There’s something I wanted to say to you while I was home, and you need to hear it. I’m really fucking worried about you. All day, every day. Twice in the past two weeks I’ve had to remind you that you’re still on this side of the grave, and frankly you didn’t sound especially convinced either time. I don’t like the tone I’m taking right now, but I can’t imagine another one that would get and hold your attention, so if it’s any consolation I’m as uncomfortable with this as I hope you are. This family loves its silences, but I’m not playing that way anymore. […] I’m not spending the rest of *my* goddamn life wondering what might have been different if I’d only said something.
He wrote me back the next day. His letter was easily ten times as long as the one I sent him, and covered a range of topics, as indeed my own letter had, but he ignored entirely the issue of his own health and well-being, so when I wrote back to him, I doubled down.
My reply wasn’t nearly as long as his, not half as long as his, but it was long. Here’s a chunk of it:
At no point did you address my main concern. So I will try to be even blunter than before: You seem to have become a kind of hermit, and spend most of your time in loathe of a world you will not participate in. I am concerned for your physical and psychological well-being. Though not a drunk or an addict, and not diseased, there is something going on in you that I would describe as a “condition” in any situation where I was an observer and not a participant. I am no longer willing to pretend that it isn’t happening. It is. You have all my love and support, now and for ever, but I would feel a lot better if I knew that you were taking steps toward obtaining diagnosis, treatment, et al.
This thing—whatever it was—that I had started was not going the way that I had hoped it would. The conversation had slipped out of my control immediately, or maybe it had been a delusion on my part to think I’d ever had control of it to begin with. I’d framed my first letter as a sort of tough love, but it was obvious, looking over what I’d actually written and the way that I responded to his response, that I was furious with him. There was a part of me that did not care, in those moments, whether I ever spoke to him again or if I ended up making him hate me. Was that, subconsciously, what had motivated me to initiate this conversation? While it is technically true to say that this wasn’t going how I’d hoped, it was going exactly the way that I would have anticipated, if I had bothered to think it through before diving in.
Three days after I sent my response, a package arrived in Nashville. It was a galley of an anthology of short fiction that I had spent the last year editing, to be published in early June 2007, just after I graduated from the MFA program. Though my first book of my own fiction was still three years away, this was a book and it had my name on it. On the cover, on the spine. I had been paid to produce it. The book was the biggest thing that had ever happened to me in my writing career (indeed it felt like the thing that gave me license to take the word “career” out of scare quotes) and it had a dedication page that read:
for my parents, who read to me
Dad sent me an email, which I will quote in full:
i just got home and took in the mail. there was a big envelope from you. i guessed it was the book and was quite excited to see it. i got to a page that has only seven words on it. i won’t repeat them because i’m sure you know exactly what they are. i would say you don’t know how much it means to me for us to be so acknowledged but i think you know exactly how much and that is likely one of the reasons the page exists. finding that page and the love, respect and honor i believe it conveys is a life’s moment that makes many of life’s not so rich moments pale and fade. thank you for providing it. i love you. your mother isn’t home but i’ll speak on her behalf and say she does too.
The other letters were never spoken of again. Their details grew vague and hazy in my mind. The next time I read them was almost exactly ten years later: January 2017. I had just arrived in Indianapolis for a teaching fellowship and was finding myself driven by a desire I did not yet understand (or, frankly, trust) to start taking some notes about my father. His physical and mental health were rapidly deteriorating and I wanted to document what was happening to him, as well as my thoughts and feelings about it. I began to write like I had that summer in New York when I was ten years old. This got me thinking about my childhood—and his. As I wrote what I remembered, the seemingly settled past began to revise itself in light of the unfolding, unraveling present.
Sitting alone in my little room in Indianapolis, reading these letters for the first time since we’d exchanged them, the main thing that surprised me was that I had been able to see and articulate the situation so clearly so early on. Everything I’d said then was true, and it had gotten worse, exponentially worse, over the next ten years. The letter in which I called him “a kind of hermit” read like a lost prophecy. If you’d asked me at any point before I reread these letters, I’d have told you that this wasn’t something I knew yet, or that I possibly could have known way back in the first week of 2007. I would have told you that I’d learned these things—learned to think of him this way—only slowly, over the brutal decade that was to follow. But it wasn’t true. It isn’t true. All the hard-won wisdom that I’ve been telling myself was earned in the heat of crisis and the long simmer of misery, it turns out I knew all along.
This book, then, is an attempt to tell the story of those ten years, but also to deconstruct it. What were the stories my father told himself, and did I—do I—believe them? What are the stories I told myself about him or about us, and why did I—and do I still—believe those? If my father, as he often said during what turned out to be the last years of his life, was a failure, when and why did this failure occur? Did he fail all of us, or only himself? In what ways did we—did I—fail him? How did it come to that night on the roof of the airport parking garage, and what was the path back out? Who was Larry Taylor? It took me longer than it should have to realize that this last question was another way of asking, Who am I?
Indianapolis Notebook
I’m living in Indianapolis for the semester on a teaching fellowship. It’s the end of January 2017. I flew into Nashville a few days ago and picked up a Volkswagen Passat that belongs to my mom’s friend’s kid, who is studying abroad for a year. I feel incredibly lucky that this came through for me, because the four or five grand it would have cost to rent a car for the semester is pretty much what I hope to have left over after taxes, living expenses, and my half of the rent on the apartment back in Portland. If not for the gift of this free car, this “writer-in-residence” position would be, essentially, a break-even deal.
I call Dad to check up. “How’s it going?” I ask.
“I was sitting by the edge of the bed, something about sitting there, it’s one of the only places—relief, a little relief, this was a week ago, and I’ve been afraid since then, afraid to sit there. One of the few things that was working and I lost it. I’m afraid now. I was sitting on the edge of the bed and I put my foot down. It came down wrong on the floor and it twisted. I rolled the ankle, I slipped. I fell. I fell between the edge of the bed and the desk. You know the room, you can picture where. I fell and hurt my ankle but I was also stuck at this angle, I lifted my arms to try to grab the edge of the desk, I couldn’t reach it, then I did but I couldn’t hold on, then I did hold on but my arms locked. I had no strength to lift myself up but now I could not let go, I was stuck that way, my muscles were exhausted, the pain I can’t even tell you, the pain and shaking still this whole time, my body, so the back of my head, my neck, banging the leg of the desk, it’s still bruised back there, my head my leg, I was drooling, crying, an hour and forty minutes, the feeling came back and I could move some, I got out of there but I haven’t sat at the edge of the bed again, I’m afraid, but why afraid, I don’t know, I mean I know but what I mean is when I was stuck there, that whole hour forty minutes all I thought about was starving to death
, how I could starve to death there, and all I kept thinking was I wouldn’t mind, I’m sorry I’m telling you this, if it only didn’t take so long, if it could happen and be done already I really think I would say okay, fine.”
“This was a week ago? Have you been to the doctor? Did Ronni or Fran come over?”
“I didn’t call them. I didn’t call anyone. I didn’t tell anyone. I’m only telling you now because you asked how things are going. Well, that’s how.”
* * *
—
My sister and I talk on the phone. I tell her Dad’s story.
“Seems like we’d better go down there, right?”
“Yeah.”
* * *
—
He takes pills that relieve his shaking—now a relentless full-body tremor—for ninety minutes at a time, though sometimes they don’t last quite that long and sometimes they fail to kick in at all, leaving him watching the clock for hours, shaking and waiting, because he can only take them three times a day. The pills’ efficacy has diminished over time, but the daily maximum dose cannot be increased. He is without insurance and still too young for Medicare, so we cannot pay for him to try the other pills the current doctor says might work better. They cost upward of $1,000 a month. We’ve suggested putting up the money for a month’s worth, just to see if they work, but he says this is pointless. It would be worse, he says, to know that something better was out there, and anyway what if they don’t work, and that’s another thousand bucks gone up in smoke?
It remains a remote but real possibility, even now, that he does not have Parkinson’s. The first neurologist he saw, back in 2007, told him his shaking (then a barely noticeable tic) was a reaction to stress. He clung to this explanation for years, because he thought it meant he could blame his condition on the divorce. Of course, the diagnoses are not mutually exclusive: He may have Parkinson’s, but it may have been triggered or at least accelerated by his emotional distress. Which is to say it is possible that he thought himself into this hell. It is not possible for him to think himself back out.
* * *
—
He lives alone in the apartment that his nephew Michael bought for him in Sunrise, Florida, not long after the suicide attempt in 2013. It’s a small one-bedroom in a development near his sisters and his parents. My sister and I pay the maintenance and dues on it, a fact of which he is unaware. When he was young, he and his friend Steve used to drive past this development and joke to each other that no matter how far they fell in their lives, they’d only know they hit bottom if they ended up there. In fact, there are far worse places to live than the Sunrise Lakes Apartments, which are modest—even a little shabby—but basically comfortable. Still, the place was for them the very incarnation of failure. Now they both live there. Steve lives with his ailing father, who at some point a few years back took out a reverse mortgage on the apartment, so whenever he dies Steve will become homeless. Steve lost a leg to diabetes while he was in prison for some kind of financial fraud. He works at a phone bank now. Dad is, of course, too sick to work. They are each the other’s oldest friend. They talked on the phone nearly every day for most of my life. Dad wrote to Steve all the time while he was in prison—long letters about anything and everything, to keep him busy and give him hope. Now that Steve is out, they are in closer proximity to each other than ever before in their lives, and they both have oceans of free time. But they rarely talk on the phone anymore, and they never get together. I don’t think that they could bear it.
* * *
—
In the months leading up to his suicide attempt, my father often spoke of feeling “used up,” “exhausted,” “hopeless,” “tired of life.” I understood my role as that of the dutiful refuter, arguing that things were different from how he saw them, or at least bound to change. Since his suicide attempt, I no longer argue. Now I hear him out, validate what he’s feeling, commiserate to the degree that I am able, and then try to shift the focus of the conversation toward concrete actions we might take to improve his situation. Usually, there are none he will accept. His sisters could come by more often; we could hire someone, maybe; maybe we could afford that. Some version of it. Maybe we could figure out a way. But he doesn’t want anyone in his space. He’s very firm on this point. And it’s true that I cannot imagine him allowing someone—me, my aunts, a stranger—to help him eat, or dress, or use the bathroom. He has never had an ounce of vanity but he has always had a massive, killing pride. Were he to lose his last vestige of self-sufficiency, his martyrdom to his own loneliness, would he even be him anymore? What is he, after all, if not this willful self-destruction? Would ripping back this last veil of his autonomy, flimsy as it is, finally move things forward, force some kind of palliative change, or would it be the ultimate indignity, destroying him once and for all? Or would it not matter? Given that he’s going to die, sooner than later, and of this illness, why not let him do it his own way, on his own terms, however deranged those terms may seem from the outside—in other words, to anyone who isn’t him?
I don’t mean suicide. I mean letting him live his life, whatever’s left of it, the way he wants to live it.
* * *
—
Maybe I’m thinking about this in entirely the wrong terms: emotion, will, philosophy, belief. Perhaps I should be thinking in medical-legal language: indigent, disabled, power of attorney. At what point does my presumption of his right to self-determination become itself a form of negligence, of harm?
* * *
—
And who says it will be sooner than later? How could I possibly know that? And when I say “this illness” do I mean Parkinson’s or depression? Do I mean poverty? Capitalism? America? He is being killed by the healthcare system at least as much as by bad choices or bad genes. What name will I give his death if he gets one of his dizzy spells and falls down in the shower or on a flight of stairs?
* * *
—
I am never more my father’s son than in the way I turn these questions over—point counterpoint subpoint, this way that way, every possible argument arguable—and endlessly. There are no such things as conclusions here. As decisions. When does a willingness to treat a complex issue with the depth and delicacy it warrants descend into Hamlet-like dithering? The form and fact of the question embody the spirit of what it is asking, thus rendering it unanswerable. The question is designed to forestall all action but further consideration of the question. In this way the question is answered: Time decides.
* * *
—
Dad and I can talk for hours. In person or on the phone, our conversations have always been marathons. Two hours is usual; three is not unheard-of. We can talk about anything. He loves to tell old stories, and to hear the minutest details of what’s going on in my life. He taught me to be a storyteller, and so I tell him stories: make epic and opera of some student I held after class, some conversation I had with an editor. In one way, these sessions are a kind of charity on my part. I know that all the good news I have to give him about my own career (however tentative or overblown) will carry him for days. But of course I enjoy the attention, the laser-focused love-hot attention; I can never tell him enough about myself and I am the hero of every story that I tell. I come to both crave and resent this dynamic, which I view as unchangeable, though it is of my own invention. It feels like childhood. Thirty, thirty-two, thirty-four years old, answering the equivalent of “What did you do in school today?” for the length of a feature film.
I try to call him once a week, but a week becomes two weeks, three weeks. I tell myself I’m storing up stories for him, which is true, but also I’m exhausted. I’m sick of performing a happiness I don’t always feel, and sick of playing his sin-eater. If I take a pause the empty space in the conversation will be filled with his pain and sorrow, which neither of us wants. His depression is always fighting for a w
ay in. A question like “How are you?” can easily open the floodgates, send us down the dark hole of the divorce and his ruined life and ruined body and how tired he is of everything until he is sobbing into the phone telling me how badly he wants to die and he knows he shouldn’t be telling me this and he’s so sorry to burden me but who else is there to tell, there is no one else, no one else to tell (though of course he’s saying all the same things to my sister): I didn’t mean to bring all this up but once I start I don’t know how to stop, Justin can you please say something let’s just talk about something, say something, change the—
“I submitted a story to The Paris Review.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing yet. It’ll probably come to nothing. But they usually write me back pretty quickly, so I feel like I’ve got their attention.”
“That must be good, right? How many people can say that?”
“Yeah, definitely good, but I mean just by the numbers it’s a long shot, so—”
“But you’re in the running.”
“Yeah.”
“So that’s great then. And what’s The Paris Review exactly? Do they pay well? Is it in French? You don’t know French.”
“I don’t know French.”
* * *
—
Lately I’m lucky if I can keep Dad on the phone for an hour. He shakes too much to hold it or to get his headphones on, so he puts it on speaker but he has to keep moving so he can’t always stay by where he set it on the table. He paces constantly. Something about movement, using his body, helps mitigate the spasms. Less and less as time goes on, but some. He tells me he’s worn a track into the carpet. He basically never sleeps so his mind is always fried—add it to the list of what’s been ruined. He doesn’t have the focus to read a book or article, probably couldn’t sit still long enough to get through it anyway. He repeats himself, his pain litany having long since become repertory. He always has the TV on: CNBC during market hours, MSNBC or CNN after the closing bell, never Fox. But lately he’s having a harder time following the news.
Riding with the Ghost Page 4