So when did he die? Draft 2

I’m trying to decide when my father died.

The date on the flat grave marker reads January 2, 1991. He’s buried in a cemetery in Salt Lake City next to his grandparents and his uncle, a few feet from a brownish upright stone that reads, well, BROWN. It’s a familiar place, he used to take us there to visit his grandparents, we’d stand about where he is now, and think about the great-grandparents that we didn’t remember and ponder on how exciting it would be to be lost at sea in a WWII fighter plane. January 2. Sounds cold, snowy.

Except January 2, 1991 wasn’t a cold day. It was a summer day, uncomfortably hot. You could see the heat waves do that squiggly thing as they wafted off of the cement in Villa Jardín. You could smell them, too, the humid, oppressive heat that mixed with odor of poverty, dogs with mange and a river so polluted it was black. We’d just stepped out into the heat after spending a hour talk with a family in their shady courtyard, drinking some lemonade cold enough to keep the flavor from becoming a deal-breaker.

As we stood squinting, trying to decide where we would find the next alleged lemonade, a group of kids surrounded us and, with fingers making pistol shapes in their shirts, demanded our filo. Now, my friend had been in Argentina all of two weeks. Didn't understand Spanish at all. He spent a lot of time alternating glances between me and the ground in our visits. He also spent a great deal of time asking me why he couldn’t wear his nice watch when we went to the villas. This time he just looked at the kids’ fingers. I, unable to fathom that they were serious, was feeling pretty impressed with my own superior Spanish ability. I had been in the country nearly two years and my vast knowledge of Argentine lunfardo (nearly ten words) included filo, a word I'd acquired a few days earlier from a bum in front of a train station. Filo meant money (something my friend had deduced in less time than it took me to congratulate myself). They were robbing us.

Or trying to. I was trying not to laugh, at least until it got violent. The group would pulse, expelling individual kids who would hit us and withdraw, grab at out pockets, then retreat to the group. One of them took my pen. Another one took my friend’s watch (I’d relented that day. I was a little preoccupied right then for the “told you so”). Then another burst of motion, a glint off of a rippling piece of that corrugated tin that formed the roofs of most of the houses, and my head was bleeding. So we ran.

We ran for a while. It was, pardon the cliché, surreal. Time moved in slow-motion, like the time I killed my father’s Honda Civic, or the time that I was the criminal, pursued through the backyards of Fruit Heights by police who had responded to reports of a nocturnal haunting. But it was day, I was the victim, and the criminals were throwing things at us. And we couldn’t find help. The houses in the area all had iron fences (made a lot of sense, all of a sudden), and people just shook their heads at us when we looked, begging for safe harbor. So we kept running, with cans, sticks, rocks accompanying us in our flight. At one point, my friend’s hand thumped me on the back, hard. I looked at him, appreciating the gesture but wondering if a pat on the back was really warranted at this particular moment. Then I looked down at his hand and noticed that he was carrying a large stone. He had just caught, backhanded, a rock headed directly for my spine. At that point I decided that the “I told you so,” would never cross my lips. He might not have been able to speak Spanish, but he had just entered “Andrew’s Friends Hall of Fame” with a place of honor between my favorite debate partner and the guy that introduced me to “The Cure.”

As I tried to keep running and imagine an appropriate pedestal for my friend (maybe he’d get a whole wing), we saw another group come around a corner. We immediately identified a couple of known drug-dealers, people that didn’t have to pretend that they had guns under their shirts. They yelled, my Spanish failed, we kept running as they came up behind the younger group and attacked... them. From behind. So we stopped, no longer part of the battle, and gaped at the street fight that ensued. But not too long, one of the dealers came up to us, it was El polaco, a guy we’d seen before, a guy whose reputation for mugging was well-established. He grabbed us by the arms and escorted us out of the neighborhood, explaining that, while he didn’t have a problem robbing the rich, he would never assault “Hombres de Dios.” So he put us on a bus, the money we wouldn’t give the kids now his as a “tip” that we were only too happy to give. Once we got back to our apartment and I’d washed the blood out of my hair we went back out again. This time, we decided to spend a week trying to talk to people in the nice part of town. Nobody let us in there either, but at least no one threw any rocks at us. The only thing that pursued us was the summer heat and you know, it just didn’t feel quite so bad. We were shaken, but thrilled. We were missionaries who had just been stoned, literally, even biblically. We were straight out of the Bible. Or maybe we weren’t, but still, this was one for the mission highlight reel, that is, once my head stopped bleeding.

So January 2, 1991? My dad didn’t die that day. That day I escaped from death (or at least injury), bleeding, with a friend whose baseball talent was much appreciated and thanks to a criminal who thought it was bad form to pick on men of God. That was a day of close calls and adrenaline. That was not a day that my father died. The stories didn’t match.

Besides, I didn’t even hear about his death until a couple of weeks later. We didn’t have a phone and then the mission president forgot to tell me until an interview at a monthly zone conference. I didn’t believe it. At first I didn’t believe that my father had died, but I also didn’t, couldn’t believe that they had taken so long to tell me. The death of a parent is a big deal, when your father really dies you find out immediately. The unconscionable delay means that he couldn’t have died on the date inscribed on his gravestone, I would have heard. So he died on January 12? The day that his death reconfigured my world, so that I left the one in which my dad was alive and joined that world in which my dad was dead?

But it didn’t reconfigure my world that much. I was shocked, but afterwards I just rejoined my companion and got on with my day. I remember an episode of Grey’s Anatomy where George has just lost his father. He says that he can’t imagine a world in which his father is not alive. Christina, who is commiserating with him, uncomfortably out of character, says that that feeling never goes away.

What if the feeling never came?

I hadn’t seen my father in nearly two years; when we go on a mission we don’t see our families. So he wasn’t a part of that world and it that world wasn’t any different with him gone. He wasn’t gone, he’d never been there. I did get the occasional letter, but there weren’t very many and I didn’t pay them much attention. I didn’t even know he was sick, though I found out later that he’d been circling the drain with multi-organ failure for some time.
So, if his death was a world-reconfiguring moment, it must not have happened then either.

I remember in high school watching the death of my parents’ marriage. My father slipping further into depression, my mother no longer able to endure. After announcing to us (not to my father) that their marriage was over, she employed our extensive legal talents (I was a pretty good lawyer at 16 and I know that my brother Sam was equally able), to draw up a division of property. We didn’t question the request, we knew how bad things had become, we knew of how he had hurt the family with debt, with all sorts of things. Divorce was the right thing to do and we supported it heartily. So in we jumped and were actively figuring out who got what at the dining room table when my father came into the kitchen looking for some food. He didn’t know what we were doing, I don’t think, and just looked at us sadly, as he often did during those years.

Something broke under the weight of that look. I don’t remember how I looked at that point, what color my hair was, which earrings were pulling on my lobes, but I knew for a certainty that I was worse than I looked, that I was betraying my father whether he knew it or not and whether he deserved it or not. If your father’s death causes a world-reconfiguring moment in your life, my father died of my broken heart in our kitchen in Kaysville in 1986.

Or maybe he died on April 28, 2007 when I wrote this.