Alan Christopher Prokosch was born on a cold winter day in Newburgh, NY on November 12, 1955. 

He was the fourth of Earl and Luella Prokosch’s budding family. With three older siblings and four more yet to come, he grew up with a variety of different influences. From his father came his love of horses, and perhaps from his sisters came a love of animals and compassion. The older brother certainly assisted in history and the military. His mother most definitely helped him gain a sense of humor.

She also inadvertently helped him grow up when she passed away around the time he turned 18. 

He did the same for me when he passed away in almost the same way he came – on a cold winter afternoon in Dothan, AL on February 1, 2023. 

My father had plenty of demons. 

I met a lot of them in Shalimar, FL when I went to visit him as a child. My parents were never married, they were barely acquainted, but they still kept in touch for the sake of me. As he got older, his favorite friends were Bud Lights, Marlboros and women. I always wondered why my dad seemed to have a new girlfriend each time I visited. 

When I was little, my daddy was the biggest treat for me. Sometimes he’d show up as a surprise and whisk me away to that magical house on the coast for a weekend, or he’d take me to eat and then to the park. He’d always push me on the swings until I was tired. He didn’t stop until I wanted to stop. 

In that house on Shalimar beach, there was a piano, a big, beautiful German grandfather clock, a room full of old toys from my long-since-moved-out sister, a western-themed bathroom with mustache wax and colognes on the counter, a laptop and an old, massive, red leather couch with a knitted patchwork blanket that he’d always be asleep under. The TV would always be on one of three things: “Saving Private Ryan”, “All Quiet on the Western Front”, or The History Channel. In front of that TV were DVD box sets of The Simpsons and Star Trek: Next Generation and a white tile floor. 

In that house on Shalimar Beach, though I was with my daddy, I would often spend my time alone. 

We would go out each day and either eat, go to the local bayside area to swim or go play a round of “Goofy Golf” in Fort Walton – but before and after those short excursions, he would come home and fall asleep with a beer and smoke – and I would be all alone again. 

Sometimes I stayed for just the weekend, and sometimes I stayed for a full week. Sometimes I was left locked in a hot car for a convenient store run, and sometimes I would burn the popcorn I was cooking in the microwave because I was seven and hungry and my daddy was asleep, and he’d get very angry if I woke him up.

I lived with my mother, and after only a few instances of me coming home and talking about the “bad things” from my trip, she would never send me over there again without my own personal flip-cell phone. 

I was eight.

Some summer day in the early 2010s, I was about ten or eleven, and my dad was due to come in and pick me up for a trip to Pensacola Beach. That day passed without anything, and all both I and my mother heard from him was his answering machine. 

Later that week we found out from one of his friends that he had been arrested for firing a gun without a firearms license. I didn’t even know what that was, but my mom knew and was disappointed. All I knew was that I was extremely embarrassed that my daddy was on the news. 

Shortly after his arrest, he was sentenced to a few years in prison. I still had no idea what the true consequences were of his actions and the impact they were about to have on me. I still have no idea.

All I know is this: his new wife at the time had divorced him, taken over his house, sold almost all of his belongings for drug money and ran. We have never seen or heard from her again. 

The woman he had married what seemed like so long ago, Robin, had joint ownership of the house and decided to sell it, splitting the profits so that my father had a cushion when he was eventually released. He and Robin had divorced years prior; my meetings with her were brief but important because she was so sincere and kind towards me – almost like she wanted another daughter. 

I didn’t object and I still don’t – she was a saint to me when I was trapped in Shalimar. Her house had a cool turtle and a bunch of cute dogs, and she’d color with me and talk to me like I was a real person. Of course, she did, because she was a schoolteacher for the majority of her life. 

Despite their divorce and rocky history, Robin and Dad remained close friends. When she passed away in 2017, shortly before his release from prison in the summer of 2017, he took it extremely hard.

The trailer she had been living in out in DeFuniak Springs became his. My older sister helped house him there and take care of him, even from afar, because despite all of the trouble he put her through, Robin would’ve wanted him to be secure. 

Because he had PTSD. Because he had trauma and would struggle to work through it all. 

Over the course of time, my mother stopped letting me visit my dad altogether, even before he was imprisoned. Too many horror stories of hunger and alcoholism, but I didn’t quite understand.

When he was released in 2017, I went to visit him for the first time in what felt like a million years. He had inherited Robin’s dogs from her passing. The trailer was extremely spacious – you felt like you were in a mansion – but it was a trailer. Her belongings were still everywhere, but you could tell they were starting to be packed away. His belongings, the ones he salvaged from the old house, were put out in small places.

A cologne bottle here, a small tube of mustache wax there, and a bunch of framed photos of my sister, Robin, his parents, his family, and then little old me. Photos of when I was very small and cute. 

It meant a lot to me that I was on the mantle. Hell, I was in front of the TV, where his History Channel was. That was a big honor. I had no problems during that visit, and I enjoyed it. It felt like coming back to my second home.

He walked my sister down the aisle in the Fall of 2017 – her wedding serving to replicate her own parent’s marriage in the Fall of 1979. He held a small urn of Robin’s ashes and wore his military regalia. 

After that, it all spiraled. 

His health had been declining for a long time. The aviator jackets he had earned were hanging so loosely over his thinned frame, no doubt from the many years of the prison yard and food. But he just couldn’t gain back weight, and his teeth began to fall out. His eyes were clouding, and he had a hard time focusing, swallowing food and even breathing. 

Kidney disease was the name of the game (among other things) and dialysis was its offender. 

In the late 2010s, my visits to Dad became rough again. There seemed to be a distinct disconnect. I had gotten older without him, and so did he. I never visited him or wrote back to him, and sometimes wouldn’t even return his calls. I was a teenager who didn’t like the concept of parents – what teenager does? – and he was amazing with little kids. Besides the casual neglect, my father was actually awesome at kid stuff, like setting me up slip-and-slides, taking me to fun places and pushing me on the swings until I was tired. 

But there wasn’t that connection anymore. Every conversation between me and him became more awkward and stilted and we didn’t know how to talk anymore. He wasn’t my daddy; he was my dad. The years of “Baby Bunny and Daddy Bunny” (the most important thing to me in the world as a kid and still is to me now) are long gone and were now replaced with awkward hugs and “I love you’s.” 

I spoke with my sister, and this was a normal thing. As kids got older, my dad didn’t know how to handle them, especially women, and so he withdrew, and so did I. 

My visits with him became less frequent, and I felt like he didn’t really particularly like me. One by one I noticed that the pictures of me began to fade and be replaced with new and better people. People who didn’t really care for him. 

Will I beat myself up for not really connecting with my dad, and actually coming to resent and hate the time we spent together in his twilight years?

Forever and ever and ever. 

I will never recover from that.

I stopped going altogether.

My main interactions with my father were through Facebook Messenger – he’d send me random videos, articles, memes, pictures about the bible, Snoopy, cats, dogs, etc. I would barely respond to any of them. He would call me and most of the time I’d pretend I was asleep. 

I came to dislike answering his calls because they were short, and he wasn’t necessarily coherent anymore. Most of the time it was all slurred. I don’t know what it was, whether it was Dementia, Alzheimer’s or some kind of mix of alcoholism and PTSD medication, but I could hardly stand to hear him anymore. It hurt me.

So, I pushed away from him further and further. He tried his best and I still kept out of it. 

He’d come into town like he used to, but now for various dental and dialysis appointments and have me act as his chauffeur. Sometimes there were moments where we felt like we used to, but they were fleeting. I disliked it because he would come so early in the morning (he was an obnoxious morning bird – always was) and I was a teen who stayed up all night to play video games. 

We’d go to eat after the appointments, usually in awkward silence and small slurred talk, and walk around the Navy Exchange and sometimes NAS Pensacola, he’d slip me money (which I always felt guilty about) and then leave. The last time he came to town, I was around 18 and had just graduated, and we went to the Navy Exchange. He told me to get anything I wanted, and I chose an American Girl Doll.

He was confused, made his classic, “what?” face, faux-rolled his eyes, chuckled, then walked me to the register. He didn’t remember that in that house on Shalimar Beach, my best friend was my sister’s old Samantha doll. She kept me company when I was afraid of the house on dark nights. My love of American Girl blossomed from her old collection, and that became a special bond between him and I, as he worked with my mom to get me dolls for Christmas.

They were some of the most special moments of my childhood, especially with him. I think somewhere within him he remembered, but he didn’t show it. He just wanted to tease me about it like all dads do.

That was the first and only time on that trip that we felt connected again. 

In October of 2022, I was approaching my seventh month of dating my boyfriend, Matthew. 

After so many years of fighting to find someone like me who liked me, I knew that he was the one I had wanted to be with for a long time. 

When you know, you know, they say. For me, knowing comes with meeting parents, and he had yet to meet my father from DeFuniak Springs. I was extremely worried, to say the least. I mean, with his own daughter he was stilted and awkward – I didn’t feel like suffering through it with a boyfriend in tow.

But still, we went. I knew it was necessary. I wanted them to have met at least once and like each other. The days leading up to the trip out drove me mad.

The visit in October was the most expressive, coherent meeting with my father I had had in the last decade.

The two of them talked for hours in a Mexican restaurant, eating tacos and rice, chatting about the Philippines (Matt is Filipino), the military, traveling and most importantly, photography. Something obvious about my father is that he was an avid photographer from the get-go, and so is Matthew.  They bonded so quickly and easily over it. 

My dad really talked to me for what felt like the first time in forever. I felt seen. That was my daddy, the daddy I remember who was sharp-witted and funny and hilariously skeptical of everything. Stubborn but sweet. I didn’t want to leave, but we had to go as it got dark, and I wish I had gotten to spend more time with him.

That was the last time I saw my dad alive. 

After I visited him in October, my father took a trip up to New York to visit my sister. 

I got a call sometime that December from her asking me if I had heard from him. I said no, I haven’t, and she panicked because he left in a hurry, and without any notice, and couldn’t be reached. We both knew that the trip was risky. He was in his late 70s with a rapidly developing cognitive disorder and required daily dialysis treatments, there was no safe way he could maintain himself all the way from Florida to New York. 

However, he made it. 

However, he barely made it home. 

When the cops finally found my father, he was about fifty miles from where his GPS said he was supposed to be. He was wandering around, dazed and confused at a gas station somewhere around Virginia. The officers didn’t apprehend him for safety, they filled up his gas tank and sent him home. 

We didn’t hear from him for another two weeks, and then we finally heard from him that he was home and safe in DeFuniak Springs.  

My dad called me in early January of 2023 while I was at work.

For some reason, I felt like I needed to answer, even though I could’ve gotten in trouble. 

But I did answer. And I talked to him for a few minutes, and he asked me about school and home and all that fun stuff. I told him I was on the President’s list at my university for the third semester in a row. He told me he was proud of me, that he loved me so very much and then said goodbye.

I got the call that he had been life-flown to Flowers Hospital in Dothan, Alabama two weeks later. I was in the bathroom at work. I was hosting, and I went up to my manager shaking and sobbing, and told her what was happening. That is the first and only time I’ve ever been dismissed from work.

That night, my sister and I (my mother’s side) drove for hours through dark backroads to reach that hospital, and when we climbed the floors to his room in the ICU, I saw him.

My world went quiet. My focus was on him and his body, what was once so strong was now sullen and soiled and hooked up to dozens of tubes and machines and that nauseating rubbing alcohol smell. The room was so cramped as well, and while I could hear the conversation going on around me (words shuffled like cards; brain aneurysm; asphyxiation; resuscitation; renal failure; most likely won’t live) my focus was on him and only him. 

I didn’t cry at all.

I called my sister in from New York. My dad’s girlfriend was there. My sister who drove me went back home and I went back out to Dothan alone. Now the familiarity was gone, and I was alone with people I barely knew. 

I sat, alone, quietly and wept from time to time on my dad’s chest and held his warm, malleable hand (hands turn to playdough when renal failure is present). After a week of getting to know my older sister again, and many trips in and out of that hospital room, we decided that he wasn’t going to improve.

His advanced directive said to not keep him alive for unnecessary reasons, and we didn’t.

We were talking to his hospice nurse when I felt his hand twitch in mine, and a loud croak came from him.

The room fell so silent I heard the blood rushing in my head, and the other three women crowded around me and held my father. 

On February 1, 2023, my father went out stubbornly but quietly. 

And I wept the whole time. 

That was the story of my dad.

No, it wasn’t.

That was the story of my dad from MY perspective.

The story of Alan was not that complicated but not that simple, either. He was multifaceted like a diamond and had so much more to him than neglect, disease, crime and fun places to go and eat. 

I hate to say it, but he was so much more than Daddy Bunny.

He was Alan Christopher Prokosch, the fourth born of Earl and Luella Prokosch. He had three older siblings, Ann, Jan and Dutch, and four younger siblings, Robin, Timmi, Caryll and Glen. His house in Newburgh, NY was always busy, and the family would raise horses. Alan raced horses on a track with his own father.

He dragged his siblings to museums and spouted historical facts – especially military history. That was his favorite thing in the entire world, just learning about the trenches and armories and planes and helicopters and everything. When he grew up he made his love of the military into a prosperous and rewarding career.

He flew Pavelows in the Air Force – he was pilot #124. He was a part of the Green Hornets and Green Giants, his battalion that fought in Desert Storm. He assisted in the tail-end of Vietnam and traveled the world along with it all. He lived in Germany, France, England, and much more with his high school sweetheart, Robin. 

He worked for NATO in the 1980s, and when he retired in 1995, he was a flight tester for new airplanes and helicopters at Eglin Air Force Base. He was a key helper in developing the V22 Osprey and even survived a plane crash. 

He collected war memorabilia from WWI and WWII and built model airplanes and helicopters. That house on Shalimar Beach had a room with a big writing desk that folded out, and contained treasures such as small model parts, various glues and strings. From the ceiling hung so many model planes and copters because he loved them. We would even build them together.

Alan was such a respected member of the Air Force that he retired as a major and was allowed to have a massive curly mustache while still being recruited. For those who don’t know, you’re not allowed to have facial hair in the military – my dad was the only one in his squadron to have that big, goofy mustache. He had earned his stripes, and I loved playing with that stupid overgrown caterpillar on his face as a kid. 

Museums were one of his favorite things; we’d visit the Naval Aviation Museum here in Pensacola all the time, to the point that I got sick of it. Now, it’s one of my favorite places to go. My love of history and learning came from him. He would even draw, which is something I definitely retained as well. His main choice of muses were various plane and helicopter models. 

My dad loved animals, especially dogs, and found companionship in so many. He had a soft spot for them, cats and children. He loved to make others happy and was even one of those parents in the neighborhood who would have all the kids adore him because he let them play basketball in his driveway. He was an entertainer and was friendly to all. 

Alan was generous to everyone he loved. He always gave out cash, food and anything someone might need because he just wanted them to be happy and safe. He would beat my sister and me at Goofy Golf in Fort Walton Beach every time we played, no matter how hard we tried. When he died, my sister and I went and played a round for him – The Alan C. Prokosch Memorial Tournament.

My sister and I also retained our love of Star Trek: The Next Generation from him. Alan loved Star Trek and had DVD box sets. They’re currently in a box in my room, and I plan on watching them after I’m done writing this. 

He had a midlife crisis that involved becoming a cowboy – all because he got stationed in Texas for a month or two. He came back wearing cowboy boots and a silly hat with a phony southern drawl; he was born and raised in upstate New York. My dad was the most Yankee Doodle Dandy you’d ever seen.

Alan would wake up at the worst hours of the morning and drag you out of bed to watch the sunrise, and then while he was getting ready to start the day you could hear him loudly brushing his teeth, humming songs, and the smell of his cologne. When he’d eat breakfast, he’d go, “Mmm mmm mm, yummy,” and I still do that even with him not around. 

That radio in his van would play talk show radio and Rush Limbaugh. I hated it, so he’d turn on music like The Beatles and Lynyrd Skynyrd. It was loud for me, but I was just happy that I didn’t have to hear that boring droning. 

We’d go to the beach often because he shared his love of the water with anyone who would tolerate it. That’s why he moved here. To this day, I’m the only one in my family that loves the beach. 

His granddaughter Julianna was the most important thing to him when she was born. He was just obsessed, and they would Facetime all of the time. He would send her gifts, especially ones surrounding Bluey because it’s her favorite. He loved to spend time with her and talk with her. He was great with kids.

At the end of his life, he spent money to see Jimmy Buffet – you know, the old Hawaiian shirt guy who sings Cheeseburger in Paradise and Margaritaville – and enjoyed it. It’s one of my favorite pictures of him, he’s making this big goofy grin that takes up his whole face and is holding out a big thumbs up. 

Bunnies were another soft spot for him and I, and we’d be Baby Bunny and Daddy Bunny. 

There is SO much to him. If I kept listing them all, this article would be thousands of pages long. 

I feel like if I stopped, though, I’d lose all the memories of him I have. I’d be left with nothing. It’d be all over, and I wouldn’t have anything left of him. Remember when I said that his death made me grow up? 

I was 19. 

I’m now 20 and writing this all for you. If you’ve stuck with me long enough, thank you. This has been something so hard to write for me, but I finally worked up the courage to do it. 

To whoever is reading this: my father had demons. Alan suffered from PTSD and substance abuse. Those dark parts of him, even though he tried to hide them, were an equal part of him as much as the goofy, loving father who tried his best despite everything. I’m not here to bash my father, I’m here to write this for you so nobody forgets him.

I hear stories now of my father from so many people – some people unexpected – that shocked me to this day. I never knew that my dad had a long curly afro and listened to Metal with my Uncle Glenn. I found that out two days ago. Even in the future, I’m sure to hear so many things about him that I never knew, and I’m thankful for that.

All of that to say, Alan had a rich and storied life that fizzled hard and fast. I don’t want to forget that. I don’t want anyone to forget that or him.

I don’t want people to look up to my father and see his mugshots, or the records of custody battles or those embarrassing articles about his arrest. I want people to know my father for who he was – a stubborn, loving, caring, sensitive, brave and funny man who sincerely tried his best for his daughters, granddaughter and family. I want people to find this article and learn about him from the perspective of his youngest daughter, Mary.

I want you all to know that I loved my father, and he loved me. 

And I miss him every day. 

Tomorrow is the year anniversary of his passing, and I’m writing this on January 31, 2024. On this day and at this time, I was in a hotel room in Dothan trying to calm my nerves with a stuffed teddy bear.

Tonight, I am here in my room, writing about my dad. And tomorrow, I will be going with my best friend, and bring red, white and blue flowers to his grave on the navy base. I will be wearing the heart-shaped necklace with his ashes stowed inside, and bunny-shaped earrings my mom gave me in honor of him. His old baseball cap with “Gulf War Veteran” will be on my head, and then afterward we will walk through the Naval Aviation Museum like he and I used to do.

Then we’ll eat at a Chinese buffet because he loved those. Maybe after that, go and get the little bunny he used to draw on my birthday cards tattooed on my wrist. 

And then that’s it – another year down.

But that won’t be the only year. 

I’m trying to make up for our lost time and I will not forget you, ever again.

Included here is a slideshow of photos taken throughout Alan’s life: 

Gallery • 17 Photos

Thank you to those who read this article in full. It was extremely difficult to even work up the courage to write this, but it helped me process my feelings in how my father was, and our relationship. I want to give special thanks to my Voyager Adviser, Dr. Tubbs, for giving me the platform to share my father’s memory and the graciousness he has given me time and time again. You are THE best. Love you all!

– Mary Prokosch