My Dead Parents

by Anya Yurchyshyn

  But that wasn’t the case. I understood that by the time my father took the job in Ukraine, my parents’ relationship was so broken that the position offered not just a life-changing opportunity but a break from my mother. Deciding to work there would have been more difficult if he was worried about her behavior. But if he’d been fighting with her about her drinking for years, and she’d shown him that she wasn’t willing to stop, he had even more reason to go. He refused to sacrifice his biggest dream to be with a person who’d disappointed him repeatedly.

  Even if their marriage wasn’t riddled with problems, my father had gotten my mother’s permission to work in Ukraine decades earlier—before they were married. He’d told her that he’d go if he ever had the chance and she’d promised she wouldn’t stop him. Bound by something she’d said so long ago, she asked Natasha to “convince George to not go to Ukraine” for her. But Natasha couldn’t. She told my mother, “You’re talking to the wrong person. I’m doing the same thing.’ ” Like Natasha and so many members of the diaspora, my father wanted to be a part of the historic changes taking place.

  When my father moved to Ukraine in 1990, it was an exciting and tumultuous time; many people referred to it as “the Wild East” because it seemed to lack laws, or people interested in enforcing the few laws that there were. I was told there was “industrial-level Mafia and industrial-level prostitution.” Every kind of vice was available, but you couldn’t find paper, paper clips, or pencils—things necessary for an office. The chaos was part of its charm, another reason to be there. There were huge food shortages because supply chains weren’t established. Markets rarely had milk or sugar, and people waited in bread lines for hours. There wasn’t anything to buy, even if you had dollars. “There was the occasional gourmet international store that no one else could afford,” Alexandra told me. “You could sometimes find something you wanted, maybe a jar of Nutella that had expired two years before. You’d think, ‘Eh, good enough.’ ”

  In addition to establishing a central bank, my father and his colleagues had to create a new currency; Ukraine had always used rubles, which were not convertible on international markets. I was told that prior to independence, the only thing banks did in Ukraine was take “paper bags of money from Moscow and dispense it to various ministries.” My father was engaged in a nation-building exercise that required skills honed in Western countries and economies, where there are checks and balances, and transparency. A Canadian who was there at the same time as my father explained that in the beginning, Westerners were enthusiastically welcomed by the Ukrainian parliament and members of the business community, though their feelings soon cooled. “We were telling Ukrainians in government to do things that were directly opposed to their personal interests. Their interest was to become the new capitalists in the world they knew was coming. We were telling them to open up opportunities to everyone, but they wanted to be the only ones with opportunity.” My father and his peers stopped being invited to meetings with the minister of finance, their closest government counterpart, because he no longer wanted to hear what they thought. My father became a vice chairman of the bank, but left shortly after he was promoted. “The chairman,” I was told, “was totally incompetent, and your father was caught in political issues. There was a lot of graft and corruption.”

  Instead of returning to Boston as he said he would, my father chose to stay longer. My mother felt increasingly abandoned. She wanted her husband to come home, to want to come home. I was angry on her behalf, but I sympathized with my father’s position. How could he have said no to such an opportunity? It was something he’d fantasized about. Should having a partner or children stop him from living his lifelong dream? I don’t know if my mother ever begged, or demanded, that he return; she knew that working in Ukraine gave him a sense of purpose and brought him happiness, and decades earlier she’d promised that she wouldn’t stop him from going. She must have been happy that he had such an extraordinary opportunity but disappointed that she didn’t have the same chance. I don’t know what my mother’s equivalent of getting to work in Ukraine would have been, but my hope is that she would have taken it. I would have been furious with her, because it would mean I was left alone with my father, but as an adult I would have celebrated her dedication to her career. She would have only been able to do that, however, if my father was willing to stay in one place and be responsible for me. I doubt if he’d have been willing to do what she had.

  My father’s next project was establishing Ukraine’s first venture capital company with a firm that was owned by our neighbor. To learn more about what they did, I spoke with his old boss—the man who my mother felt screwed her over after my father died—and his wife. They’d reached a settlement eventually, but my mother remained convinced that she hadn’t gotten everything that she should have. I was worried about seeing them after everything my mother had gone through with them or had put them through, but I avoided that particular topic and so did they.

  David told me that he and my father invested up to $50,000 in “bread-and-butter businesses that could be picked up and moved to another location in town: sewing operations, travel business, nails and hardware, companies with no assets.” Their small staff was a combination of local Ukrainians and members of the first group of Peace Corps volunteers in Ukraine. The corps worked with companies to convert their Soviet financial operations to international accounting standards. The Soviet accounting system didn’t have contracts for profit, so people didn’t record their expenses; if they did, they often kept two sets of books. The fund developed a two-day accounting course for anyone who wanted to take it, though their clients were required to. As people began approaching them with ideas for new businesses, my father saw that none of them knew how to prepare a business plan, so his staff also taught potential clients how to write those as well.

  David’s wife, Betsy, told me that when they visited Ukraine, my father showed them “all kinds of galleries and brought us to studios to meet different artists. He wanted to know what the intellectuals and artists were thinking, where they were headed. He didn’t just care about business.”

  I asked David what he thought about the car crash that killed my father. Was he certain that it was an accident?

  “I’ve thought about this a lot,” David said. “It was an accident. I went to the site. I was there a week later and the tire tracks were still there. It was an absolutely straight country road. It wasn’t three lanes, but it was definitely a good, solid two lanes with kind of ditches and trees and fields on each side. Allegedly, it was a head-on collision with a van. The people in the van were supposedly drunk or had been drinking. There’s no way that somebody would have used that as the way to kill somebody. There were no cell phones then, so some guy would have been standing beside the road and said, ‘Now he’s coming, go get him.’ Who’s going to do a head-on collision? It just doesn’t make sense.

  “We had no enemies,” he continued. “We were a source of money for people. Your father was respected by everybody. If he had lived, he could have really played a major role in the country. He had all of the key elements. He understood it. People loved him, and he gathered younger people around him. He was a Pied Piper.”

  I said that my mother understood why his work was important, but that she couldn’t, or didn’t, share the connection that he felt so strongly. Betsy told me that my mother had ranted to her about how terrible Ukraine was after she’d visited. “I totally sympathized with her,” she said. “That was no place to be the wife of somebody in your father’s capacity.”

  One of my father’s close friends in Ukraine, Elizabeth, whom he’d known vaguely from the Bank of Boston and who came to Ukraine with the Peace Corps to launch its first business volunteer program in the former Soviet Union, joined him for the Kiev Ballet’s performance of Spartacus in 1992 on the first celebration of Ukrainian Independence Day. The program was chosen for its symbolism, the slaves throwin
g off their shackles and rising up against the Romans. The national anthem was played beforehand, and she witnessed an electrifying swell of emotion. “Everybody just magically stood up,” Elizabeth told me. “People were singing, cheering, crying in the aisles. Your father said, ‘This was a forbidden song in the old days. You could be sent to Siberia for singing it.’ ”

  My father was witnessing changes he thought he’d never see and creating a new life, while my mother was stuck in Boston with me. “She was responsible for everything,” one of her friends explained. “It was overwhelming. I do remember it being so important and such a huge honor that your dad had been asked to go and do this. It was such a big thing.” My mother comforted herself with that belief, which was reinforced by her mother-in-law, the occasional press that my father got, and alcohol.

  My father knew she was angry, and that she was drinking. While Alexandra was interning in Ukraine the summer he died, he told her that our mom had gotten so drunk after the two of us went to sleep the previous Christmas Eve, he’d had to carry her to bed so we wouldn’t find her passed out in the living room the next morning. He had the impression that she’d drunk that much to show him what his absence was doing to her. He didn’t know what to do or how to help her, or wasn’t willing to. He saw his wife getting worse, angrier and lonelier, but obeyed his obligations to his country, not to her.

  In 1994, on my parents’ twenty-seventh anniversary, my father gave my mother a card with a picture of Lord Frederic Leighton’s The Painter’s Honeymoon on its cover, in which a young woman in a billowing green dress snuggles against an artist.

  Dearest Anita,

  But who would have guessed it would last twenty-seven years and still be going strong?

  I still feel just like the young artist in this painting—inspired, completed, and warmed by your presence in my heart and in my soul.

  Our love shall last forever.

  Did my mother read this and think, “Yeah, right”? When my father took his job with the venture capital fund, he told her that he hoped he’d be able to run it from Boston after a few years. Did she believe him? Was he committed to that plan? She’d never find out. A few months later, he was dead.

  My mother had shared a nightmare she’d had after my father’s death, where he told her he’d been murdered but couldn’t name his killer, though she never told me that she wondered if it was something that had been purposefully planned and executed. But she shared her fears with her friends.

  “She talked about hiring an investigator,” one of them told me. “No one in Ukraine had investigated the accident properly. Your mother said there was a lot of corruption, and that the accident was suspicious. But she didn’t know how to go about it. She didn’t speak Ukrainian, and she lived halfway around the world.” She’d spoken about her concerns with David, and he’d told her what he told me: My father had no enemies, there was no reason to kill him. He said the same thing to a journalist from the Boston Globe. One of the two articles they ran on my father’s death states, “The government is currently conducting a routine investigation of the collision…Everyone at the company feels ‘that this truly was an accident.’ ” However, among these and other articles, I found one from the Ukrainian Weekly that stated, “The U.S. Embassy in Kiev…has reported that an investigation by Ukrainian authorities is proceeding” and that “Some of Mr. Yurchyshyn’s close friends and colleagues in Ukraine suspect he was a victim of foul play.” The piece does not go into the reasons that foul play was suspected, and I don’t know if my mother knew their sources or contacted them. But this sentence alone would have been enough to stoke her fears.

  My father’s friends weren’t the only people who doubted that the crash was an accident. One night, as I was drinking wine with Natasha and discussing my parents, she told me that the FBI contacted her about my father’s death a few years after it occurred. “I got a phone call,” she told me. “The guy said, ‘I’m from the FBI. I would like to talk to you. Can I take you out for coffee or something?’ I’m not going to say no to the FBI. We went out for Italian. He said, ‘I have a question for you. You’re a friend of Yurchyshyn’s, right? Was he killed? Was he murdered? What is your opinion?’ I’ll never forget that.”

  It took me a moment to recover. “The FBI? What did you say?”

  “I said that I didn’t know. I said, ‘If I hadn’t driven on that road, I could give you a definite opinion. But I can’t, because I have, and it’s dangerous.’ ” Because she’d witnessed how treacherous the road was, she couldn’t say with certainty that it wasn’t an accident, but if she hadn’t traveled it herself, she would have said it was murder.

  “Why was the FBI contacting you so many years after the accident?”

  “Don’t know,” she said. “You can’t get much information out of them. I think your father was killed,” she continued. She’d asked my dad why he’d left his first position with the bank in Ukraine, and he’d told her, “Corruption. I cannot ever work with people like the ones who were in charge.”

  “But he died two years after leaving the bank.”

  She picked up her wine. After a long sip, she said, “We don’t know what other connections he had.”

  I’d always known my father’s accident might have been something more, but I’d never had a reason, or the desire, to investigate. The FBI’s interest in his death, and his colleagues’ doubts, raised my own for the first time. Natasha didn’t tell my mother that the FBI contacted her because so much time had passed after the accident, and she didn’t want to upset her. But my mother would likely have been eager to talk to that man, to learn more and take the opportunity to act on her concerns.

  Although my mother was alive for sixteen more years, there wasn’t much for me to learn about her life after my father died. Most of her friends’ stories were the same as mine. They tried to help, it didn’t work, they tried again, and again, then gave up.

  One of her oldest friends told me that my mother called her one morning and begged her to get her wine. When her friend explained that she would always offer to help my mother if she wanted to give up alcohol, but that she wouldn’t be her drinking buddy, my mother lashed out. When she knew she needed help, she’d call someone and ask them to get her to a short detox program. One person who tried to help her told me she’d once contacted different clinics to see who had space and learned that most would no longer take my mother. They’d found her uncooperative and uncommitted to recovery.

  The couple with whom my father had shared his concerns about my mother’s drinking told me that after his death, they worked hard to get her into a prestigious recovery center in western Massachusetts. “We had such hope,” they said. “We worked so fucking hard to get her out of her house and to get her there. Your sister was there with us. It was impossible to even get intake appointments and interviews there, but we got one for her, which meant, if she was accepted, she was set. Alexandra was as hopeful as my husband and I were. We got there, and they spoke to your mom and Alexandra together, then spoke with them separately. Your mother didn’t pass the interview because she wouldn’t say that she needed or wanted help. We were all so disappointed and angry. Your sister was just crushed. During the ride back to Boston, Anita was just talking away like we’d just gone to Dunkin’ Donuts or something. It was the crummiest day.” These friends, and others, retreated as they grew increasingly frustrated with my mother, and as they found themselves responsible for their own parents, sick spouses, and grandchildren.

  The only person who knew my mother better than I did during the last chapter of her life was my mother’s favorite aide, Nora, who spent close to three years taking care of her. I met Nora for the first time at my mother’s funeral, then later in her cozy Cambridge house.

  “When I started with your mom, it was tough,” she told me in her musical brogue. “I didn’t think I could last. Then, as I got to know her, we got really close.
I felt like she was family. I think about her almost every day.”

  “I know that she really adored you.”

  “I adored her, too. She was such a loving, sweet lady. We had days where I would get upset with her. I’d tell her, ‘The reason I get upset with you is because I care for you.’ She didn’t want to hear it. She had a tough life. Your mom went through a lot of squalls.” She sipped her tea. “She talked about the grandchildren all the time. And you and your sister as well. She loved you all so much.” Her chin quivered as she spoke.

  “That’s nice to hear,” I said. “She didn’t make much of an effort to see anyone, though I know she probably couldn’t. She missed most holidays.”

  She nodded. “The holidays were tough. She would get all excited about a month before, and then boom! She’d slip up.”

  Nora talked about dealing with the rats and mice that had taken over the house, combing my mother’s hair, and how she tried to get her to drink wine instead of gin because when she drank gin my mother was more likely to hurt or soil herself.

  Talking with Nora meant I couldn’t avoid confronting how isolated and miserable my mom had been during her last years. Despair cleaved my chest. I shivered, then considered how much smaller that momentary pain must have been than what my mother experienced daily.

  “Thank you for being so good to her. You did something that my sister and I weren’t able to do.” I didn’t want to take care of her myself, but I felt guilty for spending such little time with her. I know that seeing her more wouldn’t have helped, but it might have given her a little happiness. Then again, I thought as I remembered our last Christmas together, my presence didn’t seem to bring her much joy. If it had, I would have seen her more often. Four years after her death, I still bounced between believing that I could and should have done more and thinking that I couldn’t have done anything that would have made a difference.