It seemed so painless. All that remained, my father told me, was paperwork. I would have to sign a paper wherein I officially resigned from the so-called board of directors. On December 9, a day after the sale, the Boston Globe reported it on the front page of its business section. My father, the article said, "decided to sell, in part, because none of his own children were interested in taking over the Advocate."
That hurt. Later my father appeared on a cable-TV talk show to reiterate how I had let him down -- or that's how it seemed to me. The whole family united to watch the tape at my parents' house. I watched the show sitting, like a kid, on my parents' bedroom floor. After it was over, I said nothing. My sisters, Susan and Judy, found a way to turn the state of affairs into something humorous. They began referring to the siblings, collectively, as The Ingrates.
I felt none of that, I decided. My reasoning went like this: My father may have hurt my feelings, but at least I didn't have to live his life. I was paying a small price for my freedom.
For quite a while, I persisted in believing a burden had been lifted. To invoke another literary hero, I felt like Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist of several Philip Roth novels. In Zuckerman Unbound, Zuckerman rides a limousine through his old neighborhood after his father's death, uttering this affirmation to himself: "You are no longer any man's son, you are no longer some good woman's husband, you are no longer your brother's brother, and you don't come from anywhere, either."
How exhilarating. How liberating. How utterly untrue.
These days it feels instead as if a net beneath me, whose presence I never really acknowledged, has been pulled away. As Inc. writers, we are encouraged to find stories that will tell our readers something new about the entrepreneurial experience. But the truth is, reader, this time I hope I'm telling you something you already know: be you its owner or its prospective inheritor, there is no running from the responsibility a family business imposes.
I wish I could compress my experience to offer the kind of useful moral that magazine articles are supposed to provide; all I know, though, is that I equated joining the Advocate with doing what my father and grandfather had done. Perhaps it's a failure of imagination on my part. Or maybe my father never bothered to communicate the possibilities the newspaper offered. In any family, people are always making guesses about what other people really mean -- symbols and signs get hopelessly tangled; too much of what matters goes unsaid. If you're expecting to find a solution to any of that by plunking down $3 for a magazine (or $19 for 12, a 47% savings), then you haven't yet begun to wrestle in earnest with the quandary.
All I can tell you is this: I never wanted the family business, yet I feel lost without it.
Far from freeing me, my father's selling of the business last year has weighed me down with the task of finding my own way. Crazy questions swirl around in my brain: Did I choose to become a journalist, or was I just following the program? How many out there think I should have studied something that would have allowed me a more secure and lucrative career? (Put your hand down, Mom.)
Some days, as I drive to work, I actually feel jealous of my father. The security of "the cocoon" -- as he sometimes called the Advocate -- especially compared with the capriciousness of the outside world, looks more and more appealing. Too bad, because it's not there to take me in anymore.
A friend of mine -- a new-age type -- suggested that it might help if my family said some sort of formal good-bye to the Advocate, held a kind of funeral for it. We could each write something, make a definitive statement, sit around the dining-room table holding hands and sharing our feelings. To me, it sounded a little too much like a séance; the last thing I need is any more intrusion from the past.
After all, I still see my grandfather on a regular basis. He appears in my dreams more and more often. Some mornings I wake up with one of his favorite phrases on my lips. "I'm a man without a plan," I found myself whispering one morning -- and it was truer than even he had ever imagined. A decade ago I railed against his ghost. Now, as I struggle to define myself, I take in what he has to say. It would be hard to sustain any anger at the image my memory serves up; there is my grandfather exactly as I knew him, a charismatic and gentle elderly man. During my life, he was to ethnic journalism what Famous Amos was to chocolate-chip cookies: a self-depreciating front man, the guy who got the laughs. "I talk by the mile," he used to say, "and the people react by the inch."
Some nights I am again the small boy who could listen to his stories over and over again. He launches into tales of his early days as a reporter, his punch lines hinging on embarrassing typographical errors. One time, for instance, he wound up reporting that an actress was "starving," instead of starring, in a Boston play. And there was one anecdote in which etchings substituted for itchings. I wake up ever amazed, and grateful, that my brain has stored these tapes.
But in one recent dream, my grandfather turned on me. He actually stopped dead in the middle of saying something, interrupting himself to speak as if he were holding a press conference inside my psyche. What he said, I think, serves as a practical warning for any family struggling to confront -- or, for that matter, avoid confronting -- the question of succession within its business. As a family we allowed events to overtake us, instead of reviewing our options beforehand. Apparently, my grandfather was familiar with that tactic. "For people to act," he said reprovingly, "too often we must substitute catastrophe for imagination."
I don't know why he said it, but I think I know what he meant.
