G. The absence of a father: abandonment

This November, I met a woman named Jean who told me about her own father, a man who spent his life in the army until it broke him. His crew cut grew out and his beard tumbled down his chest as he disappeared into himself. Every day, he woke, ate breakfast, and began to pace in circles inside their house—through the kitchen, dining room, living room, hallways, entrance, and back through the kitchen again, never looking out the window at the Indiana cornfields that framed their home. His orbiting tread began to wear the carpets thin, until the threadbare rugs split to reveal the floors, like the silvery trail a snail leaves behind. He was like thread winding itself around a spool, growing tighter and more deeply lost in his mind. He paced for five years, waking up for one lucid moment to meet Jean’s baby, his grandson, and then dying quietly one night as he slept.

Jean told me about her father as we stood outside the funeral home where my father’s body lay. This November, three months ago today, my father died by his own hand. It was Election Day, the day that Mr. Obama won his second term. I was in Tennessee, studying for an exam in the library. My brothers were at school in Indiana; my sister was in Seattle; my mom went out to vote, and when she came home, Dad had hung himself in my bedroom. She called me as the police were taking his body away, and my world turned inside out.

After his restless year in Macedonia, starting with the summer he spent pacing up and down the street before my senior year of high school, Dad moved our family to France. It was the year I moved to New York, and though they were supposed to come back to America for furlough that year, but Dad was eager to begin pastoring a church in Strasbourg, France, right on the border between Germany and France. Strasbourg was an enchanted city, its lacy cathedral soaring up over a web of canals surrounded by half-timbered houses with steep roofs and bright shutters. My family moved to an apartment that was a few blocks from a little cottage-manor Napoleon built for Josephine and just across the street from the St. Maurice cathedral and the university’s observatory—a domed stone building that often opened its roof at night, a long telescope protruding out into the starry sky. At Christmas time, the city had a world-famous market that surrounded the cathedral, booths selling mulled wine, caramel apples, ornaments, loose tea, cinnamon sticks, and gingerbread. The city carousel was covered in mistletoe and holly, and choirs sang carols in the cathedral.

But in spite of the city’s beauty, Dad’s mind continued to splinter. The church he had stepped into had been strained before his arrival and came close to splitting just a few months after he became the pastor. His insomnia worsened and he began to lose weight. When I came home for Christmas that first year, his hair had turned white, and he weighed less than me. He was gentler than ever before, and had even begun to write me letters while I was away at college, as he watched me drift away across the ocean. But he was fighting to keep himself from drifting away as well.

During their third year in France, Dad stopped sleeping altogether. After an entire month of sleepless nights, something in him snapped and he went over the edge, taking a full bottle of whiskey with him and spinning out of control into desperation and darkness. He left home and traveled, visiting a dozen countries in Europe and driving around half of America. He even showed up in Tennessee for a day, shocking me when I looked up from my cubicle to see him tapping on the window of the office and smiling in at me. In the course of his three months of travel, he resigned from our mission agency, rented an apartment in a town we’d visited once in Indiana, started a consulting business, bought a car and golf clubs, and nearly got my mother’s name, Patricia, tattooed on his arm. We learned later that this was the manic phase in a disease he had managed to tame for most of our lives, bipolar disorder.

My family moved to Indiana that summer, leaving behind their lives in Europe, and I continued to work in my office in Tennessee, sitting at my desk and listening to a cardinal tapping on my window. The cardinal thought its reflection was another bird, and it spent the entire summer trying to meet itself on my windowsill, rapping on the glass like a handshake. I often watched it and thought of my father, wondering if the cardinal was a persistent messenger from God that I was ignoring, or my father’s doppelgänger—I studied its wings, its ruffled feathers, its cracking beak. It beat itself to death against the glass, relentless.

That July, as the summer drew to a close, my father slipped from his manic phase it deep depression. Unable to find work in a town where he knew no one, surrounded by shell-shocked family grieving the loss of their home in Europe, everything stood still and bleak. He saw that he was about to turn fifty and felt he had nothing to show for it, other than years of failure, leaving, and children who feared him. I was dressing for work when my mother called me in tears, saying she had locked him in their bedroom because he was trying to harm himself. I felt the world spin, like I was in the center of the Panopticon and all the dark and grim things of this world and every other world had turned to face me at once.

I went to Indiana the next week, after Mom put him in the hospital to keep him safe. We picked him up from the psychiatric ward just after I arrived at the Greyhound station, and he stared out the window in the front seat, pulling at the plastic band on his wrist, smelling like he hadn’t showered in days. His hair had been shaved off, like a sheared lamb.

When my grandfather died, he died slowly, as his body devoured itself. Grandpa lost his hair to chemotherapy, and he began rearranging the living room of his farmhouse every night like an auditorium, preparing to deliver lectures and speeches to empty rooms. Every day he seemed less like himself, like parts of him were being shed like a winter coat. Death does not occur on one single day, but over the course of weeks or months. It’s the slow fading of a life, grey walk toward eternity, surrender. And after death, the memories live on. The mind forgets, loses its place in time. Our landlady in our last house in Kosovo kept all her dead husband’s things in my bedroom, his shoes under my bed, his old Yugoslav army uniforms crowded into my closet, his papers and passports and even a half-drunk cup of tea, sugared over and thick, in the desk drawer. I felt like I was sleeping in a tomb, but now, looking back, I understand the haunting. Even three months after my father’s death, I dream that he is alive, and when I wake up and remember myself, he dies again. I lose him again every morning.

The morning that I left to go back to school in August, he tried to swallow a handful of sleeping pills. Mom found him and made him spit them out, and that was the last time I ever saw him. During the next three months, we battled to keep him with us. I wrote twenty letters, each one saying simply, Dear Dad: I love you, Erin, and I sent two a week, each one different and beautiful. I timed them so that the last one would arrive the day before I came home for Christmas, sending them like prayers. I thought that by the twentieth one, my love would have begun to heal his heart, my forgiveness to set him free from his chains.

The morning I mailed the tenth letter, he died. When I was home for the funeral, the letter came in the mail. I found it sitting on the kitchen table where my brother had dropped it, lost between bills and condolence cards and catalogues, my heart in an envelope, unopened, unread.  

It will never be opened.

When I was a child, Dad used to tell me when he shaved off his mustache that he had rolled it up inside his ear, like a striped awning rolled up above a shop. As his mustache grew back, he would let me crank an imaginary handle on the side of his head, rolling it back out of his ear again. In childhood, things wax and wane with ease, like flowers that bloom in the spring, wither, and blossom again when the sun returns. I would give anything to sit beside those flowers again, beside the sunflowers and poppies in our Ferizaj garden, drinking sweet çaj with lemon, sitting beside my father as he practiced his faltering Albanian on our elderly landlords, watching dusk settle the garden’s corners, curl up beneath the apricot trees. But those times have faded away, never to flower again.

The night before he died, I found tears in my eyes without knowing where they came from or when they had arrived. Questioned, all I could answer was, “I feel myself standing at the edge of loss.” I felt like a man leaning out from his porch, squinting out into the night after the sound of a footstep, looking to the left and the right, straining to hear something dark approaching unseen. A thief in the night.

He let the darkness carry him away, and he left me behind.