Philip James Bonomo, 1930-2024

Some thoughts on my Dad and grief

In 1959, the folk singer Pete Seeger wrote “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, marrying eight verses of the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes to a simple, earnest melody. The song first appeared in 1962 (as “To Everything There is a Season”) on the Limeliters’ Folk Matinee album, and then later that year on Seeger’s The Bitter and the Sweet. The average music fan—the average human being—knows “Turn! Turn! Turn!” best through the Byrds’ version, which hit number one on the Billboard Hot 100 chart in December of 1965. I’ve loved the Byrds’ recording since the moment I heard it as a kid—Jim McGuinn, Gene Clark, and David Crosby’s harmonies, McGuinn’s secular-sacred 12-string lead guitar, and that stately and moving melody translating ancient utterances into the present and beyond.

“I didn’t realize when I improvised a melody to a short poem in the Old Testament that these few words would be some of the most important I ever would latch onto,” Seeger remarked in 2006 to Daniel Sheehy, director of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. The words are important to me now, too, beyond any casual reckoning I’d made of them in the past, because I spoke those words at my father’s funeral mass on New Year’s Eve.

Phil Bonomo died in the hours before dawn on December 26th. He was 94. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His mother died when he was young; he went to live with extended family, and as an adolescent and teen was raised by a stepmom in unhappy circumstances. He earned degrees at Purdue and M.I.T., met my mom Kate while stationed (Air Force) in Dayton, Ohio; they married in 1957 and settled in Wheaton, Maryland, in the Washington, D.C. suburbs, where my five siblings and I were raised. He was devoted to my mom throughout their sixty-seven year marriage. A dozen or so years ago my parents moved to a nearby retirement community; there my dad died peacefully in hospice. In the previous couple of weeks each of his children was fortunate to spend some time with him, though he’d been in decline.

Any account of the things that my dad loved threatens to flatten his life, to reduce him to a list of character traits. But in my grief that’s not going to stop me: my dad loved reading, mathematics, anything to do with numbers and their tangible yet mysterious applications; he particularly loved the Integral, something about the curve of the classical form, the inscrutable but familiar nature of it; he loved God, and was a devout Catholic; he loved logic; he loved Frank Sinatra, George Shearing, Dave Brubeck, and George Gershwin, who made songs that I won’t be able to listen to for a while; he loved martinis and draft beer, and sausage and pepper sandwiches, and hot sauce; he loved baseball, first his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers, then later the Washington Senators, Baltimore Orioles (by proxy), and Washington Nationals; he loved his fifteen-minute mile walks; he loved to laugh, and to be surrounded by others laughing; he loved Robert Benchley, early Woody Allen films, the 1968 Producers movie, and The Odd Couple.

He loved his job, three decades at IBM, where he’d eventually rise to Senior Engineer. (When I was a kid, I thought that he was a train caboose engineer.) There he sat at a desk and with colleagues whom he respected, worried his beloved integral calculus while working on NASA’s unmanned spacecraft program, and with navigation, meteorological, astronomical, and earth-survey satellites, ballistic missile defense systems, telecommunication systems, highly-classified military intelligence systems, and geosynchronous orbit analysis. He also worked on early Global Positioning Satellite research. In more recent years, when Amy and I would visit Maryland, he’d join us in our rental car and take note, with obvious delight, of the dashboard GPS. A lesser man might’ve crowed about the part he played in helping develop the technology, boastful with tales; my dad, with typical modesty, would simply marvel at the GPS and the universes that it opened up. It’s grand, he’d say, a phrase that he’d use throughout his life when struck by the world’s large and small beauties.

Above all, my dad loved his wife and his family—six kids, eleven grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. As my brother Jim wrote in a social media post, “he loved family more than any man I know.”

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Over the years, I’ve taught Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” many times. Among the aspects of the story I’ve always noted was just how ripe the lawyer-narrator was for transformation, for some unexpected experience that would shift the ground beneath him and force him to reckon with everything. The journey from the copyist Bartleby’s first, mild “I would prefer not to” to Bartleby’s final moments as a vagrant, starving to death coiled in a fetal position at The Tombs, is profound, yet especially for the narrator because he prided himself on his own neatness and orderliness—boasted about it, really—and what more graphic way is there to disrupt a rational lifestyle than to meet a man who absurdly rejects the world the way the world is offered? And this from the narrator, near the end of the story:

For the first time in my life a feeling of overpowering stinging melancholy seized me. Before, I had never experienced aught but a not-unpleasing sadness. The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom. A fraternal melancholy! For both I and Bartleby were sons of Adam.

The narrator’s around sixty years old, and he hasn’t yet experienced suffering or grief, only a “not-unpleasing sadness”? I first taught “Bartleby” when I was around my late-twenties, and I found the narrator’s privilege laughable, and sad, so isolated was he, more or less by choice but also by temperament, from the world’s agonies that fraternal melancholy took decades to arrive to his heart.

When my dad died, it occurred to me that I had become that narrator. I’m now around the narrator’s age, and though I’ve experienced the minor griefs that the average human experiences, and have suffered sympathetically for friends and loved ones, most profoundly my wife, as they’ve endured major losses, I’d been relatively protected. Aeschylus wrote thousands of years ago: “There is no pain so great as the memory of joy in present grief.” And grief arrives on its own timetable, fresh no matter what its date of delivery. The recoil is awesome.

There is nothing more extraordinary and yet more ordinary than death. Most clichés originate in some moment when someone was first struck dumb by loss or love, pain or pleasure, their life radically and permanently affected. No matter what time in your life you feel major grief, the newness of it both isolates you and reminds you of its commonality. I guess that that paradox is the DNA of grief. As my family pulled our procession of cars out from the Gate of Heaven cemetery after entombing my dad, another hearse and a trail of cars were politely waiting their turn to enter.

The words to “Turn! Turn! Turn!” have long becomes stale clichés. How many times has the Byrds’ song been played—on the radio, on stereos, on late-night TIME-LIFE commercials for cash-in 1960s anthologies, stock footage of Vietnam War protests accompanying it? Yet McGuinn’s opening guitar and Chris Hilman’s bass lines ring new with every listen. (As I read the words aloud at my dad’s funeral mass, I heard the song, distantly. Seeger remarked to Sheehy that “A beautiful melody will leap language barriers or religious barriers or political barriers.”) How many countless postcards and dorm-room posters and memes have exploited the words in Ecclesiastes? The well-worn arguments there—a time for this, a time for that—gave me in their back-and-forth, universal logic much needed ballast as I read (trying both to look at and not to look at my sibs and my mom). The occasion, I guess, gave those words that we’ve all heard countless times new relevance to me, and calmed my heart, which was still racing from me—with my brothers and sister—having accompanied my dad’s casket to the altar. But of course the words are always new. The next person hasn’t needed them yet—they will by the time I finish writing this sentence.

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A second-genration southern Italian, he had a temper, and would occasionally lose it when we were younger, crowded noisily into a split-level home. Once or twice, on those nights when he raised his voice especially loudly, he’d make a point of knocking on my bedroom door, and he would apologize to me for yelling, “You know I love you,” he’d say directly to me, his eyes moist. I intuited in those moments that that small gesture took resolve, and also a sacrifice of sorts on his part—it’s so easy to stay pissed off—and I felt the maturity and the kindness in the gesture and in him, though I didn’t really know those words yet.

Many years later, when I was living on my own in Athens, Ohio during graduate school, my dad called me one afternoon for a reason I can’t remember now, and, grouchy from being awoken from a nap likely sponsored by a hangover, I was regrettably short with him, cutting the call off rudely. I called back a few minutes later, chastened, and apologized. A small token back.

He had his share of fears, and certainly regrets, large and small, but they were softened, or made minor, I hope, in the wake of the decency and morality with which he quietly lived his life. He made a baffling and, to me, somewhat heartbreaking shift to the right politically—a classic Reagan Democrat, he’d been disappointed with Jimmy Carter (RIP) who he felt was a great man but a poor leader—the lamentable Fox News era of my dad’s life. Yet truthfully, and gratefully, I could not have asked for a better father, nor could I have asked for a better, kinder, gentler, and more intelligent man to model myself after. He led by example for the whole of his life. He was my favorite man.

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Grief is a dye. It will fade but leave a mark. Near the end, my sister Jane told me that she’d recently read that one way to think about someone dying is that they’re simply going on to the next room. Whether they’ll be there when you get there depends in large part on whether you believe that room exists. For now I’d like to feel that he’s just down the hall.