Speculative Memoir: Static

Prologue

I’ll start closer to the end than the beginning.

My father’s wife called me today. She’s someone I probably never would have met if it weren’t for her connection to him. And yet, here we are, bound by this strange intersection of histories. She is clearly trying to reach out, and I am trying—really trying—to see through the reflex I’ve developed over time, the one that flares automatically, protective of my mother.

She never wanted children, yet still went after my married father. My married father with two (maybe four) kids. It was a relief when he finally left for good, but her presence, her choices, and the fallout they created—what they did to my mother, my brother, and me—left marks I’ve never fully named.

She isn’t unkind to me. I think she’s doing the best she can. But sometimes, when she talks to me, it’s as if she forgets that her husband is, in fact, my father. He never parented me, but I am his daughter, and as a kid I was close to his side of the family. My mother was an only child, so all my cousins are on his side. That connection has always mattered to me, even when I’ve felt peripheral to it.

She called to tell me he’s in the hospital. A little over a week ago. She said she heard movement after he went to bed—thrashing legs under the sheets—but she went back to sleep. The next morning, he still hadn’t gotten up. When she finally entered his room, he was curled in a ball, silent, and there was blood.

It took her nearly thirty-six hours to tell me. I want to believe she waited because she was overwhelmed, because she didn’t yet have answers—but the delay scraped against old wounds, the familiar feeling of being left out of his life until after the fact.

Eventually, the pieces came together: he’d suffered a  stroke. He must have gotten up at some point, fallen into a filing cabinet—the gash on his head, the cuts, the bruises—and somehow crawled back into bed. When she found him, he rolled over and just looked at her, eyes blank, words thick and incomprehensible. She called 911.

By the time I heard, he’d already been in the hospital for days. Tests, MRIs, specialists. The MRI confirmed the stroke. Since then, things have spiraled. True to form, he’s been an oppositional patient—pulling out IVs, trying to leave, falling, agitated enough that they stationed a 1:1 sitter outside his door. That lasted a few days. Now he’s developed pneumonia. He can’t eat or drink by mouth. He isn’t speaking anymore, just staring off into space.

She says hospice is next. She’s already given them his living will.

I shouldn’t be surprised. Since I was very little, he always said he’d rather die than lose control of his body. At seventy, he called and announced, almost cheerfully, “Hey kid, welcome to the last decade of my life. I refuse to be eighty.”

But here he is, eighty-three, having spent his birthday in the hospital a few days ago—stuck in the exact condition he swore he’d never tolerate. Hospice makes sense.

I’ve decided to go and see him. To tell him that there are no hard feelings. It’s largely true. But this whole thing puts a neat bow on my position in this family: I am a problem-solver. I was always one of the grown-ups. I don’t like the person my father was when I actually knew him many years ago, but I feel compassion for him. He probably lived most of his life miserable and confused, never understanding why people were upset with him, never figuring out how not to piss them off. Whatever caused that in him mixed with always alcohol, sometimes drugs, and always women who weren’t my mother.

I am his second-thought daughter. To him. To her. Sometimes even to my cousins. I’m spoken to not as a daughter, but as if I were some distant relative—second cousin, twice removed. My guess? She’ll put him in hospice and mostly walk away. He is difficult. She is tired. But I can’t entirely fault her. She didn’t sign up for this version of him. None of us did.

And besides his wife and a couple of friends, he’s burnt bridges and managed, somehow, to out survive his family of origin. He is the eldest of his siblings, and the last living. Besides his wife and those couple of friends, there’s no one else left to visit him.

1.

I was six when Nixon resigned. We were pulled off the road by Canandaigua Lake in our avocado-green car. My parents fussed with the radio, twisting the chrome dial and stabbing at the preset buttons that looked like Chiclets gum—shiny, candy-colored, imprecise. The station came and went in waves of static, Walter Cronkite’s voice flickering in and out like a ghost in the machine. I didn’t know what resignation meant. But I knew something had happened. The car was quiet in a way cars aren’t with two adults and two kids inside—me, and my four-year-old brother in the backseat. It wasn’t silence—it was attention.

Later, my father would joke that I was his draft deferment. Born December ’67, just in time to keep him out of the war. “You saved me,” he’d say, not always kindly, not always unkindly. He didn’t graduate, but he took classes for years—history, music theory, geology, sociology—never enough to add up to a degree, just enough to stay out of the war. He wouldn’t have called himself a pacifist. Said he didn’t care. Said he was okay with violence, just not that violence. Against the war, but not for peace, exactly. It made no sense, but it made him.

Now, half a century later, I watch history loop back on itself like a snake choking on its own tail. Fascism isn’t creeping—it’s strutting. We’re in another moment, another pulled-over car, trying to tune in through the static to something true. We are in it, again. Living history. Again. And I think of my father’s half-declared apathy, my mother’s silence in that car, the way I knew something mattered before I understood what it was. That same feeling is back now. Bigger. Clearer.

This is a beginning.

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