It has been a long time since I filled these screens with any meaningful text.
I thought about it, and started to tell the story, but got too sad to finish.
If it has been a year, well, one year does not seem like a long time to go between episodes of writing stuff here. This web site has been sitting here, in various states of undress, since 1994, so a year off is not so much, really.
Many people from across my life don’t know what happened. People I deal with on a regular basis don’t know, and these relationships lack the concomitance with which I would trouble them now with the story.
My father died one year ago today at about 12 noon. It was, a police officer told me by phone, a suicide.
I was upset but not surprised at the news that he had died. He had not been well, and our final conversation a few weeks earlier was somber and almost cheerless.
The means of his passing shocked me, but in the following weeks — and in the following hours, as a matter of fact — I came to respect his decision on principle. I did imagine he’d go out peacefully, but it was not to be. The method he chose repulses me, but the choice was his and his alone.
There was genuine love between us, yet we were not the closest father and son. We shared a distinct relationship of mutual respect. He was proud of me in his strange way, but never enough that I could forget the years of absence and indifference. I was honored when he appointed me as Trustee for his estate, but I never fully confronted the reality of this arrangement. The reality that he would die.
The estate documents were set up years ago. While they contain a boilerplate reference to suicide somewhere in their hundreds of pages of legalese I do not think it was in his plans when he established the Trust.
Though I think it was a gradual realization that he had no more life worth living, I believe that his family heritage of self-inflicted deaths and deaths of questionable circumstance made his own suicide a foregone conclusion should his own health deteriorate (as it did). He considered professional medicine and hospitals to be dangerous and insulting, and he chose to deal the ultimate fuck you to the aging process rather than spend so much as one hour in a medical care facility.
The story is too much to share all at once — too much for me. Maybe I’ll tell more on these screens, maybe not, but for now the story begins in early August, 2005.
Outside a mall in Queens I saw a large truck from a company named Normandin Transit. My father’s first name and middle initial were Norman D., so I jokingly read it as “Norman D. In Transit.” I took a picture of the truck and e-mailed it to my dad, knowing he’d also get a laugh out of it.
His e-mail response came almost immediately:
I may well be in transit.
He said to call soon so we could go over some things.
The quickness of his response was strange in itself: Unlike us kids today he was not inclined to panic about instantly responding to e-mail.
I called when I got his e-mail. Our conversation focused on his estate, with recent revisions to the trust documents and other minutiae. This topic of conversation had become common for us over the previous several years. This time, though, the focus was more detailed than usual: he made sure I had combinations to the safe, to the car, and to his apartment’s security system. Seemingly incongruous to anything at the moment he said it, he said “You’ll need to call and get the water and electricity turned off.” He said it with what I perceived as a strange grandiosity, and I didn’t know what to make of it. I think my head was too jammed with trying to avoid the subject at hand.
He sounded defeated. Exhausted and depressed, his voice barely rose above a whispering monotone.
Here and there I tried to change the subject away from the obvious but he stayed on dismal focus. There are questions I should have asked but did not. There are questions I should ask myself now but probably never will.
He asked how I was doing, and he wanted to know if I was well. This, too, was a little unusual for its deliberateness, and it is something I did not appreciate until later.
He did laugh at the Normandin Transit picture. I am proud to have raised what might have been one last laugh from my dad.
At the time I actually found this conversation inspiring. It was cheerless and businesslike, but I respected him for facing the inevitable with honor and seeming thoroughness. That night I joked with my friends, saying that he was practically excited about dying because that would set into motion his complex, years-in-the-making estate plans.
In the weeks after we spoke he made his final preparations. I would later hear stories about “Your dad just wasn’t acting like his normal self,” and “Mark, your dad looked sicker than I think I ever seen him.”
If he had any doubts in his mind about what he was to do, I think they were vanquished on Monday, August 29th. I believe this because he had a daily routine of manually changing the days on his calendars, and he last changed the calendars on his desk and back porch on August 29, five days before he died. I can not know, but I think he lived that week with a commitment to go out on his own terms.
At about 12 noon on Saturday, September 3, 2005, that is what he did. He woke up, stepped onto his front porch, and ended his life. Two shots were fired. The first shot (he had never fired a gun in his life) was a test to see if the gun worked. The second went through his head.
A few hours later I was standing in line at a grocery store when my cell phone lit up with a message I’d never seen before. It said “CALL 911.”assumed it was a misdirected text message, or some sort of wide-scale attempt to cripple the 911 system. I ignored it.
Later, though, I took a call from a police investigator, asking if I was the son of Norman. We spoke for a couple of minutes before she said “He is deceased.” I remember the exact spot where I stood on 28th Street, and I hear those words any time I walk there.
Then she proceeded to ask a lot of questions. “When is the last time you talked to him? How did he sound when you last spoke to him? How was his health? Are you with people right now?”
Just as I started to question all the questions she cut in with “It was a suicide.”
I told her to go fuck herself — an outburst I later retracted. “It was not directed at you,” I told her. She took no offense, but it was far from the last invective I hurled at my father. “There was a gun. He used a gun,” she said, and she quoted from the note he left, saying he would not live like a vegetable. She kept saying “Please, Mark, be with people now. Find people to be with.”
I now feel that I should not have been so surprised. In retrospect, it is not surprising at all. This act well suited his character, and as I knew already it was well established in his heritage. But he blew his fucking head off. I had trouble taking that in stride. I am not so surprised as offended by the God damn mess, and by the stain on the carpet which assumed an almost comical presence in my life for many months to come.
It was my mother who quickly comforted me (if that’s the right word) with the fact that suicide among older people is far more common than one might think. It is usually disguised, though, and left open to questions. Was that very slight drug overdose intentional? Was this car forced off the mountain or did the driver choose to go off?
My father left no doubt about what happened, but I remember the dark moment of hope when I was told two shots were fired. How could he shoot twice, I wondered? Was he murdered?
It was a strange moment of hopefulness that vanished as quickly as it rose up. Who knows where that first bullet sailed off to, but we know the second shot killed him and we know who fired it.
I have made several trips down to Florida, each with its own set of distinct memories and torments. It is strange to walk through his life, to walk through doors into the homes and offices of those whose worlds he inhabited.
My father had a wide circle of friends and colleagues. I somehow found myself comforting some who thought his was an act of loneliness or sadness. “He coulda just talked to me if he was depressed,” one person said. I tried to explain that his was anything but an irrational or deranged act, but I don’t know that anyone listened or even heard, or if I had any idea what I was talking about.
I cleaned out his apartment, occasionally asking myself: At what point did this object become meaningless? When did the toothpaste sit there like a stale joke, stupidly forcing its upcoming uselessness into his conscience? When did the last shred of joy drain out of his life?
The meticulous yet monotonous process of clearing that place out took longer than expected, but I wanted to do it. The place still had his presence about it, and I wanted to experience that presence before it fades.
I am a glutton for sadness. I have spent no small part of my time playing wargames with death: Pre-adolescent nights crying myself to sleep at the remotely, seemingly hypothetical loss of my parents. More recently I have spent long, long hours rambling around the vast cemeteries of New York looking for sadness, virtually always finding it.
The events of this past year have led me to study how my tears progress. My crying always starts from the right side of the right eye, moves to the inner side, then sends it over to the left eye. The part of my face where these tears first touch is so sensitive that the tears grazing over that stretch of skin cause a sinus eruption and more tears, almost like an allergy. It used to feel cleansing to have a good, hard cry, but it no longer has that effect.
I have barely any idea of what I am really thinking any more, but have noticed this year how suicide has crept into my psyche, almost establishing itself as a credible option should the dignity of living fade away.
That is part of the story. I can not write any more about it right now (see the second paragraph). If you’ve wondered what is happening behind this mostly silent screen, now you know some of it.
How am I doing? Thanks for asking! I’ve got my own thing going on these days. I remain productive, though at times it seems my hours and days go largely wasted. To spin off (or perhaps bastardize) a favorite quote from Annie Dillard:
The way we waste our days is, of course, the way we waste our lives.
My days are largely directionless, but I rediscover something about myself any time I concentrate on something. Any time I try. (“Do you ever try?” a kid named Chris asked me in the 3rd grade, commenting on the apathetic way I swung a baseball bat, yet still got on base.)
Unlike previous periods of my life I seek and even crave human contact. Nevertheless, laziness and middle age are settling in like wet leaves in a garbage bag, and I feel my years of accumulating might soon give way to its opposite. Which would be what? Decumulation?
I visited my father’s grave site the last time I was in Florida. I found it inspiring, and hope you will, too.
See you soon.
–mt
September 3, 2006
