Reluctant Happiness, Resilient Joy

I didn’t want to save you, Papa, I hope you know that. On that beautiful summer day, August bursting into September with all the fanfare of goldenrod, I was truly happy. I ran up your cracked steps, skipping the silver lines like a child mindful of my mother’s back, feeling lighter than I had in years.

I was about to tell you that you were going to be a grandfather, that Julian and I were going to move to your neighborhood, that you would be able to come over for barbecues and pool days and first toddling steps. 

I was about to tell you that if you wanted to, you could retire from the tedious masonry you had done my entire life, the work that slumped your shoulders and bit at your joints. In my naive mind I was running into your house with a new chapter open in my hands, pages crisp and unwritten and splendid to erase anything that had happened before, any parts of the story that we all might want to forget. 

When I found you in the kitchen, slumped over the kitchen table with the snowfall of pills scattered on your stained mahogany table that you made with your bare hands when I was ten, I wanted to run right back out the door, pretend I hadn’t seen anything so it wouldn’t be real. I stood, frozen, staring at the back of your head, at the splay of your hands on the table, the countless pills. I wondered that if I left now, there might still be time for me to get to the bank before they closed. 

Then your shoulders moved slightly, and resignation fell over me, a second before the adrenaline hit, and I was dialing 911, and lifting your face up to press my cheek in front of your mouth and nose, desperately feeling for the whisper of breath.

When the ambulance came I had moved you onto the floor, and every five minutes I was pressing my mouth to yours, pinching your nose, and frantically blowing air into your lungs. When the paramedics took over with their tubes and bags and stretcher, I leaned against the wall and closed my eyes. I’m sure they thought I was relieved, that the tears that fell from behind my tightly closed lashes were tears of fear and gratitude. I would sooner die myself than tell them that they were grief, grief and regret and guilt. 

“I’m sorry, Papa,” I whispered into the empty house once the paramedics left, after I declined to ride in the ambulance with them, promising I would follow close behind. “I hope you can forgive me.”

Remember when I was fifteen and I hated you? Mama had just left us, off to marry the handsome car salesman with the white teeth and fake smile, who said I would be just the cutest flower girl, even though I was about a decade too old for that and would sooner have paraded in my underwear in front of the entire boys basketball team at my school. 

What I was doing sure wasn’t too far off from that though- I was on to my fifth boyfriend of sophomore year, and you noticed. I’m sure you tried to be tactful about it, but when you insisted I bring Jasper home for your inspection before we went to the skatepark together, I was convinced that your sole purpose had become to ruin my life. 

Looking back through the far clearer lens of adult retrospect, I know you were trying your best, that everything had crumbled down around you, and yet you were still trying to keep the roof strong and dry over my head.

To your credit, you never did let me see you cry, although I’m sure you did. You did lose your temper with me on multiple accounts, once going so far as to rip all of my precious posters off the walls of my room and shred them, leaving them in a heaping pile on the floor for me to find when I came home hours after my curfew. I told you I hated you that time, stormed into your bedroom that still smelled like Mama’s rose perfume and screamed that you were the worst father in the world, and that I wished you had left instead of Mama.

You had looked me right in the eyes, your indignant, broken hearted daughter with your ex- wife’s face and your stubborn mouth, and told me that sometimes you wish you had left too. 

Neither of us was perfect, but I couldn’t forgive you for that for the longest time. I justified my own cruel words by saying that I was still a kid, whereas you were an adult, and should be able to stop the venom from falling off your tongue. It wasn’t until I became an adult and realized that the only difference between child and adult is years, which sometimes can just mean more time to lose your way. 

I don’t think I really stopped hating you until I left for college. I remember feeling an almost crushing sense of freedom my first night in the dorms, that was nearly indistinguishable from the panic that I felt the second night.

It was strange to know that you weren’t two doors down and to the left, that if someone broke into my room with an ax or knife or some other terrifying figment of my imagination, you would not be able to jump in front of me just in the nick of time. I never saw you as my hero, like some girls do their fathers, but knowing that you could be one was a comfort that I didn’t know I was so reliant on until I no longer had at arms reach. 

Of course, you were only a phone call away, but my stubborn nature kept me ignoring your calls and texts, reminding myself that there were no consequences for doing so anymore. Finally, after a week, I called you back. I told myself it was out of resentful daughterly obligation, but the second I heard your voice on the other end, familiar and hoarse, I burst into tears.

“Daddy,” I had said to you, “I miss you.”

It’s ironic the number of words it took in my adolescence to create such deep wounds between you and me, but it has always amazed me to take only three to begin the healing. 

Over the following years, we tentatively found eachother again, although there was always the slightest edge, the knowledge that once, it had seemed that our love was conditional. 

When you walked me down the aisle, and gave me away into Julian’s loving arms, I could see the fear in your eyes. Before we walked through the doorway, you stood in front of me, straightening my flower crown and avoiding my eyes. I remember how old I thought you looked suddenly, your hair all gray and your hands knotted, but your back still firm and straight. Your eyes seemed milky, and for a minute I felt a flash of concern, until I saw that it was tears, held fiercely back by decades of masculine strength. 

“June bug,” you had started to say, your old pet name for me taken off an attic shelf, dust and years falling away. 

“Papa?” I had asked you, concerned, wondering what admission was coming. It was a hard day for you I knew, my mother sitting next to you with her husband, their teenage son an unwilling buffer. I was also determined not to let anything ruin this perfect day.

“June bug,” you had said in a rush, “Don’t forget about your old man, now that you’re all grown up.”

I had laughed, too relieved and excited to recognize the heart wrenching fear in his voice, the hesitance to walk me down an aisle and leave me at the end of it, willingly let me go.

“Of course I won’t, Papa,” I had said, “That would be impossible.”

I thought about those words as I sat on the floor in your house, listening to the sirens take you away and staring at the evidence in front of me that maybe I did forget about you after all. 

The first thing I said to you in the hospital was the exact thing that the doctor told me not to.

“Why did you do it?” I asked, the minute I saw you laying there, pale and stoic and with empty, empty eyes.

I didn’t recognize your eyes, and that made me scared, scared and angry and desperate to shock life back into them. I felt like a teenager again, enraged at your lack of emotion, your refusal to talk about Mama leaving us. All I wanted then was to hit you, to make you show me any sign at all that you cared enough about me and about life to get mad too.

You cleared your throat and looked away from me, stubborn mouth to the wall.

I sat down beside you on the hospital bed, clutched your cold hands in mine.

“Papa,” I whispered, “Please tell me why.”

Finally you turned to me, and your eyes were filled with tears. I had seen you tear up before at my wedding, and once when you thought I wasn’t looking, right after Mama left, but never did they spill over. You were too Spartan, too willful.

On the hospital bed, the tears fell down your cheeks and left silver tracks behind, evidence of your body’s betrayal. 

“Why, Papa?” I pleaded, but the only answer was the tears and the slow, silent shake of your defeated head.

I called my mother, and told her what happened, out of obligation, and perhaps the smallest bit of hope that she would finally remember to be my mother again, and tell me what to do.

“He did what?” She exclaimed into the phone, in the background I could hear a Pilates instructor talking, and my mother’s breathing was heavy and rhythmic. It made perfect sense that she wouldn’t pause her work out just because she found out that her ex husband tried to commit suicide.

“Jesus Christ, Julia,” she said, “I can not believe that. What on Earth was he thinking?”

I was unsure how to respond, but she wasn’t through.

“He is far too old to be acting this juvenile. For Heaven’s sake, he was about to be able to retire, who knows what sort of impact this little stunt will have on his 401k if he has to miss work for recuperation.”

I hung up the phone on my mother; that time it was me who was walking away from her.

You still weren’t speaking to me when we left the hospital. You spoke to the hospital staff, passed enough tests and evaluations to be allowed to leave home with a new rainbow of pharmaceuticals that should ideally keep you from wanting to take more than your required dosage ever again. 

I was convinced that you hated me, that you couldn’t bring yourself to speak to the person who had kept you from the place it seemed you had been desperate to go. It was like finding out that someone who you think has always wanted to go to Italy actually has a lifelong dream of seeing the volcanoes of Hawaii, and just when you think you are about to give them villas and fresh mozzarella, you find out that they have just finalized their one way ticket to the Big Island, and they already have flowers in their hair and a golden tan. 

“Do you want to go to Hawaii?” I asked you as I wheeled you out of the doors of the hospital, a requirement that I was shocked you did not protest against. 

You stared at me blankly, like I was speaking a foreign language, and I turned away, the guilt biting at my chest so hard it took my breath away. 

We stood on the side of the road, waiting to cross. The cars flew by in front of us, and I saw an opening and stepped forward, forced to pause when I felt your hand come down to find mine, and squeeze it tightly as we walked into the road. 

I felt your rough palm against mine and remembered being four years old, waiting beside you to cross the busy road in front of the YMCA where I had taken swimming lessons. I remembered the way the wind seemed to go into my ears, and I felt cold in places I didn’t know I could feel. 

“Hold my hand, June bug,” you had said, and obediently I had taken it, slipped my baby hand into your huge one, confident that I would be safe as long as I didn’t let go.

“Crossing the road is certain uncertainty,” you had told me as we marched across, my little legs straining to keep up with your broad steps. “It’s acknowledging that it's an imperfect world, that there is never a guarantee of safety, but it isn’t an option to just stay where you are.” 

I hadn’t understood a word of what you said, but I had nodded sagely, because I knew I didn’t have to understand, you would show me the way.

Outside of the hospital when your hand closed over mine I felt an immediate rush of warmth and protection, and then I found myself suddenly cold, wondering which of us he was trying to keep safe. If this time, it wasn’t me he was worried about. 

I offered to stay at your house, but you refused, breaking your silence towards me to politely but firmly walk me to the door, and leave me with a perfunctory hug that made me wonder if you had somehow gotten smaller, your spine pressed closer against your skin, age sneaking in when I had been preoccupied. 

I did leave, but I came over every day, bringing food, Redbox movies, and records of Bob Dylan and Rod Stewart for you to listen to. You had taken a month off of work at your doctor’s insistence, and I knew you were going crazy wandering around the too big house, your eyes unfocused from the medicine. I hoped that listening to the music you cared for would wake you back up, and maybe, selfishly, allow me to get an answer from you eventually.

And I needed an answer. 

Every day I would stand on your doorstep and hyperventilate, praying that when I opened the door I wouldn't find you on the floor. I thought I hid my fear well, but one afternoon a week after the incident, you swung the door open while I was regaining control of my breathing on the front step. I stood there, caught unaware, and you stared at me. Your eyes were different since you had started taking the medicine they gave you, but I thought I saw a flash of your old fire deep in the unfocused blue.

Finally, after a long moment of you taking me in-your terrified daughter with her armful of offerings and her brave face fallen down over her shoulders, all the fear left out in the open-you spoke.

“I figured I was done,” you said softly, “I didn’t think there was a reason anymore.”

It was not the story I had expected, but somehow it made sense.

I remembered being sixteen, and sitting on my bed, holding my razor to my wrists and imagining what it would be like to just not be anymore. I didn’t want to die, but I didn’t want to keep on living either. In my memory I was about to do it, completely unafraid and almost excited to find out what was after all the absolute shit I was in. The metal was cool against my skin when you knocked on my door, said that dinner was ready. You opened it too, which you never usually did, having borne the brunt of my indignant shouts too many times. I shoved the razor under my pillow, but for a split second, I thought you saw, and I froze, sure you would say something. You didn’t, just told me to hurry, cold food wasn’t worth eating. 

Cold food wouldn’t have been worth eating, but the soup you had made that night certainly was. I will always remember the way it warmed me from the inside out, each mouthful bringing feeling back into my body where I never knew I had lost it.

On your front porch, looking at your sorrowful face that had turned introspective, I knew you were remembering that day too. 

“I suppose it was payback then, huh?” you finally asked, and your tone was at last something other than flat pleasantries, although I couldn’t tell if it’s an angry edge, or something else, something almost humorous. 

“Not payback,” I said, “Paying you back."

We went on a picnic, a few weeks later, right before you were supposed to go back to work. It was two days after you flushed all the medicine they gave you down the toilet, claiming that you were sick of seeing the world through a protective screen door, that you needed to be able to feel the metaphorical bite of mosquitoes coming in to remind you that, against your best efforts, you were still alive.

We sat on the hillside, you and me and the baby inside me, who almost never had a grandfather. You turned your face to the afternoon sun, and I wondered if I had ever seen you seem so peaceful. 

“Are you happy, Papa?” I asked. 

“June bug,” you said, “I woke up this morning feeling reluctant happiness, maybe even joy. Joy is damned resilient, you know, always remember that.”

I tipped my head back to see the sky with you, and felt the joy flow through my veins from my own resilient and beating heart.