My Father in Fragments
By William Thompson
I learned of my father’s death on the phone; he learned of his father's death on the radio. He told the story sometimes. He was nine years old. He was listening to the radio, and he heard that his dad, Percy Thompson, had died of cancer. He had to ask his mother if it was true.
It wasn’t much by way of a story. That’s the way it was for my father. He would tell you things, things about his past, about his life, but you had to ask for clarification again and again until the story was reduced to a few facts.
I didn’t usually receive such stories from my dad as I should have—with sympathy, with grace, or with the dignity such telling demanded. But I was a kid—too full of myself and my own life to appreciate or understand my father.
My mother said to me once, “Your dad tried hard to understand you and your sister as teenagers, but he just couldn’t. You were like aliens to him.” That didn’t make me feel much better.
The story of my grandfather’s death could have been a place where my dad and I connected—found some common ground, something to talk about. But it wasn’t. Too many things divided us—words, or the lack of words. There was the accident too. The accident divided us in important ways. That was partly his sense of guilt and desire not to see his children suffer, which is something I didn’t understand until much later.
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It was an event, the accident. A car crash at the top of a hill in the country—a crash that killed my cousin and left me totally blind and recovering in the hospital with a broken leg. But it was more than that—it became a noun laden with meaning; a reference point, an impact in the life of our family that rippled down through the years, affecting everyone in larger and smaller ways.
“It wasn’t just about you, you know,” my sister said to me, years later. We were on the phone. She and her husband had moved away two decades before. “It affected me too. But nobody bothered to ask if I was all right—if I was doing okay.”
I had to think about that. My sister said stuff like that to me. We were in our forties by that time. It took us that long to begin to learn how to talk to one another, and not really until after our father was dead—dead from an aortal aneurysm in 2005.
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He didn’t die right away, my dad—of course not. It took him two months to decide to leave. I had seen him a couple of days before he went into the hospital. My kids and I had visited the family home on the north side of town. He loved his grandchildren, and they had become a point of real commonality for my dad and me. He spent time with them, took them places, went to concerts, to plays, and to horse shows. He was a good grandpa, whatever he was as a father.
In the hospital, he was unreachable. Sitting beside his bed, first in the intensive care unit, and later on various wards, I already felt as though he had gone away, a man I never got to know. He seemed lucid from time to time, but never fully. He was in a hospital on the north side; I lived on the south side with my kids, so I often took a cab to visit. I was having my own trouble at that time—drinking too much and generally not having my shit together.
I wanted to ask him things—anything, but I no longer could. And maybe that’s what I didn’t let him do, or something he didn’t do well: tell us stories about himself as a kid, or his dad, or his mom.
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My grandmother died the summer I was sixteen—the same summer I was falling in love for the first time, as only a sensitive and extravagantly self-involved teenage boy can do. That’s a story I carry, even if I haven’t told it often.
And perhaps that’s what I mean. My parents married when he was twenty-eight and she nineteen. It still shocks me a little to think about that. But there must have been other women, other girls my dad must have known. He must have fallen in love for the first time too, had his heart broken by some long-haired, bright-eyed beauty who would not give him the time of day. These are things I don’t know about my dad. And maybe that’s the problem. The stuff I know about my dad is sometimes difficult for me to deal with and accept; the things I don’t know, the things he never told me, never talked about were perhaps the things that mattered more—those things that mattered to him.
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After my dad died, my mom was, of course, cleaning stuff out. Death necessitates such purging. She found, lying in a desk drawer, a collection of poems my dad had written. Poetry. No one could quite believe it. The only poetry I’d ever heard my dad recite was dirty limericks. I still can’t fathom it.
But those sheets of poems, chiefly about nature, spoke to my dad’s life that he kept from us. He was, in some important ways, a private man. It didn’t help that he was taciturn and not very articulate. He spoke in fragments, and he told stories in fragments, like the story of his dad, the story that should have been a place where we could bond.
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We buried him in Saskatchewan, my father, the man whose moods I spent my life negotiating, who made me work for every inch of closeness. He died in June, on a long evening of early summer, when the throaty calls of robins made the evening echo like a cathedral. For a few minutes after I hang up the phone, I am the only one in my family who knows my father is dead. Two weeks later, I am standing at the front of a church, speaking the eulogy, wooden floors and pews causing my voice to resonate through the sanctuary.
My dad loved trains. He pointed to trains on family holidays, he took us to visit the shunting yard near our house, and he and my brother worked endlessly on the model train in the basement.
My dad was often angry, often frustrated, but that part of the story won’t work for this expectant crowd. Instead, I frame my feelings around stories of my father’s love of trains, drawing together fragments into something more coherent. It’s the thing I think I know about my father.
The service ends, the bagpipes shrill, and the minister deposits a square wooden box into my arms. I almost fumble my white cane in my surprise.
“Here’s your dad,” says the minister.
The weight is unexpected—my father, now this box, turned ashes to ashes. And I think, It’s my turn to carry you.
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In July, seven of us pile into my dad’s van. We are driving to Saskatchewan, his childhood home. He is with the luggage, stowed in the back. My sister drives. She concentrates on the flat line of highway, fields of grain and canola to either side while my mother makes small talk. We skirt Saskatoon, the fast-food places, neon signs, and gas stations having little to do with the W.O. Mitchell country of my imagination.
We drive south, becoming lost in the prairie, a moving point of family dynamics in an expanse of flatness. My niece and nephew bicker. My daughter mediates—as I do, as I did. My brother is mostly quiet. I wonder what my eldest daughter is doing back at home.
Finally, we arrive in Moose Jaw, where we will bury my father. We are grateful for the hotel, settling into connecting rooms, an evening of TV and fast food ahead.
Next day, we visit my aunt, ninety-something and sharp as a tack. She and my dad corresponded for forty years. She is tiny and wizened, and my mother is the only one not a little surprised by this outspoken, elfin woman.
“We wrote letters, yes,” she says, answering my question. “I always told him he should get his arse out here to visit more often.”
She’s glad to see us, but I’m relieved when she tires. We pile out of the nursing home into the sun-dried afternoon. It’s time to bury my father.
We drive to the cemetery. It’s a quiet place of trees, green grass, and headstones—some clean-lined and new, others old and crumbling. My grandmother is here, so are my grandfathers: my dad’s dad, Percy Thompson; and my dad’s stepfather, the man I knew as Grandpa, another man I loved and followed around in my desperate desire to please.
The hole is just big enough to take the box. The minister, who doesn’t know us until he stands at the graveside, politely shaking hands, recites “ashes to ashes,” a funeral cliché that offers no comfort. Into the ground goes my dad. One by one, we murmur something and drop in handfuls of earth, and it’s over. The group breaks apart. We thank the minister and say goodbye.
I walk away. My daughter watches me. She has known my dad as I never have. She’s known him as a grandfather, and I think, for maybe the thousandth time, my god, he was a better grandpa than he was a dad. Both my daughters loved their grandpa, and he loved them in return, openly and fulsomely, and more demonstratively than any of his own children.
For me, the struggle not to drink is part of the inheritance from my dad. My kids never knew him as I did, and my drinking, my negativity, and my anger become the enactment of those things I couldn’t control then and can’t control now.
These memories are the pack of playing cards I lay out one by one, just as my dad did when he played solitaire at the end of the dining-room table, cigarette trailing smoke from the ashtray at his elbow. I repeatedly lay out each card, each memory of my dad, fitting them together, half-hoping for a new way to tell myself this story.
The accident that took my sight at the age of eleven was a boyhood trauma that altered my life. The death of my dad’s dad maybe didn’t change his life in the same way, but it was a boyhood trauma that also stayed with him his whole life. And now, I get to assemble and reassemble these fragments into a larger picture, one that I use to keep trying to understand this man, who, in some important ways, I never knew very well.
END