Chainsaws in the quiet in anticlimatic

The first memory I have of my dad was in autumn, when I was three years old, the day the muffler fell off of his ancient piece of shit Ford pickup on the way to collect wood. It was a 70s era pickup, with an old fashioned radio and a near-shattered windshield- like someone had hit it with a giant hammer at some point but didn’t completely knock it out. BOOM! Losing the muffler was a jarring experience, I recall, and I remember looking at it laying in the middle of the road as we kept driving. My dad just reached around back and cracked another road beer, turning up the Johnny Cash to compensate for the noise.

It was a beautiful day in my memory; bright and cool. The dirt road ran straight, slowly climbing a hill. Both sides of the road had wide areas of grass before transitioning into forest, so the light was absolutely pure. After the hill plateaued, a two-track on the right became our road, crossing the small river of yellow grass before meandering into a pine forest. There we stopped, and while my dad worked to fell trees with a chainsaw and cut them into manageable pieces, I sat in the bed of the truck with the plastic guard for the blade and pretended to cut up my own logs with it.

That road has never been far from where I live, but somehow, for some reason, I never returned to that area until yesterday. Today there was a visitation at the church with a prayer service, and tomorrow is the proper funeral. Feels like having two funerals, though for some reason I’ll need a suit tomorrow, but flip-flops were just fine today. I am over funerals. My dad makes the 5th one of someone dear to me in 3 years. A suicide from an old friend, a stroke, old age, another stroke, and finally my dad- another suicide.

The last time I saw him he had just been talked down from his first near attempt. He was washing his hands in the sink and I interrupted it to force a hug on him. It was the first time we had hugged in a long while, and he wouldn’t let me go. He was crying. Squeezing, and slapping me on the back, squeezing and slapping me on the back. Eventually we half broke the hug, standing one-arm in one-arm looking at each other with our faces inches apart patting each other on the back. He was smiling through tears. I could have kissed him. After a few moments he pulled me back for hug round two and more crying. I put all the love I had for him in that hug, and I could feel him putting the same back on me. After that we talked for a bit, then small talked for a bit more, and I left. The next day he drove up to the lake cabin with my mom and mowed the grass. She fell asleep reading a book, and he hanged himself in the garage.

He had a bad case of Lyme disease and a history of poor mental health; obsessive negative thoughts. He was convinced he was dying of cancer, though the endless bevy of tests he had leading up to it painted a picture of good health. It’s not how he felt though, and I get the impression that he couldn’t live with it any longer. Or maybe he sensed he was on the cusp of being put in a bed for the rest of his days and wanted to get ahead of it. He wasn’t much of a talker, and didn’t leave any kind of note, so it’s up for speculation. Not much of a talker at all, but a doer? One hell of a doer, let me tell you.

I am so sad for him I do not feel as though I can bare it. The grief in general- for me, for him, for my family- is so large right now. I hold all the gifts he could have possibly given me, including being a capable man that he could be proud of; strong, independent, and unrelenting in the face of tactical adversity, or so I like to think. There is not much else he could have taught me, and not much left that he could do that I couldn’t, yet his absence makes me feel like a frightened child again- like I am going to wake from a nightmare and want to call out to him to make me feel safe, but nothing but stillness will be there to cradle me. Beyond the fear of the unknown in this new world in which, for the first time, he isn’t out there somewhere with his calm and reassuring presence, there is still the grief of the present, and awareness of grief in the future. He always made me eggs and bacon on christmas morning, even just this last year. I have a habit of arriving early, and he had a habit of waking early, so it became our tradition. It’s been three days since I’ve seen him, and it’s summer. How am I going to manage myself come November?

With so much grief, I don’t even know where to begin. So I decided to begin at the beginning. I bought a road beer at a gas station in Cross Village and drove back to the place we used to cut wood when I was a kid. The forest had moved since then, pinching the road now and blocking the golden sunlight I remember. The two-track was still there, though it was barely used, as a large mound of dirt was placed to block its path just inside the tree line. I parked, and walked a bit, until I found the moss covered stumps of trees that had been felled by my dad, with me nearby, in another world in another time. I drank half the beer and left the rest on one of the stumps. First stop of many to come to share a reverie with his ghost.

Last updated June 06, 2020