When My Father Came Home

Reckoning with love, loss, and hope

Twenty-one years ago, on the longest night of the year, December 20, 2004, my father died. This is an excerpt of that day from my memoir, a braided narrative of reckoning that explores the cost of silence for a generation of women—and for one girl who came of age at a powerful Southern prep school that buried its truths for decades. Woven through this narrative is the parallel story of restoring my family’s century-old home, a metaphor for repairing the fractured legacy of alcoholism that left me a vulnerable teenager. In the many years since my father’s death, I’ve come to understand that peace of mind relies so much on learning how to be okay whether someone you love is still drinking, or not — a skill I certainly didn’t have while my father was alive, and one I struggle with now as I’m learning to accept life on life’s terms.

“He needs to come home now,” I said as I sat in our living room with my mother, uncle and my brother John. They all agreed as we made plans to bring my father, dubbed “Papa” by my oldest brother Billy, back to Birmingham, where he would live in an assisted living facility. At 74 years old, with prostate cancer, he kept falling alone in his apartment in Washington D.C where he’d lived since he left Birmingham in the mid-70s.

His first night back home, I walked in the small room, where Papa was sitting in a chair reading, his skinny legs crossed, a thinner version of himself, but as always, flushed in the face, his reading glasses precarious on the end of his squat nose, as if he’d never left home to begin with. I set his favorite meal, a Golden Rule barbeque sandwich, on the table. I’d seen my father a handful of times since he’d left. A few visits home, college graduation, my wedding, my brothers’ weddings, but that was it. He often called the house, forgetting my mother didn’t live there, even though I’d given him her number to the garage apartment where she lived across the driveway when she wasn’t traveling or at S’s house.

At first, I visited him frequently in his dorm-like room where he kept Campbell’s tomato soup stocked in his cabinets and rainbow sherbet in his freezer, but our conversations skimmed the surface, and our connection as distant as if he still lived in Washington. When my therapist recognized my childish hope that he’d magically morph into the father I needed him to be when he was content to read his history books and biographies of great men and call a cab to take him to the liquor store to buy Vodka, she gently told me if I expected something different, I’d be disappointed.

For a couple of years, the cleaning staff overlooked his drinking, and the entire establishment referred to him as “Otis,” the harmless old drunk on The Andy Griffith Show who voluntarily slept off his stupor in the jail cell. But when my father began soiling himself in bed, they could only overlook his drinking for so long, and the nursing home said he had to quit drinking or move. John had done everything he could to keep Papa from drinking at the nursing home, and there was nothing left to do, we believed, but obtain a conservatorship to control the small social security income he had so he couldn’t buy liquor and could stay where he was.

“I’m going to end up in the gutter,” he told a cleaning woman. “I left my family,” he said, but John and I still felt responsible for Papa, unable to walk away from him the same way he’d walked away from us.

Soon after my daughter Frances was born in 2003, I sat in a courtroom to try to gain conservatorship over my father’s finances. I’d left teaching and was an editor of a local magazine. I wore a matching white summer suit I thought spoke to my status as a grown woman, a magazine editor, and someone put together enough to face the hard decisions in life. My father shuffled behind his court-appointed lawyer in his tan suede bedroom moccasins with red checked lining, wearing his rumpled suit, his reading glasses perched on the tip of his nose. Seeing my father carrying The New York Times as he shambled in the somber courtroom, I felt my heart shatter. The pain I’d avoided a thousand different ways the past three decades he’d disappeared from my life resurfaced even though I thought I’d overcome losing him.

I tried to control my tears, hoping the judge hadn’t noticed me tucked in the corner of the bench behind John and our attorney at the table in front of us. “I’m sorry,” I said sitting next to my mother. “I can’t quit crying.” She looked at my red eyes and said, “You’re sensitive like my brother Donald.” She paused, “And your father.”

She and I had been talking about who in the family had struggled with drinking and who in the family had been too sensitive. Her brother Donald stayed glued to Mama Jo’s knee as a young boy, she said, and later never recovered from the war when, based in northern Africa, he’d led a squadron of B-17s on sorties over Italy. One day, suffering from allergies, he was grounded, and his plane and crew left without him. They never returned. Once home, Uncle Donald took to the bottle. Only a generation before, his own Uncle Jenz, wounded from mustard gas and trench warfare in World War I, lived with my mother’s family. A drunk ghost of a man in covered overalls floating on the edges of my mother’s childhood, he lived in the same concrete garage apartment she now lived in.

Sensitivity was also Papa’s downfall, too delicate to handle life’s demands. When young boys, my father and his brothers were known throughout the neighborhood for wreaking havoc, but compared to his brothers, my father was more inclined to literature than back-alley games and fights. He attended four high schools. He left his senior year to join the Air Force to become a pilot. He began his training as World War II was winding down. Before the war ended, he lost his way on a training mission, ending his heroic and deadly ventures. Afterwards, he considered becoming part of the Diplomatic Corps but returned to Birmingham to continue dating a woman he knew before my mother. A dashing diplomat—charismatic, social, well-read, and well-mannered—was an unlived life that suited my father better than the one he followed.

Once he graduated from The University of Virginia, he briefly considered law school, but without his brothers’ ambitions, he never found a compelling profession beyond being a discontented salesman, who turned to the bottle to numb and escape life’s sorrows, unlike his hard-charging brothers. Papa’s brother said it best when he described him in the inscription in the book he’d written about their paternal grandfather, a colonel known as “Blackjack,” who led the 10th Cavalry, a regiment known as the “Buffalo Soldiers,” that Papa “filled the world with quiet charm and lovely disposition.” When he wasn’t drinking.

On the stand, my mother summed up her description of her marriage, saying, “I thought he was coming back, but he never did until he fell a few years ago.” I’d never heard her say that. I’d always held out hope, but from what I could see as a teenager, as far as the late-night phone calls full of recriminations and anger and my mom’s new life with D and then S, she didn’t seem to think he was returning. But that day the picture she painted was different and I do believe sincere in its recollection. She had loved my father. She just didn’t love the restrictions of motherhood and being married to a drunk.

During the proceeding my father read The New York Times until he was called to the stand. At the end of the judge’s questioning, he respectfully concluded, “Sir, you had a fine education at The University of Virginia, a fine family, and a good life you threw away. In all my years as a judge, never has an ex-wife stood before me and said the kind words your ex-wife has.”

In his black robes behind his high wooden desk, he said, “Sir, you’re an alcoholic.”

My father looked at him bewildered and shook his head, “No sir, I’m not an alcoholic.” He repeated himself as he and the judge argued back and forth, the judge caught for a moment in the insidious and incredulous trap of knocking up against an alcoholic’s blind denial like a parent arguing with an unreasonable teenager. My family had suffered through my father’s entrenched refusal to yield to anyone else’s will but never had I heard him deny the truth after an entire life of drinking, in those actual words. Exasperated, the judge let him go back to his seat before he conceded to give John control of Papa’s finances.

Not long after that the staff called on a Saturday night to say someone needed to check on Papa.

John and I found Papa unable to get out of bed because he was so weak. We called an ambulance and stayed with him as he was admitted. Lying in the exam room waiting for a room to open, my father kept his eyes closed, his skin thin as onion skin paper, bruises on his arms where he bumped into things in his small room. When the nurse took his blood, it looked like motor oil.

When he came home from the hospital, Billy came from out West to visit him, took him to Golden Rule, and drove him around his old childhood haunts. My youngest brother Peter had said his good-byes a long time ago. After Billy left, Papa landed back in the hospital. He stayed in the hospital until he went to a rehabilitation center where he shared a room with a man with an amputated leg. But that wasn’t for long. Every time I walked in the room, the plastic bag full of blood hanging from his bedside was like a ticking clock telling me it wouldn’t be long. The doctor said his stomach pain was diverticulitis, but my father had bone cancer and was in extreme pain, so he was medicated heavily.

One time, I walked into his room, and he was thrashing in his sleep, so I woke him up from his nightmare. Sometimes, in his morphine haze, he talked nonsensically. Another time he said the word “cogitate,” stopped for a minute and remarked, “Now that’s a good word.” He seemed startled by the whole experience as I would help him sit up and adjust his robe, my hand brushing the soft skin on his back as vulnerable as a baby’s.

One afternoon after work, I visited my father, where his wooden cross now hung on the wall across from him. When my parents were headed home from that very same Catholic hospital where my grandfather had been a urologist, where my brother Billy had been born, Papa asked a nun if he could take the cross hanging on the wall. She paused, took it off the wall, stuck it under her habit, then looked up and down each end of the hallway. The coast clear, she quickly handed him the cross. He carried this cross with him his entire life. It had hung in our house before Papa left and now John had brought it and hung it in Papa’s hospital room.

As Papa’s sickness quickly progressed, the hospice nurse Trudy advised us to make our peace with him. Worried I was having a tough time letting go and trying to make up for a lifetime of absence in two short months, John told Papa he needed to make his peace with me. Papa responded, “You mean I need to tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t give her what she wanted and needed?” But Papa meant this apology for all his family and friends who, like me, still harbored hopes that in the few remaining days, he’d become what I’d always wanted, what I grieved my entire life, and now would mourn again.

One evening after work, John checked on Papa. He wasn’t doing well. When Hugo and I arrived, Papa lay on the bed his eyes closed, his head tilted back, and his white hair flattened against his ghostly skin. His breath was strangled as I sat next to him and held his limp hand. John, my mother and Hugo and I sat quietly as Papa pulled away from us with each raspy breath, a slow, sure movement as natural and strange as the tide being sucked to sea after a tsunami, inevitable and horrific in the knowledge a huge wave will come crashing back home afterwards. I leaned over and whispered, “You can let go.”

Two nurses came in, one young and the other older. “It’s time to take Mr. Scott for his test,” the young one said in the upbeat tone schoolteachers reserve for kindergarteners. She started unhooking something. The older nurse looked at Papa and reached over and touched her arm. She caught the brisk, young nurse’s eye and shook her head. The young nurse looked at Papa for the first time and stopped what she was doing. They both left as we sat there listening in silence and tears for Papa’s last breath.

The endless pause shocked me, though it’s what we’d been waiting for, anticipating, dreading, hoping to end his pain. Rigid and red-eyed, John took the cross off the wall and handed it to me. Up until the moment of Papa’s death, I’d longed for a different story, hoped for a better ending, believed he’d stop drinking. I imagined my father’s redemption story. My delusions died with his last rasping, rattled breath.

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