My dad and I have never been close. Dad has always kept himself isolated from others; he prefers to arrange his world around himself and his needs, and keeps to an absolute minimum the messy business of relationships with others. He prefers not to know about the lives of those around him, even his own children. This has not changed since he came to live with me and my family. His sphere and mine overlap only at meals and at other times when he needs my assistance.
So it has developed that most of our conversations take place in the car, when I’m driving him to medical appointments.
A couple of days ago, when we were returning from his appointment with the cardiologist, Dad and I reminisced about my mother. It was January, and the third anniversary of her death. I’ve heard all of Dad’s stories about my mom; in fact I’ve heard them each at least a dozen times. But this time his story about first spotting her amidst a noisy group of college girls in a soda fountain seemed more vivid and immediate. For a moment I imagined what she must have been like. “She was the leader of the group,” Dad said, and I thought (but did not reply) how strange that seems to me. I never knew my mom to be like that.
To me, mom always stayed in the background. She couldn’t socialize, get to know new people, hold a job, meet my teachers, or go anywhere without my dad. Her brain, and her life, were irreparably damaged in an automobile accident, when she was only 45 years old.
Physicists talk about singularities–the no man’s land inside the event horizon of a black hole, beyond which we can make no predictions and reality itself is alien. Mom’s accident is a singularity in the life of my family. We speak of it in capital letters: The Accident. Before the accident my family was normal, routine, imperfect, but relatively happy. After the accident we were dysfunctional. I tolerated things no child should experience. Prior to that December day, in 1961, we would not have imagined what our family life was about to become.
In the car, after telling me how vivacious Mom had been, Dad softly remarked that he wished she had outlived him. The neurologist had told him, Dad said, that Mom would age prematurely. And though Mom lived to be 86 years old–a long life by any standard–I knew exactly what he meant. That accident did cause premature aging. After the accident, we saw Mom recover a little bit, for a time. And then, it seemed, we watched a very long, very slow decline.
I remember standing out in my parents’ driveway, a few years ago, talking with Dad and our family friend David Boyer. When David was a young man he had driven the ambulance that carried Mom to the hospital in Columbus. “How many years ago was that accident?” He asked. Dad and I replied, simultaneously, “Thirty-seven.” Thirty-seven years since the singularity. Dad and I and my siblings, we always know how many years have passed since that day. This November will be the 45th year. Mom died in year 41–nearly half a life lived inside a broken mind.
In the driveway that day, and in the car coming back from the cardiologist last Friday, Dad and I were of one mind. We hardly know each other. But inside this singularity, we are family.
