Inside Out(17)

MY DAD WAS now living with Morgan, who’d turned twelve, in Oceanside, California. Freddy and I went to see them for Christmas. Pulling up to the building where they were living in a small, depressing, nondescript apartment, my heart sank. My father looked terrible, as bad as the setting. There are some people you can look at and not really see their pain. On my dad it was unmistakable—in his bloated face, his slumped posture, and his vacant eyes.

I remember sitting at the kitchen table on Christmas Day feeling the emptiness of us spending the holiday with just my dad and my little brother, split off from the rest of the family. Freddy—who, I realize now, was only a few years younger than my dad—was socially awkward in general, and this setting was no exception. He was a classic quiet Minnesotan with Scandinavian roots: taciturn, pragmatic, recessive. It’s not like he didn’t care about me, he was just inexpressive. I was the only one at that table scrambling to connect.

As a present, my dad gave me a random poster—something completely impersonal that had nothing to do with me or, for that matter, him. He was drinking heavily and so was fairly out of it, and I worried about what kind of care my dad, in his defeated state, could be providing for Morgan. I chatted nervously about the different things I had going on, self-consciously aware that it was uncomfortable for my dad to look at me, that he didn’t know what to say.

The most painful thing for me had not been finding out that Danny wasn’t my biological father, but finding that he was incapable of reaching out to reassure me that he loved me regardless. Now, I wish that I had reached out to him—grabbed him, looked him in the eyes, told him that he was my dad from the start and would be my dad till the end, and that I loved him.

Not long after I returned to Los Angeles, I got a call that Danny was in the hospital. His liver had ruptured. He tried to drive himself to the emergency room but didn’t quite make it; they found him passed out in the car—leaning on the horn, fortunately—at the entrance to the hospital, and rushed him inside. He recovered from that episode, but a doctor informed him that he was an alcoholic with pancreatitis and needed to stop drinking immediately. My dad was so furious at that doctor he threatened to use everything in his power to ruin him if the doctor put that in his medical record. He must have been pretty intimidating, because the doctor rescinded his diagnosis. The doctor also said he couldn’t eat red meat anymore, so Dad immediately opened an account at the local butcher shop, Morgan later told me, and he started eating triple the amount of red meat he had before. Everything he was told not to do, he did it in spades. He was slowly trying to kill himself. He told me many times that he wanted to die. When I think of what it must have been like for Morgan as a twelve-year-old hearing from his own father how much he wanted his life to end, it breaks my heart.

Back in New Mexico a year later, it was Morgan who found Dad in his garage, slumped over the steering wheel of his car with the engine running, after he committed suicide. He was thirty-six.

When I got the call, I burst into tears. I was sitting at the dining room table with Freddy. He didn’t come over to hold me or comfort me. He didn’t tell me that he loved me and that everything would be okay. He sat still in his seat and said calmly, “There’s no point in crying; there’s nothing you can do now. It’s not going to change anything.”


THE FUNERAL IN Roswell was a nightmare. Instead of shared grief, there were warring camps—my dad’s family and my mom. My parents had spent the weekend before Dad died together, and my dad’s eight siblings were convinced that Ginny was somehow to blame for his death. There were various theories, ranging from speculation that she had driven him to it, to the idea that she’d left him drunk in his car knowing what would happen, all the way up to the suspicion of out-and-out foul play, with my dad’s family threatening to turn Ginny in to the police. It got very, very ugly. DeAnna remembers that even her husband, my uncle George, was convinced that Ginny was responsible.

The truth is that my dad had probably planned his own death to the last detail. His blood alcohol level was so high that his death had to be ruled an accident—he was too drunk for the insurance company to label it a suicide. Consequently, they were obliged to make a small payout, which Dad left to Morgan. I guarantee you my dad had done his research and knew precisely how much he had to drink for all of that to happen. It was his final scam, one for the road. But it was also, obviously, a way of ending the pain he was carrying, which had become too much to bear. He felt he had failed us all, and I think that, on some level, he really believed he was doing the best thing for everyone.

Meanwhile, over at my grandmother’s house, my mother’s sisters half-heartedly rallied around Ginny, trying to show some solidarity. But my mom was in full-blown victim mode, crying uncontrollably and inserting herself into the center of the unfolding drama. She tried to insist that Danny be dressed in the suit she picked out for the wake, but my dad’s sister Margie wanted him in the brown suit she’d selected. It escalated from there: Margie went over to my dad’s house and took everything of value and hid it from Ginny. The funeral home was providing cars for the family, and my mother demanded to be in one. His siblings were furious that she’d even ask: She wasn’t his wife anymore, what was she even doing there? And so on. It felt like my dad’s family’s anger at my mother was spilling over onto me, as if I was an extension of Ginny. (In fact, the only substantial interaction I remember having with her the whole time I was there was a fight about what I was going to wear.) Everybody knew that Danny wasn’t my biological father, and suddenly it felt like that mattered enormously. Do I even belong in this family? Maybe I was being hypersensitive, but I felt unwelcome and uncomfortable. Is it okay that I’m here? Not here here, at this funeral, but here on this earth. Is it okay that I was even born?