by Wendy Ware

Created on: May 08, 2008

My memories of that day are foggy. A brief phone call from my mother, telling me how much my father loved me but that he was so sick and didn't know how to make it better. I remember eating chicken at a fast food joint later that day, wondering what it must be like to be dead and how I should not be eating chicken right now because my father couldn't. Was he being entered into the gates of heaven or was he being picked apart my demons in hell. My boyfriend's mother told me that even though she was catholic, she didn't believe he was in Hell. I didn't believe her. I think she was just trying to be nice.

My father was a very fat, loud alcoholic. His mood would bounce wildly from extreme grandiose thoughts and optimism to crying fits of despair on a daily basis. He would take my little sister and I to a park we named The Red Park because all of the old metal play equipment was painted a fire engine red. The swings were as tall as the trees and I would take my doll named Sue and slide her down the slide again and again. My dad would bring wax paper for us to sit on to make the tall slide fast and dangerous and fun. He would always have a six pack of beer in a cooler that he would drink while we played. He was too fat and drunk to play with us, but my sister and I were happy he was there. One chooses to not be so picky when you only get to see your father for 2 weeks in the summer.

My sister and I would wait until he was not slurring his words anymore, try to convince him we should walk to go eat versus drive, and go have a very fancy dinner. He would tell us dining out was different than eating, that every bite should be savored, eaten slowly. He would order us lobster and shrimp and shirley temples, let us take sips of his wine and then swirl us out onto the dance floor and let us dance with our feet on the top of his shoes.

We would go back to his tiny apartment and try to get him to go to bed before it happened. But it never worked, after the crack of that beer that was it. He would first start speaking of the good times, when he first met my mother, when they bought that first house, how he was so happy when my sister and I were born. Then it would start and not stop until he passed out in a drunken stupor on the couch. He would start wailing, crying like a small child, saying how much he missed our mother and how could she have left. Then he would get angry, saying he will never trust her again, his life is over and will never be complete.

Every summer I went to see my father there is one thing he always told my sister and I again and again. He would always tell us not to mourn him. On the anniversary of his death he told my sister and I we should go to the circus or the amusement park. He said he was going to be cremated and sprinkled over the ocean so no one could mourn his rotting body in the ground. He believed once you were dead you were dead, no god, no nothing.

Once he got his gun out of closet and told me to hold it. I did not want to. I did not like guns. Guns hurt people. He did not want me to be scared of it, and he made me hold it. It was cold and shiny and heavy, and I have never held a gun since.

When I was sixteen and got that telephone call from my mother I was really not that surprised. He was trying to prepare me for it. My father drove to The Red Park on a warm August afternoon. He had a cooler of beer and a gun in his pocket. He waited until dusk, after all of the mothers had left with their children. He put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. When I think of The Red Park now I do not think about the red play equipment.

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