Epitaphs

There is, I suppose, a good side and a bad side to suffering from insomnia. The good news is that it allows you to see more of the world than you normally would; the bad news is that it gives that many more hours in which to think. When you get tired enough, when you fall into that zone where your mind fogs with fatigue but the body just refuses to stop moving, those things that you keep so carefully boxed away have an annoying habit of breaking free of their hiding places, dreary ghosts rising from drearier graves.

Momentous events have a unique way of searing themselves into the brain in a way that the moment is forever preserved in amber in a startling clarity. An older generation than mine, for example, can vividly recall where they were and what they were doing when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. An even older generation can recall, in minute detail, the same thing about Pearl Harbour. For ourselves, we have 9/11. And I can recall the exact moment at which my life changed course, when the person I was meant to be quitely slipped off the stage to be replaced by the man I became.

But while that instant in time is preserved in my memory, unchangeable, other things, equally important to me, have perversely become faded with the passage of time, somehow unclear. Bits and pieces that lie just beyond touch, will'o'wisps that dart from your grasp even as you reach out for them, that lose their meaning the harder you try to make sense of them. I remember my father precisly because I can't remember him, at least not in the details rather than the kind of distant comfort he has become. It has been thirty-three years since he died and, the farther removed from that day I have become, the farther removed he has likewise become from me. His face, his voice, the man he was have all quietly faded from what was a living, breathing, feeling reality to a kind of warm, distant sense of ill-defined warmth, more of a gestalt than anything else. Perhaps that is just the way of these sorts of things, or perhaps it is more the result of some shortcoming of mine as a human being; after all, they say that Time wounds all heels.

Yet there are memories that remain, and that is perhaps the cruellest thing of all. My father may have been consigned to oblivion, but he has not quite crossed over, in my mind, to obscurity. Not yet, at least, not until I pass from this world myself into the darkness waiting beyond. That, I think, will be the day that my father truly dies indeed, and may he finally find peace at last.

My father was a large man, built like a Sherman tank, and he really did bear more than a passing resemblance to that venerable vehicle. He was a man of infinite patience and infinite kindness, perpetually surrounded by a cloud of sweet-smelling pipe smoke. I can remember how safe I felt when I was a toddler and he picked me up in his arms, knowing with the certainty of a child that as long as he was there, no harm could ever come to me. In the apartment we lived in then, there was a cartoon map of Paris hung on one wall of the kitchen, and every morning before he left for work my father would pick me up in front of that map, point out the landmarks, and have me repeat the names in French after him. At night, when he was home early enough, he would read Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows to me until I fell asleep.

Down the street from that apartment, right next to where The Water Tower Place now stands, there was a playground surrounded by a tall, cedar fence. I can remember warm, sunny Sunday afternoons running and skipping down the sidewalk to that playground as my father followed behind, whistling Lili Marlene as we walked, a haunting melody for what is now a haunted time.

My father was a psychologist, catering to both the rich and poitically powerful and to anyone else who walked through his door. Part of the week, he practiced his art in Indiana, and the rest of the week in his office on Michigan Avenue. It seems to me that the older I got, the less I actually saw of him, for a typical work day for him began at 9 AM and ended somewhere around 11 PM. When I was younger, before my parents started exiling me to summer camp in Michigan, there were times when I would accompany him to his office in Hammond, Indiana. Those were days where I would be ensconced in a back room of his suite, loaded down with plastic models and a TV to keep me busy, his secretary checking in on me every once in a while. He and I would have lunch at the local lunch counter, and there was a really good Chinese restaurant where we would have dinner. At night, after he'd seen the last patient of the day, we would return to the hotel where we would have late-night sandwiches and I would fall asleep, finally, to re-runs of old Buster Crabbe Flash Gordon serials.

To say that I was spoiled as a child would be a vast understatement, but to truly describe it would make spoiled children everywhere green with envy. My father doted on his children and, I suppose, as a way of making up for all the hours he spent at work, he was always buying my brother and I toys. Every time he came back from his office in Indiana, he had gifts for us. Some of my earliest memories are of models that he somehow found the time to build and meticulously detail and paint, that I would find placed on my dresser when I woke up in the morning. Every birthday and Christmas, I could depend on getting, among all the other presents, an electric train set. Of course, I never got to play with those electric trains because my father was busy playing with them, always with the excuse that he and his architect friend were going to build a really neat layout for me to play with. Oh, well, it's the thought that counts, right?

Between about 1965 and 1972, we lived in a large house in the Lincoln Park area that had a coach house out back. When we moved out of that house, my parents had to hire a dump truck to haul away all the old toys my brother and I no longer played with and that had been stored there. Viewed in retrospect, Christmas for my brother and I was something of an obscenity. My parents would have us come up with a list of what we wanted, and then they would go out and buy those things. Then, usually on Christmas Eve, they would take us out to our favourite stores and turn us loose. When I think about that now, I am staggered.

My father had a love affair with cars. He was one of those people who traded in the "old" car and bought a new one every year. Cadillac made a mint off him, as did Mercedes, which was my mother's car of choice. He also had a 1933 and a 1936 Jaguar touring coupes, and Sunday afternoons he could be found tinkering with them, taking parts from the engine of one to get the other one running. Being a good city boy, I have memories of the family piling into one of those cars and taking long drives out into the counrtyside in the Fall, going apple-picking and antique hunting and just looking at the riot of colours as the trees changed.

At some point, I don't remember exactly when, we stopped taking vacations as a family, and Spring Break became the province of my mother, who would haul my brother and I off to West Palm Beach to rub shoulders with the likes of the Kennedys. But Christmas break belonged to my father. The day after Christmas, until my brother was old enough to go off to Aspen on his own, my father would take he and I and our best friends off to Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan for an eight-day skiing trip. As his life ran swiftly on towards its end, those are the only vacations I can remember him taking.

My father was also something of a football fan. He had season tickets to both the Bears and to Northwestern, always enough for him and my brother and I and our best friends. In the Fall, when my brother was playing high school football, my father would take those Saturday mornings off from work to go and watch. I remember how pround he was of my brother, and I remember how proud he was of me when I started playing football, too. He always made it a point to take off from work to watch my football, basketball and baseball games. I wish he had been able to see more of them.

He may have worked six days a week, but Sundays always belonged to the family, as did Wednesday evenings and Friday nights. My father would cook a Sunday brunch fit to literally feed an army. I'd wake up in the mid-morning to the smells of bacon, eggs, pancakes, waffles and French toast, and there was always fresh-squeezed orange juice for us and coffee for them. Then he'd tinker with his cars for a bit and, in the afternoon, he'd gently call for me, and take me out to a hobby shop.

Wednesday nights, he would always come home for a sit-down family dinner. On Friday nights, he would take me and my best friend out to dinner, and then to a movie. He never missed one of those nights, ever. Something that I took for granted, never realizing how much it would hurt when it was lost.

By 1972, we lived about a block and a half from my school. Every morning, my father would wake me up, then cook breakfast and walk me to school. I remember one day, shortly before he died, when we stood in front of the school building and he looked at me and said, "I suppose you're getting too old to kiss your father goodbye." I remember being shocked by that, or, rather, that he might think that, because I couldn't ever imagine a time when I would be embarrassed to give my father a peck on the cheek. Sometimes, I think, he may have known something that I did not. Or, perhaps, he was just acknowledging the possible end of an era as I embarked on those truly awkward teenage years.

I spoke to my father every night on the phone, just before I went to bed. That last conversation I had with him haunts me to this day, the words as clear as the moment at which they were spoken. There was a heaviness in his voice that night, a weight that transcended fatigue and elevated itself to something else, and when I asked him what was wrong, the words sounded like they were coming from the grave. "I'm just tired, bone tired." Such an innocuous phrase, but when I hung up, I knew with a certainty I can't explain that I would never talk to him again.

The next morning, my life changed, unalterably and forever.

Thirty-three years, and the details fade and blur. If he were still alive today, he would be 90 years old and, while I'm certain he wouldn't possibly have been able to keep the same schedule, I also don't doubt for a moment that he would still be practicing. That was just the kind of man he was. Nor do I doubt for a moment that I would not be the same man I am now.

I sometimes wonder what my father would think of me, of what I have done. We were not a military clan but every male member of my family - with the exception of my brother - has served this country in uniform. From my nihilistic teenage years I grew to do the same thing, the first of my family to be an Officer and, like my father, I have seen the randomness of Fate claim life even as I hung my own in the balance. I have spent a lifetime wading through the blood and wreckage of others' lives, ignoring my own, because I saw broken people and knew that I could put them back together. I have tried to do the right things not because I expected any reward or gain from doing that, but simply because they were the right things to do. As one friend of mine once described me, "He's honest to a fault," and yet I fail to see how honesty can be a fault. Better by far a bad truth than a good lie.

And I wonder what he would say, were he able to see my life. Would he be proud of his youngest son, or bewildered by the sense of promise lost? Or, perhaps, it is just a vanity to believe that one generation actually learns from the mistakes of the previous one. I remember my father but, in some fundamental ways, I don't remember him, at least not as a person instead of a concept. He always used to say that the past should not dominate the present but that one day, out of so many days, has done exactly that. I don't know what he would say to that, but I do know I would be willing to pay any price to hear it.