“But then she had a stroke, a severe one, and she lost so much of what she had. She couldn’t teach any longer. She couldn’t run or even walk. She was confined to a wheelchair. She was on heavy medication for all kinds of things, including drugs for pain. My father—well, my father wasn’t exactly the Florence Nightingale type. He wasn’t a caregiver. He hired someone to take care of Mom, and I tried to help, too, while I was starting college in Chicago.
“Then our financial situation cratered. We had some money, actually a good amount, but my father made some bad financial decisions and we lost it all. We were broke. He was a lawyer, and he could scrap for money, but not enough to afford a full-time caregiver. It was just too expensive. So we had to let the caregiver go.
“My father, well, he said the only realistic thing to do was to put Mom in some facility or nursing home. I didn’t want that. I said I’d stay home from college. Skip a year or two and take care of her until we figured something out.”
I sigh. “My mother overdosed on pain meds. It was probably a combination of reasons. Losing her functionality, losing her ability to do all the things she loved, the thought of not being in our house with us, and it’s probably fair to say that the stroke robbed her of some of her cognitive reasoning. I can’t put a finger on exactly what put her over the edge.”
Actually, I can. But I’m going to leave that part out.
The secrets, the lies. I don’t tell people that part.
I don’t tell them that my father broke my mother’s heart. That he cheated on her. That in her final days, my mother knew that her husband no longer wanted her, that she not only had lost the functionality of her body and part of her brain, but she also had lost the love and loyalty of the man who had promised to devote himself to her through thick and thin, for better or worse, ’til death.
I don’t tell them that Iknewmy father was cheating, that I caught him, that I didn’t tell my mother because I knew it would crush her, that I was complicit in his betrayal, that I could have tried harder to stop him, that if I had, everything might have turned out differently.
I don’t mention that part because it sounds an awful lot,ahem, like amotive to kill my father. And that investigation in St. Louis remains unsolved. Ain’t no statute of limitations on murder.
“I didn’t know how to handle her death,” I say. “I did some dumb things, got into some trouble. I spent some time in an institution. I’m lucky it wasn’t worse. It wasn’t until I stopped lashing out and started listening that I was able to get my head above water again. I talked to all kinds of therapists, who explained to me that we look at suicide through this prism of control. We think we can control other things and other people. So when someone we love takes their own life, we think we could have stopped it. We think we had control, and we blew it. We are so unwilling to give up this notion that we control things and people around us that we’d rather feel guilt over the suicide than admit that we didn’t have that control in the first place.”
This advice, in my experience working with other survivors, is spot-on. It helps most people. Not me, but most people.
No, the person who healed me was Vicky. And I healed her. This is where we met, here at Survivors of Suicide. Her loss of her sister, Monica, had been much more recent than mine, but when we talked, just the two of us, we helped each other. We got through it. We made a pact.
A plan of attack, Vicky called it, declaring war on our grief.
—
It happened on a Thursday night. The next day would be my last day working at my dad’s law firm that summer, before I started at U of C as an incoming college freshman. I’d saved up some money I made that summer and bought him a present. It was a little thing, nothing bigger than a small trophy, the scales of justice in gold, the wordslaw offices of theodore dobiasengraved in the wooden base.
I waited until the end of the day to pick it up. He thought I’d left for the day and gone home. Instead, I’d stopped at the jewelry store to pick up the order, killed some time downtown waiting for everyone to leave the office, then snuck back up to the office after seven.
It was rare for anyone to be in the office that late. Personal-injury lawyers don’t get paid by the hour, so unlike defense firms that value their associates by the number of billable hours they generate—by how long it takes them to complete a task—P.I. lawyers are more efficient with theirwritten work product and don’t burn the midnight oil unless they’re preparing for trial. Trials aren’t that common anymore, so the odds of anyone being in the office were small.
I used my key card and swiped through. The reception lights were off, and usually the last person to leave turned those off. But then I swiped through the second glass door and could see, instantly, that his office light was on, peeking out from under the closed door. I stopped and thought a moment. My plan had been to put the gift on his desk so he’d find it Friday morning when we arrived at work together. That wasn’t going to happen with him still here, but at least I could sneak into my cubicle and hide it and give it to him in the morning.
I heard a sound. My first reaction, he was in pain. My first mental image, he was moving something heavy. He was moving furniture and hurt himself, something like that. A heart attack, maybe.
Sometimes I chide myself in hindsight for my naivete. But then—maybe it was okay that a teenage boy didn’t immediately leap to the worst conclusions about his father.
I moved slowly toward the door, carefully along the carpet, as the moaning and the grunting continued, then a thumping noise, and a woman’s breathless voice.
We didn’t have locks on the office doors. I remember my father saying that was a kind of statement, some bullshit about an open-door, egalitarian philosophy around the office.
I wish the door had been locked. I wish I hadn’t opened it.
I wish I didn’t have to listen to him grovel and apologize and try to justify to me why he was fucking around on my mother, who was probably being fed her dinner, spoon to mouth, at that moment by our in-home nurse, Edie.
That was the moment. It got worse, after the money was gone, and we could no longer afford Edie, and Mom was headed for a nursing home at the age of forty-nine. But right there in the law firm, on the seventeenth floor of the Chicago Title & Trust Building, with my father chasing after me down the hall as he pulled up his trousers, trying to block me from the elevator while shoving his shirt inside his pants, begging me to listen to reason, not to go home and do something everyone would regret—that was the moment, for me, when everything changed.
I wish I didn’t let him convince me not to say anything to my mother.
I wish I didn’t let him make me a coconspirator in his crime.
Because he didn’t stop. Oh, no, even after I found out, he kept on. He didn’t tell me, but I caught him again. A few months later, just before Thanksgiving, stepping out onto the back patio for some fresh air, I found an empty bottle of champagne and two glasses tucked in the corner of the porch.
Two glasses, not one, even though my mother could no longer drink alcohol. He wasn’t just cheating on my mother; his lady friend was sneaking over to the house at night after my mother was asleep and I was working late at the school.
A stupid bottle of champagne, two red-tinted plastic champagne flutes you’d buy at a convenience store. Those things told me that my father wasn’t just a weak man who succumbed to a moment of temptation—he was a liar. He was a cheat. His carnal needs were more important than his commitment to my mother, to our family.