A daughter’s love letter to her dad, Chris Fagan ’77
In All the Colors Came Out, Kate Fagan writes about her close yet sometimes complicated relationship with her dad, Chris Fagan ’77, who died of ALS in December 2019. Kate’s mom, Kathleen (Crowley) ’78 Fagan, refers to the book as “Kate’s love letter to her dad” in the introduction. “Lucky us … our daughters hit the jackpot,” Kathleen writes of Chris as a father. “Chris’ drive, his devotion, and above all, his attention to his daughters’ dreams made our girls who they are.” The following excerpt is from a chapter titled “Fort Moultrie.”
There’s a narrow street in Charleston — Huger Street — that cuts across upper downtown; my wife, Kathryn, and I happen to frequently find ourselves there. One of our favorite restaurants is on this street, and it’s also around the corner from Hampton Park, where we walk our dogs a few mornings a week.
Kathryn doesn’t know this, but the street is haunted. Each time we drive down it, a scene plays out, and sometimes so vividly I have to remind myself it’s happening only in my head. (Or is it? Maybe there’s also an energetic imprint on the street.) The scene is excruciatingly simple. I’m in the car with my dad. He’s driving. It’s the night before my wedding — Oct. 3, 2018 — and we’re driving slowly on Huger looking for street parking. We find a spot, but we need to parallel park, so my dad pulls the car past the opening, lines it up, shifts the car into reverse, and begins to crank the wheel.
I’m looking over my shoulder at his progress when the car suddenly stops. He looks at me, his eyebrows arched, his eyes big. “I need you to do it,” he says. “I — I can’t, this wheel.” His left arm, long rendered useless, dangles from his shoulder; his right arm, the one on which we’ve pinned our hopes, keeps slipping from the top of the wheel.
“I got this,” I say, popping out of the car and darting around, believing the faster I park, the less time my dad has to analyze what just happened. And this is the moment. I see as a drone would, from above: the silver car idled on Huger, both our doors open, me scrambling around the hood, my dad dazed, struggling to pull himself from the driver’s seat. I quickly park the car, pretending that the wheel is sticky, grimacing for effect. “Man, that’s a really tough steering wheel,” I say as I get out of the parked car. It’s one of those lies we build to get our hearts from one moment to the next, like grabbing someone’s arm and dragging them from a gruesome sight.
Each time we drive down Huger, no matter the time of day, this scene plays. And sometimes as we pass the exact place on the street, I turn my head to keep my eyes there, just to stay in the moment a little longer.
It’s no mystery why this has happened. Just hours before he and I drove down Huger, my dad and I had talked — finally talked — about all the failures and miscommunications in our relationship over the years. It was the kind of conversation I promised myself we’d one day have but worried we wouldn’t. Nearly a decade had passed between me knowing I had things to say and actually saying them. And for two of those years, my dad had an ALS diagnosis hovering over him, and still I couldn’t figure out how to carve out time just for the two of us.
But earlier that day, I’d asked if we could go for a ride, just us. As I knew would happen, my dad’s eyes darted to mine, and he said, “Uh oh, am I in trouble?” Now that he was sick, he balked at interactions presented as “special.” He thought they meant the other person believed he was dying, and if the other person believed he was dying — well, that was incorrect messaging for the powers that be, the big man upstairs. This kind of reverence for spoken ideas isn’t unusual. Many of us believe we can speak things into existence. We think that if we say our hopes aloud, the universe might just conspire to help us. And so, conversely, we worry that if we name our gravest fear, the thing we desperately hope isn’t true . . . well, what will the universe do with that energy? (Nothing good, my dad imagined.)
“Let’s just spend some time together. I know a cool place,” I said, and, giving me another wary look, he accepted.
We drove to Sullivan’s Island and parked the car facing the cannons of Fort Moultrie and, just beyond, the expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. The row of war machinery rests between two forts that feel as if they’re part of the lush hillside, and along the winding path detailed signs explain the strategic importance of each variation in the landscape. From this perch, with nothing in view but relics of long-ago battles and swaying palm trees, modern life can feel like an abstract concept.
Even in October the temperature was touching 90 degrees, and my dad had his window down. For a few minutes, we said nothing. I shifted in my seat, took in a deep breath. My mind was filled with a jumble of ums, ands, I justs, I wanted tos — these false starts, this wheel spinning. Sitting there, finally in the moment I had wanted to create, I was still unable to imagine myself saying the things I needed to say.
For 30 years, our language had been low fives and the New York Knicks and practical advice and sneakers. My dad’s love had been expressed verbally through his signature text “aml” — all my love — but mostly through service: he mailed me cards with cash for a dinner out, he drove my car from New York to Colorado, he carried my gym bag around my summer basketball tournaments, he showed up for everything that was important to me. For all this, my gratitude was expressed simply: Thanks, Dad; you’re the best. We paved over the mistakes and miscommunications and kept chugging along. But what we never did was get in there, wade into the mix of awesome and awful, and see each other clearly.
Sitting next to him, I realized that if I waited for a poetic way to begin the conversation, it would never start. I just needed to dive in and thrash about until I found my footing.
“Um, I just . . . wanted to get some time together to, to talk, because I feel like there are all these things I want to say that I’ve never said before — I don’t think I’ve said, anyway.”
His eyes turned soft and tender, and he opened his body to me. He could hear the tone of my voice, how it was running along the edge, threatening to fall into the pool of tears below.
“I don’t know, I just don’t think you realize how important you are to me and how grateful I am . . . that . . . you’re my dad. I mean, all the time we spent together. How many dads do that? You took me everywhere with you, and you showed me everything you loved, and now I love those things, too.”
“I’m not sure I deserve that much credit,” he said, putting his right hand on my shoulder. “It wasn’t a sacrifice to spend time with you. I really liked you.”
“I just always think about all the hours you put in rebounding for me, a little girl, like I was the most important thing in the world. I can’t have you thinking I don’t remember that, that I don’t see that and think about it all the time. That we had such a great childhood and you treated me equally and gave me all these opportunities. I mean, I didn’t even realize people thought female athletes and women’s sports were inferior until, like, five years ago.”
He laughed. “It was so much fun for me, those years, getting to watch you and seeing you fall in love with the game. I had as much fun as you did. Maybe I should be thanking you.”
“I’m sorry I went to Colorado without thinking about how it would make you feel. I just didn’t, I didn’t even think of how it would change everything, and how hard it would be for you to not be a part of that chapter of my life —” and here my voice lost its balance. “I don’t think I ever said I’m sorry.”
“And you never needed to say you were sorry. Going to Colorado was a great decision for you — haven’t I said that, in retrospect?”
I nodded, fat tears falling down my cheeks. Seeing them, he said, “Katie, oh, honey,” and touched my hair, and I thought how stubborn I’d been, missing him so much for so long and yet doing nothing about it. I wished I’d said something before the diagnosis, before the clock had started ticking.
“And I just — I’m sorry about how I came out as gay, that I didn’t tell you directly, and I’m sorry about that email I wrote when I was mad at you. I’m sorry — I’m sorry I let myself put that anger down in words and sent it to you.”
“I made mistakes, too, and I still think about them. I should have come play in that tournament with you in Los Angeles — I regret that to this day. But none of those regrets, or none of our mistakes, changes how much I love you or how proud I am that you’re my daughter. I mean, Katie, you’ve given us so much. I get to be the guy who walks into a room and people want to know if I’m your dad.”
“But then you have to tell them you are,” I said, trying to make him laugh.
“I am so incredibly proud of who you’ve become,” he said. “And I know it’s important to say these things, to talk them out, but you must also know that there’s nothing you could say or do that would change the way I feel about you.”
And so, hours later, as we were driving down Huger, there was still this kinetic energy between us, this palpable warmth and softness that we’d both missed so much. More than just love, it was a kind of breaking open.
It’s this energy, this feeling, that is now trapped in amber alongside the scene — a bird’s-eye view of the car, doors open — on that downtown street. And if it’s possible to feel a kinship with streets, I do with Huger, because a small part of my dad lives there.
Kate Fagan is an Emmy Award–winning journalist and New York Times best-selling author. She currently works for Meadowlark Media and writes for Sports Illustrated.
After college, Chris and Kathleen lived in Europe, where he played professional basketball in Amsterdam, Holland; Ajaccio, Corsica; and Fougeres, France.