An Untimely Death

Before you read further, this is a personal story. I don't necessarily like to tell the story, but there are no barriers and no need for reticence necessarily.  I usually write blogs here for my sci-fi fans as entertainment,  but it really doesn't tell my audience much about myself.  

Another point I'd like to make before I begin is that sharing a personal experience like this is really about my past challenges, my current triumphs, and lessons learned in my life. Who knows, maybe it will inspire someone else to keep fighting even though they may feel like quitting. And also might encourage someone to continue working towards their dreams regardless of the bad things that can happen. 

"It was an accident," is how I usually begin. "A car accident?" is always the assumption. But people are conditioned by that word — accident. 

My father was a soil scientist, a very good one.  He and my mother had met at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where I was born, and we later moved to Rudolph for my father to start his own soil science business. He intended to help 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 an affluent family. His father, my grandfather, Kermit Berger, who was also a soil scientist, had insisted he pursue science. My grandfather had forged an extremely successful career in agriculture, having often traveled to third-world countries as a consultant in crop farming and soil science. He had published a few books on agriculture, even teaching at the University of Wisconsin and later in Lebanon for a short time. But, what I remember most about my father, leads me to believe he had a love for both art and science. When I was about seven years old,  I painted a potted plant, and my father stopped looking at it, to tell me there was more than green on a leaf. He gently pointed out that hues of brown, red, and yellow were also on the leaves.  I thought it was strange at the time, but I know now it was because he'd also had an unfulfilled passion for art.

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 were other events, like 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, thirty-one,  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 sudden 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 sometimes manage to 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.