The morning I left for my flight back east, I was nearly to the garage, bags in hand, when Evangeline ran out in her pajamas, barefoot in that gray, damp morning. “I didn’t mean that stuff about Daniel. You know that, right?”
At the time, I nodded. But in truth, I didn’t know that. As the plane lifted off that afternoon, I pondered why Evangeline’s claimed hatred of my son rang truer than her retraction. Daniel had changed his last few years. All adolescents do, but it seemed more pronounced in my son. With his beauty and athleticism, his easy humor and sociability, Daniel never once struggled for friends. Boys and girls—adults too, for that matter—were drawn to him. He grew to believe that his attentions toward others, no matter the form, would always be welcome.
I suspect this latitude of behavior, not granted others, turned him careless. I witnessed several encounters that made me consider counseling my son—a rough and tumble, more rough than tumble; a verbal teasing a little too cutting—but each time I concluded I’d misjudged the situation. The boy involved would wrestle free laughing or shooting back his own retort, happy, genuinely happy, that Daniel’s notice had landed on him.
Daniel’s general manner, one of casual familiarity, could also be problematic at times. Though he was that way with both boys and girls, more than one girl had become confused by it. Evangeline might have hated my son, but if so, it was likely grounded in a belief that he had promised something he never had.
We reached altitude, and as the cabin lights dimmed, I leaned back and turned my thoughts to Aunt Becky. I hadn’t seen her in the five years since my father died. She had been the one who called the school that day. When I answered, she’d said simply, “Your father’s heart gave out.”
“What do you mean his heart gave out? He was only seventy-two.”
The line fell silent. I heard her breathing, a congestion in it. Finally she spoke. “Some hearts are stronger than others. I think every heart knows when it’s had enough, don’t you?”
I could still feel the shock of those words, the way they implied volition. My father struggled with depression. He had suffered with it ever since my mother died decades before.
“Are you saying he killed himself?”
“No,” she said quietly. “No. Not that. His heart just failed. But sometimes you wonder what a man can decide.”
THE SUMMER I TURNED EIGHT, my mother died of ovarian cancer. I was in the kitchen eating a peanut butter sandwich with my maternal aunt when my father came home from the hospital. He stood at the door. “Your mother left us today,” he said, speaking into the room as if to rid himself of it, refusing to meet my eyes. He retreated to the bedroom he had shared with her for more than a decade. And there he stayed for a week.
That is what I most remember from those first days without my mother: my father on one side of a wall and me on the other. But he was a good man, my father. Despite his pain, he always did right by me. Without fail, he got up, fed me, went to work, and returned. Every night, as he had before, he went to the den to reflect for an hour or two. But something in him was missing, some spark or force he’d had before. At times, I would follow him into the den hoping to find it there. He’d sit in his desk chair, and I’d sit on the floor, resting my hands on my thighs in imitation of him. Despite the occasional mild scolding if I squirmed too much, I sensed he liked having me there.
Once I set up a folding chair within a few inches of his, as if we were sharing a bench at meeting. Some time had passed when I noticed an odd jerkiness in his breath. When I snuck a peek, I saw tears on his cheeks. Just then, with his eyes still closed, he reached over and took my hand.
All my life I had wanted my father to touch me, share with me the physical affection he showed my mother. His reluctance with me had nothing to do with our faith or parochial attitudes. At gatherings of Friends, fathers often embraced their sons or planted kisses on their heads. Sometimes Friends swept even me up in a random hug, trying to compensate for my obvious lack.
But the evening my father grabbed my hand, everything in me froze, as if he were asking for something I had no way to give. He must have felt rejection in the rigidity of my response, and he quietly slid his hand away. After another few minutes, he sighed, and though we couldn’t have been thirty minutes in, he said, “Well, I think that’s enough for today.”
My father never again reached for my hand.
I WAS CONSIDERING ALL THIS AS I TRAVELED TOWARD my childhood home, sensing as I often did in flight that I had escaped the planet with its artificial dividing lines—cities and states and countries, skin colors and genders, religions and political tribes, animal, mineral, plant. At thirty thousand feet, these distinctions fell away. But even at that lofty height, I believed with unquestioned certainty that a boundary could be drawn around a small group of people and labeled a family. My family. Yours.
Except mine no longer had a past to which I could return nor a future beyond my own depleted life. There was only my aunt’s disintegrating mind and a grave barely a month old.