So when did he die?

I just got back from driving to Kentucky and so I’m trying to decide when my father died. There’s a connection, I promise.

I like the movie Elizabethtown. It’s not in my top 25 list. I don’t have a top 25 list, but if I did, it wouldn’t be there. But I saw it with Alberto Fuguet, a Chilean novelist and film director for whom lists are extremely important in Florida in 2005, so it has fun memories attached. It’s poorly structured as a film, I think, but it grows on you with subsequent watchings. I like the love story, I like the tribute to the US and its attention to all the good that there is in southern culture. The death of the father part isn’t as accomplished but it makes me think about what it means to have lost a father when you’re in your 20s. So when I drive through Kentucky, through Louisville, I think of the movie. And so I think of dead fathers. And so, since I drove through Louisville on April 19, 2007 and back through on April 21, 2007, and since I drove through that tunnel near Louisville that we see in Elizabethtown, I’m trying to decide what day my father died.

The date on the flat grave marker reads January 2, 1991, but that date doesn’t signify death to me, quite the opposite. On that date I was running through the slums of Buenos Aires, trying to escape a gang of kids bent on robbing the yanquis.

My nuevito and I had just visited someone in a very sketchy part of Lanus when a several kids came up pretending to brandish a gun and demanded our filo. I’d been in Argentina a long time at that point but had only recently learned enough lunfardo to know that filo meant money. Probably could have figured it out from the context, now that I think about it, but at that moment I remember making note of the vocabulary I had just learned, even as my mind was refusing to let me believe that we were being robbed.
They were disappointed, we didn’t give them any money. They took a pen from my pocket and my greenie’s watch (that was a loss, an expensive gift from his father, and I had told him not to wear it, but...) Then they hit me with a piece of the corrugated tin that they use for roofing in those areas. I started to bleed. And we started to run. It was surreal, a cliché to be certain, but sometimes clichés work like that. Things went in slow motion, like the time I was in a car accident, or the time that I was the criminal instead of the victim, running through backyards while the police chased me. But now I was the victim and we were being chased through the streets while people refused us entrance to their gated homes. At one moment my companion’s hand hit my back hard. I looked at him quizzically and noted that he was holding a large rock in his hand. He had caught backhand a rock headed for my spine. That was cool. Then a group of known drug-dealers, men who had real guns and used them came around a corner. That wasn’t so cool. Except that something happened even more surprising than the rock that appeared in my companion’s hand. The drug-dealers started fighting the gang of youthful muggers. One of them, El polaco, grabbed us and escorted us out of the neighborhood. The money that we wouldn’t give to the kids was happily offered up as a tip to our bodyguard. We went back to our apartment and spent the rest of the day knocking doors in the rich part Lanus where no one would let us in either, but at least they weren’t throwing rocks at us. We were shaken but thrilled. We were missionaries who had been stoned, literally, biblically. We were like the apostles of old. Maybe we weren’t, but still, this was one for the mission highlight reel, that is, once my head stopped bleeding.

So my father didn’t die that day. That day I escaped from death (or maybe just serious or semi-serious injury), bleeding, with a friend whose baseball talent was much appreciated and thanks to a criminal who exempted “hombres de Dios” from potential targets. That was a day of close calls and adrenaline. That was not a day that my father died.

I didn’t even hear about his death until a couple of weeks later. The mission president forgot to tell me until an interview at a monthly zone conference. When a father really dies you find out immediately, so the delay means that he couldn’t have died on the date inscribed on his gravestone. So clearly 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 became that world in which my dad was dead?

But it didn’t reconfigure my world that much. 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 it 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 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.
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.