—
There are all kinds of ways to get too close to the edge of something that initially seems attractive but about which you actually know nothing. Along with his frequent-flyer miles and time logged away from home, my dad spent years amassing significant experience with crippling depression. Like his work and his mileage, I was aware of his depression really only in that it meant another absence, even though he was physically there. I never realized how close he’d gotten to a tipping point until he told me about it one afternoon when I was home from college, while we sat in the front seat of his pickup in the driveway. I don’t remember where we had just been—it could have been something as boring as the grocery store—or how he brought it up, but I remember that even though the weather was chokingly hot, I felt rooted to my seat like I couldn’t move.
“You two had just gotten on the bus to go to school and I got out the pistol. I sat on the side of my bed, and I just held it for a long time. I couldn’t see a way for things to get any better, and I thought maybe Kathy and you and Doug would be better off without me.”
“You did what?” He was quiet for a long time. “But I thought Mom got all the guns out.”
“Those were just the shotguns. I guess I kept the pistol somewhere else. Things were tough for a long time.” If there’s a correct way to react when your parent confesses to a suicidal period, even if it’s far in the past, I don’t know what it is. I just stared at him. “I’m not telling you this to scare you. I’m telling you because there are certain things in life that look like solutions, but they’re not. If you give them too much thought, they kind of pull you toward them. You’ve got to be careful what you think about, especially when it comes to depression.”
By now, my dad and I were both on antidepressants and depression and its legacy in our family had become an open topic of conversation. Therapy had helped, as had my getting kicked out of school, but what really cemented the change in our family’s treatment of the subject was my uncle Sandy’s suicide a year after my expulsion. Sandy married my dad’s older sister, and in so doing took on the role of de facto older brother and role model for most of the nearly four decades he and my dad knew each other. Sandy had worked in the oil field, and he and my aunt and my cousin had lived in Saudi Arabia for a short time many years before us. I knew this, but it had seemed like random background information for most of the time I’d known them, like some weird vacation they took once. I could see, though, how the idea of moving his family to the Middle East must have made much more sense to my dad the night he told us about it over dinner, and not like the wild pitch I saw it as.
Belatedly, and with a sick feeling of regret, I realized this meant my dad had been working from a pattern set by Sandy’s stories, just as I would later find myself aping my own parents’ steps. To be left guessing at how Sandy must have felt, even if only for a moment, on a sunny afternoon home alone with a gun in Odessa, Texas—I could finally see, beyond my own experience, how depression affected, and continued to affect, my whole family. Perspective like this only lasts briefly, and the shock of it can take your breath away.
I think of my uncle and my father and the San Marcos River these days when I think about the irresistible pull of perfectionism and isolation I feel in times of great stress. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say I probably seek these situations out, just to prove something. Is idiocy like this passed down in the DNA? Or is it cultural, the result of too many cowboy shows and war movies, or of living in a male-dominated subculture with narrow female roles? What kind of world was I living in if asking for help was a weakness?
PART III
CHAPTER 18
TOPGUN. Always all caps, always one word.