Writing His Obituary

In stringing together some measured words about her late ex-husband, Sallie Reynolds sets herself free.

maystra/Getty Images

My daughter’s father died last spring. He was 85. She was crying into the phone—it was minutes before I could make out that she’d spoken to him the day before, and he hadn’t been feeling well. “He was never sick! I should have gone right then!” Now he was dead.

The next day, she left for his house halfway across the country, and for two weeks she called, sometimes hourly, overwhelmed with pain and the chores of death—lawyers, banks, friends, crematorium. His things! Every object had his essence, his odor. She couldn’t give away a shirt or a coat. Hadn’t he just worn it the other day? And his dog. His dog completely unraveled her.

“What am I going to do?” Her husband didn’t want another animal. But now the dog was sleeping every night beside her. Should she give him to a friend’s son—a young man badly injured, needing a constant companion? “I know it’s right,” she said, “but I can’t bear it. I’m abandoning my father’s dog.”

An echo of a small voice, long ago: My dad needs me.

Her father and I divorced when she was 3, and when she was 5, he kidnapped her while I was in the hospital having surgery. He took her 1,000 miles away to his parents’ house, and for two years I didn’t hear her voice, or know what she was doing. He wouldn’t answer questions, refused to put her on the phone or let her know I called.

He reinvented himself as “a single father.”

***

The first thing you noticed was how enormous the man was. You had to tilt your head back to meet his eye. She’s also tall. At 12 she went through a growth spurt like a boy, and the other kids tormented her. “Giraffe!” “Skyscraper!”

“They’re just pipsqueaks,” he told her. “You don’t have to listen to them.” Years later she and I had an argument and she said that: “You’re a pipsqueak. I don’t have to listen to you.”

Now she worries on and on—his shoes, what is she going to do with 40 pairs of size-16 shoes? I say, “Isn’t there a club of big and tall men or something?” She says there is, but I see in her hesitation that the problem isn’t in what to do, but to do anything at all.

Listening to her, I am remembering not his shoes, but a shirt. White, crisp, ironed. When I was pregnant with her, I wore that shirt, it was like an angel robe. Virginal. Enfolding. I was wearing it when he told me he’d fucked my best friend.

What powerful things, the belongings of the dead! Connective tissue. I cannot get that white shirt out of my head. And now I’m trying not to think about my own parents—sure-fire way to a mind-worm. They were alcoholics—stinking breath, that terrifying vagueness. For long stretches they ignored me. Then suddenly they’d descend, a tornado of attention and control: my god, how unacceptable the child is! And how I longed for them to treasure me. After their deaths, I kept a small watch of Mother’s that calls up an eye pale as water, fine gold ring around the iris—bull’s eye—straight to my failings. And an old Parker pen of my father’s that leaked, spoiling whatever I wrote. Oh you’ll never amount to anything!

Good lord, why don’t I just throw them out?

Neither can she.

Our fathers had rigid rules about who we could be—weaseling, cutting, stretching us to fit, like that old bandit Procrustes. When I first met my husband, I loved being what he wanted. At last, the attention I longed for! And if I did exactly what he said, he loved me.

He hurt me in the ways such people do—sexual betrayals, financial betrayals. But there were also the deeper wounds-to-the-spirit that spring from a choked-down violence. So much power, so much malice—it rose to his surface like sweat. And when I couldn’t love him, his rage built. We broke.

For my daughter, this tailoring was a siren call. She was his precious—she could have anything she wanted. Only when she wanted long hair, he cut it, when she wanted jeans, he put her in dresses—whatever deviated from his desires, he changed. Afterward he’d buy her expensive things to make up, and she’d treat them carelessly, to get back at him. Later, when she wanted to study biology, he said he’d pay for an MBA. You’ll never amount to anything unless you do what I tell you.

Two years after he took her, when my health and finances were not in such a shambles, I hired a lawyer who (with a sneer of distaste—people will think you don’t love your daughter!) did what I asked. Our divorce granted us joint custody. I was willing to give that up for the opportunity to talk to her weekly and see her for a month in the summer. I became my own Procrustes, chopping myself into pieces to get what I could.

Under our new agreement, I could call her once a week. She called me, collect and in secret, whenever she wanted. He played games with the summers, agreeing on a date, then not putting her on the plane or cutting the visit short. But we always had some time, and she and I wrapped ourselves in a tangle of joy and pain. At the end, she always begged to stay. Then—My dad needs me.

What I didn’t see was how fiercely she loved him. She showed me only his need. So she too became Procrustes, cutting off part of herself with each of us.

Now, hearing her thousand feelings and duties, I say only, “I love you . . . I love you.”

One day, she said, “Mom, will you do something for me?”

“Anything.”

“Will you write his obituary?”

Dear god. How could she ask that?

***

After the first flush of lust, I was afraid of him. I’d been married before and my first husband died. Actually, he killed himself. And like my daughter, I went into shock. Then I met her father, the man larger than life, and saw rescue. He saw a woman he could train to his desires. He hurt me in the ways such people do—sexual betrayals, financial betrayals. But there were also the deeper wounds-to-the-spirit that spring from a choked-down violence. So much power, so much malice—it rose to his surface like sweat. And when I couldn’t love him, his rage built. We broke.

I’ve never told my daughter the hardest things.

“Will you write it for me, Mom?”

“Of course”—oh I was going to hate myself!—“of course I will.”

***

alexmillos/Getty Images

So I sat down to it. I’d known the beautiful young man “of promise.” Known his immigrant grandparents, arriving here destitute and hungry. His parents, uneducated, never comfortable in their American skins—stern German mother, with the wandering eye that “saw all.” Sweet Czech father, retired to his recliner, listening to all he hadn’t done with his life, constant finger digging holes in his T-shirt right over his apprehensive heart.

I’d known the harsh Catholic Fathers. The expulsions. His mother pleading with the schools to take him back. Just this once . . . your best student . . . our only hope, our golden boy! The first in the family to go to college. You were born to do good for mankind, his mother said. You’ll find the cure for cancer.

I dressed their young man carefully for his last portrait. I was a good girl—didn’t describe the bad husband or the raging fury daring the world to try me! I allowed only two twists of the tiger’s tail. His high-school friend, a schizophrenic on-and-off his meds, had dubbed him “the one-and-a-half-size all-American boy.” He’d repeat that and laugh—relishing his power over contempt? Maybe his obituary-readers would too. In it went.

One day, my daughter said, “Mom, will you do something for me?” “Anything.” “Will you write his obituary?” Dear god. How could she ask that? I’ve never told my daughter the hardest things. “Will you write it for me, Mom?” “Of course”—oh I was going to hate myself!—“of course I will.”

My daughter sent me notes outlining the unknown years, and I wrestled with the guns, the motorcycles, the Mensa membership, the friends. And of course, business. He hadn’t discovered the cure for cancer, he’d become the number-one real-estate salesman in his city—“the elephant hunter in the art of the deal,” as one of the young men he mentored put it. Everyone adored that line. So in it went, too. After all, he’d worked half a century, for that elephant, never letting up for a second. Three generations, he said, from nothing to the top 5 percent. The American Dream!

***

It was done. My daughter was happy, his friends were happy. I sat staring at the page, bracing for the inevitable rage and depression.

But—I was just tired. The writing had washed me clean.

I’ll never like this cold, driven 5-percenter. Or forget the devastation that was our marriage, or how he tried to make our child into his alone. But I’d drawn the picture of an acceptable other. An ordinary man—elderly, a bit diminished, enjoying his friends, his money, his hobbies.

And one central still-point: a child he loved the only way he could. He sent her a note on her last birthday: “This day changed my life forever.”

Look: It’s dark. Winter—the night that changed all our lives forever. He’s tucking our small daughter into his “runaway” truck, which has no heater. He wraps her in a brown blanket, soft and thick, kisses her, slips a hot-water bottle at her feet. And drives—that long, cold drive, back to his mother’s house, the child asleep and warm beside him.

She found that blanket in his garage.

“I smelt it,” she says, “and remembered everything.”

***

The night I sent in the obituary, I dreamed I was locked in the big glass house where I lived for a while after I left New York. My daughter was there, and her father. I was having memory problems. My daughter had put locks on all the doors so I couldn’t lose myself or get hurt. I couldn’t begin to work them. Then I looked at them again and suddenly saw how—of course! I opened them and stepped out into the night. The relief was so powerful, I cried.

**

Grief is many-horned and old Procrustes is still at work.

She’s keeping his dog. She’s having a quilt made of his flannel shirts.

And there are those locked doors in my dream.

But—I opened them!

I’m free.

---