An Untimely Death

I don't want to tell the story, and yet at times, I will if asked. My father and his untimely death at thirty-one, when I was only ten. This is what I tell myself as I sit next to a close friend, or colleague, who recounts a death in their family, a tragedy, a person killed, someone who's died of cancer perhaps. And there will be certain reactions to the story and assumptions. Sometimes pity.

"It was an accident," I begin. "A car accident?" they assume. But people are conditioned by that word — accident. I gather my strength because his death was not. I want to make the story known, but these are hidden things — facts, emotions, events — that I keep buried deep inside me since I was a young girl. And there are no more barriers, no need for reticence. The story can’t find a hiding anymore. And nothing in the past seems to represent an ideal image of my life now.

No one can guess, as I sit in my comfortable home, with every modern convenience around me, that the crossing this time in 1975 was going to be such an important event in my life. And yet to me, that memory barely exists; like it was omitted, forgotten and that is its virtue. Things happened, but they don’t yet have a center or direction. In the old black and white photograph of my father, no one knows its significance, and yet, all fathers are central to anyone's life. As for the photo albums, those spurious monuments to look at them once in a while, then I stuff them away in a drawer. An album.

My father was a soil scientist, a very good one. But he died in a very small town we had moved to in Wisconsin when we were still very young. He and my mother both came out of Madison, where I was born, to Rudolph to start a soil science business and help the crop farmers. He brought the three of us there. My twin sister, and my younger brother.

There we were, my family, struggling. My father, who having toyed with the idea of being artist, had been brought up by in an affluent family. His father also a soil scientist, had insisted he pursue science. I remember once drawing a plant, and my father, telling me there was more than green on a leaf. Showing me how to use hues of brown, red, and yellow on the picture. It’s true. Very strange, but I know now, it was because he'd also had a passion for art as well.

My esteemed father, a scientist with his college degree, his wealthy family, had been trying to begin his own business, but the truth was we lived in poverty. It was difficult also because he began the business with a partner who promptly killed himself before our arrival. And then there was the farmer who had deserted his property and left his animals to starve and die. My father had been alerted and tried to save the lambs. The lambs had been starved, and nearly died of pneumonia. He managed to save most of them with the help of a friend and dairy farmer who could keep them and later a vet. And then my mother, unhappy, knows this place isn’t what she had expected. My father took a second job. Driving trucks, delivering supplies, wood, and roofing. Heavy loads through rough frozen terrain.

Then one day he wasn’t there. The police came to the door. A neighbor had seen him lying underneath the truck behind our house. The neighbor had walked up to my father to help. My father had miscalculated the weight of the truck's pin and had laid underneath it to unpin it. It had fallen on his neck, killing him instantly. The police were alerted, and as my mother busily prepared us for church, she opened the door.

My mother shocked, rode in the ambulance with him, while we were sequestered to a neighbor's care. She never foresaw what would become of the three of us as a result of his death. Anyway what could she have done? Later she remarried, and raised us, but she went on living, and we loved her beyond the bounds of love, just as she loved us.

As I explain the story, the untimely death, the circumstances, I smile. It was very sad but everything is in the past now. But it would be nice to see him clearly again, just once in my life. And we left that place. Years have passed. War, marriages, children, divorces. Lost in the tide of events, like water seeping through sand. My father is just the past of course, but his body, his life, is always part of mine.