My Father Before Me

by Chris Forhan

  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.r />
  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.

  44

  We kept the car. The white Dodge stayed in the carport, where our father had parked it, where he’d lain down and died in it. We kids took turns driving the Dart—first Peggy; then Kevin; then, when I turned sixteen, me; then Dana. Each of us got behind the wheel, sat where our father had last sat, started it up, just as he had, and drove to work or to a friend’s house or—

  We kept the car. How were we able to do this? And why? Did anybody suggest we might sell it, even give it away? But it was useful, it ran well, and it was paid for. It was only a car. It didn’t have to be a symbol or even a reminder. After enough time, a year or two, I came to think of it as just the Dart, not the place where he’d done it.

  Still, something was wrong with it: the shelf between the backseat and rear window, constructed of stiff red cardboard, began to blister. It bubbled, blackened, peeled. Was this normal—just the consequence of years of exposure to sunlight—or was it a late and continuing effect of the fumes with which our father had filled the car?

  What were we thinking? We kept the car.

  We kept it until we could keep it no longer, until keeping it was a burden, until years later, when I was hundreds of miles away at college, and it had taken on the habit of sputtering suddenly to a stop, and then something essential within it broke for the last time, and it would not budge, and Kevin threw up his hands and took twenty dollars from the driver of a tow truck, and the guy hauled the damned thing away for good.

  45

  A month after the funeral, my mother received a letter from a man whose name she did not recognize. He enclosed a check for a hundred and fifty dollars, explaining that he owed the money to her husband. It was a gambling debt.

  The letter was one small clue, a reminder, of the life my father inhabited outside of the family. He had a life at work, a life in Alaska, where he traveled continually throughout his career, a life with people we did not know. What was that life like? And what was he like when he was in it, when he was far from us?

  Almost forty years after my father’s death, hunting for answers, I tracked down a former professional colleague of his—maybe the last one still living. Kirk, also an accountant, traveled with my father several times a year to the pulp mill in Alaska to audit the Alaska Lumber and Pulp Company’s financial reports.

  He remembered my father well. Kirk had been impressed by his amiability and intelligence and professional integrity. Beyond that, he wasn’t sure he had any information that could help me. “Well,” I said, “tell me about those trips to Alaska. What were they like?”

  Kirk and my father would fly to Sitka, the remote town along the water, and check in to a hotel. In the morning, they would drive to the company’s offices at the pulp mill, ten miles out of town, and go over the books. My father, being in charge of the Japanese company’s financial activities in the U.S., had a difficult job, Kirk said. AL&P was continually in financial trouble. The pulp industry was unstable, the cost of doing business in Alaska was steep, and the company “played games with where the money went.

  “Your father’s main job,” Kirk said, “was to prevent the company from foreclosing.” But he did his work well: “The records were always clean.”

  After a day’s work at the office, Kirk and my father would head back into town for dinner—a big one. “We’d be gobbling up twenty-ounce steaks.” Who knows what my mother, who weighed my diabetic father’s portions by the gram, would have thought of those meals. During one dinner, my dad excused himself to go to the bathroom. Kirk waited for him to return. Then he started worrying and went to check on him. In the bathroom, he found my father, confused, “out of it”: having a diabetic reaction. Later, Kirk asked him, “What should I do if that happens again?”

  “Feed me chocolate,” my father told him.

  After dinner, Kirk would return to the hotel, but, for my father, the evening was just beginning: he went to the Elks lodge to meet with his regular poker group. One of the members was a priest. According to Kirk, my father would stay up all night—he might go two or three days without sleeping. “He was not disciplined about his health.” Sometimes, when the two of them had to travel two hundred miles to the lumber mill in Wrangell, they played cards with the company’s Japanese employees.

  Even in Seattle, Kirk told me,
my dad was in the habit of playing cards for an hour or two after work. I thought about all those evenings, through all those years, when our mother had set a place at the table for him and he arrived late—an hour or two, sometimes, after he had promised to.

  “Why wasn’t he going home to his family instead?”

  “Well,” Kirk answered, “he was a gambling addict. You know that, of course.”

  A gambling addict. No. I didn’t know that.

  “Oh, he was a dedicated gambler—but he didn’t win much. He owed a lot of money. I had assumed the gambling contributed to his death.”

  My dad might have killed himself to escape his debts?

  What about drinking?

  “He wasn’t much of a drinker. I don’t recall ever seeing him drink, really.” If he was up till all hours playing cards, Kirk said, he would likely “have a beer or two,” but that didn’t mean he had a drinking problem.

  So maybe that explains it: all those late arrivals home, all those long nights away. Early in their marriage, hadn’t he sat my mother down and tried to teach her how to play poker, tried to excite in her an interest that matched his? Maybe he hadn’t been vanishing into some dim bar; maybe he hadn’t been escaping into some stranger’s bed. Even during his last months, when he had put on a suit and pretended to be heading to a job interview, maybe he’d been heading for the gambling table, where he would lay his money down—lay our money down. What was the seduction? I imagine him trying one more hand, then another, getting swept up in the thrill of it, the drama, the chase, taking solace in the safety of it: at this table, in this circle of poker buddies, he could feel neither depressed nor helpless; it was only numbers he was dealing with, and he knew about numbers—they were his trade. His job was to make numbers balance, make them come out even, be unassailable, while he remained invisible; but here, with luck, with patience, with skill, he might make numbers work for him. He might win just by sitting and thinking, counting, calculating his chances, saying little, revealing nothing with his eyes, making not a single gesture to give himself away. And if he lost? No harm: it was only play, and there was the next hand with which to win it all back, or the hand after that. There was always time—or, rather, time was not a condition of this realm. While he sat studying his cards, he was happily alone in his life, in this floating, enclosed fragment of it; there was only this silence to inhabit, this silence of numbers and chance doing their work, this abstracted, projected space, this closed circle, this knowable world of controlled risk.