February 2007, Merrill, Wisconsin

By Anonymous

Earlier this year, I published a story on Common Ties about my father. He was a Vietnam War veteran and a high-school teacher, and it’s perhaps unfortunate that I recall him primarily as an alcoholic.

I tried to illuminate his contradictions, his pettiness, and his violence alongside his feeble yet genuine efforts to love his students and family. Less than a month after that story ran, he committed suicide.

It was a bright cold Saturday in Wisconsin. I was in Madison that morning when mom called from Merrill, two hours north.

“Your father wants to talk to you,” she said, and she put him on the phone for what would become our last conversation.

In a strange, terse voice, he said he’d been having an affair and that mom was kicking him out of the house. He ended the conversation by saying, “I’m ashamed. I’ve let you down. I’ve let all of you down.”

I don’t remember my response. I was stunned.

“Here’s your mom,” he said, handing her the phone.

“That’s not what I thought he was going to say,” she said.

“What did you think he was going to say?”

“He told me he’s going to kill himself. He’s been talking about it all morning.”

And it was funny. Because this was not the first time he had threatened to kill himself. All my life, this was his trump card, his ultimate bid for pity. He would get drunk and scream at the family, and if anyone challenged him, he cried that no one loved him and threatened to kill himself. So many times that it had become a joke.

In a way, I pitied him because I thought him too much a coward to actually go through with it. Among the many things that changed that day was my estimation of his resolve.

Mom said she’d call later, and I promptly turned off my cell phone, determined to avoid any role in their conflict. I wanted to lie down and close my eyes and be uninvolved.

But I couldn’t sleep. I showered and dressed. Eventually, worry set in. At 2:05 p.m., I turned on my phone. There was a voice message from 2:03 p.m. My stomach sank.

I listened to my mother’s screaming voice. “Please call immediately! Dad just killed himself!”

The sheer terror was horrific. And the knowing that this time, it was real. And the disbelief. And the anger. I started swearing at my father seconds after I found out that he was dead. I felt personally offended.

I called Mom. I was the last to actually speak to her, following my two sisters and brother.

Dad had been drunk the entire week. He hadn’t showered or slept in days. The fight that morning had been only the latest in an ongoing confrontation. Dad repeatedly brought up the affair and asked, “How can you love me?” and Mom continually pleaded, “I don’t know, but I love you, I love you.”

(As it turns out, there was no affair. This is delicate family business, I realize, and you may think I’m dodging inconvenient details, but after investigating, I learned that he had developed a severe fixation with a woman in town who had no interest in him. He was essentially stalking her, and it’s a measure of my father’s warped reality that he concocted a fictitious relationship out of his private obsession and believed it so thoroughly.)

That afternoon, my mother was scheduled to volunteer at the local library. She would spend an hour helping children make valentines. Before leaving, she asked Dad repeatedly, “Are you going to be OK? Do you want me to stay here?”

He assured her that he was fine and gave her permission to leave. Exhausted and drained, she urged him to take a shower and change. For days, he’d been wearing the same sweatpants and shirt, emblazoned with the Marine Corps logo.

“You’ll feel better,” she stressed.

And then she spent a wary hour cutting hearts out of red paper, making dad a Valentine’s Day card. The cover asked, “Do you know how much I love you?” The inside showed a person spreading their arms wide. “This much.”

And when she went home to give it to him, she found him in the basement, where he had shot himself through the forehead with his Vietnam service revolver. “It was the most horrible scene I’ve ever….” she later tried to tell me before she started shaking.

My friend Ken drove me north. It was a gorgeous winter day. Farmland fell away from either side of the interstate, gilded with snow and lined with bare trees, and the sun hung low on the horizon. I was on the phone most of the time, trading calls with my sisters and brother.

All the children, now grown and dispersed across the Midwest. The whole family recoiling inward, like a threatened animal. All of us in cars speeding north toward home.

And in the silent spaces between phone calls, the realization came in waves. If I marry, he will not be at the wedding. If I have children, he will never meet them. He won’t be there for Christmas. And the date. I had to think: February 10. I only thought to note the date hours afterward. And so, by degrees, the fact of his death took on meaning.

The cops and ambulance were gone by the time we pulled up in front of the house. It was cold, and the sun was setting. The first thing I noticed was a bunch of couch cushions, piled in the driveway between the cars, soaked in blood and slowly freezing.

I wanted to point or scream. But I felt oddly calm and composed. I went inside, and the living room was filled with people. My sister Leah was already there. Friends of the family and neighbors were there. My mom was crying, and we hugged. My godmother called me a doll. My brother was in the basement helping the cleaners remove the couch.

I went down into the basement. I had to see. I knew that if I didn’t, it would have been worse in my imagination. A man was cleaning the carpet, and a woman was wiping blood off a pair of snowshoes. They way they looked at me … I felt so sorry for them. I wanted to apologize.

I glanced around. Cheap wood paneling and gray carpet, so familiar and so transformed. In the back were bookshelves and a desk where my dad spent nearly every evening of his married life watching TV, looking at porn, and drinking.

I went upstairs and rejoined the family. We sat in the living room for hours. Leah was silent the whole time, staring into space, wiping her eyes. My brother was unshakable, thinking only in pragmatic terms: insurance and legal matters and funeral preparations. He kept assuring Mom that it wasn’t her fault, that there was nothing she could have done. My mom sobbed, “How could he do this? How could he do this to the people he loved?”

This family, I thought. This good, strong family.

All evening, neighbors dropped by with food. We filled the fridge in the kitchen and then piled bags of groceries on the back porch. The small town I had grown up in was renewed with a sense of community and support.

Visitors kept coming. People spread throughout the house, and there was a sense of vigil. Some were laughing, keeping it light, keeping the gravity at bay with a soft, low-spoken humor, but there was a weight in the jokes, a tone like reverence. Others sat quietly, staring at nothing.

I slept surprisingly well that night. I dreamt about September 11. A friend and I had watched the towers burn, and we knew they were going to come down, but we were helpless to do anything but watch.

The next morning, it was still becoming real. For days, I lived in the unrelenting present, reacting only to my immediate surroundings. There was no reflection or analysis beyond the understanding that time is irrevocable.

We went to the funeral home to make arrangements, and I saw my father’s body for the first time. It was unmistakably him, and yet it looked nothing like him. The finality of death astonished me as I looked at him on the gurney. He could not talk or breathe. He had been a living person, and now it was over.

The viewing came the next day, followed by the funeral, then days and weeks and months.

In a way, my dad’s suicide was a fitting conclusion to his life. I feel cruel writing that. But he was tormented by Vietnam and by career failures, and he often couldn’t help but hurt the people who loved him. Soon after his suicide, I felt partly relieved that his suffering was over.

The writer is 26 years old. He lives in Seattle.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Tuesday, July 17th, 2007 | Email This Post

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