----

As the train slipped through the wintery landscape of the Northeast Corridor I could scarcely believe what had happened, though at the same time if I were to have been honest with myself I had to have known that it was coming sooner rather than later.

I had gotten the call while at work the afternoon before, and though I dodged the interaction initially, the result was an uncharacteristically serious voicemail. When I returned the call, the housekeeper answered, and the tone of her voice said everything I needed to know.

"I really didn't want to be the one to tell you..."

My father was dead. He was 54 years old. And he had drunk himself to death.

Though double paned and surely insulated, my brow felt cool as it pressed against the glass of the window; skeletal trees blurring as they passed. My mind was clear and calm, like the sky after a brutal storm. Covered in a foot of snow, train-window Connecticut was beautiful from where I sat and as I prepared to debark I noted how the book on my lap had remained unopened the entire time.

In the end, as cliché as it sounds, I never really knew my father, but I knew him well enough to know that he was broken.

---

My mother and he had divorced when I was 4, and that had come with all of the requisite baggage a divorce like that does: bitter custody battles, name calling, slashed tires, sugar in the gas tank, and the psychological scars that only a young child can brandish. I remember almost nothing of my father from those days, perhaps subconsciously blocking the memories. In stories, supported by later experience, my father was a childish cad, prone to extreme exaggeration when the story improved his image. He was a braggart and blowhard: inflating his importance to any and all that would listen, and yet he was a man prone to extreme generosity. He would give where he had none to give and then beyond – perhaps in order to live up to the image he so desperately wished to embody, but perhaps to simply be of help.

My father had come back into my life at a time when I needed his help: I had foolishly broken the law as a 13 year old and was in over my head. Like some storybook knight, in he swept with lawyers and gifts, saving the day. He had remarried by then, a woman who both adored him and had money – combining two of the things most important to him. He welcomed me back into his new life, showering me with kindness and regaling me with stories of his accomplishments and greatness. He spared no expense while exposing me to many of the finer things in life during this time, and yet, reveled in the control his newfound fortune allowed him over those around him, including me.

My father's, and his new wife's, generosity afforded me many things, not the least of which was an excellent education. I was able to see the world in ways I may never have been given the opportunity to otherwise and it was good to know my father again, though even then I could see his flaws: the startling amount of drink he would take in at dinner parties, embarrassing his wife at their family functions, gibbering on about this and that – the point always being the same: do you see how great I am?

Born into a family of three brothers in the mid-fifties, his mother was a manic-depressive alcoholic who suffered beneath her husband’s abuse for years. It was no surprise to learn that Captain John's abuse was not saved solely for the mother of his children: a tyrant in his own home, he ruled his patriarchy with an iron fist routinely meting out punishment to those that did not meet or exceed his expectations. Though my father never mentioned it himself, the disappointment his father felt for him burned within him, driving everything he did: a true father complex. What a burden it must have been to have hated someone so much, and yet to have sought their approval in all that you did?!? In many ways my father would become the monster that had haunted his youth – the one that asked him, in all seriousness, if he was retarded. Belittling him in front of others. His brothers. Women. Breaking him down so that he would: Do. As. Told.

When the divorce was finalized my father was crushed, and yet, he put on the brave face and fought tooth and nail to punish the woman who had loved him so selflessly by overturning their pre-nuptial agreement. By then, his philandering and drinking had actively begun to drive those around him away. No longer contained to family functions and celebratory events my father’s self-medicating stood watch from kitchen cupboards in the form of pint glasses and gallon jugs of Johnny Walker Red.

Though awarded a startling amount of alimony, my father no longer had access to the kind of money that allowed him to back-up his rakish braggadocio and to fuel the lifestyle he had learned to love and abuse. But image was everything to my father, for I suspect that he too realized that at the end of the day, the illusion of grandeur was all he had. He had fallen, and that was simply too much for him to bear.

---

"We've prepared the body for viewing... whenever you're ready," intoned the funeral home's morgue attendant as she passed me a velvet bag containing my father’s bodily possessions at the time of his death.

I hadn't spoken to my father in over 8 months, nor seen him in nearly a year.

My uncle and I sat side by side in the chilly viewing room. My father's corpse laid out before us, covered in a hospital Johnny and thin blanket.

It had gotten to the point where were you not to catch him before 10:00am, in all likelihood he would be antagonistically intoxicated.

There was very little said between us – clearly there was little to be said that hadn't been said in the 48 hours of dealing with the details of death prior to that moment. My uncle had been a rock in that time.

Watching my father drink a pint glass full of scotch at 11:00am had been incomparably unsettling. He no longer wanted help, he no longer wanted to be weighted down by the torment of his disappointment. I had to go.

His skin was icy to the touch, showing dark blooms of pooled blood where the ichor had settled in the time before his body had been found on the bathroom floor. He looked small and weak in the absence of his spirit and the over-large personality that had once filled the lifeless husk that lay at the end of my fingertips.

My father was dead.

For all of his flaws, and for all of his pains, he had been the man from whose seed I had sprung. He was my father and I loved him and I missed him as I sent his body to the flames.

My father...