The last time I talked to my father, he told me I was a ghoul. I was sitting in my college dorm room, junior year, as he yelled at me over the phone. “You are a ghoul,” he shouted. “You’re a liar, a fucking thief.”
“Gary, Gary, Gary.” I tried to say his name to break the relentless screaming. I repeated it like a mantra, hoping it would block out what he was saying. He eventually heard me.
“You don’t know me well enough to call me by my name,” he spat.
“Actually, I don’t know you well enough to call you Dad,” I replied in a shaky voice.
“You greedy fucking ghoul of a daughter,” he shouted back. “You don’t deserve one fucking ounce of good from this life. You ghoul.”
He said this, over and over and over, until his voice became hoarse. I hung up. My ears were ringing. My dictionary was sitting on my desk, I felt like I could still hear him shouting. I flipped to the word ghoul: “an evil spirit or phantom, especially one supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies.” The sample sentence: “A wicked ghoul was suspected of all the terrible crimes committed in the town.”
All the terrible crimes.
When I picked up the phone to speak to him, two years after our estrangement, the conversation started off politely enough. He did not behave as if we had spent the last two years not talking. He told me he had heard I was writing and asked how I was. I brought up the reason for my call, mainly that he had been harassing my mother with incessant calls about money he thought she owed him. “Fucking ghoul,” he roared at me as soon as I said this.
I took the things he said about me and carefully tucked them inside my body. The word ghoul floats through my bloodstream even now; I carry it with me.
The last time he spoke to my sister was over email. They were arguing over money. He told her that she was the biggest disappointment of his life, and he hoped she fell asleep with a needle in her arm.
When my father was fifty-nine years old, a few years after everyone in my family had stopped speaking to him, he had a stroke and fell down and hit his head. A friend tried to take him to a doctor, but he refused to go. Shortly thereafter, he had another stroke and had to go to the hospital.
A week later, my mom received a phone call from one of my father’s friends, looking for my sister and me, as we were Gary’s next of kin. The hospital needed us to make decisions regarding his care. By the time we were contacted, he was in a coma. He could not see or hear us. He could not even call me a terrible name I could stitch onto my skin. He was just a body that could not breathe on its own anymore.
I had no illusions that I would repair my relationship with my father. I never imagined some long-time-coming reconciliation. But I thought of him often. I dreamed of cowboys, wild horses, and rattlesnakes. I wrote stories for fiction class about men who could breathe fire, little boys hung by accident in a dude-ranch barn, cows stuck in desert trees.
Sarah was in rehab at Shining Light. She’d been there for about a week when my mother flew over to tell her in person. I worried that the news, coming so soon into an in-patient program, might trigger her to use. I also knew it might trigger a desire for recovery.
Shining Light allowed her to leave so she could see him. My entire family—my mom, sister, and brother—went to be with him, stayed overnight, and took turns holding his hand. I went, but only for a minute, after Sarah came out to my truck, parked in the hospital lot, and told me I would regret not saying goodbye. “He is waiting for you before he lets go,” she said to me, and took my hand, pulling me toward the hospital doors.
Sober
I hovered in the doorway of his room and heard him breathe a terrible, rattling breath. I watched his face, his beautiful wrinkles, struggle against the machines keeping him alive. His hair was grayer than I remembered. I wanted to go over and smell him, to see if the father I knew when I was young would materialize in a haze of smoke and pine. I looked at my sister, who had taken a seat, her hand in his, whispering quietly in his direction. She looked so young.
In that moment, I wished to be a ghoul. I ached to float over to my father and press my lips against his gaping gray mouth. I wanted to suck the death out of him. I imagined all his terrible crimes leaving his body in one violent exhalation and entering mine. Maybe that is what he was screaming at me all those years ago: what he saw in himself. You are a ghoul. You’re a liar, a fucking thief. Maybe he was asking me to take it all away, all those monstrous feelings. For all his storytelling, he could never tell the truth. He could never say I need help to be a better person. He thought if he yelled loudly enough that I would understand, that I would save him at the very end. I would rob his grave, feed on his body, and absolve him. I’d like to think that he wanted the best of himself left for that moment, for my sister, who insisted on holding the hand of the man who had called her the biggest disappointment of his life.
She returned from his deathbed to Shining Light Recovery. She would stay sober for one year after his death.