wednesday, march 5th, 2008

It's my late father's birthday today and in honor of him, I decided to post a story I wrote a few years ago that was originally published at lostwriters.net. This piece is not about food, save for the consumption of one very melancholy meal at a Mexican restaurant, but every year I think my father on this day and it is my way of paying tribute to him this year. Happy Birthday Dad. I love you.

A friend I met a few months earlier visited my house and walked past a black and white framed photograph hanging on the wall of a young man smiling broadly and leaning comfortably against a tree. His hands hang loosely from his pockets and even though he is young, early twenties at most, there are creases near his eyes from a lifetime of grinning. He is vital and fresh and full of life and energy.

“Is that Matt Damon?” she asks, pointing at the photo.

“Don’t you think he’s better looking than Matt Damon?” I ask, a bit insulted.

She leans in and examines the small picture closely and after several long moments she replies, “You’re right. Who is it?”

“He’s my father,” I respond proudly, but a little wearily too.

“Wow,” she leans in a little closer,  “Don’t take this the wrong way but, he was hot.”

‘He was, wasn’t he?” I ask, looking at the photo that I have already spent a lifetime examining.

“When was this taken?”

“I have no idea.”

“Didn’t you ever ask him?”

“Nope. I never had the chance.”

“Why?” she asks a little pensively.

“He died.”

“When you were a baby?”

“No, when I was twenty one.”

I spent the first ten years of my life telling anyone who asked me why I didn’t have a dad that he was dead and I remember vividly the very minute I found out that he wasn’t. My grandma, mom and I were sitting at grandma’s kitchen table as we usually did on Saturday afternoons. Once the mailman left, I ran to get the mail and go through it for her as was our ritual. I sorted out the advertisements from the bills and divided the letters from people I knew from those that I didn't. There was only one letter relegated to the latter pile. It was a letter addressed to me, c/o my grandmother.

“Grandma, this one’s to me,” I held it up and looked at her with excitement. I was ten. No one ever sent anything to me.

“Let me see that dear,’ she said as she reached for it and examined the return address. She stared at it for what seemed like years before handing it over to my mom who did the same exact thing. My grandma watched my mother and then slowly, they both turned their gaze on me as I shifted awkwardly in my seat and turned my eyes to the table.

“It’s for you pumpkinhead,” my mom said, voice ripe with anxiety, as she handed the letter over to me.

I examined the envelope but since there was no name given with the return address, I did not know who it was from.

“But I don’t know anyone who lives in Minneapolis,” I said as I looked from my grandmother to my mom.

“You’re right honey. But someone important in your life lives there.”

‘Who?”

“Your father.”

It was a moment of utter confusion. My mind was the sea and this letter the moon, tugging hard to create a tidal shift.

“But he’s dead,” I said after days and years.

“What ever gave you that idea, dear?” my grandmother asked as she moved her hands closer to me across the table.

“You told me he was,” I looked angrily at my mom.

“No I didn’t,” she replied defensively and with surprise.

“But you did. I know you did,” even as I said this I knew I was wrong. The fact was, I don’t think I had ever asked about my dad and in all those years, I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning him. I instantly felt angry with myself for never inquiring and even angrier at my mom who should have let me know that he was alive and well in the world.

“Honey,” my mom reached out for my hand, which I pulled away. She withdrew her hand and said soothingly, “I always knew that one day the subject would come up and I was prepared to tell you the truth but since you never asked, I figured you were just not interested.”

“But he’s my dad. How could I not be interested?”

“I suppose I hoped the family you had fulfilled you enough to not stir up a desire to have a dad. That’s always what I hoped the silence meant.”

I felt a little guilty now. She was right. Even though I only knew my maternal family, they loved me dearly and it had always been enough. Yet I could not deny that the issue of my father was not a fairly frequent presence in at least the back of my mind. I suppose I made up the father is deceased back story as a response to the questions from all those nosey, cruel kids at my conservative Catholic school who would ask me before going home to their two parent households, why I didn’t have a dad. At the time, in my insular Midwestern small town, I was the only one in my class who did not have two parents at home and I must admit with a bit of guilt that when I would hear later in life that so and so's parent’s relationship bit the dust, a sinister smile would creep across my face as I thought back to all the torment they subjected me to because I was the freak-kid with only one parent. I realized then at my grandmother’s kitchen table that the dad is dead story was something I made up entirely on my own.

Not knowing what to say now, I carefully opened the envelope with my grandfather’s letter opener that I normally did not use when opening up their mail. I can no longer recall exactly what the letter said, lost as it was in the endless moves of a college student, but as I recall, it was an, “I am your father, how have you been? I hope we can meet someday” sort of thing, and it baffled me.

“But why don’t I know him?” I asked my mom once I finished reading the letter, in my slow, ten year old style.

My mom and grandmother looked at each other and my grandmother gave mom a slight nod.

“He’s sick honey,” my mom responded, as my grandmother reached over and put her hand on top of my mom’s.

“What do you mean? Dying?”

“No pumpkin,” she continued, “he’s sick in the head. There is something wrong with him He’s something called paranoid schizophrenic.

“But if he’s sick, I want to see him. I want to meet him,” I paused as the tears welled up from the realization that my dad was out there somewhere. “He’s my dad,” I cried.

“He’s dangerous dear,’ my grandmother tried to help.

“What do you mean? Is it contagious, like chicken pox?” I asked.

“No honey, he’s dangerous in the way that I worry he might hurt you.”

“But I’m his daughter. Why would he want to hurt me?”

“Honey,” my mom said as calmly as she could, “you’re father is a good man. It’s not his fault that he 's sick but it’s the illness that might cause him to hurt you.”

“I don’t understand,’ I cried.

“Dear,” my grandmother offered, “your father has tried to hurt you in the past. He loves you, but he can’t help it. That is why your phone number is not listed in the phone book, that is why he addressed this letter to my house, not your own. He does not know where you live.

“My dad tried to hurt me?” I asked incredulously.

It went on and on and nothing they said helped me wrap my head around those huge words; paranoid schizophrenic. I later learned that my parents had been married and after a few years of living with the extreme symptoms of my father’s mental illness, my mother finally decided to leave when she came home to their apartment one night and found him holding me upside down the open window by my feet with one hand.

My grandmother and mom chose to leave this chapter out of the story to protect me but nothing they said helped me understand what exactly was wrong with my father and for the next few years, instead of lugging around the numb sadness that my dad was dead, I now struggled with the confusion and embarrassment of a father who was so sick that he might want to hurt me. I never mentioned any of this to even my closest friends, for I feared they might reject me, or be frightened of the girl with the sick in the head parent. At the time, mental illness was still secretive and misunderstood, and I was first in that bewildered line. The immensity of knowing this secret about my father yet not being able to reveal it to anyone was a burden, and it was sadness and longing too.

As I grew up and began to read and understand more about schizophrenia and society’s attitude towards mental illness improved, I told a precious few about my father, but still in hushed, embarrassed whispers. I read that mental illness could be hereditary and this sent me into yet another tailspin. I read an article about Van Gogh’s ear and how in one crazed, most likely absinthe-fueled night, he hacked off his ear lobe. It was attributed to his mental illness and for months, I feared for the survival of my lobes. Anything I felt or thought that seemed at all out of the ordinary I was sure was the onset of my very own schizophrenic hell. I never attributed my flittering emotions to the fact that I was a teenager, I instead assumed that it meant I too was sick in the head and I waited anxiously for inevitable medications and institutionalization.

I managed to remain out of a halfway house for the remainder of my teenage years and by the time I was in college, I felt no shame in telling people about my father. When I talked to anyone who had known him, mainly my relatives and my mom’s college friends, everyone told me the same thing; that he was a warm, friendly, charismatic man and they genuinely liked him. It was only the schizophrenia that changed him, warped him, prevented him from remaining the likeable guy that he was beneath the rancid skin of mental illness. Even my uncle, who in his staid, Midwestern way, has a difficult time expressing his love for anything outright, told me once that he felt sorry for my dad. He said something like, “He was such a great guy. I loved spending time with him. It makes me so mad that he had to deal with all that crap.”

Through the years I collected a wealth of similar stories and comments and they reinforced the conviction that I wanted to meet my father. The urge to do so initially felt insurmountable, after a lifetime as strangers, what would we ever say to each other? I finally summoned my courage after I graduated from college and my mom, who over the course of so many years, never told me a single negative thing about my father, even though she would have been perfectly justified to do so, called up my paternal grandmother and requested a meeting. My grandmother thought it might be better for me to first meet her and my aunt, my father’s sister, in order to ease me into a face to face with my dad.

She told my mom, “He’s not doing well these days Mary, and it might shock her to meet him without having us prepare her for what to expect.”

My mom and I both thought this was a good idea and we set up a lunch date far into the future at a Mexican restaurant in Minneapolis. I was the one who pushed the date out into the future, my anxiety gnawing, chewing, almost drowning me.

Many months later I found myself sitting with a burrito on my plate, my mom to my right and my grandmother-stranger and aunt-stranger sitting opposite me. It was as awkward as one might expect, but once we got through the initial anxiety and I realized that they were just as nervous about this encounter as I was, the conversation flowed. We jumped around from subject to subject without ever landing on the one that mattered. At last, busting into some mundane thing we were chatting about, I asked, “So how is he?”

The conversation stopped and we all stared at our tortillas and refried beans for a moment. My grandmother and aunt looked at each other and then my grandmother looked at me. She inhaled deeply and laid her hands on either side of her burrito, cut laser deep into my eyes and said, “Jody, your father suffered a heart attack two weeks ago. And he died.”

Not even the spiciest salsa could have jogged me out of my shock. Anger. Resentment. Bitterness. Frustration. And more than any of these, it was anguish.

For weeks I tore myself up as I asked the same questions over and over and over again. "Why did it take you this long to find the courage to meet him? Why did you delay? Why were you not brave? You had a lifetime, why did you wait?"

After the initial mourning for a person I would never meet, my paternal grandmother thought it might be a good idea for me to meet my uncle Todd. He was my father’s younger brother by fifteen years and would be visiting from Chicago the following weekend. Having learned that delay would most likely morph into regret, I eagerly said yes and set something up immediately.

There he was; an extremely tall, thin, handsome man, the spitting image with the addition of a decade, of my father in the black and white photograph hanging on my wall. I spent the evening laughing with him and my grandmother while eating the meal she had prepared and looking through old photographs of the family I had never known. I found out that my family has deep roots in America and she told me she would give me names and addresses if I ever wanted to meet anyone. She showed me a photo of some great, great something aunt who had fought on her own steed in the Mexican-American war. To my relief, I also discovered that I no longer had to tell people that I was half German and half something else. I could now tell them that the something else was Norwegian and English. It was a revelation to discover so much about half of who I was in the span of a very pleasant evening. I left feeling whole and more importantly, I left adoring my fresh, shiny new uncle. I realized years later that he was the man I hoped my dad would be but it was inevitable, could never be, crippled as he was from a haunted mind.

Over the years, I learned many things about my new family. I learned that of the six children my grandparents had, three were healthy, and brilliant too, and the other three were tormented by mental illness. My father’s heart attack was related to the medications he was taking, my aunt Helen died in a mental hospital after slicing open her wrists and my uncle Keith made the most dramatic departure of all; while standing on the roof of the mental institution he resided at, he wrapped his head in a sheet, doused it in starter fluid, set it on fire and ran off the edge. He died upon his impact with the street below.

My uncle Todd, who I have grown very close to over the years, gave me a book for Christmas a few years ago. I spent many years climbing recreationally in and around Seattle and my ultimate climbing related goal is to trek the Annapurna Trail in Nepal. I never mentioned this to Todd and he therefore did not realize the significance of the gift he gave me. It was a book entitled “Annapurna”.

“Your father was obsessed with the idea of going there one day,’ he told me non-chalantly, not realizing how serendipitous this gift was. “He read this book religiously and could quote form it verbatim.

When I told him of my Himalayan ambitions, he looked at me calmly through blue eyes that had witnesses a lifetime of family tragedy and said, “Then you must do it. For yourself. For him.”

A few months later, Todd and I visited the institution where my dad spent decades of his life. I never knew its location and when I drove up to the front door and realized that it was only a few blocks from the dormitory I lived in during college, the all too familiar wave of regret washed over me once again. How many times had I walked by this place? Had my dad watched me stroll by while looking out his window? Had I ever looked out into the fenced in recreational area and seen my father? I stopped myself this time before I even got out of the car. It was meant to be this way. Do not regret. Discover.

Cliches converged in the hallway of this place. Patients stumbled, grumped and mumbled around and it was more than vaguely One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. My father's doctor welcomed Todd and I into his office and for the next hour, told me that my dad was one of his favorite patients.

“I’m not just telling you this to make you feel better. Your dad was special. He had so many friends here. Everyone liked him.  He became very religious near the end of his life and in typical John fashion, he learned the bible front to back and front again. He would call into a daily religious radio program and it didn’t matter which expert they had on that week, John always outshone them. The entire staff at the station came to his funeral. He spent hours each day drawing in the courtyard outside. He was extremely talented. Did you ever see his work?”

I shook my head no.

“Well, I know it’s around somewhere. You should really track it down. I just loved your father, Jody. I really did. I need to tell you something that you might not want to hear but I think it’s important.”

“Go on,” I encouraged him.

"When your dad returned from Vietnam he was a mess. I had not met him at this point but during that era, they did not know how to deal with post-traumatic stress from the war, let alone schizophrenia. He was put on the wrong medication and he remained on it for years. It’s what caused his tremor.”

“I didn’t know he had a tremor,” I interrupted.

“He did,” Todd said sadly, “his right leg would shake so much it would send him into fits because he couldn’t focus on anything else when it got bad. I think it’s what sent him into the streets. That frustration”

“Into the streets?” I asked.

Todd did not look at me but stared at the doctor who shook his head in affirmation, “Your dad was homeless for about three years,” Todd continued,  “We had no idea where he was, then one day your aunt Patrice walked by a homeless man, bundled up in papers, mumbling to himself on the street and realized it was your father.”

Had I ever walked past him? My mom and I spent weekends in Minneapolis and I was sure we'd walked past dozens of homeless men. I felt protective of him, I felt genuine sorrow and futile concern. He must have been so cold out there in those bitter, unforgiving Minnesota winters. He must have been so hungry. He must have felt so alone, so lost.

The doctor saved me from the spiraling guilt, “I was a new doctor when John returned to us and I considered him a new patient. I was angry when I looked through his old charts and saw the medication he was given for all those years. Studies had come out in recent years that proved the pills he took after Vietnam actually harmed patients with mental illnesses and often the effects were irreversible,’ he paused, ‘I think we could have sent your dad out into the world to live a fairly normal life if he had never been cared for as he was for so long with ineffective, detrimental treatment. While it might be painful to hear that Jody, I want you to hear it because I want you to know that your father was a good man. He could have possibly lived a fairly normal life. We loved John around here. He was a shining light and we all miss him tremendously. Your father was a good man."

I refused this time to succumb to sorrow or regret. I instead felt proud of my father, for the man he could have been, and even for the man he was. For even in the midst of crippling illness, he shimmered and shone.

A few months later, an enormous package arrived at my home in New York. Inside, wrapped tightly in bubble wrap was a large green, plastic storage bin labeled John Eddy and a note from my mom.

“Your aunt Patrice delivered this to my house a few days ago. I thought you might want it. I love you. Mom.”

Stuffed inside were random puzzle pieces that when put together formed a man, his life, his legacy. There was a magenta colored wooden yo-yo, a football medal, a high school diploma, a brown plastic recorder wrapped in sheet music, a yellow kaleidoscope, various military awards, red and blue high school letters that had never been ironed onto a jacket, a black leather bound bible, a sheet of green construction paper with the image of a small hand, outlined by white paint, on the hand it reads in kid script, “Merry Christmas Mom and Dad, Love John. 1953,” a school report entitled "The Atom Bomb" that received in red ink an A-, hundreds of incredible drawings, dripping with creative juice and delirious madness, dozens of pictures in black and white of a happy boy doing various happy things; opening Christmas presents, playing football, dressed up as a pirate for Halloween. There was also a death certificate and a map to his gravesite at Fort Snelling.

In this treasure trove, my favorite thing of all was a drawing, one that he clearly did not draw after the cruelness of schizophrenia had set in. Instead, it was crafted in the careful and deliberate pencil sketch of a thoughtful and talented young boy. It’s a picture of a rocket ship in fine detail and next to it reads, “My Rocket Ship. I Will Sail To The Moon One Day.”

I spent hours examining the priceless contents of this box. There was one photograph that kept pulling me back. Every time I sifted through his things, it was this picture I looked at last and contemplated the longest. It’s a photo of him and I. He’s the better-looking version of Matt Damon that he was; I’m the tiny baby that I was. He’s holding me tightly, showing me off to the camera, like any proud father would. It’s a picture of possibility; two people unaware that they will soon be separated forever by a terrible disease that one of them will overcome in death, and the other will overcome through understanding and love.

A few months ago, I turned the small photograph over for the first time and heard my father speaking to me from across a universe of space and time. He is free from disease, filled with dreams and possibility, cruising to the moon on board his streaking rocket ship. In small blue letters it reads, “Darling, I love you. Dad.”