A LIFE OF INTRIGUE: ON FATHERS, PAPERBACKS, AND UNSOLVABLE MYSTERIES 

Full article originally posted on Medium.

What a man can’t remember, doesn’t exist for him.

­–Robert Ludlum, The Bourne Identity

The news came by text from my older sister. I just had a policeman at the door. Dad died. Found deceased in his apt. I don’t know any other details yet. I was grocery shopping with my daughter, and she was growing impatient, squirming in her stroller. I quickly wrote back: thanks for letting me know. I’ll call you. I tried calling my sister later that night, but she didn’t answer. I didn’t call again.

My father’s death was not a shock. Months before, he’d been hospitalized for respiratory failure, his lungs ravaged from decades of smoking, his cirrhotic liver barely functioning. He’d pulled through that time, but by all reports, just barely.

I hadn’t seen or spoken to my father in almost two decades. What scarce information I had about his life in recent times came filtered through my sister, who still lived back in Nova Scotia. She too knew very little. For years, he’d resided in the same rented basement room in Lower Sackville. By his landlady’s account, he never went anywhere, never saw anyone, mostly drifted back and forth between his room and the house’s porch, where he was permitted to smoke. Occasionally he’d head out at night then make a noisy return, stumbling and lurching around down there. Sometimes he did the landlady’s laundry for her. But as far as she knew, he spent the entirety of his days alone, reading.

It took my sister less than an hour to gather my father’s belongings and clean out his room. The only furnishings were a single bed, a television, the hot plate where he warmed up canned meals, and a single chair — the recliner where he sat and read for hours every day.

This is how I remembered him: on the loveseat in our upstairs den, the television on but with volume low, eyes on a paperback. Or on a plastic recliner on the beach at our cottage in Pictou, clutching a beer, butting his cigarettes in the sand. For hours he’d sit like this, immovable and unapproachable, reading in silence.

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