WHEN YOU KILL YOURSELF

August 30, 1994

"Do not go gently into the good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."
                            Dylan Thomas  -  Do Not Go Gently Into The Good Night

At approximately 1:30am this morning my father died unexpectedly and suddenly of congestive heart failure. Like the flip of a light switch, one minute he was bright and radiant, the next his life extinguished to blackness - utter darkness.  One minute alive and laughing, the next a cold corpse - one month shy of his 72nd birthday, five months short of his 50th wedding anniversary.

I never expected my father to die like this. I always thought he would slowly die of old age, sometime in his late 80's or early 90's. He was such a powerful man, physically strong with hands of steel - and he had a shining soul and a heavenly heart. He was the happiest person I've ever known, he woke-up every morning with a smile on his favce and at night he usually went to bed laughing. No longer will I awake to his sounds in the kitchen and the smell of fresh brewed coffee, and his cheerful good morning.

There is no sadness in my heart, only shock and disbelief. But I know there are weeks and months of sadness ahead of me, days of burning and blinding tears - of being lost with no father to turn to, for I am now a son without a father.

When I got back to my parents cottage last night at around 9:30pm, my mother and father, like two teenagers, were laying next to one  another on the couch watching the movie, Casablanca. After the movie we watched the news and then we all went to bed. I had trouble falling asleep and around 12:30am I heard my father in the kitchen and went to join him. He told me he was having difficulty breathing, so we went outside and walked around the deck but his breathing didn't improve. When we went back inside my mother was in the kitchen and my father told her to call 911.

As the EMT's took my father out of the house on a stretcher, it was the first time I had ever seen fear in his eyes, uncertainty on his face. My mother went in the ambulance, riding with the driver - I followed them a few minutes later. Just after I joined my mother in the waiting area at Falmouth Hospital, a doctor delicately delivered the numbing news - that my father had died upon arrival.

When I was in grammar school the nuns used to teach us that man is born from another's agony but dies in his own - my father died in his own, alone. No loved one was there to hold his hand, there was no time to say a final goodbye, no tome for one last, "I love you,dad."  In a blink of an eye my father was robbed of today with no more tomorrows.

It's odd what one prays for at times kike this, a time when tomorrow's hopes have dissolved to sorrow. I pray that my father's death will not bother and burden my two nephews, Casey and Kevy, as my grandfather's death has saddened and scarred me - that they will not be haunted by this day in the years and decades to come as I have been obsessed and possessed by my grandfather's death.

Yesterday afternoon I met with Jim and Nancy. They decided that I could live with Francis and that I could move in on Saturday. They told me I could live rent free, my only obligation being to pay one half of the utilities. It was a great deal and I accepted. But when I got to Randolph this morning I called them and told them of my father's death and that under the circumstances I am unable to move in with Francis - that for the foreseeable future my mother is going to need me and Chatham is just too far from Randolph. They were disappointed but were sincere in their understanding condolences.

After speaking with Jim and Nancy, I called my doctors and my friends at the Samaritans. They were shocked by the news and offered to help me anyway they could. Late this afternoon my doctors called to see how I was doing, as did two of the woman from the Samaritans. I was touched by their concern, am fortunate to be blessed with such friends.

What troubles me most about today, what pains me and what plunders my soul and pulverizes my conscience, is not my father's death but the phone call I made to my brother at 5:45am. When I told him of our father's death, there was a sudden, straining and suspending silence - and then in a haunting, hollow and hoarse voice, Kevin whispered, "My dad died? My dad died?"  Yes Kevin, my father and your dad died. You were always closer to him than I was and I am oh, so sorry that I brought you the deadly news that broke your heart.

At the funeral of Robert Kennedy, Ted Kennedy quoted Yeats during his eulogy when he said, "Who said he would live to comb gray hair?" My father lived to comb gray hair and for that I am thankful. But I wish he could have combed it for many more years to come - that he could have lived to see his sons comb gray hair.

In the darkest hour of this morning, my father went gently into the good night - and all I  can is rage against the dying of the light, rage against the passing of his light. And pray that as his soul takes flight, he is soon at home in heaven's sunlight.

10:30pm  -  My Childhood Room   -  Randolph, MA

contact: fortheheartcries@gmail.com