Emmylou Harris

G and I were in trouble. Married for three years, we had hit an impasse. She wanted kids, and I didn’t, and there didn’t seem to be any way around the issue, neither of us were willing to budge. She loved kids and had spent all of her professional life teaching them and nurturing them and watching them grow and feeding from their shiny eyes and big hearts and wanted to raise some of her own. I had been a happy child and made friends fairly easily most of the time and liked kids, although I never really spent much time around them as an adult, but was dead set against having any of my own. Some of it was that I was afraid (and rightly so) that my life would end. Or, rather (even worse), that it wouldn’t end, but that I’d have to live it in the service of somebody else and would have to put my needs and desires on the back burner, if not push them off the stove entirely. Although a legitimate fear, my own experience was that my mom had been able to follow some of her dreams and live her life and she had raised me almost entirely by herself. There were compromises made, and I was required to reach a premature level of maturity (prematurity) to help make our tiny family function, but she clearly loved me and I loved her and we had – and still have – one of the best parent/child relationships I had ever witnessed. Mostly, I was selfish, and worried about bringing kids into this cracked and troubled world. I hated the idea of watching a perfect, beautiful, trusting human being get beaten and crushed by the evils and inequities of this world and have to learn to protect their heart and avert their eyes and make the millions of rationalizations and compromises that being a member of this – or, really any – society meant. Plus, I had some serious unresolved issues with my own father and didn’t want anybody to have that kind of a relationship with me.

So, we were stuck.

Then G resorted to what turns out to be an alarmingly common deceit. She lied about using her birth control. I later found out that many women do this in order to kick the relationship to the next level – and, even worse – most of the time they seem to have no qualms about it. I couldn’t believe it when I heard that from G, who had polled several of her friends who were mothers. Their rationalization was that the husband or boyfriend had cold feet and would be a great dad but didn’t want to take the plunge. So, they’d engineer an “accident”, get pregnant, and that would be that. G, fortunately, had the character and courage to feel guilty almost immediately after trying it with me and told me about it, and although I admired her honesty, her confession and the subsequent fight put an enormous strain on our relationship.

So much so that we both went into therapy. Through my weekly visits to the healing hills of Topanga, I started to unravel some of my feelings about my father and some of the stresses that relationship put on me. I decided I needed to confront him about some of my feelings and bring them out into the air. I dreaded doing this, but I was encouraged by my therapist and it sounded like the only way of really moving on, so I took a deep breath – and another one – and wrote my dad a long letter. I told him about the things that I loved about him, but then I also told him about the things I didn’t love about him, like his tendency to disappear and stay emotionally unavailable and his seeming need to control our relationship and set the rules and, especially, his cruel assertion, when things got rough between us, that he wasn’t really my father at all. I cried, then folded the pages into an envelope and sent them to the frozen wilds of Alaska, where he had lived the last few years.

He, being a therapist himself, was quite gracious. He wrote back right away (phone conversations were rare and strained between us, we’re both much better at writing than talking), and told me he was sorry and that he was glad I had told him these things and that he didn’t want me to carry these bad feelings around and that he hoped we could mend old fences and come together in a new, peaceful space. Grateful for his generosity, I wrote him another long letter back, thanking him for his response and promising that I would try to put the past behind us and encouraging him, and me, to have strength in the darkness, the dawn would be coming soon. Smiling, I folded the pages into an envelope and sent them north.

That weekend, I had my last visit with my therapist and we both agreed that I had made good progress and that I should carry on by myself for a while. I thanked him, he thanked me, and I drove back home with a light heart.

The next day, I got a call from the sheriff of Kodiak, telling me that they had found my father’s body that morning. Numb, I asked him how he had died, but I already knew the answer, and had known the answer for many years. Sure enough, I was right. Self-inflicted gunshot to the head. When I got up to Alaska and was cleaning out his mailbox, I found my letter, unopened, sitting among the bills.