One Sunday when my father was a boy, sitting in the backseat of his parent's car, leaving their house in Jacksonville, North Carolina for church, the neighbor's dog approached their automobile, barking incessantly as he had many times before. My dad's father, a Marine, stopped the car, got out and shot the dog in the head, and then off to church they went.
My father was an only child. His mother, a tiny woman with six siblings in nearby Kinston, suffered from manic depression, and was hospitalized and institutionalized at various times in his childhood for her illness; at one or more points even receiving shock therapy at Dorothea Dix Hospital in Raleigh, NC. It was during those times that my father was left to the care of his father, a stern military man who busied himself with highly organized projects like the raising of quail or growing grape vines. My father revered his father – placed him on a pedestal. And though he feared his temper, his father, unlike his mother, was consistent and could be counted on to make him breakfast in the mornings.
My father recalled being afraid to fall asleep on his mother’s lap as a boy, maybe in the middle of a summer afternoon, because he didn’t know if she’d be there when he woke up. By there, I suppose he meant alive. But he may have also meant, escaped or wandered off, but certainly not available to care for him in the way he needed. He recalls listening to her pace the floors in their house in the dark of night, and there are several years of school pictures where my father does not look like a happy boy, no doubt racked with a weariness over his mother’s fragile state and the insecurity and frustration it caused him. If his father’s abusive, controlling, explosive behavior in the home played a role in his solemn school-photo expressions, my father would not be the one to say.
Years later when I was in high school my dad learned that his father had a previous family in California, with a true eldest son whose January birthday was almost exactly the same day as my dad’s. His father sent his secret son birthday cards for years, with zero contact with his first born. His first wife in California had divorced him for domestic abuse, and eventually the boy was adopted by a kinder man whom he considered his dad.
It was said that my father's father isolated his wife from most of her family, that he was largely disliked by her siblings in Kinston for his temperament, and that no one really understood what was wrong with my grandmother, except that she became sicker, sadder, and more distant over time. My father believed his dad never hit his mother, but there is speculation to the contrary, and some said that when the two of them were older, and my 19-year-old father was enrolled in a community college in Raleigh, that they suspected his father killed his wife by overmedicating her or suffocating her with a pillow in her sleep. Countless medications, likely with contrary indications, and devastating side effects that damaged her organs, were recovered from her cabinets after she died from an apparent heart attack. But to say that my grandfather killed his wife – that would be an intolerable blasphemy to my dad, and I’ve never mentioned this family rumor that made its way to me in my thirties.
Over the years, my father told the story several times of the last interaction he had with his mother, which involved him angrily throwing a beach towel in her face before speeding away to go surfing, a decision he always regretted. In the end, my father could not save his mother, and he talked of her far less than he did his father, almost as if her perceived "weakness" cast a shadow over anything she ever did of worth in his life.
Less than a year after his mother passed, my dad received a phone call that his father had been in a car accident, and his father’s friend reported that he had been walking into door frames in the days since, and felt that something else was wrong. He said my father should come home and admit his dad into the Hospital on Camp Lejeune, where he had been employed in his senior years as a television repairman. It would turn out that his father had a brain tumor, which they believed developed from placing his head in the radiation fields in the back of old television sets. Though he would be sent to the VA Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia for surgery, he would ultimately deteriorate and die, an emotional man, in the hospital back at Camp Lejeune.
My father would meet my mother at the PX on base on one of the trips to manage his father’s hospital care, and he would tell me once that she was the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen. My 18-year-old mother would move in with him, become the visiting caregiver to his father in the hospital, as my dad apparently could not stomach hospitals due to memories of visiting his mom in psyche wards in his youth. My own mother would be the person there when my dad found himself parentless at the age of 20. And at the expense of my mom, and his future children, he would spend the bulk of his life angry and running from this pain...
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