How my father and I grieved my brother and mom over Little League games

If I drive down Indian School Road, between Camelback Mountain and the less majestic but equally formidable Ingleside Middle School, my head still turns toward the baseball fields, like I’m on a bus tour of Jerusalem passing by the Temple Mount. I can’t help feeling like I’m hugging a curve of Phoenix road around some kind of holy place.

"Circle K Proudly Supports State of Arizona Little League," announces a white vinyl sign fastened to a chain-link fence. "Courtesy Automotive Supports Arcadia Little League," too. A tall green wooden scoreboard is hoisted up high by two long beams, erected for the purpose of counting balls, strikes and outs, tracking innings for the guest and home teams. The Diamondbacks logo, a giant red capital A, sits atop the scoreboard, which is operational only one magical night a year, the night of the championships, when you can squint through the desert sky and tally the evolving possibilities.

For the most part, though, we had to keep score for ourselves, and that’s what we did, my dad and I, sitting along the first-base line at those three fields behind Ingleside Middle School.

“Morgan would’ve gotten that ground ball.” My dad would grimace, his watering, twitchy eyes on the field. “He never missed a grounder at first. You have to play the bounce. Don’t let the bounce play you.”

Morgan was my older brother, a lights-out, fastball-loving lefty who was a baseball prodigy until he slid into a mysterious hitting slump that nobody could understand or cure. He stopped playing at age 13 and, relevant to this story, he stopped living at age 47. In between, he was a juvenile delinquent, passed the California State Bar exam on the first try, taught himself how to use a manual-focus Nikon he bought with money he earned parking cars. He fell in love with an Argentine economist named Laura, with whom he had two children. Both kids were still small on the stormy night he died on a rented hospital bed in the basement. Laura curled up next to his body for hours, until the snow slowed to a delicate flurry. A couple of guys finally showed up, wrapped him in a plain sheet, belted his body to a gurney, and rolled him down a plywood ramp into a nondescript van and out into the blustery blackness.

When I drive by Ingleside Middle School, I refuse to know it’s just a cluster of standard-issue boxy public school buildings, beige with faded red trim. Next to that school are the neighborhood diamonds. For me, those middle school baseball fields — the red dirt under the bleachers dotted with small pine cones and forgotten Drumstick wrappers — are sacred ground.

During the course of a certain season my oldest son played there, I mourned my dead brother, who had died of spinal cancer. I mourned the sibling relationship with him I never got to have after our parents divorced and divided us, King Solomon–style, an event that happened before my conscious memory, but a separation that came alive that spring in every cell of my body.

Then, in these bleachers and along these sidelines, I mourned my mom, who died four months to the day after my brother.

And it’s here, in the desert, alongside this busy, winding street, that I sat with my dad as my husband coached, holding our breaths together at every full count. And it’s here, unable to detach from the whims and bounces of a baseball, that I came to know the terrible, beautiful, agonizing truth, that there are forces a parent can’t control.

“Who has it better than we do?” my dad’d ask, after his grandson connected on an 0-2 count. He’d raise his bushy eyebrows, throw back his head and cackle before covering his mouth with his bandana, remembering the conspicuous gap where his right incisor and canine used to be.

“Nobody,” I’d answer, our call-and-response.

We were a congregation of two in this chapel of chalk lines and regulated dimensions, where fair was fair and foul was foul and rules were rules. Things didn’t go out of order, like a father outliving his son. And at least when it came to baseball, we were finally on the same team.

“This batting order makes no sense,” I’d whisper, shoulder to shoulder with my trailer-park Pops.

“I know. Sorry, but the kid in the two hole can’t hit.”

“Couldn’t hit water if he fell out of a boat. Damn, I can’t believe I just said that about a third grader. I’m an awful person, Dad.”

“You’re a monster,” he’d say, before I punched his bony upper arm.

Little League baseball gave me a way to be with my dad in all his eccentric multitudes — the bankruptcy and abiding compulsion to invest in hopeless schemes and plots of land, the evil stepmother he’d foisted on us, the slapdash parenting, the divvying up of his children.

Letting him be broken was a thing I learned to do as the wildly unpredictable physics of baseball thrust us into a mutual foxhole. The ballpark seemed to be the only place it was safe to fully experience, inning after inning, the colossal ways the world could fuck you over and the vast possibilities for redemption.

The Great American Pastime was also a kind of nirvana for Dad. A former mechanic with no desire to talk death, Nelson Strasser processed his s--- by riding the rhythm of sitting in bleachers and camp chairs with his daughter.

I know what you might be thinking: There are Jewish mechanics? Not many. I’ve never met another.

He was a terrible businessman, but at least as an auto mechanic he never had a boss, some square who could fire him for refusing to wear a tie. This was the case with his first job out of college, working for the Los Angeles Health Department. His duties there involved the contact tracing of suspected syphilis cases, ferreting out unfortunates in dark bars. I consider it a damn shame he lost that gig. My dad is exactly the guy you’d want calmly telling you about your syphilis, then quoting Camus, then sticking around to watch the last inning of the Dodgers game before grandly paying for your beer, even if he couldn’t expense it.

I didn’t know much about baseball fundamentals, but I would learn. It was grief or baseball, and we’d take baseball every time.

“You can’t protect your kids from life,” my dad would say as we sank into the depths of darkness over a strikeout.

He only talked about baseball, but I knew what he meant.

When I snap my head to take in the open-air sanctuary of the ballpark, I praise Jesus, Moses, Elvis, the Buddha and the Babe for that season, even on the days it drove my dad to hit the Kirkland tequila before noon. I give praise to the baseball gods, who made it possible to accept that all of us will swing and miss. But if we’re lucky, by the end of the game, we’ll be covered in dirt and bruises because we played so hard, played with our whole hearts, even when it hurt. We will relish all the bruises we got rounding the bases, headed toward home.

This is the season my dad and I conduct a grief group of two, just us, in our striped beach chairs lined up directly behind the first-base line, so my dad can see every play, despite his crappy vision and the eye spasms he has developed over the past few years.

This group will meet at the Ingleside Middle School in Phoenix, Arizona.

There are no therapeutically trained facilitators and there are no rules, other than those dictated by the Little League of America and the human heart.

Excerpted from "Making It Home: Life Lessons from a Season of Little League" by Teresa Strasser, published by Berkley, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2023

This article was originally published on TODAY.com