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It was a cool Autumn day in October, and I had just gotten into my dad’s car after a soccer game against our rival Upper St. Claire. I remember looking at my dad and noticing he was not acting like himself. He is usually a really happy funny guy, but in this particular moment he seemed very somber. I tried talking to him about the game however he seemed distant and distracted. This is when I noticed that he had two identical Nokia phones sitting in the cup holder of his car. Obviously, I thought this was a little strange, and in an effort to make some conversation I asked him why he had two phones. This seemingly simple question set my dad off into an extremely serious mood. He turned to me, drew a deep breath and said, “I split from the agency.” My dad had just left his job and was now putting the entire family’s wellbeing at risk. At the time I knew it was serious, but being only fourteen-years-old I do not think I understood the magnitude of the situation. Sure people leave their jobs to start their own businesses all the time, but this case was much more complicated. My dad’s old boss just happened to be his father in-law, my mom’s dad. This broken business partnership would go on to change to the landscape of my family relations forever.

I would arrive at my house to my mom with tears streaming down her face. This was a strange sight to me because I had hardly ever seen my mom full-out crying. She was heartbroken over the breakup, but knew that it had to be done. For years my dad was essential running the company. For years he had tried to get the succession plan written on paper, but my grandpa refused and stalled. My dad also wanted his name attached to the company so it would be called Coyne, Berry Advertising and Public Relations. My grandpa, being the stubborn man that he is, objected to this unless my dad paid him some ridiculous sum of money.

I found it somewhat surprising that my grandpa would be so unreasonable about this. As someone who had split from an agency in the past to start his own, I thought he would realize what was at stake. He knew the risks that would be associated with losing my dad, but he continued to hold up a stubborn front. I think this has entirely to do with his personal pride. He likes to think of himself as a self-made man who was able to rise out of the steel environment of 1950s’ Pittsburgh and become very successful. He was the son of Irish immigrants, his dad a steel worker in the mills, and he grew up as a member of the lower class. With hard work, dedication and stubbornness he was able to get himself through college and into the working world. I have a sneaking suspicion that my grandpa did not respect my dad as much because they never had to experience that. I think he may have thought my dad was handed too much in life and that he did not know the value of hard work. On the other hand, this is entirely untrue. My dad is the hardest working person I have ever seen. This has been extremely apparent since he has started to run his own business.

Anyways, apparently negotiations had been taking place all that week unbeknownst to me. However, these negotiations only made the whole breakup even uglier as my grandpa threatened to take away the pool membership at his country club, my dad’s car, and access to his condo in Florida. My mom is an intelligent and realistic person so she knew she had to stand behind my dad and support him through these trying times. The entire ordeal had to be the roughest on her. It pitted her husband against her father and she had to pick a side. I cannot imagine having to face this situation and knowing that if you pick your spouse, your father may never speak to you again. This would be a terrible situation and one that I would do anything to avoid.

I remember her agonizing over making conversation with my grandpa. She would send him emails, and she would nervously wait, anticipating a response. However, this response would never come. Another email would be sent to him, and again to no avail. Now these emails were not her pouring out her soul to my grandpa, but rather random things trying to spark dialogue between the two. One email I believe was a link to some specials on plane tickets to Florida, with a message attached. The message may have read something like this, “Hey dad, I thought you might be interested in this, hope you’re having a good day, love Pam.” A simple message, but more symbolic of the hope she had that they could return to their normal father-daughter relationship of the past. Constantly my mom would be checking her email, waiting for a response of any sort from my grandpa. Like I said before this response never came and it only further scared and saddened my mom. Eventually, she would drop the email approach and try to round up the strength to call him. I can still see her sitting on the kitchen island holding a phone in her shaking hand. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to make the call or not, and she even asked me for advice on it. I think my advice at the time was to go ahead and do it. I remember her saying that her biggest fear was her dad picking up the phone and saying, “Pammy I never want to talk to you again.” I can only imagine how scary it would be to think that it was a real possibility that your dad would say that to you. I’m sure my dad would never say anything like that to me, but if he did I would be absolutely heartbroken and devastated. After a while, my mom did gather the courage to make that call. She headed up to her room, filled with the fear of rejection, to do the thing that she had agonized about for so long. We were all nervous for this moment because my grandpa has a history of overreacting and severing ties. At one point he had cut my Uncle John out of the will and said he did not want anything to do with him. This was in response to him leaving the church, joining a new church or as we describe it a “cult”, and marrying a woman from that church. In time, my grandpa would apologize and go on to love my uncle’s wife and daughter. I have actually always believed that his favorite grandchild was my Uncle John’s daughter, Dylan. I think this comes from the feeling a got when I was younger and he used to talk about her. He would get so excited when telling the stories about visiting her, and going to Disney Land with her. It made me wonder if he shared that same excitement about me and my brother whenever he was over there, I suspected not. I’m sure this was just me overreacting, and I bet he was just excited because she was his newest grandchild, his first girl grandchild and he rarely got to see her because she lived in California. On the other hand, I don’t think it would be unlike my grandpa to play favorites.

I know that my mom thinks my Uncle John was his favorite kid. He was the only son my grandpa had; he was the middle child between my mom, the oldest, and my Aunt Kate, the baby. From day one his life had been laid out for him. He was to follow in my grandpa’s footsteps by attending Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and then entering into advertising. This was the path that he followed despite having the grades to go anywhere, and having football scholarships to other schools. This made my uncle the golden child, and put him above my mom and her sister. This was extremely apparent in the college process. While my uncle was being pushed to Duquesne, my mom was being pushed away from college. My grandpa wanted her become a secretary, and enter into the working world at age eighteen, and for a year she tried this. Eventually realizing that being a secretary wasn’t for her, my mom went to college and graduated in three years. Having enjoyed college and the whole educational system my mom wanted to go and get her master’s degree. However, she was told by her dad that going to graduate school was a ridiculous idea, and only for people who are trying to avoid working by become what he called “professional students.” This is weird considering only a year later my uncle would enroll in a graduate program at Northwestern University with my grandpa’s full blessing and advice. This just one of the stories my mom has given me to support the idea that my grandpa played favorites, and was pretty obvious about it.

Anyways, back to my mom and her phone call that had the potential to strengthen or crumble her relationship with her dad. My dad and I sat in the kitchen anxious about what was going to happen and how the conversation would go. I think we both came to the conclusion that my grandpa would not even answer, and my mom would be forced to further agonize about the future. Time began to pass as five minutes ticked off the clock, then ten, then twenty, and then thirty minutes. We weren’t sure what was going on. Maybe this long conversation was a good thing, perhaps problems were being hammered out. On the other hand, maybe the conversation had gone horribly and my mom was sitting upstairs on her bed crying. By the time she finally emerged, my dad and I had moved to the family room where we were watching a game. When she entered the room we could immediately tell that she was happy and that the conversation had gone well. Not because she had a smile on her face, but just by her presence, it was as if a giant weight had been lifted from her shoulders. Apparently they just talked it out, and while my grandpa was still extremely upset and angry he didn’t have any plans of disowning her. I know if he would have severed ties it would have killed both my mom and my dad. My mom would have been upset and traumatized for obvious reasons, but my dad would also have been heartbroken. He would’ve had to live with the fact that his wife’s dad was no longer talking to her because of him. Knowing my dad, this would have weighed heavily on him forever.

To make the whole thing more complicated, my dad planned on taking a lot of his clients with him. He had his eyes on ten potential clients to take with him, and I think he ended up with nine of them when it was all said and done. This added business aspect of the dispute would only further strain the already fragile existence of the relationship between my immediate family and my grandpa.

The biggest question surrounding the fallout was what would happen with our family outside of the business atmosphere. Would we still have Easter brunch together? Would my grandpa be there to celebrate our birthdays? Overtime the answers to these questions would surface. At first it was as if my grandpa conveniently scheduled vacations to avoid family get-togethers. That first Christmas he was in Florida and when it came time for my brother’s birthday in January, he was in Hawaii. Was this coincidence or was it pre-planned? To the day I still don’t know but I suspect it was premeditated. As time would go on, things would become more and more normal, or at least more normal for everyone in my family outside of my dad. There is definitely still tension between the two. It is an unspoken tension, but one that we can all notice. This tension has never been more apparent than the first time he came over our house following the split. It was sometime in May and we had gotten together for either my birthday or Mother’s Day. My grandpa was the last one to arrive and you could sense the anxiety surging through the house waiting for him to show up. When he did it was a little weird at first for me, but eventually the weirdness evaporated and was replaced with normalcy. For my dad and my grandpa I’m sure it was strange if not very awkward. These were two people who in the past had been very close. For fifteen years they had spent time together on almost a daily basis, mainly at work but also on the golf course and at family dinners. They had spent uncountable hours driving around the Northeast on business trips together, and they had even taken boating classes together so that my grandpa could buy a boat and make them co-captains. Now the two were barely speaking, consumed by the tension resulting from the breakup. The only words that I can remember them speaking were simple greetings. The rest of their time that afternoon was spent avoiding each other and talking to other people.

Over the years and with time a lot of this awkwardness and weirdness would pass, and things would start to return to normal. After golfing he would sometimes randomly stop by our house unannounced and hang out for a while. I loved when he would do this because it was a sign of the world returning to normalcy after all those years of strangeness. My grandpa also started to do things with my brothers and I again. He would take my middle brother and I golfing. He even entered himself and my brother, Sean, in a father-offspring golf tournament. As for me, he gave me his hat that was signed by the former Penguins Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr. This meant a lot to me because it was something that I had always wanted from the time when I was little. When I was younger I had even laid claim to it upon his death. As horrible as that is, that’s how much I wanted that hat. The situation has progressed so far that there have even been talks between my dad and my grandpa about uniting their businesses. This would be amazing and something that I pull for everyday. From the entire ordeal I have learned that time can heal all wounds no matter how deep the cut especially when family is involved.