There are hundreds of ways to end a life, your own or someone else's. Dorothy Parker famously knew this: razors, rivers, acids, drugs, guns, noose, gas. None of these methods are foolproof, though a gun'll do ya. But when I approach the anniversary of my father's death, I feel not-so-dim resentment with him for choosing the easiest way of all and slipping away from a diabetes symptom, the product of a lifetime of benign neglect and denial. I feel resentment that I can't follow him. I feel frustration, keen as impending frostbite, that his death laid clear the two paths before me. Regardless of how unbearable a loss is, the choices do stay binary. Live or die. Grieve or repress. Rage or sob -- just kidding, you can do both of those at the same time.
We are wary of lives marked by loss, though we do love tragedy porn. As I write this, the death count for Hurricane Ian is stabilizing; the last desperate missing person notices for probably-dead relatives are circulating. America eats this shit up: big storm, 70 dead. Big fire, 30 dead. Big flood, 100 dead. But a lifetime of degradation awaits those whose misery is less cinematic. Yesterday they bulldozed the Franklin/Cedar encampment.
My sister called me, I don't know how old I was. 20, maybe; not older. She called me and told me she'd told our father about our years of abuse at the hands of another father figure. I was so angry. The first time after I called my father, I could feel the change in his voice, a presence and an absence. A desire to understand and a hesitancy to discuss it, because I'd told my sister that I didn't want to, that if she told him about all of that then she had to tell him that I didn't want to talk about it. For the rest of his life, all 3-ish years of it, he respected that. In some ways I wish he hadn't.
I wonder: if we'd talked, if I had been honest, would he have gone to the doctor? The two aren't intrinsically linked. But I did call him when I was 16, sobbing, begging to stay with him for the last year of "high school": I had been out of school for over a year. I did dissociate through Christmas with him when I was 18 and then again when I was 19, and I didn't tell him it was because I'd been chased with a gun, questioned by police, frozen out by siblings I'd tried to save. If I had shared those experiences with him, would he have called me earlier? Would he still be alive, hypoglycemia treated by the doctors he didn't want to talk to?
There are hundreds of ways to end a life. My mother left my father during one of his depressive episodes. She told me he was delusional. She said he said God spoke to him through a dog. My sister changed my diapers during a court-mandated visit. Did he know how bad it had been? Had it gotten bad again? Did he leave on purpose?
I wonder: how much of him is in me? We spoke rarely. I avoided him; avoidance is what I do when I have any feeling I don't want to deal with, and I'd rather have no parental feelings at all. We spoke rarely and we weren't close but none of his siblings, nieces, or nephews had been apprised of his faith. We talked about it as we drove past Dixon. We spoke rarely but I think of him all the time, when I see baseball news, when I read about English education, when I listen to a record, when I think of the sea.
His house had a sailboat theme. Before he gave up on renovating the second story, he told me about his interior decorating plans. The man was landlocked on a scale of hundreds of miles, but he dreamed of oceans he'd only been exposed to during college. He died right after I graduated. What abandoned dreams will my family remember when I'm in the ground?
Will I give up like I suspect he did?
Emmylou Harris sings a song about her father's death, Bang the Drum Slowly. It is a song about missed chances and regret, and also a song about deification to a degree. Her father fought in World War II. My father was a Vietnam draft dodger, and he worked in a steel mill in high school. He painted houses in grad school. He always seemed blithe to me, uncaring, and he was dead before I understood that to be an adult's way of comporting himself around a child he didn't know as well as he wanted. He was brave and he was a coward. Like Emmylou, I meant to ask him lots of things, but they weren't really about his heroism, about how afraid he had or hadn't been. They were questions about how one endures in a haunted house for 20 years. They were questions about the upstairs toilet, rusted with disuse between two bedrooms meant to be mine and my sister's; they were about the 15-year-old turtle-shaped sandbox outside, which we had played in for those one-week summer visits until the ants took over.
I follow his former house on Zillow. This is mentally unhealthy behavior. My sister and I sold it as part of settling his estate, or more accurately my older sister sold it while I avoided and repressed everything, inherited coping mechanisms winning that particular checkers game. The house was sold for under $40,000. It was built in the 40s and almost certainly full of asbestos. My father smoked so heavily the whole house smelled of it. The basement was carpeted and had survived several floods. It occurs to me as I write this that he never took down the cat tree in the laundry room; the cats were gone when my mother was.
The house did sell, though. DIYers bought it, then put it on the market a few years later. It was a failed renovation. Uneven paint, ugly floors. My father's home was cramped and smelled like smoke but it wasn't ugly in that careless way. Then again, he died on the toilet, so maybe it was a little too comfortable.
They did paint over or remove the kitchen wallpaper, though.
My father had a very classic kitchen. It was at the back of the house, next to the back door and the basement stairs. Wood cabinets, white with scalloped trim; a small built-in pantry with a door that never quite fit its frame; a microwave so old it had big metal manual dials. He kept the surfaces very clean. We drank from old pebbled plastic glasses. He had a toaster oven mounted to the counter. Cabinets were mounted along the far wall, and beneath them was a workspace of sorts, with a filing cabinet and an old typewriter and a big stapler. The space between the typewriter and the cabinets was technically an eat-in kitchen. For the entirety of my childhood it held a glass table, meant for outdoor dining, the hole in the center of the table permanently missing an umbrella. We ate on white director's chairs with navy fabric. Across from the table, next to the pantry and a few feet from the doors leading to the dining room and the hallway, was an old landline jack.
I think there was a dent in the wall, which my father laughingly told us was from my mother throwing a phone. I don't remember where. But I do remember the walls. They were wallpapered. The paper had a deep blue background and vibrant yellow and orange flowers. I told all my friends about this wallpaper, because the thing was, the flowers were mostly dying. Not all of them, of course; some were blooming, big sunflowers and daisies. But most of the wallpaper was consumed with decaying browns and yellows: withered leaves, wilting petals. It was hideous. I never understood why someone would want that in their kitchen.
Two days ago I went for a walk. Many of my neighbors have native flowers planted. I stopped to photograph a few of them, and I noticed that they had wilted and withered just like my father's wallpaper: not death from sun or drought like I'd grown up with in North Carolina, but the wilt of death by hard frost. A chill wind, a short-lived but grim night, and these flowers began the month-long process of sinking back into the earth.
When I feel too strongly about something, I put it off. I didn't attend my father's funeral. When I knew he was having health problems I dodged his calls. I've let friendships lapse. I've let family fade.
This grief crushing my heart is nine years old and two weeks old. It has been forgotten and it is metastasized. It has flourished in my absence.
It occurs to me that seasons change independent of input. We are all mulched in the end. A wallpaper of pretty flowers is a better choice for a kitchen, but sometimes we don't recognize the quality of a particular ugliness until we encounter the inadequacy of other attempts to portray it.
I miss him every day.
