My Father Before Me (19 page)

– Part IV –

A Voice in the Air

42

Kevin

In those last weeks, I was the first to return home in the afternoon, and he would leave the house then. The last time I saw him, I had come home and poured myself a big bowl of cereal. He comes out, and I say, “Hi, Dad.” We're having a light conversation, and he says, “Son?”

I say, “Yeah?”

He says, “I'm scared.”

“Well, good luck,” I say, and he goes downstairs and leaves. And I never see him again.

After all this time? You completely failed to prepare me to be any use to you, and now you're telling me you're scared? You've never told me anything like that in your life. It came out of the blue. Nothing led up to it. It was basically throwing out one last line, and I did him no good. It's not something I blame myself for. It wasn't my job. It would have been easy just to say, “What are you scared of?” That would have been a good answer, but I was essentially trained to avoid meaningful conversation with my parents.

Dana

On a night not long before Dad died, he and Kim and Erica and I were playing Life, the board game. I remember, with Life, you spin a wheel and move your piece—a little plastic car—along a road a certain number of
spaces, and along the way you get married or have children or become a doctor or buy life insurance, whatever. I spun and landed on the green Revenge Square, which gave me the power to pick any player and take money from him or move his piece backward. I picked up Dad's car and moved it back ten spaces. He said, “Why would you do that?” I said, “Because I hate you.”

I wasn't saying “I hate you!” as a brat. I just said it, and there must have been some sort of true emotion in it. I don't have a memory of his reaction. After he died, I didn't think,
What I said is the reason why.
But I sure felt bad about it.

Peggy

When Dad died, I was twenty-one and living in an apartment. I returned there from work at maybe three-thirty in the afternoon, and there was a message on the answering machine to call home, which was unusual. I called, and our aunt Janice said, “Honey, honey, your dad passed away this morning.”

When I got home, I walked into the living room, and Mom put a blanket around me and led me to the couch. We sat down, and she just hugged me for a long time, maybe a half hour. There were voices in the background, busy noises around me, and I was just sitting there. Then Mom had to get up to take care of something, and I sat there. Even when the shock wore off, I thought,
I don't want to get up off this couch,
because I'd have to face everybody and have to start talking about it.

Terry

When I look at Dad's life, from his early marriage to his death, to me it's a story of the tragedy of mental health in our society in that time period. He knew he was ill. Everybody around him knew he was ill. There was no way to get family therapy. There was no one being honest with Mom about what kind of care he was getting. I don't think counselors were giving good help; they didn't understand the real impact of abandonment he had early in his life and let him deal with that. He was probably being given
very conventional therapy—nothing very creative and nothing holistic—and, meanwhile, when someone is ill, as he goes through his day, the people around him could be a support system or could help destroy him, but if they don't do the whole thing together, he's not really going to get well, or, even while he's getting well, other people are getting ill from having to deal with this sick individual.

When I got the call and was told that he had died, I asked, “Did he take his own life?”

“Yes, he did.”

I said, “Okay.” I think Dad was having conversations with me about how he should just end it, but I felt powerless. You want to say, “Oh, no, you don't want to do that. Life's good.” I remember saying that. But by the time he did it, I understood. There was no way out for Dad. It was actually a heroic act—because it takes a lot of energy when you have none; it takes a lot of planning when all you want to do is sleep; and it's a proactive stance, when for years you've been passive and just let life run you over. He was getting no other help, so he had to help himself.

He had such a tough life and didn't have any way to sort it through, and it just got worse, and he got ill—he had diabetes, and then he drank a little too much, and he had psychological problems that impacted his marriage, and then he did avoidance: I think there's a story there. But how his kids live with that and then continue their own life—what they learn from it, what impacts are in their life: that's a huge story, too.

Kim

I remember talking about Dad to my friends after he died, so that was when I started to tell the story, but I was telling it as a seven-year-old. Even then I had very few memories of him. Only as an adult did I figure out that he hadn't even been in the house half of my life.

This is what I remember of him. He was always sleeping behind a closed bedroom door, or I assumed he was sleeping. We weren't allowed to go in. He
was always tired or sick, or he needed quiet time, so we weren't supposed to disturb him.

The other memory I have is sitting in the front seat of the white Dodge. We were driving by Calvary Cemetery, and he told me, “My mother and brother are buried in that cemetery.” He told me the story of his mom and Skippy. As I got older, I thought,
What an interesting thing that I remember that, and why was he telling me that?
—because now I think he probably had his own death in his head. That could have been very close to the time he died. What he said could have been prompted just by our driving by the cemetery; it could have been like any other normal conversation. But then, when he died, that's what I remembered about him, and that's the story I started clinging to in my head. It was probably the only significant conversation I had with him—driving in that car, with him telling me about his family.

Erica

A weird thing happens to me when I write the word
dad
. I simply do not have and have not had occasion to actually write the word in any context relative to me. I've said the word often enough. Saying it allows it to disappear into history, into thin air. Writing the word is different: it requires far more commitment and immediate recognition as it lies there on the page and stares back at me. It feels like when there's a stranger in the room looking at me.

I don't see my dad as not being around. My “experience” of his death continues. It's with me every day, and it's part of who I am. It's not so much an event in my life as a characteristic of me and my personality. So, while to me he's never been around, he's always around.

For most of my life it seems that no one talked about him or what happened, at least not in the open and not to me, so there is a lot I did not and do not know. But I knew our family didn't talk about it, and I had no skills or invitation to bring up the subject to anyone. I could feel that his presence
and then his absence affected the family and me. So while I grew up without a father, he had a tremendous influence on me.

I was only five when he died. I remember, on that day, standing on the porch while Mom was screaming and his head rolled out of the car into her hands. I remember being shuffled off to the neighbors' house and peering out their window. I remember seeing Father Lane in his stole, making the sign of the cross, and the ambulance in the driveway.

I remember, when I returned to school, the incredible shame I was supposed to feel because suicide was such a sin, and we were taught to be polite about the whole thing. I remember being told that if anyone asked I should say he died of a heart attack. Of course, at five years old, it's hard to know what the truth is. I carried this story and other misconceptions with me until my teen years
, when I heard Kim talking to friends about it, and I was shocked to hear the truth.

Not knowing provides the benefit of not even having to deal with bigger questions. Still, I do wish that once I had reached an age of comprehension, I had a fuller understanding of the situation, who he was, and why he might have been how he was.

Our mother

I can honestly say that the thought of him taking his own life never entered my mind, but I knew something would happen. I thought that he would go into a coma, maybe, and not come out of it. Or he would just take off and leave. I did know something would happen, because you can't live like that forever.

On the day before he died, he got up late and left the house. It was the day that school let out for Christmas vacation, and I was in the kitchen. It was about four o'clock. I'd just gotten home about an hour before. He came out all dressed in his suit, and, as he usually didn't do, he stopped on the stairs going down, and he said, “Goodbye.” And I said, “Goodbye.”

He normally would go out when I wasn't in the room seeing him. He
was in the habit of doing that. I didn't know specifically where he was going. I just thought it was the usual thing. Actually, since he was dressed—I remember how nicely he was dressed—I probably thought he had an appointment for a job, because theoretically that's what he was doing.

In retrospect, I think he knew what he was going to do. I do think that. Otherwise, he wouldn't have said goodbye.

43

He never asked to be here. He did the best he could.

It was his father's fault. His mother's. His brother's. All those dead, disowned, and unaccounted for who would not stop walking around intemperately within him.

As a boy, he was mortally wounded. It took him four decades to hit the ground.

But he chose to marry, chose to have children. What about us? He owed us something.

He owed us nothing. He yearned to be without obligation or pain—who can blame him.

I blame him, the coward. He turned away from us, away from life, tried to wiggle his way out of the deals he'd made.

He was brave. Unable to function in this world, he nonetheless roused his will and took a step toward death, that inevitable thing. He welcomed it, whatever it might prove to be.

He planned the act, for months, for years. He instructed himself and obeyed those instructions.

It was a moment's impulse, an unfortunate choice. If only he had returned home earlier that night—if only he had walked in while I was sitting on the couch in the flickering glow of the television, he would have stayed. He would have seen his son. He would have thought twice, and stayed.

He did it at home to make it easy on my mother. There would be no mystery, no investigation, no search.

He did it at home to torture my mother. He knew that she would miss him in bed and look for him. She would be the one to find him that way.

It never happened. That was not him—it was an impostor in the carport, another person's body. My dad is elsewhere and may yet return.

It's what parents do: they leave and don't say goodbye. His mother had done it. His father, too.

Like his immigrant forebears, he began with little and had to improvise a life, create it on the fly, and the life he made—of hard work, duty, crude charm, and silence—became impossible to live in.

He was Buddy as a boy, then Eddie, then Ed. Which was most real to him? Which one did he kill?

The 1950s did him in: the stifling culture of smiling ambition.

He was Irish, an orphan, a diabetic, a perfectionist, a burier of feelings: he didn't stand a chance.

A series of little secrets killed him.

He dreamed up a life and disguised himself in it. When the mask dropped, no one was behind it anymore.

He was bipolar: he must have been. The disorder, it turns out, is rampant in the family. He could stay up for days at a time, working manically, then sleep through a weekend. Toward the end, he mumbled of his worthlessness and helplessness. Did his psychiatrist diagnose him as manic-depressive? What was that medication he was given, the one he stopped taking? Of course, of course, that's it: he was bipolar. He finally sank so low he wanted out.

And what does that explain? Not enough.

He was born too early. He lived and died before we started
sharing,
before we started
talking things out
.

His children were to blame; we were too many.

Our mother: she drove him to it.

No, she saved his life for years. She saved him from himself.

He died of natural causes.

He died of silence. His. Ours.

His life was not his to take.

His life was not his.

He was sick. He did not know what he was doing.

He knew what he was doing. He knew that he was sick.

I forgive him. I do not forgive him. It is not for me to forgive.

He left no note to haunt us.

To haunt us, he left no note. Maybe he couldn't begin to explain. Maybe a note of explanation wasn't necessary.

But it was. Here I am, trying to write it for him.

His life was a gradual vanishing, a slow unnoticeable erasure of the self he might have been. By the end, he was not himself; he was the husk his self had left behind. There was little left for him to kill.

He killed my dad, asshole.

Bastard.

Poor tortured man.