My Father's Painted Shoes

It was an average Tuesday in July, not much different than any that had come before. I went to work, came home and quick tidied my studio apartment before tossing myself onto my duvet for my ritualistic post-work social media scroll. A call came in from my oldest sister, I answered, “Grace wants us all to conference call her together when we’re at home”, “…um okay” I replied. Grace was my father’s wife, a wary woman whose discerning forethought on any matters of concern could at times feel overstepping. Still, a conference call from her on a Tuesday afternoon was exceptionally out of the ordinary. I hung up the phone and began to feel that deep sickness, the kind that lingers into your gut when your body knows something is wrong. It was about my dad; I could feel it. I laid with my back against my pillows subconsciously bracing for the call that would turn out to be the worst call of my life.

My phone rang, I gazed half-heartedly at the answer button for a few moments before answering. Lauren, Steph and I were on the line and we waited anxiously through the brief silence before Grace began to speak. “Your father took his life today…”, the words echo even still, overshadowing any others that were spoken that day. What… how… Where… Questions flooded my mind as I drifted backwards through the blackness that separates the living from the bereaved. I felt shock, but I never felt denial, I knew Grace’s words to be true for I began losing my father long before the fateful call on July 12th that would change the course of my life forever.

My dad was a man of 62, loving, yet paradoxically emotionally withdrawn from me and others closest to him. In his final years I could feel the father I once knew pulling into himself while concurrently isolating away from others. My father lost his business at 60 and had to start a new after his ex-business partner stole holdings from their general contracting company to build his multi-million-dollar mansion (he still lives in today). Soon there was not enough money to pay the trades, deals went sideways, and my father was forced to bow out of the successful company he’d spend the better part of 30 years building. Left with copious debts acquired through forged signatures, my father filed for bankruptcy and after a short time, everything he’d ever built was gone. This marks the moment that my father’s mental health accelerated in a downward spiral. My father gathered his sense of self through his pride in providing for his family and the life he could afford for himself. I believe this stems from his addiction and the need to externally fill internal pain and conflict through whatever means necessary. My father carried childhood trauma and was raised in an alcoholic family himself; as a result, he was often distant and unreachable. I never had the chance to get to know his soul before his spirit left. It was always this way and I learned to accept it. He worked from 7am to 6pm every day, fighting like we all do to find happiness through acquired success in a world that is unfair and unkind.

My father spoke of death and dying in casual conversation, the same way I speak of autumn and the passing of seasons. He was not afraid of death, or at least did not seem to be. This trait was passed to me. I am now afraid of how I do not fear death yet am curiously drawn to its darkness. I reflect on the imprint my father’s death left on me knowing that I am that much closer to suicide, because I am a survivor of it.

After the call from Grace ended, I was alone. The weightless absence of gravity held me briefly before I began slipping into the bottomless floor. My father was gone, my questions forever unanswered and a heart that would never fully heal. They say suicide loss can cause the most pain and often and inevitability leads to complicated grief. This is because of how questions remain suspended in air without answers, like a metronome that will never stop ticking even within the box it stored in for years to come. Words fail to encapsulate the despair of a loved one choosing to exit this world, leaving the ones they loved, leaving me behind. It is a notion that left me breathless, weightless and barely surviving. I understand suicide to be not a selfish choice but the absence of the hope our souls need to keep living. I understand it as the end to enduring and embedded pain that most are fortunate to live without knowing. I never forgave my father because he never sought forgiveness, only love, and in the compassion for his story and untimely death is where I found my own process of healing.

After the call from Grace and the 2 hours I spent alone embedded in fibers of my carpet, my sisters and I gathered at my Mother’s house. Lauren, the eldest of us girls flew home from Calgary and Steph came from nearby. The initial days after my father’s passing are a haze. Grief takes you to another state of consciousness that clouds all mind and thought; like you can see people and you can hear the world, but you exist in a place far removed from where others are. It takes bravery to cry for there is no bottom to the despair that can soon swallow you. I learned to take breaks in grief, I knew it would be the only way to survive it.

After a few days it was time to gather our things and make the trip to the mainland and my father’s residence. I remember it was hot, and we all braced to see the first sign of Chilliwack, the city where my father lived, and the town that raised me. Grace greeted us at the door, and I stepped inside. At first when someone dies, you think somehow all of their things will be gone too, but my dad was everywhere in that house. The smells, his scattered shoes, the bowls of uneaten candies leftover from previous gatherings. I was once again alone while the others went out for a walk. I curled up on his tv chair where the faded leather was stained by the scent of his cologne. The chair wrapped me like a final hug, and I was given the gift of a short nap.

My dad left long detailed letters found by Grace on the night of his passing. There were other notes and poems found on his iPad along with instructions of how Grace was to pass us our individual letters. I won’t go into too much detail about my letter besides to say that it was from reading it that I learned that my father was not well before his passing. His words were calm, formulated, if not beautifully poetic. How could someone write 4-page goodbye letters to everyone they loved while somehow justifying their departure and eloquently bidding farewell? I place these thoughts neatly into the box of all that I will never know regarding the suicide of my father.

My dad left what I thought of as treasure trail of answers and gifts that I used to fill what was left of my grieving heart. In the top drawer of his nightstand he left a ring to my sister Steph with a note attached that read, “it means, may peace be with you”. Alone in his house I scoured dressers and drawers and jacket pockets until I ended up at his shoe closest on the main floor by the entrance to the garage. I opened it to find his collection of shoes and to the front and on top of all the others lay square toe dress shoes dusted in speckles of white paint. Upon seeing the shoes my heart cracked open and tears led me to a new depth of pain that even now still shatters me. you see, 2 months previous, my dad had asked my sisters and I to help him paint his new office space and for reasons beyond the scope of this story we never helped him. Thoughts of every moment my father dropped everything to help me, to raise me, to care for me flashed as I saw his 62-year-old body painting his office alone into the nights. In that moment, all that I had left of him were his shoes, a poignant reminder that I was not there to help him in what would be his last request and his final favour from me. Even to this day nearly 4 years passed, I cannot think about my fathers painted shoes without falling tears that creep up from the lake of grief that will always linger inside of me.

What I have written is all I am willing to share of my story for the vine of details would continue to grow and the roots of all the story entails are not only mine to share. Like many others before me I share my story in hopes that if you have experienced or are currently grieving the loss of someone close, to suicide, you are not alone. My hope for the world is that the silence of the withdrawn depression that took my father from me is heard by others who see a similar pattern in a loved one before it is too late. I never saw it coming, yet now I can see that it was, always, coming. I watched my father write out my suicide letter during my last visit to his home, yet only wondered who he was writing to outside by himself smoking cigars. I am haunted by the fear I had of his distance from me when I said my last goodbye, yet I never stepped closer to him. I missed the chance to ask him where he was in his mind, yet in the spare room I texted my sister that “the energy in dad’s house is really dark…”. I do not get another chance to try and help him and I wish to be clear that I do not blame myself for his passing, I am simply left with what I have learned. I would urge others to step into that feeling, the unease when something is wrong; be curious about it. I don’t wish to end our story on a foreboding note, but it only seems right to share my experience in hopes that it sparks even a small distant change out there, somewhere.