“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.”
― William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 2
“You need to come home,” my mother said during a phone call in early February 2007.
Again? I thought. “What’s going on?”
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| Plebe-Parent Week, 1992. |
My mother’s health had been poor for more than a decade. In recent years, however, it had gotten notably worse. Though just fifty-nine, Mom had the body of an eighty-year-old. Her own mother passed that year from pancreatic cancer, and it took something from my mother that she never recovered. Granny had been my mother’s rock. In some ways, losing Granny left my mother as adrift as my father had been when he retired from the Marine Corps.
Unfortunately, parsing my mom’s actual problems from the problems that existed solely in her mind presented a serious challenge. Grief—about losing my dad, as a result of her constant physical pain, and from feeling rejected via my move to New York—left her susceptible to the very worst effects of prescription pain medication. She stayed touchy and irritable, a side-effect of the medications themselves, which exacerbated her symptoms by making her rather more susceptible to pain whenever she tried to wean herself. She spoke often about her great mental and emotional strength, but by 2007 her supposed strength was more a remembered habit of orneriness than a genuine character trait. In the real world, I got panicked phone calls from various hospital rooms scattered around the State of Tennessee at least twice every year. Some of these were for legitimate medical crises, others were drug-induced crises of pain. Either way, I wound up fly down to sit by my mother’s hospital bed more times than I could count.
My mom had real health concerns. She also had a vested interest in seeming sicker than she was. She’d call me from the hospital and say, “You’d better get down here right now if you want to see me to say goodbye,” and I’d be left trying to parse what that actually meant. Years of hard-won experience had made me wise to my mother’s emotional manipulations. Still, I was terrified of erring on the side of cynicism, only to have my mother die alone in another state.
The aortic spasm was the worst. She told me that she’d had a heart attack, and I went through a week of Hell trying to get emergency plane tickets and time off that wasn’t scheduled, but when I finally reached her bedside in Tennessee, I found her as happy as I’d seen her in years. The danger, if any ever actually existed, had long since passed. Now Mom wanted to have a nice family visit, granted within the confines of Vanderbilt Hospital Cardiac Unit.
She was delighted that I’d dropped everything to rush to her side.
This pattern repeated itself with back and knee pain and a variety of additional phantom ailments, but then she got lung cancer for real, and I sat at her bedside again both before and after they removed one of her lungs and retaught her to breathe.
It was maddening. Not only because I never knew what was real, but also because she so consistently refused to follow medical advice. She never quit smoking, but she went to pains to hide her smoking from me. She never went to physical therapy or scheduled any kind of proactive medical treatment or, God forbid, exercise, but she insisted ad naseum that I drop everything and take her health seriously regardless of any other considerations. Most importantly, she never made time to try to make herself happy, always finding something that needed her attention immediately in lieu of dealing with her own, very real problems.
All of this ran through my mind during the initial moments of that phone call in 2007. I thought I was ready for anything, but what Mom actually said caught me off-guard.
“It’s your father,” she said simply. “I don’t think he’s got very much time left. You need to go see him now if you ever want to see him again.”
I will admit that this sounded like exactly the same horseshit that my mother had been bludgeoning me with for the past decade or more. After a few minutes of conversation, however, I reluctantly agreed to go. By that point, I’d not spoken to my father in almost two years. I’d sent letters and tried to call, but he’d long since stopped answering his phone, and he never even opened many of my letters. They sat silently on the floor of his apartment, mostly still in their envelopes.
That Dad was in a bad state was not in doubt. He’d been in several car wrecks recently, drunk driving, once so badly that he’d actually driven his car into a lake. How did that even happen? His bank had called to ask if he’d had a traumatic brain injury, and occasionally collection agents called me to inquire if he was hiding out at our house. He was drunk all the time, literally howling at the moon. He couldn’t hold a job; he’d fallen so low that he’d eventually gotten work as a stock boy at the local drug store, only to be fired for being drunk on duty. Alas, my old dog Dixie got the worst of it. She’d spent a month in the pound after one particularly bad accident in which Dad had hit a utility pole and blacked out. Poor Dixie had run away in the resulting chaos and been caught by Animal Control. Though my mom eventually rescued her, she was never the same dog again afterwards. The experience of being forgotten for weeks at the pound left her emotionally scarred.
I knew at some level that my father wanted to die. With all of his drunk driving, I could only hope that he wouldn’t take anyone with him when he finally went.
I got to Tennessee that spring and drove with my mom to a sad little apartment complex on the outskirts of Columbia. The place was two-story off-white stucco construction with a small parking lot—exactly one spot per apartment. It was fine as a starter apartment for a kid out of college, but it was decidedly downscale from the life my father had known as a Marine infantry officer. However, it looked fairly clean.
Mom and I tried to call ahead, but of course, my father hadn’t answered his phone. We therefore knocked on his door unannounced. The man who answered was like a homeless person, the kind of man you might meet living under a subway overpass. He had wild, unkempt hair that stuck up all over his head and a long, disheveled salt-and-pepper beard. His eyes were sunk deep into his face and rimmed with exhaustion, their gaze bloodshot and vacant. He smelled so bad that God alone knew when he’d last bathed. His right collarbone was noticeably broken, presumably from one of his many car wrecks. It looked like it had been broken for weeks. He’d not bothered to go to the doctor, though. He knew that he couldn’t stay sober long enough to be hospitalized. He stood there helplessly surprised, the ghost of the man he’d once been, one shoulder high, the other laid low and useless. His left arm hung limply at his side.
He was a dead man who’d not quite lain down his burdens. His once gloriously athletic body hadn’t yet given up the fight.
“Can we come in?” my mother asked.
Dad stuttered and then smiled. He was happy to see us but also clearly embarrassed by his appearance. “I guess so,” he said at last. Then he cleared his throat. “Uh, excuse the mess.”
I followed him inside, too stunned to speak.
My father’s apartment was a chaos-strewn disaster. Paper and trash lay everywhere, several inches deep along the floor, alongside mounds of Popov vodka bottles and old, long-dried dog poop that had lain in place so long it had molded to the carpet. The stench of filth lay heavy in the air. The garbage piles were so high that we could barely see the furniture beyond its general outlines.
I stood dumbstruck. I literally did not know what to say or even what to think. I’d known that my father wanted to die, but I’d not appreciated what this might actually look like until I saw it with my own eyes.
Dad’s apartment reflected his life and his mental state. It was unadulterated chaos, all of it. The treasures of a lifetime spent in service to the nation mingled freely with collection notices, puke stains, and actual shit. The smell was hideous. Horrific despair clung to the walls like mildew.
We tried to make small talk, but I simply could not. I couldn’t process what I was seeing. I wanted to run and never look back. I might even have said so. The man who had once been my hero was gone. He had disintegrated. In his place stood an icon of grief. He’d made his own Hell, and it had swallowed him whole. My brief glimpse of it was instantly more than I could bear.
“Tom,” my mother pleaded, “please… Let us take you to a hospital. Let us get you fixed up. It doesn’t have to be like this. You don’t have to live this way.”
My dad shook his head. “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m fine.” He considered a moment and then added, “I’ll be okay.”
“Tom, please…”
My father would not be moved. He didn’t want to change. That was the point.
At last, he said, “I’m fine. But I think it’s time you ought to go.”
“You’re not fine,” I said. “Dad, this is madness. You need to see a doctor.”
He shook his head, but that was all.
Mom couldn’t stop crying. I felt like I couldn’t cry at all. All my tears were bottled up behind a wall of numbness and emotional exhaustion. I’d been angry with my father because he’d let himself go, but it was hard to be mad at the man in that apartment. My father was gone; there was nothing left. He was dead; he just hadn’t actually died. Worse, there was no way that we could institutionalize him without his consent. It was perfectly legal in the State of Tennessee to drink oneself to death. He wouldn’t consent even to letting us take him to get his shoulder fixed. Perhaps I could have dragged him to the hospital, but they wouldn’t have admitted him. Not without his consent. Besides, he’d been in and out of hospitals. He’d been in so many car wrecks, they knew who he was. He’d even been under a psychiatrist’s care. No one could not treat a man who flat did not want help.
Our visit didn’t last much longer. The horror of my father’s life was more than I could bear. An abyss of sorrow beckoned, and I knew that I needed to hold myself away from it, or it would swallow me as surely as it had swallowed my father. I was left to hope that the rest wouldn’t take too long. At times, I found myself wondering if it wouldn’t have been better for Dad to have broken his neck jumping out of that airplane with Recon Battalion instead of just his leg. He’d have been better served to have died in the Marine Corps, I thought, or maybe to have given his life in Vietnam. What remained after his service was not at all like the life he’d deserved or earned. In the end, however, we all make our own choices, and then we have to live with them.
Our loved ones have to live with them, too.
I got back to Connecticut and fell gratefully back into my own life. We sold our little house in Fairfield and bought a bigger one in Stratford. We hired a moving company and made plans to move during the coming summer. My wife and my kids were happy and healthy. We had our challenges, but we also had a lot to look forward to. I hoped that one last move would see me set in a real hometown for the first time in my entire life. After decades of roaming, I very much wanted to plant roots.
My mother called to tell me that my father had been found dead the same week that we moved, in early July 2007. Dad’s liver had finally failed. He’d lain alone on the floor in his room for several hours before passing, presumably writhing in pain. He’d eventually rolled himself under his bed for some reason, and it was there that his landlord found him when he’d finally come to see about the rent. By then, Dad had been dead for nearly a week.
Sally and I closed on our house in Stratford, organized our move, and I saw to it that our stuff was delivered. I then flew back to Tennessee to see about taking care of my father’s affairs.
I spent three days in Tennessee. It was a minor miracle that I couldn’t stay longer. I don’t think that I could have taken more than a mere glimpse of the true horror that my father had made for himself. Mom hired her handyman Thomas to come and do the heavy lifting of cleaning out my dad’s apartment, though she insisted that I pay him. I didn’t argue. We went through my father’s place and tried to salvage what we could. Mostly we just threw stuff away. Dad had one upstairs room that wasn’t completely trashed, one place that retained at least some semblance of the man he’d once been and that held almost all of his cherished possessions. These included his various awards and plaques, the daisho he’d gotten asWarlord of 3rd Marine Division in Okinawa, and a goodly number of old scrapbooks and picture albums. He had every newspaper article that had ever been written about me and my swimming career painstakingly catalogued in two enormous scrapbooks, alongside reams of pictures from my days as a swimmer and from his own time in the Marine Corps. In this one room, his pride in who he’d been and in his son’s athletic career somehow retained primacy of place over the chaos of his life, his grief, and his personal madness. He’d kept exactly one spot of sanity from a life that he’d otherwise driven completely off the rails.
I did my best to help Thomas sort through my dad’s stuff, but after a full day of immersion in filth, I retreated to that one sane room and cried into my hands for almost an hour. Even afterwards, I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I just sat there, going through those old pictures while my mother berated me repeatedly for not helping more with the physical labor of cleaning up. That one room alone contained the father that I’d known and loved. Now that his physical shadow had passed on, I couldn’t help but remember the man that he’d been. I didn’t have the strength to reconcile the life he’d earned with the horror of his actual passing. My father’s truth lay beyond my comprehension.
It wasn’t just that he was gone, or that he’d died at just fifty-nine years of age. I’d known he was going to die. I could accept that. What bothered me was that he had purposefully destroyed himself, that he’d done this to himself deliberately. He’d been offered help and refused--repeatedly. He’d turned inward and pushed away all helping hands. He’d proven incapable of accepting the blessings that should have been his as the result of a life well-lived. He’d even lost his family, but in the end, that had not meant enough to him to get him to try to change.
In the end, he’d wanted to drink.
It was not a secret to me that my father had put his Marine Corps career ahead of the well-being of his family. I’d lived that truth time and again. He’d set his service as his primary focus, and when that service ended, he could not refocus. Retirement left him adrift.
My counsellor had been right. My father was a sinking ship, and now he’d sunk. I sat mired in the wake of his passing, and if I was no longer worried that he was going to drag me down alongside him, I knew as well that I would grieve his memory for a long, long time to come.
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