My sister Kriska approached me before I climbed back in the hearse. “That part of your eulogy, when you said war brings trauma, that the children need to heal it in themselves…”
“Yes…”
“I’m glad you said it. For all of us. Thank you.”
|||||||||||
Over the coming weeks, I reread my father’s entire book. His words were like a conversation from the grave. He told me stories. I cried. Within the context of my father’s life, my own past fit. We had stepped in the way, my siblings and I, of ghosts.
Then I stopped crying, and he told me more stories as I prepared the book for my mother to give to my siblings. I had already spent the past year editing the book—retaining as much of my father’s voice while sharpening some of his more disorienting memories with corrected punctuation or grammar, adding a sentence or two to bridge what at times were confusing leaps of logic, subsuming a few of his overly repetitive memories into one streamlined reflection. Then I formatted all the text, numbered pages, reordered pictures at the end according to how I knew he would’ve wanted them to appear, and even named all of my Hungarian relatives. Working on my father’s book also helped me return to my own—I jumped back and forth between the two, from father to son. One would likely not have been completed without the other.
Finally, on the front cover of my father’s book, I added one of his black-and-white “movie star” photos from the 1950s, his swarthy complexion and thick, curly hair complemented by a wool suit. And on the back jacket, as an ending to the story of his life, the book he’d written “from memory,” I added one of the recent photos of the backside of his head—tufts of gray hair poking out from under a wide-brimmed fedora.
“The father that was forever faced away from me.”
On the mattress in the Styx I had mourned the father I never knew and, for all intents and purposes, never had. Both my mother and my father had died for me in primal, and I was orphaned, like my father, estranged even from myself, my nature; at war and imprisoned, solitarily alone, like my mother. Then I returned home and was given the gift of fourteen additional years of conversations and arguments with my parents; dinners and desserts; exchanges of gratitude and forgiveness; expressions of love. The heart beats fast until it doesn’t, and the only thing that lasts is what is real, what can’t be changed.
Remembering this brings me peace.
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt gratitude to my tribe, past and present: Thomas Lisicar, Cynthia Woodward, Patrick King, Alana Samson, Bryan McIver, Catherine Racine, Eric Marchand, Jule Epp, Pam Howard-Jones, Ingrid Kröblinger, Cathleen With, Didi Mitchell, Nancy Leach, Alice Ages, and Dixie Black.
Thanks to my writers’ groups at Lambda Literary Foundation and Banff Centre for the Arts, particularly my teachers, Ellery Washington and Bill Schermbrucker.
For their early editorial feedback, thanks to Claire Robson and Arnold Dolin.
I am indebted to Jeff Moores, wherever he is, for championing the work early on.
Special gratitude to Alan Rinzler, who helped bring it all together near the end.
No book is complete until it is published, and so I want to praise Alban Fischer for his design, Carol Killman Rosenberg for her eagle-eyed final editing, and most especially my publishers at Brown Paper Press, Wendy Thomas Russell and Jennifer Volland, for scrutinizing my every word. Thank you.
PETER GAJDICS is a recipient of a writers grant from Canada Council for the Arts, a fellowship from The Summer Literary Seminars, and an alumni of Lambda Literary Foundation’s “Writers Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices.” When not in Budapest, Hungary, his home away from home, Peter lives in Vancouver, Canada. The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir is his first book.
More information can be found at inheritanceofshame.com.
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