By Bill Tope
When I was very young–actually all my life until I was 50, when he died–I would observe my dad sitting alone, on the front steps, with his elbows on his knees. He would be smoking a cigarette or drinking coffee, and staring blankly into space. I often wondered, what was he thinking? I never asked.
Was he thinking of his long-ago service in the Army, watching fellow members of his platoon being shot? Recovering from his wounds stateside and his eventual discharge?
Was he watching in his memory as his eldest son stood convicted of a crime for which Dad had no money to provide him an attorney? Visiting him in the state prison once–that was enough for one lifetime, he’d said.
Or was he seeing his daughter, torn, disheveled and humiliated, following her violent rape, which ultimately led to her taking her own life? Of his feelings of impotence at the criminality of a society which would sentence his son to two years imprisonment for stealing drugs to which he was hopelessly addicted, yet turn a blind eye to his daughter’s rapist?
Or was he pondering the night he stole out of the house with a shotgun, in the early morning, before sun up, and killed the bastard who had taken his only daughter? They never proved a thing. Was he thinking of the endless, ongoing investigation? Did he have regrets?
Maybe Dad was thinking of the breast cancer that took his wife when she was only 50, leaving him with two teenaged children to finish raising on his own. Was he thinking of the cold, lonely bed he lay in night after night? To the sounds of the evening, eerily amplified by his solitude?
And much later, did Dad try to recall happier times, as he lay in his sterile room in the hospice, dying of lung cancer and suffering the onset of dementia? Could he feel mind slipping away into the shadows of forgetfulness? Could he lose touch with reality swiftly enough?
Now I sit here, 20 years later, on the front steps of the home once owned by my parents, who raised three sons and a daughter, and where I raised my own family. Dementia, the doctors told me, is often inheritable. And I wonder vaguely now, as I’ve already forgotten how many beers I’ve drunk tonight, and whether or not I’ve eaten, am I recounting my father’s experiences, or my own?
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Bill Tope is a prose writer who has been published in a score of magazines. He lives in the American Midwest with his mean little cat Baby.