Eight years ago today...

The Night My Father Left His Life

The fifteen-foot walk to the shed took hours,
hiking alone with his back to the house,
to his cats he fed for the last time,
to me driving through the mountains
three thousand miles away,
to my mother behind him,
next to him, asleep inside him.
The air was cool. It was night.
Stars were shining silver-white,
the ground sighed as his feet sunk
into the soft wet cushion of green grass.
He did not see colors.
He turned the handle, did not hear
the click or whoosh of the door.
This is the night he destroyed himself.
He removed his glasses, set them down carefully,
took his place on the floor and
fumbled in the dark with the gun.
His final walk, his glasses,
his breath coming short and scared,
his finger, the ripping sound
tearing through the still darkness—
all of this, his final gift to me
as I, from a cold beach,
watched meteors streak
through the sky.

© JEF 2005


His Journey

He is aware now. His eyes move around.
He feels he is waking from anesthesia.
The volume is turned up slowly with
no sense of the silence before.
The film is unpaused with no
memory of what happened last.
How long were his eyes closed?
What was he doing?
He left his house; that much he knows.
But he is back in his living room,
on the sofa, hands on knees,
in stillness, like a photograph;
all is flat, unreal.
He is alone.
Same sofa, same TV, but this
feels like different terrain.

In the kitchen now:
same sink, same counter.
He stands, tossing a salad but
no one is here to eat it:
only the slow, rhythmic
scraping of wooden forks.
There is a pain in his head.
Did he injure it? Yes, he recalls.
Yes, he did. But how?

The phone is in his hand.
He can’t remember dialing
or who he has called.
He knows he must speak
yet no words will come,
only a low groan.
He clears his throat, tries again.
It’s important; this much he knows.

This department store is
empty too. How did he get here?
Shopping for towels—these blue ones
will look good in the bathroom—
but his head still hurts.
Touching his hand to his temple,
it comes back bloody.

At the Barefoot Motel
in a place like Texas,
in a turquoise room,
at a scarred wooden desk
he writes a letter of
explanation, apology.
He knows what he did now
so the bleeding has stopped.
His head still hurts a little
and there is no way to
send this letter.

Lost in a desert,
so far from home,
not knowing where he is
or how to get where
he needs to be.
He is hungry and fishes
from the banks of a wide river
while a steamboat slides by.
Unable to return or move on.

The bottom of a cave,
miles deep, never seen:
among moist black rock
sits a structure made from
sections of all the homes
he has ever lived in,
a room from each one.
This does not make sense,
but it does; this much he knows.
At the edge of the yard,
perfect grass gives way to gravel.
With one step beyond,
the cave floor is gone.
The threshold, the last place.
There is nowhere else to go here.
He looks back, floating,
past the clothesline, the patio,
he can see the house through
white mist and stars.
Lights are on in the living room
but he can’t stay.

He is aware now. His eyes move around.
He is more aware than he has ever been.
Things sparkle. Days are brighter.
It is exciting to wake up each morning.
He drove here, the whole way,
without stopping once.
There is the idea of cities,
buildings, roads, homes.
Shimmering.
“I got us a house to live in.
I’ll wait here for my wife.
She’ll be coming soon.”

© JEF 2008


My father was a man of few words: not cold or uncaring, just silent. His mother once told me that when he was a teenager, he would go for weeks without saying anything more than “Good morning.”
He spoke with his actions and as I look back and review my life with him, I find that sometimes he had a lot to say. I just didn’t know it at the time.
I was ten years old and my parents had surprised me with a trip to Disney World. While there, my dad took me on the automobile ride—my dad loved cars so this was as much for him as it was for me. It was a sort of combination of a race track and freeway where one “drove” a scaled down replica of a car, albeit tethered to a center rail, around a meandering loop.
A line of cars waited; my dad and I were first in line. We climbed into our little fiber glass cart and waited, per the instructions from the Disney ride attendant, for the lights tumbling down the traffic light tree to turn green.
When the light began at the top in red, my father floored it and we lurched away from the crowd.
“Daddy, what are you doing? We have to wait!” I said, worried that we would get “in trouble.” Didn’t he hear the instructions?
“Nope. We don’t have to wait.”
“But Daddy…”
“It’s okay,” he said, “just have fun!”
We circled the track but I was scared to pull back to the loading dock, wondering what authority would punish us for disobeying the rules. Of course there was no one waiting for us, no punishment, no trouble.
As a result, this simple event, this blip, this innocuous occurrence comes to me with more and more frequency. I see now that my father had heard the instructions just fine, thank you. He misunderstood nothing. In fact, it was the opposite: he understood the futility of waiting for nothing, of being forced to stay with the herd. It was a beautiful lesson for me. As an adult, I wonder if even he fully understood the meaning of his action.

1939-2001