Doctor’s office

[sabugo]

On June 3rd 2025 it will be 9 years since my dad died. I was fortunate enough to have him my life for over 3 decades. In comparison, I lost my mom when I was only 17. I still miss him a lot.

As the years go by, it just gets a little bit harder to remember them and what made them special to you. Random conversations. An inside joke. A shared interest. Their quirks, qualities and faults.

My dad was many things. He went to war – a life changing experience for anyone. He had to relocate his family from one continent to another while what he knew as a country drastically changed. He was both a sports doctor and a rural village doctor. He was a father of 4. He was a chain smoker who for some reason put out his cigarettes after two or three puffs (at most!). He drank a little bit more than I’d like. He was also a wealth of knowledge, stories and interests. Politics and crime novels come to mind. And his plants – there was a pine three at our house that he pretty much considered it his 5th child. The fact that the roots were damaging the house quite a bit (and the road) made no difference to him.

He had such a rich life that I’d often tell him he should have written a book. Unfortunately he never did.

I am starting this topic because I don’t want to forget. Memories and stories pop in my mind from time to time. I’d like my son to know his grandfather somehow. If anybody finds this interesting, great. If nobody reads it, that’s cool too. I just really feel like I need to put this in writing somehow. He never wrote the damn book and my life definitely isn’t as interesting as his was, so here go some stories, as I remember them. Some will be funny, some will be darker. Some will just be weird – this is a man who saw no problem discussing autopsies at the dinner table. (I had no problems with the topic either – my mother and sisters, not so much). Lighting up a Marlboro Light while stating (stating, not complaining!) that a drowned corpse has a really bad smell can cause quite a scene at a family dinner. In contrast, my mom’s cooking always smelled and tasted amazing.

So, let us have our fist appointment:
 

The greatest player ever (since Eusébio)

 

Starting in the 1974 my dad worked for over 40 years for SL Benfica, Portugal’s most storied football club. He was the first team doctor until 1994, after which he went to work for the club’s basketball squad.
This story takes place in 1978. I will write it as it was relayed to me by my dad and a few other people who are present at the time.

 

One of the stars of that team was a player called Vitor Batista. An elegant forward, with a physical capacity that was uncommon at that time, Vitor was, to say the least, quirky. Having grown in poverty, he reaped all the benefits of being a star in the 1970’s. The cars, the girls, the nightlife. A lot was happening in 1978, as Portugal was just 4 years removed from a decades long dictatorship and Vitor knew how to take advantage of all this freedom.

Remember when I said he was quirky? I probably used the wrong words. Vitor liked to call himself ‘The greatest player ever – since Eusébio’ (who was a true legend, and Portugal’s biggest sporting icon until Cristiano Ronaldo).

One time Vitor scored an important goal against one of our biggest rivals but lost an earring in the process. He made everybody look for the gold earring, oblivious to the fact that he had just scored an important goal. They never found the earring, but there are some interesting photos of his teammates looking for it while laughing their asses off.

When somebody was as different as he was in 1978, people just laughed it off, or called him crazy. Mental health was not a thing. Which brings us to about 1 hour before game time, when a team director comes bursting into my dad’s office, in a panic:

Doc, you need to come fast, Vitor has gone mad! The events unfolded like this:

Doc: Hey Vitor, what’s up? They’re telling me you don’t want to play.
Vitor: The stadium is going to fall down. I’m not playing!
Doc: The stadium is what!?
Vitor: It’s all going to come down Doc, I can’t play.
Doc: Vitor…If it all falls down, you’re gonna be in the safest spot possible. You’ll be just fine in the grass.
Vitor: Doc, if it falls down, they can’t mess with me because I’m right. If it doesn’t, I’ve gone mad, in which case they can’t mess with me either!

My dad tried to figure out what the actual problem was, but the end result was that Vitor did not play. Not that day, nor ever again for Benfica.

He was showing the first stages of schizophrenia. The fact that he was experimenting with drugs probably didn’t help either. His career went straight downhill. He played a few more years but these problems caught up to him fast. Later he got in trouble with the law for petty theft and drug related offenses.

Many years later, I was about 10 and I was at the stadium with my father when a guy who just looked terrible came up to my father. In my mind, he didn’t look like anybody my dad would have known. But they talked for a little while and when the man left, my dad gave him some money. That man was Vitor, former soccer star, but now an addict working as a gravedigger and permanently living at a cemetery. He died a young man, not too long after this.

[Yankee4Life]

Sabugo, I'm sorry that your father has been gone so long but trust me you will never have a hard time remembering both your mother and father. Our memories are our own private scrapbooks.

 

Your father sounded like a very interesting guy and I would have loved for the opportunity to shake his hand. 

 

He would no doubt be proud of the way his son turned out.

 

I think it is a great idea to write down memories of him and maybe keep adding to it when you think of something else. Your son will love it.