Do Not Seek Death

Death will find you.
-Dag Hammarskjold

Today is the anniversary of my father's death. I would not be thinking about it if my younger sister had not called yesterday and asked me what date our father had died. I could not remember and said it had to be sometime soon because I did remember that his body had been found on our older sister's birthday.

My father spent his life running away from things. He ran away from home and joined the Navy at sixteen. He ran away (went AWOL) many, many times while in the Navy. He ran away from his first wife. He ran away from is second wife, my mother. He ran away from us, his children. He ran away from his third family after it became apparent that he had never divorced my mother before remarrying again. Then finally, at the age of 46, he ran away from life.

That was not his first attempt at suicide, just the last. My first memory is linked to one of his attempts. It's not a conscious memory and I did not know it was there until my sister told me this story that our mother had told her.

When my mother was pregnant with my brother she and my father were living with my father's mother. One day my father was arguing with his mother and lost it. He struck both her and my mother and then forced them out of the house. My mother managed to grab my older sister and me on the way out. She and my grandmother stood outside the house listening to the sound of glass breaking. Over my grandmother's objections my mother went to the house next door and called the police. When the police arrived and entered the house they found it empty with every mirror broken. It seems my father had put his fist through them all before running away. They started searching for my father and found him lying in a nearby field. He had tried to kill himself.

As my sister told me this story I could feel my body tense up and my heart beat faster. I felt light headed and a sense of dread, anxiety, sorrow, and confusion washed over me. I thought, "Oh, God, I remember this," but the memory wasn't in my brain. It was in my body. I tried to think how old I would have been when this happened and, depending on how far alone my mother was in her pregnancy, I realized I could not have been more than eighteen-months-old.

There were many attempts after that but only a few stick in my memory. I remember walking home from school one day at the age of ten and seeing an ambulance parked in front of my house. The ambulance attendants were carrying a gurney with my father on it down the front steps. I knew in an instant what was happening and slowed down to a crawl, hoping my father and the ambulance would be gone before I reached home. The next memory was three years later. My father decide to try and kill himself while my mother was in the hospital having surgery. I remember saying to the policeman putting my brother, sisters, and me into a squadcar to take us to a foster home, "No, you don't understand. I can take care of them." I was the one who did not understand. There was no way that they were going to leave three children ages eleven, eight, and two in the care of their thirteen-year-old sister.

In all the attempts before the last one my father always made sure someone was around to find him before it was to late. On the day he died he checked into a room with a kitchenette in a cheap motel somewhere in Los Angeles, far away from his home near Seattle, Washington. Inside that room he got drunk, took pills, and turned on the oven gas. His body was found two days later.

When I heard my father was dead I said,"Good. He can't hurt anyone, including himself, any more," but now, I feel sorry for the poor son-of-a-bitch. Nobody deserves to die the way he did- spiritually lost, forgotten, and all alone.