Aaron Hernandez

Sportswriters looking to explain the apparent suicide of ex-Patriots tight-end Aaron Hernandez and the events that precipitated it seem to think that losing his father at the age of 16 played a significant role in all that transpired afterward.  I don’t know why.

My father was thirteen months old when his father died.  His mother remarried when he was 3-1/2, but it didn’t work out.  This is an understatement akin to calling the Grand Canyon a ditch.  My grandmother was Polish and Catholic; that she instituted divorce proceedings against her second husband can only mean that scandal was preferable to marriage.  For all but five months of that second marriage, she raised three boys on her own.

Elizabeth Bukowska pulled her middle son Edwin—my father—out of school when he was thirteen.  In other words, my dad never made it past seventh grade.  Instead, he started work, going from the family bakery to the Ford assembly line on Torrence Avenue to the Chicago Fire Department.  Then he “retired,” taking a part-time job as a truck driver for a couple of years.  In all that time, I’m not aware of him ever being indicted or convicted of murder, as Hernandez was.  Nor did my father, who was an avid Chicago Cardinals’ fan, ever sign a $40 million contract, as Hernandez did.

For that matter, neither did my father-in-law, who lost his father at the age of five.  A few years later, his mother found it impossible to raise two young boys—twins, at that—on her own, so she put them in an orphanage.  When he grew old enough, my father-in-law went into the foster-care system.  Oh, and he had a fun year on the front lines in Korea.  To this day, he can tell you the fastest way to get off a hill that’s under fire—you roll down.

I’ve wanted to kill my father-in-law on several occasions, which is another way of saying he must’ve wanted to kill me more than once; to the best of my knowledge, that didn’t happen.  No, what did happen is that Ed Bukowski and Bob Harris took the cards that life dealt them and left the world a better place by virtue of the families they raised. 

I can only imagine what these two men might have accomplished given the chances Aaron Hernandez wasted.