Dancing with the Octopus

by Debora Harding

  Dad wrote back and said it was time he let me know how he truly felt about me “dissing my mother.” He said the communication we had wasn’t serving him well, and he felt dishonest with his life partner. He could not understand why the core issues could not be brought to the surface. People go on Dr. Phil with problems like ours. He and Mom were open to seeing anyone, spending any amount of money to reach resolution. He would not be included in a visitation with the caveat that my mother wouldn’t be. He was enraged that we had returned the gifts, that I could intentionally hurt my own mother like this. She had done something generous.

  It was another swing.

  I tried one more time. I told Dad I had made it clear almost a year before that I would no longer continue in a relationship with Mom. He had promised me my boundaries would be respected. I pointed out my trip home wasn’t planned with the intention to hurt Mom. In fact, I had to plan the trip to rectify the situation she caused by refusing to respect my wishes.

  Several weeks later, Dad wrote back. He said he wanted to drive down to see me. He’d be happy to stay in a hotel. There was no overt or covert reason for coming. He simply missed me and wanted time with me. He signed, “Love, Pop.”

  I wrote back and told him I couldn’t see him until he got help. I suggested he take my last letter to a psychiatrist and have it explained to him.

  He wrote back at the end of January. Said he had taken my letter to a healer who advised him that I was in obvious pain. “I have a wife. I plan to continue having that wife until I die. She is complex, but making good progress in terms of better understanding herself, the implications of past actions, and what options she has open to her today for going forward. I will continue to search for answers that might be worthwhile. It would please me a great deal if I could have a relationship with you, and therefore, my son-in-law and grandchildren. Jim.”

  I wrote back two days later. “We’ve reached an impasse.”

  That was all. I’d hit that wall. I either allowed him to command my gratitude and forgiveness, or I made the break for reasons of self-preservation. All I could hope for was that time might present different options. I told myself over and over and over again, it was the right thing to do for me, for my family. The fight for Dad was draining my soul. Perhaps most painful of all, I would have to stop denying that what saved me that night alongside that railcar was not my father’s love for me but my love for him. My need to save his life. And now it was time to grieve what wasn’t, so I could claim my freedom.

  Over the next year and half, I stayed close to Jenifer and Gayle. Mom’s drinking didn’t take long to pick up, which became hard on Gayle. Not only did she live across the street, but she also worked in the family business.

  It was around this time that Gayle met the husband I’d always wanted for her. Rob was a commercial airline pilot. After six months of dating, they came to Shepherdstown and told us they’d be getting married. They both understood we couldn’t be at the wedding. Gayle called up after and told me Mom got drunk at the reception, then climbed in behind the wheel of a car and started backing out of the driveway before she had some kind of stroke. The wedding celebration ended with Mom being taken by ambulance to the hospital. She lost what was left of her hearing.

  Months later, when my mother went into surgery for a hearing implant, she died on the table and had to undergo open-heart surgery. They inserted a pacemaker and said she was good to go. A few weeks later Gayle called again. She was worried about Dad. He had started working at home because Mom needed lots of help. The only way anyone could communicate with her was by pencil and paper because she couldn’t hear. But she had no problem speaking. Gayle said Mom was threatening Dad with a divorce if he didn’t stop working, but Dad wasn’t ready to retire. That the situation had gotten so dysfunctional that Gayle was pleading with Dad to leave her.

  But he said he wouldn’t, or couldn’t, until he found the “right solution”—whatever that meant.

  In Which a Choice in the Road Is Taken

  Geneva, 2006—We were on our way to Switzerland for a ski holiday with Thomas’s parents. The train hurried south toward the Alps. It would have been about two P.M. our time—eight A.M. Dad’s time. He was intending to go to Bible study group, but instead his mind was making a U-turn.

  Our train rounded the bend and slowed as it pulled into the snowy village of Aime. We found a cab and chased the sun up steep switchbacks to the fir-lined glaciers. When we arrived at the chalet, I thought about borrowing my father-in-law’s mobile phone to call Dad—it was one of those moments in life that felt so good I just wanted to share it with him. Over the years I had made so many calls like the one I wanted to make to him now. It would have been as easy as that. But things had changed, and I didn’t make that call.

  We ate a late lunch, then went out to rent skis.

  My father, meanwhile, left his king-size bed. My mother was sleeping in the room next to him. Maybe he went to the bathroom sink to get a drink of water. I wonder if it was the mirror that spooked him. It happened to me at the worst times. I’d look at my eyes and see a complete stranger. The psychological term for it is dissociation. It’s not a good place from which to make big decisions.

  He was sixty-seven and in perfect physical shape. He had recently returned from New Orleans, where he spent a month helping people rebuild homes after Hurricane Katrina. The motorcycle had been traded in for a new RV that was parked and waiting for more adventure. The horses were long gone. He had sold his million-dollar business to Gayle, who had been his top saleswoman for years. It had been three weeks since he had seen my mother through her major surgeries. One week ago, he had showed up at his four-thousand-member Methodist church in flippers and a scuba diving outfit in order to recruit volunteers for the summer Bible camps he was running for the church.

  Dad had spent the previous day chopping wood with his fifteen-year-old grandson, whom he had helped raise. The previous night Dad had called Gayle to make sure she had made it home safely from her business trip. He went to bed early so he could get a good night’s sleep for the computer skills workshop he planned to attend the next day.

  But then he looked in the mirror. I imagined his hazel eyes and his head of full brown-gray curly hair. I wonder if he ran his hand down his pointed chin, the one I inherited from him. He had one of those smiles that included everything—the eyes, brows, and dimples.

  That morning he was meant to start taking Wellbutrin, but instead of reaching for the pills that would save him, he reached for the sleeping pills that would help him die.

  In Which I Play Hamlet

  Indianapolis, 2006—Thomas and I flew back to Indiana for the funeral. My mother had aged in the few years since I’d seen her last. She appeared feeble. She had lost all hearing and was now learning to hear with an implant and processor, but you could talk with her and it seemed better than when she needed a paper and pen. She’d say “eh?” and put her hand up to the side of her head.

  The house was full of mourners. I didn’t know most of them, but I greeted a few of Dad’s good buddies from the Lee Valley days. I noticed Mom had a Scotch in her hand, but no longer cared. I couldn’t blame her. But it looked to me like she was enjoying the party. How I loathed the person I became in her presence. I searched again for something I could give her, a more generous thought to override the rage I felt for her not being devastated as I watched her from across the room. Couldn’t she be a little less herself?

  When I asked her how she was doing, she said she was sad but “doing okay.” Then she said she had something she thought I might like. Suggested I follow her upstairs. I looked at Thomas, gave him the secret code look for “it’s cool,” and followed her. She took me into her office, where she had been going through pictures. Evidently she had a few of me. She handed me the envelope. I couldn’t help but smile when I flicked through them; I genuinely thanked her. There was a picture of me with what looked like lobster claws in the snow, a series of photo booth shots of me at age si
x where I’m showing fangs, Arlo and me at the Breeze Cottage in Maine, the school picture of me taken on the day of the kidnapping. I thanked her again. And then I asked her if she could tell me what happened with Dad. She said that four months earlier he had started drinking quite heavily and became depressed. A week before he had gone to see a psychiatrist, who prescribed him Prozac. And after five days, Dad called back and said he didn’t trust the way he felt, so they agreed he should switch to Wellbutrin. He had picked up the new prescription on Friday and was supposed to start it on Saturday.

  She continued, telling me Dad had come to her Friday night and said he thought he should go to the hospital. “I asked him what for? So he could sleep? He complained that’s all he did last time. You have no idea what these hospitals charge.” She took a slurp of the Scotch. “And you know what? When he took the sleeping pills, he took mine. Why do you think he’d take mine? He had his own. He could have taken those.” There wasn’t pain expressed in the question, no suggestion in her tone that she was struggling with guilt. She was curious. Did I have an opinion?

  “I don’t know, Mom, maybe he was afraid he didn’t have enough.”

  “Oh no, he had plenty.”

  I experienced a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach, the same one I had in Nebraska when I wondered if Charles Goodwin was intentionally manipulating me. I looked at her. Why, with all the people in the world she could have had the conversation with, why did she have it with me? What was it with sociopaths?

  But I couldn’t let this little heart-to-heart get in the way. I needed something from her. I asked her if Dad left a note, scared to know the answer. She hadn’t seen one. I asked if it would be helpful for me to look, if she would be comfortable with that. She said no problem—go ahead.

  I went to the basement, which he had turned into an office, and began searching. Aren’t you supposed to leave a note if you’re going to kill yourself? What does it mean if you don’t? Was he really going to leave without saying goodbye? I went through the top of his desk, the drawers, the bookshelves, fanned the pages of every book he had.

  The only thing I found that could shed any light on his state of mind was a piece of paper on his desk, with the name and number of his psychiatrist, and a list of symptoms:

  • racing thoughts

  • can’t sleep

  • lack of appetite

  • can’t concentrate

  • thoughts of suicide

  • anxiety

  That was it. At what point did that list of depressive symptoms turn into a series of actions? I moved to the bedroom. I started with the table next to his bed. Went through the drawer. Medications of various sorts, pens, a few other items. Next to the lamp on the bedside table was his Bible. Underneath the Bible was a notebook. It was a stenographer’s notebook, with a white plastic spiral binding along the top. I had seen it before. When I opened it up, I remembered why.

  It was the journal he had kept of the time he had come to visit Thomas and me in Oxford. He had shown me some of the pictures he had drawn of our back garden, and of the book bindery across the street. There were stories for each day with his signature humor: his “enrollment” in our vegetarian cooking school; his “man on the street” interviews—a bus driver, the Italian owner of the greasy spoon café around the corner from our house; his trip to a grocery store; an epic punting trip in which he flipped himself twice into the River Isis by losing control of the pole; our bicycle rides; lunch, when he would play with my in-laws’ leaf blower; and his last view of us as we ran after the bus when it was pulling out to say goodbye. I closed the notebook. Sat against the wall and wept, overcome by the poignancy of the gift, made more powerful by the panic of almost not having found it, a spiritual fantasy that he had led me to it, as I struggled to find a way to connect with him.

  After I collected myself, I walked into the garage. I looked around, imagining myself him. I wanted to know what he’d seen as he was about to die and there it was, on the wall in front of the car—his hat with the moose ears, the one he wore when he was telling us about the Civil War and the ghosts, his head bobbing as he directed our looks to the various historical sites, making us laugh so hard it hurt our sides. Next to it was another hat: a reindeer with antlers. It was too Dad. Did he really sit himself in front of that kind of absurdity and say goodbye to the world?

  Did he feel close to Katherine and Arlo that morning? Was he thinking of anyone? Was he thinking to hell with everyone? Was he scared? Was he just tired? Did he cry? Was he numb? Did I even cross his mind? Did I have the right to ask?

  And then I spotted the industrial vacuum cleaner without its hose in the corner. Gayle had told me he had used it to connect the tailpipe to the car—ran it into the back window and duct-taped it so it was air-tight. Swallowed a handful of sleeping pills for added insurance, closed his eyes, and that was it.

  A vacuum. And I remembered that’s where Dad had started with the story of his getting kicked out of theology school and making the decision that defined his life—using a vacuum for cleaning up his vomit. And with a rage I’d never given vent to before, I impulsively picked up a sledgehammer next to the machine and rained down enough violence on it to make the steel cylinder crumble with the blows.

  Jenifer and Gayle, hearing the commotion, came out to the garage. After I had exhausted myself, we stood together and shared a cigar.

  In Which I Meditate on Violence

  England, 2020—I spent a lot of time pondering the reasons for writing this story, asking myself what was to be gained. I suppose I hoped that putting the fragments in order, looking at the narrative threads, moving the pieces around, might offer some therapeutic effect. But at times, it felt more like self-harm. Yet I continued, because I felt like there was too much in my shared life experience with my father to leave unexamined. Too many of the social forces that acted on our lives are those also shaping lives in America today. The levels of national violence we are required to adapt to are unprecedented. And the toll on mental health, the levels of anxiety we live with, and the long-term consequences to victims are immense.

  In June 2001, after living in England for a decade, Thomas and I returned home to the United States with our two young children. Three months later, Osama bin Laden and his followers hijacked one of the world’s great religions and used it to justify their heinous acts. Though I was fortunate not to lose a loved one in this violence, my proximity to this barbarity erased my body’s sense of past and present. The region where we lived, just outside Washington, D.C., went from comfortable stability to unpredictable terror with a speed that echoed the way the Omaha community of my childhood was turned upside down. At the time, I didn’t see the connection, but I knew these events demanded of me more than I wanted to give. I carried little patience for the depth of anxiety it triggered, for my own reaction. I was not prepared to accept the idea that my body had a genius my mind did not and that I was not in sync with the history it carried, a history I had repressed, a pain I was still denying. Instead, I adapted to the new physical sensations of generalized anxiety, ignored the warnings they were, and staved off the emotional reckoning.

  One year later, as I have recounted, the sniper attacks began. Muhammad and Malvo targeted their ten murder victims for no other reason than they were going about their day. This time the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, something that I still didn’t know how to name, were enough to bring me to a grinding halt. I was brought straight back to that split second when Charles Goodwin pulled up in front of me in a stolen van, jumped out wearing a ski mask, and put a knife to my throat, turning what once had once been a place of assumed sanctuary, my church and my school, into a life-threatening danger zone.

  I am thankful I survived that night, especially given that the majority of children who are abducted by strangers, a crime that is fortunately rare, do not. I hate to mention these children as a statistic, when each one deserves to have their individual stories heard, each one had a family whose l
ives were shattered.

  I could not have dreamt in 1978 that children at schools would become the repeated target of mass killings. Who could have? The morning of Goodwin’s parole hearing, Kent Friesen, my junior high school teacher, called to give me some support, speaking of the horrific violence he’d survived after our parting. Ten years earlier, Kent had been teaching students in a chemistry lab at Columbine High School when Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris entered the building and shot and killed twelve students and one teacher.

  That this teacher, who had played such a vital role in ushering me through the aftermath of the kidnapping and made such a positive difference in my life, would be placed in a situation where he would be protecting sixty-three students from gunfire while trying to save the life of his colleague Dave Sanders still makes me rage. It belies comprehension that this has become a way of life in a nation that has professed itself capable of progressive change.

  Three years and six months after our meeting at the Lincoln correctional center, Charles Goodwin was arrested in Omaha, despite the promises he made to me and countless others that he would never hurt anyone again. He received a sentence of seven years in prison plus four years of supervised release for conspiracy to commit extortion. I refuse to recount the details of his felonies here, as he is no longer a part of my story.

  But before I move on, I must note the early choice I made as an author to not differentiate the humanity of Charles Goodwin and myself by race. This was not a simple decision, as we live in a grossly racist society that is not color-blind, and I do not feel it right to deny him the oppression that shaped his external world. Yet to suggest the kind of devastating pain Goodwin inflicted is the fault of society is to err grossly.

  Criminals often justify their behavior by claiming they are uniquely abused by society. Goodwin was not uniquely abused, but has proved himself to be uniquely violent. I therefore made the decision to let his rage—which he explained as originating in the trauma of racist violence—emerge in the story as he told it.