“Sometimes I still think it has blood on them”, he says looking ahead in the distance as we sit on his porch after his Sunday morning mass.
An old weathered wrinkled leather wallet. A broken watch. A wedding ring. Some spare pennies. A ballpoint pen chipped off and broken.
For 11-year-old Will, this was all that remained of his soft-spoken lawyer father … an assortment of 59-year-old James’s meager belongings emptied onto the kitchen table.
‘It’s gruesome, I know, but I think they still had himself on them.’
And then there’s the music. Those haunting melodies that ring in his ears he says. Melodies that take him back instantly in time to those dark places he has tried so hard to run out of.
On 12 September 1980, Will and his brother, Patrick, had just got home from school when there was an unexpected knock at the door. There were two policemen, solemn-looking, hats removed, asking to speak with their mother.
‘You just think, what’s going on? What’s this about?’ asks Will.
‘Mom goes into another room with them. They leave, she comes back into the kitchen, sits down at the table, and — I’ll never forget this — she has that clear plastic bag with my dad’s stuff in it.
“Will,” she tells us. “Your father’s dead. He’s killed himself. He jumped in front of a train. Here’s what he had on him.”’
It was the only time his mother would ever speak openly of his father’s suicide.
‘She didn’t come out and say we’re not allowed to talk about your father,’ explains Will about his mother’s handling of the situation.
‘But it was made clear that it was a taboo subject, and we were to build a wall around ourselves and forget about it. It was horrendous because the support just wasn’t there … She went through and burned all the old photos. She just wanted “it” gone.’
By age 13, Will would find himself battling those dark impulses himself. Identifying more with his quiet and contemplative father than his matter-of-fact mother, for years he was secretly riven with guilt over his death. His parents’ marriage had fallen apart two years before the suicide; in desperate straits, his dad had taken out a room at the YMCA, 10 miles up the road.
‘I’d spoken to him a few days before he killed himself. I’d said to him — not understanding how bad off he was — “Daddy, I want a bike for my birthday. Do you think you’d be able to?”
“That’s all I remember about that phone call. So, it’s a guilt issue. I think: God, did I push him over the edge, pressuring him to get me a bloody bike?’
Will remembers the starkest of details from that terrible afternoon in his mother’s kitchen all those years ago. But that was it. His parents had split up. He was down on his luck. He had asked a man who could barely afford a shave, to buy him a bike.
‘Because that,’ I remind him, ‘is simply what 12-year-olds do.’
‘I never did feel any anger toward him,’ he replies plainly in response.
‘I’ve always had a sort of — oh god, maybe I’ve always been a sort of dowdy child myself, I don’t know — but I’ve always had an understanding. I felt sorry for him. Just … sad.’
His capacity for empathy is severely constricted when in the throes of self-destructive thought
Still, Will longs for that lost connection with his dad.
In his 40s, uncertainty eating away at him, he takes a bold leap by reaching out to the coroner’s office in Watford, the town near San Simeon in which his father had ended his life.
‘I remembered that somebody had mentioned there’d been a note,’ he says.
‘Whether my mother had intercepted it and not let us have it or not, I don’t know.’
Months later when I meet him, I find out that the coroner still had a copy of his father’s suicide note, all those years later.
His letter arrived much later than it was meant to, but Will and his siblings are lucky in at least now knowing their dad’s final thoughts.
But that wasn’t the case for him probably.
Will slowly opens a crumpled double-lined paper from his wallet and passes it on to me. I am almost dreading opening it, lest I cause any harm to that memoir.
Addressed to him, his brother Patrick, and their sister Jenna, it spoke of existential despair, of his love for his children, of how he knew that this would undo them… and of music. On the bike, there was not a word:
“I know this will be painful and somewhat a surprise but, for obvious reasons, I will not be there to take care of you … It has taken some careful thought before I knew I was not strong enough to see me through.”
“Please take solace from the knowledge that I loved, and love, you all as much as anyone could, and I know that you will think of me often — I hope with some love — mostly just because we all love music and I hope that there will be many times when a tune will remind you of me.”
I see Will sitting next to me on those steps in front of his house sobbing slightly on that bright Sunday morning and I see him in a different light.
My friend. My crazy eccentric loveable friend. We have had so many long discussions on our way back from the airport, those long discussions about life and death as he insists on dropping me back home, every single time.
The man that most people think of as a whack job, volatile, brilliant but almost crazy.
The one that smashes keyboard when things don’t go his way and the one who bangs the phone receiver on his desk hard after a disagreeable call –
That man.
How easy it is to judge?
How hard it is to know the depths, the sources, the reasons, the causes, the rationales, the circumstances
Of how we turn out to be who we are….
