YOLFO: You Only Live Forever

On what would be my father's 77th birthday, I prove that people, in fact, live more than once. They live on through what they did with the time they have, for better or ill.

Perhaps unconsciously, I wrote yesterday’s newsletter about role models in preparation for today’s date, which would be my father’s 77th birthday. Dan Friedlander was born on this day, 1945 (2-3-45) in Hyde Park, Chicago and died on July, 9th 2012 in Boulder, Colorado, nine days before the birth of my first son, Finn, in Brooklyn, New York. For my son’s first weekend, I was 1,000 miles away speaking at my father’s overflowing memorial service. In days, I lost my main role model and became someone else’s. 

My father spent his last several years being a clarion for climate action.

I don’t believe there’s any more impactful relationship a human has than with their parents, especially a same-sex parent, who provides sex-specific modeling and direction. This impact is made as much in a parent’s absence as their presence, and as much for what they don’t do as what they do. Considering the huge role of parental influence, I was blessed with an amazing father. While hardly flawless, my father was a renaissance man: a poet, naturalist, and economist, social justice, anti-war, and climate activist, tech pioneer —a guy-behind-the-guy  driving trends like networked computing, big storage, and cleantech long before they were on anyone’s radar. 

Despite his big influence, my father and I didn’t spend that much time together. Our early relationship was marred by the aftermath of my parents’ divorce and much of my adolescence  and twenties—when we bonded the most —was defined by our respective ramblings as wandering soul and tech executive. Despite the paucity of facetime, with each passing year, the truth of James Baldwin’s statement “children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them” becomes clearer. It wasn’t what my dad said, taught, or even did for me directly that defined his impact on me. It was his conduct and legacy that provided a template for my own life and capabilities. In many senses, I became him in order to improve on him.  

My father and grandparents were the subject of ongoing investigations by the FBI from the forties through at least the seventies and accounts of their right-side-of-history positions are easy to find.

Perhaps the most important thing my father showed me  was a respect for history. He taught me to look at the present day as a tally of the geologic, climatic, economic, and human forces that came before it. The preoccupation with the past and future compels many men in my family to forsake present comforts for future rewards, particularly clean consciences. For example, my great-grandfather Israel martyred himself in war torn Ukraine a day after my grandfather’s 10th birthday in 1920; both my grandfather and father stood up to McCarthy and Hoover, the latter calling my father “America’s second most dangerous man” because of his supposedly communist-tinged anti-war activities.   

Having a famous martyr in the family is one of the more dangerous parental role models one can have.

The commerce-fueled world wants to keep the public obsessing about the day . YOLO , they say, because fixes for daily problems —laundry detergent, antidepressants, fast cars —are purchasable and easily achieved. Solving enduring problems requires lifetimes of work and sacrifice that (sorta) concludes when one dies and can no longer work. To my grandfather, great-grandfather, Dorthy Day, Jerry Garcia, and especially my father, I want to give thanks and speak your names so that you may live on forever.