Not long ago I asked my mother what kind of child I’d been. Thinking back, her eyes brightened, and she laughed, “You were a happy child,” she said. Although I’m sure that’s true, it’s the opposite of my memories, which all begin on the afternoon before my twelfth birthday, when I rode home on my bicycle to find out that my father was dying.

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It was a bright, cold, windless Saturday. I’d prepared the work for Safety merit badge, which brought my total to five and made me a Star Boy Scout. As I was leaving that morning to ride to the counselor’s house a few miles away, the word come that they were operating on Dad, which sent a shock wave through the family. It was his second operation in six months, but I figured they knew what they were doing. “You’re not still going, are you?,” my older sister Judy said as I headed out the door. “Why shouldn’t I?,” I said petulantly. I’d practically forgotten about the operation by the time I left the counselor’s house, my success excited me so much. I raced back home to bask in the glory of it with my family.

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I opened the door to find my two older sisters weeping uncontrollably.

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“What are we going to do? What are we going to do?”, my oldest sister Becky cried repeatedly. I looked to Judy for an explanation.

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“Daddy’s dying,” she wailed through her tears. My bewildered six-year-old brother stood to one side and poked a toe at my youngest sister, crawling on the floor in diapers, while my mother, with a beatific continence that she somehow maintained all day, did what she could to comfort her fatherless children. It was straight out of Dostoyevsky.

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Late that night, long after everyone had gone to bed, I woke to hear Mom crying in the living room. Not having the heart to leave her alone in such a state, I mutely presented myself to her in my pajamas. It seemed to work; she cried on my shoulder for a while and then recovered. I’d never seen her cry before, and found it frightening. “I guess you’re the man of the family now,” she said. The words scared me silly.

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Just thirty-eight years old, Dad had been hospitalized for six months, as a growing team of doctors tinkered away, attempting to correct their previous mistakes. He’d been given oral doses of cortisone to relieve the pain of his arthritis, and the cortisone had masked the symptoms of a developing case of diverticulitis, a common infection of the large intestine, until it got out of hand, ran up complications, and finally poisoned his blood and killed him. He wrote down a ditty in his final days, which he recited to my mother:

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It is ever so strange

The doctors exclaimed

As they hammered his coffin of wood.

That a man could succumb--

While he’s under our thumb--

With his vital signs looking so good?

 

The morning after his death the house filled up with neighbors, family, friends, and food, lots and lots of food. The word got around that it was my birthday, and by the afternoon the house was full of presents too, which I received with a mixture of happiness and calculation: although it didn’t seem right to profit from Dad’s death in this way, it hardly seemed fair to ruin my birthday. The raw ambivalence gnawed on me.

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Then came the ordeal of the viewing. Mom wanted to spare the kids the shock of viewing Dad’s corpse, but she was overruled by our grandmother, Mama Lou, and no doubt the funeral director, who thought we should have a final look to remember him by. So all of us except the two youngest dressed up and drove to the funeral parlor, where a crowd was gathered around the open coffin in a viewing room decorated like a motel lobby, overseen by a couple of black-suited undertakers. I hung back by the doorway until Mama Lou pushed me forward through the crowd. I looked inside the coffin and saw the waxy, painted mannequin they’d made of Dad, with his garish, gelatinous skin and a sheen of plastic coating on his hair. It looked nothing like him. He seemed to have vanished, leaving a carapace behind. It made me worried and confused.

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We never had a chance to say goodbye. He was home one day, in the hospital the next, and six months later dead. They sent him home just once, about four months into his

ordeal, presumably thinking he was on the mend. This proved to be a mistake from a medical point of view, and a disaster for the family. He was forced to use a colostomy bag, which meant he had to sleep in the den, in

the middle of the house with the television set, because it had a bathroom next to it. He was exhausted, irritated, frightened, and repulsive. He got into a fight with Becky over the television, and the rest of us took her side, enduring his presence with resentment. After five or six days he returned to the hospital without saying goodbye.

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The funeral was large, held in the church in Alexandria that we attended sporadically as a family. Dad had been an editor for the Salt Lake Tribune; we’d come to Virginia seven years before when a congressman from Utah made him his chief of staff. A senator delivered the eulogy with an air of distracted sanctimony that suggested he hardly knew Dad. The minister was in the same boat. Having no knowledge of the man, they fell back on family history and talked about his great grandfather, who pushed a hand cart through the Great Plains and over the Rockies with the first of his five wives and their two children, one of them my great grandfather, Walter Fell Squires. Walter wrote an account of that first winter in Salt Lake City, where they lived in a dirt-floored carpentry shed, with roots to eat at the beginning of the winter, but only bark by the end.

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This was interesting stuff, but had nothing to do with Dad, a rebellious, witty, hard drinking Jack Mormon, with four painters and a poet in his family, who thought himself a Communist when he met my mother at Berkeley, (whose ancestors arrived in Massachusetts with the Winthrop party of 1640, fought as Tories in the Revolution, converted to Mormonism in the early days of the church, and were members of the scouting party that found the promised land of the Great Salt Lake in 1846.) Dad had lots of interesting friends who would have had plenty to say about him, who sometimes called him Cassius, the man who murdered Caesar. We endured this clumsy spectacle instead, and lost their memories of him.

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The cemetery was just across the street; it was another cold, still, sunny day. Six of Dad’s friends carried the coffin from the hearse and placed it on a pair of straps stretched over the grave on winches. The minister gave a short reading and we said the Lord’s Prayer. Then to everyone’s surprise he turned to my mother and asked if she wanted them to lower the coffin into the grave. Beside herself in grief, she shook her head to say “No”. He nodded kindly, and the whole crowd filed away, leaving the job unfinished, as it were, with Dad in the coffin floating awkwardly over his tomb.

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There was a wake at home, but my memory is hopelessly muddled with the soirees that preceded the funeral. Dad had been president of the local civic association, which made his death a community event. I remember the smell of the ladies’ powder and perfume, and the smooth touch of their dresses as they brushed by. And the dread comments, too:

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“I guess you’re the man of the family, now.” What could I say to that? I took to staring mutely at the stomach of anyone who said it.

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“My god, you look so much like your dad.” This was true; in photographs taken at the same age you couldn’t tell the two of us apart.

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Knowing that we didn’t have insurance, Dad’s friend Bill Graves, an editor at the National Geographic, paid for the funeral. It was supposed to be anonymous, but the undertaker spilled the beans. The relatives went back home and the neighbors stopped coming around.

We lapsed into a stunned collective silence. In the last six months he’d been gone to the

hospital; now he was gone for good. Gone for good. There was nothing to hold on to, just emptiness.

 

Then the dreams began, or visions. A couple of weeks after the funeral, I was fast asleep in

the dead of the night when Dad suddenly appeared before my startled eyes, as vibrant as

ever in life.

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“Dad!”

“Hi, Ricky!”

“Dad, what are you…” He seemed to be happy, and composed. “You’re supposed to be...”

“No, no, that was just a mistake; I never died.”

“A mistake!”

“Yes, I’ll be back in a while.”

“You’ll be back!”

“Yes, I’m coming back. Just need a bit more time over here.”

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These encounters were so vivid that when I woke the next morning I couldn’t be sure he was actually dead. In one world he still lived, in the other he was dead, and my mind partook of both of them. After twenty minutes of confusion I’d have to abandon the vision of him as living by an act of will. I’d give my head a shake, enter the kitchen in a slowly lifting state of uncertainty, gauge the attitude of my mother and sisters as they went about their morning routines, and eat breakfast with my nose in the Cheerios.

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He appeared this way a half dozen times over the next two months, patiently explaining that everything was fine, that he wasn’t really dead, that he was sorry he’d gone away, and he was coming back. He gave an impression of healthy vitality. He pledged to make amends on his return.

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Then after a time he stopped coming. I don’t know if I was glad for that or not. It seemed to suggest that he’d found somewhere else to go, but I didn’t want him to be gone for good. When we visited the cemetery a few months later, fresh spring grass was sprouting from the ground, but the earth over Dad’s grave, and his alone, was sunken two or three inches below the surface. I found this alarming: perhaps there was a problem in his tomb. Had the coffin broken from the weight above it, and let the dirt fall in? Would this have happened if we’d seen the burial through? Twenty years later, the turf over his grave remained anomalously sunken.