Permanent Record

By Jessica Handler

Last semester, one of my students asked me to change his grade on a quiz. The way I’d phrased a particular question wasn’t clear, he said, which is why he earned a 95 instead of a 100. I explained to him that the quiz was one of four, which together totaled twenty percent of the semester’s overall course grade. In other words, a five-point difference on a single quiz was meaningless.

He was having none of it. He was clearly worried about his permanent record. No matter what I might have told him, I know that he wouldn’t accept that the grade on this quiz, or any quiz, has no bearing on who he is as a person. That no school administrator is going to come roaring into the room with his grades from middle school. That for the rest of his life, no one is going to judge him on his GPA.

But who teaches him, or me, about how to judge ourselves as people? Parents, to start with. Teachers, perceived as proxy parents, even if we don’t want to be. I’m thinking here of my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Moye, who left us to our own devices while she stepped out for what I realize now was a smoke break. For however long she was gone—and it couldn’t have been terribly long—the noise level in the room rose to a solid wall of released energy. I was the kid who hunkered down to read ahead in my textbook, wishing I were as audacious as the over-excitable boy who managed to climb out of the classroom via the transom over the door. When Miss (I have no idea of her actual honorific—in Atlanta in 1971, all adult women were addressed as Miss) Moye was on her way back to the classroom, the PA speaker over our heads would click on. From the principal’s office, she’d whisper, “teacher’s comin’.” No matter what we’d been doing, judgement came from above the coat closet. Act right even when you’re on your own, because someone’s watching you.

Now that I’m a teacher, I love her for this. She must have cracked herself up.

I wonder when I stopped believing in the power of the Permanent Record that loomed over school like a wagging finger. Earn a bad grade and see my “permanent record” forever scarred. Get caught passing notes or miss my turn feeding the classroom hamster, and be told by someone (A teacher? A principal? A game of telephone on the playground?) that these temporary oversights will haunt me throughout adulthood and possibly into the afterlife. The permanent record that no one ever actually saw? It would follow me to the grave.

My elementary school grades, on their flimsy pink paper, have vanished into the ether. My high school adhered to the trend in “alternative education” by disdaining traditional letter grades. Instead, our teachers, with whom we were all on a first-name, Frisbee-tossing basis, wrote paragraphs-long assessments of our personal growth and individual strengths. I have no idea what happened to these dispatches from the barefoot and bell-bottom jeans front, but I appreciate the attempt to broaden the interpretation of how a person becomes whole. My college transcripts were useful only as items in my graduate school applications. My graduate school studies resulted in my first book, which was written as a kind of permanent record of a place, a time, and a family in crisis.

What is my permanent record, if it’s not decades-old grades and well-meaning teacher commentary? On every elementary school report card, I was given a checkmark beside the “uses time wisely” criteria, verifying that I had done just that: used my time wisely. That checkmark made me proud. What I’m trying to figure out, though, is what it means to use time wisely as an adult, if it’s not reading ahead while the teacher’s out on a smoke break. Who teaches us a viable template for a “wise” use of time? When do we learn to do that for ourselves?

•••

When my father was dying, he asked me to forgive him. As I sat by the crank-up hospital bed in his living room, my impulse was to list every act of his for which I could not forgive him. “What about this?” I wanted to say. “Or that?”

Instead, I lied. I said that I forgave him. Nothing good would have come of telling him otherwise.

My father had turned sixty-seven that month. After a lifetime of four-pack-a-day smoking and decades of drug abuse, he had been diagnosed with cancer a year or so earlier. At that moment, he had less than a week to live.

When I was a child, my father intoned over the Passover Seder plate, “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat.” All the adults at the table laughed, and I did, too, believing this was the actual prayer. Of course it was, spoken by the irreverent, fun, charismatic version of my dad, acting like the kid who climbed out of the transom while the teacher was out of the room.

But this not why my father asked my blessing.

A few months ago, I awoke unsettled, because I felt that my father was in my bedroom. I could smell him. Pall Mall cigarettes and anxious flatulence. He had been dead nineteen years, but he was somehow present.

“Why are you here?” I asked the air near my husband’s nightstand.

“Forgive me?” my father asked. He was wheedling, like a child.

I closed my eyes. “No,” I said. “Go away. Maybe later, but I’m not ready yet.”

Proud of having told even a ghostly version of my father to leave me alone, I went back to sleep.

•••

My real permanent record is written, in part, in my father’s hand. That same hand that held an electric carving knife to my throat at a family dinner. I was about ten years old, and my laughing made sounds that grated on my father, especially when he was very, very high.

I wondered for years if I’d created a false memory from a roast, a carving knife, and my father’s instability. When I reconnected with a childhood friend last year, I got proof that it had happened. My friend described my mother frozen in fear at the table, unable to pull my father away from me. I remember my father’s face so close to mine that I could see his pores, his pupils spinning like pinwheels. I remember thinking, “Oh, he’s on acid.” I remember believing that was a reasonable excuse.

This is the same man who brought me, at eight years old, to Dr. Martin Luther King’s funeral. As we made our way through the solemn, slow moving crowd outside, and then inside Ebenezer Baptist Church, my father, gentle and grieving, lifted me to eye-level with the adults and turned me toward the first open casket I had ever seen. He wanted me to see Dr. King’s face up close, not on television as I had so often. What he wanted was for me to absorb the need for justice in the world.

Within a year, my father tried to shove me out of a moving car. When I tell this story, I laugh and say, “It was only in second gear,” but the irrationality of his act, his absence of judgement—or the presence of his cruel judgement of me—is what strikes my listener. My attempt to make this into a funny anecdote doesn’t land well.

I am trying, here, to reconcile a permanent record that can’t be graded. My father tucked me in at night when I was small and sat at my side reading poetry in the same elegant baritone he surely used defending his clients in court. The ballad meter of Countee Cullen’s “Incident,” telling of a child stunned and hurt by racial violence, and the mystical images of T.S. Eliot’s “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” lulled me to sleep.

The last time I saw my sister Susie alive, my father was cradling her in his arms as he rushed her out of our shared bedroom to the hospital. She had been ill with leukemia for a year, and died a few days later. Through my lashes, I watched him run with her. He was terrified, my mother was terrified, Susie was terrified, and so was I.

After my father died, my husband and I helped his second wife sort his possessions. My husband found my father’s Twelve Step workbook. He will not let me see it. “He blames you,” my husband says, “because you’re too much like him.” Throughout the workbook’s pages, my husband says, my father blames other people in his life, but he never accepted his own role in his permanent record.

It’s become clear to me since my father died that he lived with a mental illness that may never have been diagnosed. Within its rapid cycles, he treated himself with amphetamines and Scotch. That the amphetamines were (sometimes) legally obtained and that the Scotch was eighteen-year-old single malt is immaterial. His emotional and psychological turmoil escalated as my two sisters died of illnesses, as he brutalized my mother for failings only he imagined, as whatever had transpired in his own childhood ensnared his mind. Abuse is real, no matter the ZIP code, no matter if the clothing hurled to the floor is a Brooks Brothers’ suit or coveralls.

My aunt, my father’s sister, told me the other day that her mother once refused to let a woman wearing green nail polish into her house. I can’t corroborate this, but I believe it. My father’s mother, was, as the phrase of the time went, uptight.

What I’m saying is that my father must have been harshly judged, and then judging himself harshly, turned that blade to me. I am the first daughter, the oldest, the one in whom he saw himself.

•••

A few years after my father died, my husband and I vacationed in Memphis. We visited Graceland and Stax Records, and we toured the National Civil Rights Museum. It was there, in a display of photographs by documentary photographer Benedict Fernandez, that I came face to face with an image of an unsmiling young man in a suit and tie, sitting on a curb beside another similarly attired and equally serious young man. The Black man held a placard reading “Union Justice Now!” The White man held one reading “Honor King: End Racism.”

The White man was my father.

I knew the placard. It’s framed in my house. My father had given it to me the night he came home from the vigil in Memphis in 1968. I had never seen the photograph before, never known of its existence, and there in the museum, I screamed. A group of middle-schoolers, touring the exhibit, stopped and gaped at me.

“That’s my father,” I said, pointing at the image on the wall. I began to cry.

One of the students approached me. She peered at the photograph, then at me, then at the photograph again.

“You do favor him,” she said.

•••

My father visited me again the other morning. He seems to surface when I am emerging from sleep. Maybe it’s his presence that wakes me. I think this time he wanted me to forgive myself as well as him, to stop hearing the echoes of his angry words in my own head. To stop allowing him to judge me, even now.

I don’t know if I can forgive him, entirely. I can’t grade an abusive father’s relationship to a daughter. If he gets an A for some things and an F for others, does that really average to a C? On the days when my own fist splits my lip to silence his taunting voice in my mind, I’d say no. On the days when I turn to a poem and physically, truly, feel his longing for words, I’d say yes. If I wrote an assessment, as my high school teachers did for me, would I implore him to get the help he needed, or would I suggest something benign like learning to meditate or taking up a musical instrument?

Perhaps I should be grading myself, since I’m the one living with this permanent record.

I am trying to understand how to create a permanent record for him and for me. For us together. I want to teach myself to judge him fairly. I don’t know if I can forgive him, as he asked, or if doing so is a requirement for his, or my, final grade. But in trying to learn this, to read ahead in the book that he’s put down, I want to believe that I am using time wisely.

•••

JESSICA HANDLER is the author of the novel The Magnetic Girl, winner of the 2020 Southern Book Prize and a nominee for the Townsend Prize for Fiction. The novel is one of the 2019 “Books All Georgians Should Read,” an Indie Next pick, Wall Street Journal Spring 2019 pick, Bitter Southerner Summer 2019 pick, and a Southern Independent Bookseller’s Alliance “Okra Pick.” Her memoir Invisible Sisters was also named one of the “Books All Georgians Should Read,” and her craft guide Braving the Fire: A Guide to Writing About Grief and Loss was praised by Vanity Fair magazine. Her writing has appeared on NPR, in Tin House, Drunken Boat, The Bitter Southerner, Electric Literature, Brevity, Creative Nonfiction, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Full Grown People, and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, and lectures internationally on writing. www.jessicahandler.com.

The House That Lies Built

Photo by Gina Easley www.ginaeasley.com

By Gina Frangello

My three children slept on mattresses on the floor, in the office adjacent to the master bath, pretending not to hear their father sobbing and pounding on the shower walls. This had become a morning ritual. How long had it been going on—two weeks, three?—on the morning when one of our twins woke to find a beetle in her ear. She’d become so inured to this strange new life of ours that she, who had once wept theatrically upon any insect sighting, simply flicked it across the room and slept on, later to see it on her brother’s mattress.

Sometimes, after the weeping, there would be shouting behind the closed door of their father’s and my master bedroom. Sometime near the end of that period of weeping and shouting, my son would come to my husband and me and beg us to “stop crying, stop yelling, stop closing the door to have talks.” My heart flipped and cracked and shredded itself apart with guilt. Even though it was my husband emitting the noises, my body pulsed with I did this. I did this.

We were confined, all five of us, to the upstairs of our two-level home, one proper bed between us all, extra furniture heaped in piles around our emotional chaos. Downstairs, the first floor of our apartment was gutted, everything draped in plastic. We were in the early stages of an extensive home renovation project we had been planning for a year—the first in fifteen years for our hundred-plus-year-old house. The renovation was, as such things always do, going more slowly than intended.

In the sixth week, my husband finally packed his bags for a solo trip to Colorado and informed me, while this time I wept hysterically on the floor of his closet, that I was to have had all his things moved to an apartment we co-owned with friends by the time he returned, and that he would never spend another night with me in our house. He had to walk past the children on their mattresses, to get to the stairs that would lead him out. Our fourteen-year-old twin daughters pretended to sleep and ignored him, but our nine-year-old son leapt up and rushed to the closet where I was howling like an animal and took me in his arms saying, “It’s okay, Mommy.” I had never, to my recollection, cried in front of my children before, even mildly. My son kissed my face and I tried to calm myself down, to not be That Mother, whose children have to parent her, the way my own mother, depressed in a back bedroom, had often been. Now, however, I was a broken thing with no control of the noises coming out of my body. I had wanted to be so many other things, but instead I was this: a bad memory my children would never be able to get out of their heads.

•••

Don’t feel sorry for me, hysterical on a closet floor, a woman left behind. It isn’t like that, some Elena Ferrante Days of Abandonment descent into rejected grief and madness. I am the Asshole in this story. What they never tell you is how much being the asshole hurts too.

•••

Three days into a home renovation my husband of twenty-two years and I were planning for our duplexed apartment, where we lived with our three children—my elderly parents in a separate downstairs unit—I confessed that I had been having an affair on and off (but mostly on…say it clearly: mostly on) for nearly three and a half years.

My husband and our children and I were in the Wisconsin Dells when I told him, at a horrible water park resort, in exile of the most invasive stage of the renovations: things being demolished, air thick with dust. My husband and I had left our teen twins in charge of our son and gone to dinner at the swanky restaurant inside the hotel, where we had several cocktails each. Though I’d never been a big drinker, lately—by which I mean at least the past two and a half years—I had more or less required a couple of drinks in order to have what passed as a fun time with my husband, to whom even saying “hello” had become a guilty lie.

I was stewing in a toxic, complex brew of my own guilt and duplicity, combined with longstanding marital resentments, anxieties, and almost unbearable boredom. That night, however, was a good night. It was a night—the first in at least a year—in which I could see the glimmers of why I had once fallen intensely in love with my husband and how we had ended up married to begin with. I felt moved by the way his smile was higher and more creased at one end; I could remember how once upon a time he had made me laugh, had been the confidante with whom I casually shared inside jokes that meant nothing to anyone Not Us. Even though he had told me several months prior, at a friend’s wedding, that he knew I didn’t “love him anymore” and that he feared I was just waiting for the children to go to college and then we would become “a clichéd empty nester divorce,” I could see he was still trying—that he wanted to fix whatever it was that had been broken for years before my affair. He still believed in me, even if it seemed years since we had made each other happy. He trusted me, even though it had been years since I’d been worthy of trust.

Was it my ability to glimpse our former love, that night at dinner, that allowed me to finally see—really see—how grotesquely entitled I had been, thinking it was in any way acceptable for me to lie so blatantly? To confuse kindness and tact with cowardice and manipulation—to tell myself stories about how “the Europeans” don’t make a “big deal” about infidelity, as though all I was guilty of was some vague Francophilia?

During the long night of wandering the resort in search of private spaces, my husband and I sobbed and fought, bargained and despaired, in the wake of my announcement. He kept saying, “It’s him or me” and telling me I could never speak to my lover again if I wanted to stay in our marriage. I knew what the Right Answer to such a demand—when you have three children together and elderly parents in the unit downstairs and nearly a quarter century as a couple under your belt—was supposed to be, but I couldn’t give it. I couldn’t promise to cut out of my life the man I had fallen passionately in love with and “rededicate myself to the marriage,” and I realized all at once that if I had been able to do such a thing, which my husband had every right to demand, I would never have had an affair in the first place. I had walked away from other flirtations or borderline-emotional-affairs with a fair amount of ease over the years, knowing they were not worth the risk, knowing where I wanted to be at the end of my story, and not to mess that up for some momentary rush.

The second I actually started my affair, the decision had already been made.

I had withheld that decision—from both my husband and myself—for more than three years.

I had no Right Answers anymore.

•••

This is not about whether I had a “right” to leave my marriage. Of course I had a right. The fact that my husband never cheated on me or that he was a good provider or that he didn’t abuse drugs or alcohol or didn’t beat me has nothing to do with whether or not I was obligated to stay. No one is obligated to stay. We live in a society in which women are no longer chattel, in which we are permitted to choose our relationships, in which divorce is painful but common and legal. My guilt isn’t for knowing that I was never going to love my husband the way I needed to again—the way I believe people should love each other if they are going to use up all the days of their fleeting lives on each other. I don’t feel guilty for the fact that I could already glimpse the picture on the other side of our full-throttle “parenting years”—our children busy with their own lives, heading off to college and out-of-state jobs, our retirement years alone together—and knew I could not stay stagnant inside that frame. This is not about whether or not my husband also made his share of mistakes in our marriage or what they may have been. My leaving my husband was not retribution for any fault of his, but rather—and I believe this in every core of my being—that we each have the right to choose what ships to go down with versus when to get into a lifeboat and save ourselves emotionally. Promises made at the age of twenty-five can feel like words uttered by someone else entirely by the time we are forty-six. There is no one who doesn’t have the right to leave a consensual relationship between adults: no marital atrocities required.

Rather, this is about living, quite literally, inside the toxicity of a lie that had the power to knock down walls. If I did not owe my husband an Until Death Do We Part I no longer believed in, I still owed him a common decency and truth that I did not deliver. Our demolished house became a too-obvious metaphor for the ways I had literally blown our house down. How had I even become a person who would commit to an extensive and costly home renovation, paid for by my husband’s salary, when I was desperately in love with another man? After I shocked myself by confessing, I still held fast that my husband and I could live together “as friends” in our home and raise our children together, each having our freedom—I believed this so completely that I nearly convinced him of it, as he rushed out on a dozen Match and eHarmony dates, then came home either sexually keyed up while I hid awkwardly in the bathroom, or tearful in his grief. This was the livable solution I was selling? How do we become so blind to ourselves? How do we come to believe we have the right to know more about the narrative of someone else’s life than they do, to manipulate that narrative behind the scenes for years, and then believe they actually owe us a friendship?

By “how do we,” I mean of course “how did I?”

“…people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes,” wrote Joan Didion. “If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties.” I was trying to force my husband to forgive me, to still think well of me somehow, to avoid having to look at myself. I no longer wanted to be married to him, but after twenty-five years together, I was selfishly unready to surrender using his eyes as a mirror for my own vanities.

To say he was furious about the timing of my confession would be an understatement. But likely it was my very guilt about the renovation—about all that money spent—that finally drove me, after years of Sphinx-like secrecy, to leave hints that night at dinner until my husband at last asked me point blank, “Have you had sex with him? Are you in love with him?” Ultimately, it was the astronomical renovation costs that shook me out of my three-year era of spectacular rationalizations and made me understand that the only thing I had left to give him anymore was the truth.

•••

I still live in the building my husband and I once shared. Within six months of our separation, he had already come to find being in our home unbearable, even when he was alone with our children—he had moved in with another woman and her three children and had no desire, by the time of our finalized divorce, to ever set foot in our house again. He made moves in our divorce proceedings to try to sell the house, but with three children who have lived here their entire lives, and my elderly parents who were too sick to move anywhere else besides assisted living, selling the home would have punished all the wrong people. I was determined to keep our physical home intact, choosing it above the far more lucrative “permanent maintenance” to which every attorney and every friend told me I was entitled after twenty-three years of marriage, even though at the time of my divorce I had just finished chemotherapy for breast cancer and had no reliable income. “Divorce law is not about atonement,” my fatherly attorney kept telling me anxiously, but in my mind, if somehow I could keep the kids and my parents safely in their longstanding home, I could contain, at least to some small degree, the wreckage I had wrought.

During the weeks of our marital cleaving, our shattered and tarp-strewn house was a painfully literal metaphor for so many things gone wrong. Now, the beautifully restored home in which I live with my children and my widowed mother, where the man I love writes at an orange desk in the spot where my children’s floor-mattresses were strewn during those terrible weeks, where our three cats curl up with us and we have dinner parties and Game of Thrones marathons with friends…now this place carries enormous contradictions. It is a less volatile, more fun, and more transparent place than it was. Yet this space is also a constant reminder of my worst regrets and shame. Though my once double life is now whole, the dark wood floors of my dining room and restored vintage door (thicker and more soundproof than the flimsy former one) on my bedroom still remind me daily of the casual cruelty of which I was capable and of the privileges—even with my tax return only a couple thousand above the poverty level the year of my divorce—my ex-husband provided in buying and paying off this home he expected to grow old in. Here in what should have been a safe and sacred space, but instead became a site of violation, I wake up every day trying to live authentically, with truth and ethics, trying to be better than I was.

This is about and not about regret. It is possible to both not be sorry that a marriage is over, yet to be grotesquely sorry for the ways in which I ended it. It is possible to be incredibly more myself now, and yet to understand that other people paid far too high a price for my pursuit of freedom and happiness. I love my house, and I do not feel deserving of my house, even though I am trying to be, in the way I parent, the way I daughter, the way I hold to honesty in my new relationship; in the ways I work to care for and manage this household, responsible myself now for its bills and upkeep. Someday, maybe I will sell this beautiful shell that contains so much history, both luminous and sad. Until then, it is a walk-in model of my heart, capable of ruin and beauty, of pain and reinvention. I don’t know if these walls would ever forgive me, but I am trying, every day, to forgive myself.

•••

GINA FRANGELLO’s fourth book of fiction, Every Kind of Wanting, was released on Counterpoint in September 2016, has been optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver & Delilah, and was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including in Chicago Magazine and The Chicago Review of Books. Her last novel, A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), was selected for the Target Emerging Authors series, was also optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver & Delilah, and was a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the author of two other books of fiction: Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006). She has nearly twenty years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the Executive Editor for Other Voices magazine, and the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, Dame, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, Role Reboot, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post and in many other magazines and anthologies. www.ginafrangello.org

My Father’s Estate

By Melissent Zumwalt

Dad believed that the countless objects he amassed held value, and he took great pride in that. My parents had both come from families of working poor and weren’t familiar with terms like 401K; my dad played keno as part of a financial plan. Being able to pay their bills in full and on time was a Herculean feat. When my dad died, there were no life insurance policies or inheritance to claim. There was only his stuff.

I was raised in the countryside of Oregon, but my mom often recounted a story of when we once lived in town. I was still a baby then. She and I were home alone together. Holding me on her hip, she answered a knock at the door and was surprised to see a policeman. He told her this was a city and there were ordinances. She was going to need to clean up her yard, or he’d have to fine her. With the pride she took in her appearance and her impeccable housekeeping skills, she choked up with embarrassment. She didn’t mention my dad, that the mess was his. She spent the afternoon with a neighbor woman feverishly cleaning up the small yard and garage. When my dad came home, he was enraged. He screamed at her, red-faced, for touching his things, accusing her of trying to get rid of him. My dad was over six feet tall and barrel-chested. When angered, he was a charging bull.

Mom had a decision to make; either leave him or accept this craziness as the life she had married into. She was a young mother, seeking stability for herself and her family in whatever form she could find. She wanted us to stay together. She looked for a way to make it work. Within a week, she found a house for sale in the country, and they moved every last item away from the judgmental gaze of city life. Mom always wanted to move back to town, but Dad’s stuff kept them rooted until the day he died.

When I was growing up, we would constantly find new things strewn about the yard: battered oxygen tanks or a discarded boat motor, pieces of sheet metal twenty feet long and wine distilling equipment. How he got some of those things home single-handedly remains a mystery. He had an idea in mind for all of it; he would cultivate a vineyard or engineer a new type of sea-going vessel. Not one of the plans ever came to fruition, but he refused to part with a single thing.

There were rare occasions when mom spotted the latest addition out in the yard and couldn’t contain herself. “What is that? What’s that metal for?” she’d demand.

“I’m going to build a two-person passenger plane,” he replied. ”I can fly you to Chicago to visit your sister when it’s done. Think of the money we’ll save on airfare.”

Out in the countryside of the Willamette Valley, my dad was free to accumulate to his heart’s content. The wooden skeleton of his barn sagged with rot, unable to contain the vastness of his imagined treasures. The contents piled up to the rafters and cascaded out, covering the yard and becoming entangled with the rampant, wild vegetation. There was no system to any of it. Wherever he put something down last, that’s where it would stay, and he heaped new things on top of old as he brought them in.

When he passed away, my husband and I began working to help my mom prepare the house for sale. As I looked out over their property, I realized I would have to touch every relic of our lives from the past four decades. I would have to revisit each painful moment; and ultimately, I would have to grieve that his entire lifetime of ambitions amounted only to the worthless piles stretched out in front of me.

•••

Dad always bragged about his vintage coin collection, his prized guns, and his classic cars. For safekeeping, the coin collection was stored in a locked briefcase shoved under the bed. The combination had long since been forgotten. We pried it open to find a sea of wheat pennies and US state quarters encased in plastic. We found two-dollar bills squirreled away in his sock drawer. A coin collector assessed nothing we brought in was worth more than face value, including the plastic-enshrined quarters. At work, an older colleague of mine had also recently lost a parent and he would say things like, “I’m going to be out tomorrow; I need to tend to my parent’s estate.” I thought about this phrase as I slammed plastic-enshrined quarters against the kitchen floor to break them free of their casings: “I am tending to my parent’s estate.”

Dad had left his two-dozen assorted guns and boxes of ammunition lying haphazardly in a pile on the garage floor. We were too frightened to touch any of them, not knowing whether any remained cocked or loaded. My uncle, who we had not seen in years, showed up to claim them all. That would be the last time we heard from him.

Dad’s automobile collection consisted of nine vehicles in states of mild to severe decay. He constantly talked about his intention to resuscitate each of them to the glorious condition of their heydays, and the amazing fortune he would reap. The best car of the lot was the one pick-up that still ran. The driver’s seat was broken into a permanent position of recline and the rearview mirror dangled by a thread. Most perplexing of the bunch was the 1972 Chrysler Crown Imperial.

Even in my earliest memories, the Chrysler never ran. I never saw it driven, never saw anyone start it up, never even saw anyone open the driver’s side door and sit on one of the plastic bench seats to reminisce.

In the early years the Chrysler sat adjacent to the driveway. After a decade without improvement it was decided—I’m not sure exactly who decided—to move it to the back of the house, near the barn. In Dad’s mind, this probably equated to progress. The car needed to be near his tools if he was going to repair it. In my mom’s mind, I’m certain she just wanted to get the eyesore out of sight from the general passerby.

In Oregon, the elements of nature are subtle. There are no bone-rattling earthquakes, the complete and sudden devastation of hurricanes, or the intensity of a Midwest blizzard. There is only the rain, the omnipresent dampness. It seeps in quietly, seemingly harmless. But left unchecked over time, that ubiquitous moisture is power.

Over the years the two-ton Chrysler turned from dusty rose to a bleached mauve to forest green, covered in moss. The sodden earth began to consume the car—the tires buried up to the rims. And out of nowhere, the descent of Himalayan Blackberry, vegetation that seemed like science fiction.

When my aunt came to visit a few years back, she looked out the family room window onto the overgrown backyard and asked, “What’s that red thing sticking out of that bush?”

Sheepishly, my mom murmured, “That’s a tail light.”

Brambles had grown up and around the Chrysler, devouring all of it except one final piece of tail light. They grew twelve feet tall, surpassing the height and width of the barn, engulfing not just the car, but the expanse between the car and the barn, using both as makeshift trellises.

After Dad passed away, I wasn’t sure my husband and I were up to the challenge of unearthing the car from the grips of the brambles. But my wiry husband assured me we could do it. Not knowing where or how to start, we each simply bought a new pair of work gloves and hedge clippers.

On a crisp winter morning, the smell of wood smoke permeating the air, we embarked on our odyssey. I began clinically, like a novice surgeon taking the first cautious snip. The weed was covered in stickers, shooting out in catawampus directions like an army of angry penknives. It clawed at us with vicious tentacles, pulling at our arms and legs. We emerged from the bushes with scratches everywhere, on our backs and faces, blood dripping down our forearms.

Soon I was hacking and lunging with unquenchable hostility. Questions cascaded through me. What other daughter had to engage in an activity like this in the wake of her father’s death? Why did he leave this mess for us to clean up? Why didn’t he take better care of things? Why didn’t he take better care of us?

After several days of relentless toil we stood smugly over the decimated thicket and beheld the Chrysler in full exposure. The initial victory was sweet; we felt like laborers excavating the ruins of Machu Picchu.

Once we turned our attention to the car, our spirits sank. The windshield looked like a kaleidoscope. The interior seats were brittle and splintered, the ceiling upholstery torn and dislodged; where the passenger side floorboard once existed there was now an irreparable hole. After waiting for decades to be restored to its former glory, the car was unceremoniously sold in an estate sale, purchased by an anonymous buyer for the paltry sum it could fetch as scrap.

•••

I looked up the number for Molalla garbage service online.

“I’d like to arrange for delivery of a drop box.” I used terms I found on their website and hoped I could translate my needs into their language.

“What size do you need?”

Barn-size? “What are the options?”

“Our smallest is twenty yards. That’s 7’5” by 16’ by 4’7” and the largest is forty yards. 7’5” by 22’ by 6’8”.” She rattled the numbers off with quick efficiency and I hurried to jot them down.

I shoved the figures imploringly in front of my husband with a “???” and a helpless look on my face.

“The biggest,” he mouthed back to me.

“The biggest one,” I responded. I feared the woman on the other end would question me. What does a well-spoken young lady like you need with a dumpster that large? I thought she would doubt me. That’s really large, honey. Are you sure you need something so big?

But she did no such thing. She merely asked when I wanted it delivered.

I responded without hesitation, “As soon as possible.”

•••

For over two decades, with joy and fear I’d envisioned the day I would walk into the barn and clean it up. In my imagination, I’d be wearing knee high rubber boots and would have somehow gotten my hands on a Hazmat suit. In reality, I wore a grey Army t-shirt (Dad’s) and my mom’s jeans with an elastic waistband. The clothes were foreign to me, which fit the foreignness of the experience. It is hard to remember what my gloved hands touched first, but once started, I was transfixed. We had always been forbidden from touching his stuff. This would never have occurred in his lifetime.

•••

On our first pass, we filled the forty-yard industrial dumpster in less than three days. It was so full, I’d end up owing over-tonnage fees. We’d only scratched the surface, though; we decided the rest would need to be addressed in stages and subsequent visits to the dump.

•••

As we loaded the bed of my father’s truck with memories from my childhood, I was mystified to find decomposing rolls of shag carpet Dad had removed from the house when I was eight years old. My mom made plans for its disposal back in 1986. But Dad demanded to keep it; he planned to repurpose it. How did he think he was going to repurpose used 1970s Granny Smith apple–green shag carpet?

The hundreds of pairs of identical, fringe-beaded earrings intrigued my husband. The summer before I started high school, my dad was fired from his job. I don’t know if he looked for other work and couldn’t get anything, or if he became enticed by a pyramid scheme before he ever got that far. He sent money in to some unknown destination, and in return, he received a set of beads and string. He simply had to construct them into earrings and make five times the profit on his money. Except, of course, his beaded constructions were never purchased, leaving us with hundreds of sets of identical earrings and a hole in the bank account. When my childhood friends asked what my dad did for a living, it was hard to explain.

•••

My mom hadn’t had reason to visit the dump in ages, but she thought she remembered the way. She was mistaken. Neither of us had any idea where it was. Unbelievably, in the year 2013, neither of us owned a smart phone or GPS. My mom’s idea was to roam through the Wal-Mart and ask for directions.

Upon entering the store, Mom instructed me, “Look for someone who looks like they’d know where the dump is.”

“What would someone who knows where the dump is look like?”

Without missing a beat, she said, “Someone like us.”

I gazed over at my mom, a reflection of myself, in her messy flannel shirt, muddy boots, and stocking cap pulled tight over her ears. We burst into raucous laughter at the absurdity of it all. Silently, I also prayed this would not be the instant I run into someone I knew from high school.

Once we found our way to the facility, I stood at the edge of the platform and tossed our mold-infested memories into the dump. It is hard to throw away a life.

•••

In the next round, we rented a metal “drop box”, another forty-yard container we’d fill to brimming and sell the contents for scrap. I was determined to get all the riding lawnmowers in there. Dad bought a new one every few years on credit. Whenever he mowed for the last time in the fall, the lawnmower would stay put right there on whatever the last patch of grass had been, uncovered all winter, until the next spring. After several cycles of this, the machines would rust into disrepair, the wheels would lock up, and he’d buy a new one. On the day he died, there would be four riding lawnmowers scattered around the yard, immobile.

My mom, husband, and I groaned collectively under six hundred pounds of riding lawnmower. In perfect synchronicity, we exhaled and lifted on the count of three. We progressed across the backyard in inches. There was a point where I looked down and saw I had gashed my leg. Blood ran into my shoe. I felt nothing. I was a robot-o-tron with one thought: Metal in the bin. Not metal to the dump. Surprisingly, many things had morphed to a point where it was impossible to tell what their origins were.

Mom begged me to come inside the house and spend time with her.

“Mel, why don’t you take a break? We can visit.”

“What do you mean? You can take break. I want to keep working.” Throughout my life I’d been merciless with my own belongings, throwing things out without a hint of sentimentality. With all that was in front of us, how could she think of stopping with so much still to get done?

“It’d just be nice—to visit for a while.”

“We can talk while we work. I came to work.” At my response, her shoulders slumped with a heaviness I didn’t understand. I was oblivious to the loneliness of my recently widowed mother. I felt nothing except a driving desire to finish this. I had to finish this.

•••

Among the ruins, I found a handicap bar, the kind attached in restroom stalls. When I was ten years old, my dad worked security at a rehab facility and brought the bar home. I had begged for a ballet barre in my bedroom. The stolen handicap bar was his solution to purchasing a real one. When he showed it to me, it didn’t look sleek and pretty like a real barre, but it would be mine nonetheless, and I was excited in the way only a child could be. The bar sat on the floor of my bedroom, awaiting installation, until I left for college. Seventeen years later, I threw this symbol of my dashed childhood hopes into the dump.

•••

And then there were the papers.

Stashed into dozens of file cabinets, boxes, nooks and crannies, we uncovered every “official” piece of paper that had ever entered our home. Every phone bill, bank statement, tax return and department store receipt since 1974.

Some of it was just plain odd—prescriptions my mom had received for conditions long since forgotten; the pay stubs I’d received from my first job at age fifteen.

Some of it inspired a spark of pride—a commendation memo Dad had received for some task he’d completed in the Army Reserve.

Much of it told something deeper.

The court summons addressed to Dad for stealing from his employer (items which were likely still sitting out in the barn at the time he passed away.)

Business cards that had women’s names and phone numbers scrawled on the back, which my mom pulled angrily from my hands.

Written warnings Dad received for being too aggressive with his co-workers.

A lay-off notice addressed to Dad when the cannery shut down.

Records from a financial consultant when my parents filed for bankruptcy.

Notices from the IRS regarding the lien they had had on the house.

Through these papers, the story of our family was told.

We burned all of it.

•••

After many months, we were coming to the end. We’d worked our way across the yard, to the outer reaches of the barn and into its depths. Only the “wine distillery,” a slapped together addition at the back of the barn, remained. Dad fermented cherries into a putrid concoction he generously called “wine” and then boasted of his plans to sell to major distributors once he’d produced enough jugs. After all we had dealt with, this final hut would be simple. The structure and everything in it were completely dilapidated. I just needed a stash of garbage bags and a bit more endurance.

The space was more disgusting than I had anticipated; it smelled like the walls were doused in cherry wine. It was nauseating. I hastily started to sweep whole shelves into a sack. But the stuff—a conglomeration of rags, plastic tubing, cardboard boxes—was molten and disintegrated under my touch. I discovered glass beakers that still had a deep burgundy substance in them, solidifying. I stepped in something far too squishy and found myself gagging reflexively.

Before I knew what was happening, I was doubled over, convulsing, tears soaking my face. I cried until I felt empty. I crumpled onto the waterlogged plywood serving as a floor.

In that moment, I finally understood. I was not cleaning up my dad’s selfish mess; I was cleaning up the remnants of a disease. This yard, this barn, were not merely the objects of a careless man who brought home too many bicycles. He had a psychological condition. I was only able to recognize this after he passed away, after spending countless hours cleaning out his things. I had spent my life feeling so much anger toward him and so much shame about the turmoil we were forced to live in. But I could not hold on to that resentment. Just like I would not feel irritation at a stroke victim for slurred speech, I could not continue this animosity towards my dad for a mess he couldn’t stop himself from making.

I saw now he was not collecting garbage—he was collecting possibilities. The possibility of a gleaming classic car, the possibility of success and accomplishment. He wasn’t a perfect man and didn’t follow through with his plans, but he was able to believe in the impossible. And there was beauty in that.

Out there in the space that had been the source of so much shame and humiliation, I was able to find my own form of forgiveness.

•••

MELISSENT ZUMWALT is an artist, advocate, and administrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. She learned the art of story telling from her mother, a woman who has an uncanny ability to recount the most ridiculous and tragic moments of life with beauty and humor.

A Eulogy, Despite

coverface — By Gina Easley www.GinaEasley.com

By Jacqueline Doyle

“Will anyone in the family want to speak?”

The silence in the sunlit office grows. The priest behind the desk, young and rosy-faced, looks expectant. My mother looks at my brother. My brother looks at the floor. Nobody looks at me.

I’m surprised by the priest’s question. I haven’t been to many funerals, and it hasn’t actually occurred to me until now that there will be a eulogy and someone will have to deliver it. I’m not surprised that my mother is looking at my brother. I’m the older and was closer to my father, but my brother’s the male and has always been her favorite.

“Would you like to think it over?” the priest asks, looking pointedly at my brother this time. The priest is new and has never met my father. My parents were not regular churchgoers, and for the past six months they were absorbed in treatments for my father’s cancer. Months of radiation therapy for a tumor in his mouth. Months when he couldn’t eat, liquids and yogurt dribbling out of his nose as he sucked on a straw.

The room we’re sitting in is lined with leather-bound books. They don’t look well thumbed or personal. I suspect they don’t belong to the priest, but probably just come with the office as clergy rotate in and out of the parish. Outside the window the autumn sky is deep blue. The lawn is littered with yellow and red leaves that shuffle and recombine with each gust of wind.

“I’ll talk about his birthday then,” the priest says. “How’s that?”

He’s decided to focus on my father’s long life in his own short eulogy after the homily, and the pending eighty-eighth birthday he didn’t quite reach. After talking to my mother the priest hasn’t found much more to say. “The man was a saint,” my mother keeps repeating. Not exactly something the priest can include. Not exactly true either.

•••

My brother didn’t say no to the priest right then, but he postponed his decision. A successful businessman, he nevertheless hates public speaking, and maybe that’s the reason he refused to give the eulogy. Or maybe it was more complicated than that, part of the damaged father-son relationship that no one ever faced in my family, as we refused to face so many things. I didn’t exactly say yes to the priest. I murmured that we’d get back to him.

Fretting over what I might say in the eulogy dominated my thoughts as my mother and I visited the mortuary, wrote and called in the obituaries, visited the florist to choose arrangements for the altar, went through decades of clothes crammed in her closet to choose her outfit for the funeral, and argued about her reasons for not calling any relatives. “It’s a long trip,” she insisted. “It’s just too expensive. I’ll tell them later.” My mother wanted to know how much she was supposed to pay the priest and the Ladies Auxiliary that was providing some food at the meager reception after the service. She wanted to give the lavish floral display she’d ordered to the church for their Sunday mass. “Might as well,” she said. “What am I going to do with it?”

•••

What I Considered Including in the Eulogy:

My father’s love of Ireland
His love of his job
How much his employees loved him (at least according to my mother, but I think it was true)
His engineering accomplishments, drafting abilities, passion for math
His carpentry skills, and all the work he invested in our eighty-year-old house
His love of literature (a long time ago, really)
His love of music (ditto)
His love of art (ditto)
His love of his family (despite)

No, not despite. I couldn’t include that.

•••

I can see him in his wing chair in front of the fireplace reading my high school report card. He’s wearing a maroon polo shirt, beige Bermuda shorts, dark brown nylon knee socks and slippers, his feet stretched out in front of him on the wicker footstool. I’ve gotten all As and a C in Phys. Ed. “What’s this C in Phys. Ed.?” There’s a bit of a twinkle there, but he’s also partly serious.

My brother’s hovering in the hall, his report card crammed in his pocket. He’s going to get in trouble and he knows it. At the very least he’ll be grounded for his grades. My father will force him to quit the football team. Sports are not important, in my father’s opinion. Grades are important.

When my brother responds by flunking half his classes, my father roughs him up in the downstairs hall. I hang over the second floor banister while my father shoves my brother against the wall and my mother wails. Somehow my brother manages to graduate with a good enough GPA to get into the engineering program at Lehigh, but he drops out of Lehigh, and then out of the University of Wisconsin, and then out of Middlebury, and then out of the University of Wisconsin again.

He stays there, marries a local girl, bowls and golfs and drinks a lot of beer. His grammar changes. He starts to say “ain’t.” He builds an enormous house to impress my father, who’s not impressed. My father never revises his original blueprint for my brother’s achievements. After he dies I find a folder with my brother’s name on it in one of my father’s file cabinets. He’d preserved all the bad report cards from school and college. There’s an article on college failure rates, with statistics showing that boys are more likely to fail than girls. He’d underlined whole sections of the article in red ink.

•••

Never unconditional love. Always qualified. Years of barely suppressed rage because my brother failed to finish his college degree. “He broke your father’s heart,” my mother repeated, for decades. Years of festering anger because I fell in love with the wrong men—wrong race, wrong politics, wrong ethnicity, wrong profession, wrong income bracket. Not the conservative, Ivy-educated, white brain surgeon he’d had in mind for me to marry. Not the dazzling professional job in a big engineering firm he’d envisioned for my brother. My father’s Horatio Alger story prematurely concluded in one generation when we failed to follow the scripts for upward mobility he’d written even before we were born.

•••

A scholarship boy in the engineering program at Cooper Union, a privately funded college in New York City, my father wanted my brother and me to go to private colleges and to climb the intellectual and social ladder he’d barely begun to ascend himself. He was professionally successful, working his way up from copy boy to draftsman to junior engineer to senior engineer to vice president and member of the board. He was proud of that. He would have wanted those achievements in the eulogy. But he never felt socially accepted. He never saw other men in management (there were no women) outside the office.

I didn’t comprehend the depth of his isolation until shortly before he died. He’d pretty much ignored my half Mexican American son until Ben got an early acceptance to Harvard. Then he showed an interest.

We were sitting on the tiny balcony of their independent living apartment in their retirement complex in North Carolina.

“The perfect son,” he said, his voice vibrating with emotion.

It was so clear he felt he hadn’t had the perfect son.

He wanted to know more about Ben’s victories in cross-country and track. I was surprised he cared at all.

“I never fit in. I didn’t play golf or tennis.” I could hear all the yearning of a bookish, working-class kid who’d spent his high school years in the dark room developing photographs, who’d started working full time at seventeen and done his college classes in night school. Who’d never played sports, or enjoyed the privilege of leisure.

“Ben doesn’t play golf or tennis either, Dad.”

“But he could, couldn’t he. He could learn. I couldn’t.” The longing in his eyes was almost unbearable.

•••

My mother didn’t want my husband and son to come to the funeral in North Carolina. My husband was teaching in California. Ben had just started his freshman year in Massachusetts, and he was running in a cross-country meet that weekend. She didn’t think it was worth making the trip. “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” she said.

I didn’t realize how much that hurt my husband until he told me later. At the time it just seemed part of my mother’s insane thrift and determination not to make a big deal about the funeral arrangements.

So my husband and son didn’t attend. Partly because I was acceding to my mother’s wishes. Partly because I inherited some of my mother’s insane thrift. We’d just spent money flying out East to see our son off to college. We’d just paid our first tuition installment.

But they should have been there. Looking back, I can see that. The few relatives who might have come should have been there, too. Not for my father, who was dead. Not for my mother, who didn’t care. Maybe for me, so I wouldn’t be looking back now at the nearly empty church and a ceremony that felt so incomplete. But for something larger too. For the occasion. For all of us and our deep-seated need to mark the significance of a loved one’s life and death in a fully realized communal ritual. Our hope that we, too, won’t pass unnoticed.

•••

The eulogy was botched in a number of ways. Before the service, I told the priest that the three of us wanted to go up to the pulpit to say goodbye at the end. I was thinking I might even deliver a full eulogy then, but I was still not sure, still turning over the possibilities in my mind. The priest didn’t call us up. It might have been because the Catholic funeral service was so emphatically directed at the joys of the afterlife and not saying goodbye. Or he just forgot.

I ended up extemporizing a eulogy at the entrance of the parish hall, with the handful of mourners standing in the vestibule. I put my hand on the coffin, which was being wheeled out of the church by the mortuary attendants, who stopped and stood back. I cleared my throat. “I’d like to say a few words.”

I kept the eulogy short, and positive. I talked about inheritance. How my father had passed on his love of Ireland and literature to me. His ability to build and repair things to my brother. His mathematical and scientific skills to my son. I don’t know why I gave the eulogy at all, under such awkward circumstances, to my parents’ cleaning lady and a small group of acquaintances from their retirement complex. People who barely knew my father, and certainly didn’t mourn his passing. My mother was misty eyed, my brother stolid. The rest of them milled in the vestibule of the empty church, respectful smiles pasted on their faces, waiting for me to finish. The daughter who’d flown in from California. “Did you know she’s a professor?” I heard one of my mother’s bridge partners say afterwards. “Isn’t it funny, Peggy never mentioned that.”

I could see them eyeing the trays of sliced cheese and cold cuts on folding tables in the parish hall behind me. The white-haired volunteers from the Catholic Ladies Auxiliary were putting out paper plates and Styrofoam cups and plastic knives and forks. The bitter smell of boiled coffee filled the air.

•••

Tips for Writing and Delivering a Eulogy that the Internet Would Have Provided, If I’d Looked:

Think about the person and your relationship to the person.
Gather information, including special accomplishments, career, hobbies, family anecdotes. Look for humorous and touching memories.
Decide whether your tone will be light or serious. Look for appropriate religious quotations if your eulogy is serious.
Organize your information and create an outline.
Write, review, and revise.
Rehearse.
Have tissues and a bottle of water handy. Take a deep breath before you begin. Remember to speak slowly and distinctly.

•••

I’m used to public speaking, in the classroom at least. I was composed, and spoke slowly and distinctly. I was choked up but didn’t cry. I didn’t gather any information beforehand or tell any anecdotes, though I did mentally rehearse what I was going to say. I don’t know how useful the Internet tips would have been. Even if I had located them and proceeded in an orderly fashion, I would have been stalled on the first one.

“Think about the person and your relationship to that person.” How to express my mixed feelings about the father who nurtured my creativity and intellectual development and then turned his back on me and the choices I made? Who strong-armed me into transferring to another college by threatening to cut off my funds after he learned of my African-American boyfriend? Who thought I traveled too much, lived abroad too long, stayed in school too long? Who never fully accepted my Mexican American husband or our son? “Look for humorous and touching memories.” How far back would I have to go? I could have said more about his job. There was a lot I left out, and a lot I couldn’t say, not that anyone there would have cared.

•••

What I Did Not Include in the Eulogy:

My father’s rages when we were children
His anger and resentment later
His silences
The burden of his expectations
The fact that I’d lived in California for almost twenty-five years and he’d never once visited
How I felt about that

•••

My mother was pleased with the eulogy, and six months later asked me to send a copy to her. It hadn’t been written to begin with, but I typed up what I remembered. It seemed sparse and inadequate to the man and my feelings about him.

I didn’t keep a copy for myself.

•••

“I’ve lived longer than anyone in my family tree,” he said more than once, so perhaps the priest was right to emphasize his age. The fact that the priest focused his eulogy on something my father didn’t reach—his eighty-eighth birthday—fits the man, whose expectations exceeded his grasp, whose youthful dreams dominated a life where nothing was enough.

He was a man who held on to his ambitions, even to his detriment. Whose sense of duty never flagged. Who worked hard. Who retreated into angry solitude when he felt others had failed him. Who couldn’t look past his son’s failure to finish his degree. Who may have been proud of his daughter’s Ivy League Ph.D., but never said so. Who fought constantly with his wife but may have derived more from their bond than an outsider, even his own daughter, could fathom.

When they got the news that his tumor had spread beyond the possibility of further treatment, “We just lay on the bed,” my mother told me, “holding hands. We didn’t say anything. Just held hands.”

I hold on to that. I like to think he found some comfort amid so many disappointments, some companionship in his alienation.

•••

What I Would Include, If I Were Asked to Deliver His Eulogy Today:

After eight years, I still don’t know. I stare at the blank computer screen in my home office, fingers frozen on the keys. My wooden desk chair, a swivel chair that my father bought as a young man in Greenwich Village, creaks as I lean forward. I review my directions from the Internet, stuck on the first point. “Think about the person and your relationship to the person.” I write:

“My father had big dreams for his future and his family’s. They weren’t my dreams.”

It’s all I’ve come up with, after years of writing, so much of it about my father. I’m like him, meticulous, critical, socially awkward, a hoarder of memories and books and souvenirs of the past. Obsessive in my quests—obsessive in this quest to write something that would express the man and our complicated history together.

To eulogize is to forgive, James Baldwin writes in “Notes of a Native Son,” a better guide than the Internet to the enormity of the task. Everyone hopes that upon death he too “would be eulogized,” Baldwin writes, “which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity.” I continue to seek that truth and coherence, labor to forgive the unforgiving, to find the words that no one in my family wants to speak.

My father’s dreams died with him. His disappointment and anger died with him. His love did not.

•••

JACQUELINE DOYLE’s creative nonfiction has appeared in South Dakota Review, Waccamaw, Southern Indiana Review, Cold Mountain Review, Under the Sun, and elsewhere. Her essays have earned Pushcart nominations from Southern Humanities Review and South Loop Review, and Notable Essay citations in Best American Essays 2013 and Best American Essays 2015. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. Find her online at www.facebook.com/authorjacquelinedoyle