with me.

Dad always had the kind of hair people envy. Black in his youth, it turned a shimmering silver at a young age that contrasted with his dark skin. His hair was also thick, and stayed in whatever shape he combed it into. Somewhere there’s a photo of him in Amsterdam, where he used to visit when he was stationed in Germany during his first tour of duty during the Vietnam War. He was thin, wearing a long, dark coat and a natural pompadour that looked like it weighed more than he did. He looks happy, and a little bemused at where life had taken him.

Somewhere there’s a terrible picture of me, my long hair frizzed up by a perm that thankfully didn’t last long. I was a typical high school student of the 80s, and had thrown in with the rocker tribe. My hair was a little past my shoulders at the time, until I let a smokey-eyed rocker girl convince me I’d look good with a perm. She faded before the perm did.

I grew my hair again, decades later, when my wife and I were in Chicago and the throes of pandemic-fueled anxiety and depression. It was early days, and no one knew how COVID-19 worked except that it seemed to be efficient at filling refrigerated trucks with bodies. We rarely left the apartment, and even then mostly to grab deliveries from the foyer of our building. There was no way in hell I was going to go out to get a haircut.

Sandy offered to cut my hair, but reneged out of nervousness that she’d maim me. I’d shaved my head to a short buzz in the past, but either I didn’t have clippers anymore or I just didn’t see the point. Either is possible.

Two years later, my hair was down to the middle of my back. It was the longest I’d ever had it, and the humid air coming off Lake Michigan gave my hair gorgeous waves and loose curls. But at that point I was ready to move on from the burden of the pandemic, and the hair came off in a symbolic reaping.

That’s probably when I gave my hairline more attention. Maybe it was just that I hadn’t seen that much of my forehead in a while. Or maybe because I was creeping toward my mid-50s. Dad was 55 when he died. I was becoming more and more aware of that.

Dad was 55, and an alcoholic. He had drank my entire life, and it was something that got worse as time went on. Sometimes he’d stop, but never for long. Eventually he drank so much, so regularly, that he didn’t seem to get drunk anymore. He’d become a functioning alcoholic, needing beer and wine just to feel normal, to not get sick.

But he was sick. The years of abuse had worn away at his throat until I got a call at work, telling me to go to the hospital because my dad had been throwing up blood and was unconscious. We were all in a private waiting room when a doctor came in and told us Dad had esophageal varices — his throat had basically been weakened by alcohol to the point that it couldn’t hold itself together anymore. They couldn’t stop the bleeding, and he was going into organ failure. It was our decision, the doctor said, but it was probably best to say our goodbyes.

So we did.

Later, I’d wonder about signs I might’ve missed, things he’d dismiss or explain away if it came up. The way the color would go out of his face sometimes. The weight loss. His thinning hair. I’d ask myself if these were hints to his slow-building bleed out, or if even asking was just an impulse to ponder whether there was something more I could’ve done. Questions without answers.

It’s a strange feeling, to be the same age your father was when he died. Even stranger when you’re that age and coming up on the anniversary of his death. It’ll be a few days from now as I write this. After that, I’ll be older than my father ever was. Older than he ever got to be.

In the year after his death, I would forget myself and reach for the phone when I had a question about car maintenance or his time growing up in Albuquerque or how he made the masa for tamales. I’d forget he wasn’t there to answer my questions anymore. That was more than 20 years ago.

I wish he could tell me about my hair.