Suicide and Survivor's Guilt

One of the few times we were all together after my first birthday.

There are aspects of life that highlight the contrast between the things you know and the things you feel. There are trivial ones, like sports fan superstitions, and then there's things like coping with suicide. It's common for the people left behind to carry guilt. We feel like we should have been able to do something. If only we'd seen it coming, if we'd called, said something, answered the phone, whatever it is we feel we should have been able to do to prevent it. We feel this way even though it's probably not true. It's not our fault. It's the difference between what we know and what we feel.

My uncle committed suicide shortly before I was born. As long as I've been a conscious person I've been aware that people sometimes kill themselves. It became part of the backdrop of my life, something that was always a possibility. When I was twenty a friend hung himself in the stairwell of my house. We always believed that the 15 bedroom house was so big, and busy at all hours, that he expected to stopped. Or he was making a statement. Either way, I didn't feel guilty, or angry. It was just something that happened. We all knew that the way we lived as adolescents, some of us weren't going to make it to adulthood. I didn't blame my friend, I knew there was something wrong inside him that he couldn't control.

My dad was different. I had been married a few months when I came home and found a police officer's business card stuck in my screen door. It was the coroner's office. They wanted me to come identify the body. I was a thirty-year-old orphan. It wasn't fair. Not just that he'd died, but that he'd lived as long as he had, while my mom died of cancer at 54. My mother did everything "right." She was vegetarian, a swimmer, she drank her one glass of wine. She raised me. 

My dad was the opposite. He wasn't around when I was a kid. At one point I hadn't heard from him in so long that I started telling people he had died. Growing up in the South Bronx projects, he was at times a gang member, a heroine addict and an alcoholic. He claimed he'd been shot once. He didn't eat well or exercise. But he was indestructible. I was six-years-old when he first beat cancer. He lost a lung that time. At twelve I came home one night and found him comatose from vodka and pills. My senior year of college he did it again, they told me he wouldn't live through the weekend. I was told that four weeks in a row before I stopped driving the 400 miles home on Fridays. They later found him wandering the ICU looking for cigarettes. He'd woken up from an induced coma, pulled out all the tubes, and set about finding some smokes. That's also when he beat cancer the second time. They'd found he had prostate cancer but didn't treat it until they knew he'd recover from the pneumonia.

In later years he survived diabetes and a car accident that destroyed his car and lost him his license. By 2008 he was losing his sight and a foot. We had been in touch sporadically over the years, trying to repair a broken past. I wasn't as attentive as I could have been in the year after my mother passed. I was also newly married and we were waiting out the three months before telling people we were expecting a baby. We were three days from the big announcement when I found the card in my door.

I could have called him earlier and told him he was going to be a grandfather. I still can't shake the feeling that I might have been able to give him something to live for. After every incident my dad would say, "Nothing can kill me. I'm from the Bronx." He was right. The only thing that could end his life was his own desire to die. I don't know if he was depressed about our fractured relationship, or if he was weary of his rapidly deteriorating body. Maybe it was a quality of life issue. Maybe staying alive for his grandson would have been a burden rather than a relief. The problem with suicide is you rarely get answers. None of the four suicides that have touched my life have involved a note. Without one no matter how much I know I couldn't have changed it, I feel like I might have.

I didn't know my dad well at the end of his life. I did love him. I do miss him. I miss having that link to my childhood. I miss being able to compare my son to myself at the same age. I have no one now who can tell me if he's just like me. To this day, no matter how much I read to the contrary, I carry the guilt of not having done enough to save him.

It's not my fault. It's not yours either.

Dad

Tonight I did something I haven't done in several years, several more years than the four represented on the death certificate, I sat down and had a beer with my dad.  The last time I remember doing this, just the two of us, has to be around 1998.  He was managing a movie theater in San Mateo, California (or somewhere equally foreign to  Berkeley boy with no car) and he insisted that we walk around to the other side of the mall and have a couple tall boys in the parking lot.

The next time I remember seeing him we didn't drink, which was a bit of a surprise.  Dad always drank.  But this next time I saw him he was in his apartment and a problem with his foot wouldn't allow him to get around like he used to.  This time it was 2003 and I was there to extend an olive branch and invite him to my wedding.  He showed me around the apartment building, the pool, his car, the cute neighbor.  That was one of the few times we talked about our past.  About him disappearing for long stretches of my childhood.  It was one of the few time I got a glimpse of his shame though he never said "I'm sorry."  Through that shame shone the same man I'd come to know over the years.  The one who didn't understand that a kid doesn't need a hero or a grand gesture, all he needs is a dad.  All he needs is the dad he remembers best.  Not the one with presents or an old Cadillac, but the one who can throw a football in the park or who has just enough money for a malt in the bleachers.  He wanted me to forgive him then, as he had when he'd first gotten back in touch again, after vanishing for a period of years.  Again. What I had to offer him was a wedding invitation.  He accepted though he didn't actually come.  By the time the wedding came he couldn't drive.  His foot condition had gotten worse.  His helper was supposed to bring him but something came up. 

The next time I remember seeing my dad, or even talking to him was a few years later.  I was bringing my new fiancee, or maybe she was still "just" a girlfriend at the time, to meet him.  We went out for Mexican food.  I took a short video of them dancing in the restaurant.  I think it was the last time I saw him.  He didn't make it to that wedding either.  Diabetes had taken his sight and his mobility.  He'd already survived throat cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer, at least one pneumonia induced coma, alcoholism, heroin addiction, and the Bronx.  He was in no shape to travel.  I couldn't commit myself to keeping in touch.  After all, this was the man who'd abandoned me so many times and who kind of shrugged off my attempts to hash this out.  I knew he was sorry, I knew he was as damaged by it as I was but I just didn't care.  I wanted my pound of flesh.

My wife got pregnant at just about the very first possible chance after we were married.  My mom had been dead for a year already at that point and my contact with that side of the family was dissolving.  I kept meaning to call my dad and tell him but something, friends, work, resentment, always came up.  Besides, we were waiting three months before telling people because we knew the statistics.  About a week before we were ready to tell the world that there would indeed be another generation of the Santiago line I came home to find a business card stuck in the screen of my front door.  It was from farther away than I'd have expected and my first thought was that my grandmother had been compelled to drive farther than she should have.  When I called the number and got the news I couldn't believe it, mostly because I'd expected to hear it twenty years earlier.  Then ten years earlier, then five.  "We regret to inform you that your father is dead.  He was found by a friend.  Here are some numbers where you can reach people who knew him."

While my dad's death was a shock it wasn't really a surprise.  The amazing thing is that he'd lived this long.  My senior year of college I'd spent three weekends driving from Los Angeles to the Bay Area to be by his side because the doctors swore "He's going to go this weekend."  This was his pneumonia (and vodka and pills) induced coma.  After three weeks he still wasn't dead.  I stopped going.  Two weeks later they found him wandering around the ICU.  He'd woken up suddenly, pulled all the tubes out and was trying to go home.  He'd been on a respirator.  He had a tube running down his nose to his stomach to feed him.  None of that seemed to matter to him, he just pulled it all out which means he was either on a ton of pain meds or just a complete bad ass.  Whenever we'd discuss any of his seemingly life threatening ailments later he'd always come back to one explanation, which he'd draw out in his raspy, one-lunged-life-time-smoker rattle, "Nothing can kill me, I'm from the Bronx."

In the end he was right.  It wasn't the various cancers that got him.  It wasn't the diabetes or the vodka.  In the end the only thing that could kill my dad was himself.  One day he called his case worker, told him what he was going to do, took a shit load of who knows what, laid down in his La-Z-Boy and went to sleep.  I got the card from the coroner's office a few days later. A few days before I was really going to call and tell him he was going to be a grandfather.  A few days before I might have given him something to live for.

I've carried that guilt with me the last four years as I've watched my son grow up without half his heritage.  I don't know if my dad would have been any better a grandfather than he was a father, but I wish we'd had the chance to find out.  Now, instead of answers or apologies, I have a five by seven by three inch box.  It's strange to think that all that we are can be distilled to 105 cubic inches.  I always felt like I was going through the motions when I tried to openly converse with the dead.  There's something about talking to a headstone or a photo that always seemed like I was just acting out a trope from a thousand staged dramas.  But recently it's felt real.  So tonight I sat down to have a beer with my dad.  To forgive him. To thank him for the good things I remember. For the lessons he provided, if not by instruction, then by example.

I love you dad.  I miss you.  I wish you could have met Feechy Jr.  Thank you for giving me baseball.  Thank you for buying me that yellow Pittsburgh Pirates pill box cap even though we were at a Giants game.  For letting me love Willie Stargell.  For letting me see those old rainbow Astros unis in person.  For letting me steer the van as a kid.  For teaching me about the Three Stooges, Little Rascals, and Honeymooners.  For taking me to one of the last lunch counters.  For giving me some moxie.  For that little taste of the South Bronx.  For my name, for my looks, thank you.

I love you dad.  I forgive you.  Happy Father's Day.

My Son's First Game/Rickey Henderson Day

Taking Buddy Buddy to this game was special for me because it bookended a chapter of my life. When I was a little kid my dad used to take me to A's games and as a three or four year old kid I immediately latched on to my favorite player. He could run, hit, steal bases, and made great plays in the outfield. That player was Dwayne Murphy. Later on I learned to appreciate, then love a new guy named Rickey Henderson. Going to those games are the best memories I have of my father. Baseball is the one thing he gave me, other than my name, that has lasted and I love him for it.

Eventually Rickey replaced Dwayne as my favorite player. When Rickey went to New York I joined my Bronx based family in rooting for the Yankees. (I know, it's a hard thing for me to admit.) When Rickey came back to Oakland in 1998 I was thrilled. The main reason for my excitement was that I was now able to take my eight year old brother to see Rickey. His dad traveled a lot for work so I had the privilege of providing my brother with his baseball education. We'd been going to games for a couple years but taking hm to see Rickey helped me gain some closure with my experience of my father.

Rickey was drafted nine months before I was born. Thirty-three years later I got to bring my three month old son to his first A's game, the day we closed the book on Rickey's career. Number twenty-four has been retired in Oakland. I would have loved to have brought my dad. He passed away almost exactly a year ago. He never knew he was going to be a grandfather.

Having been there for the start of Rickey's career and having my son there for the end means more to me than I can express in print. So I'll close by saying thanks Rickey, for the memories, for the endless entertainment, and for being a constant for all those years. Thanks dad. Your failings were what they were but you tried in your own way and you gave me the gift of baseball.

This video has some typos and the camera work is shaky at best. That's what happens when I hold my son while taping on my cheap little snap shot camera then rush home to put together a video at 12:00am. Anyway, enjoy it for what it is.

Ryu's First Ball Game (Rickey Henderson Day)
So bear with me, I made this after 12:00am last night. I was so excited to get Ryu's first game out there.If you're not a baseball fan you can skip Rickey's speech, but it's pretty good.
Posted by Roberto Santiago on Sunday, August 2, 2009