From Cowboy to Scientist: On the Life and Death of My Father, or, My Great-Grandfather Had Six Wives - Part Two: Death

He achieved much, he fell fast. 

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In a book dedicated to my father's lifetime work on epilepsy, the author quotes my father:  'the brain is like a map, but no matter how much we know of this map, there will always be more of the unknown than the known.'

This was typical of my father's scientific writings, so different from many scientists who publish in journals today. He was a renaissance man who heard classical music for the first time in college, and, with a year of taking piano lessons, could play Beethoven.

Years after his death, relatives would walk into a room and do a double take when they heard me play, "Two Easy Sonatas" by Beethoven. Hearing his cadences and the way his fingers touched the keys, relatives thought it was my father, and not me, at the piano.

He first taught me to read music when I was five. He played the piano at parties upon request. There were a lot of requests. I had ample time to listen to his cadences, so attuned was I to his inner ear, his soul. 

He worked hard. Twelve months long, with only a few weekends off, he was at work. In the lab, there were experiments to prepare and lectures to give, graduate students to teach. At home, there were articles to write, revisions and edits to make.

In his spare time, he cooked. Oh, he barely knew how to turn on a stove, but he made the American country favorite of Porcupines. We all relished this casual dish, much as we relished the stroganoff and boeuf bourguignon that I would make. We relished the cowboy side of him, much as we were proud of him as a scientist.

There were catered parties at the house in Montreal, often for the entire department, usually with a special guest of honor. Once, when a world-famous neurologist was the guest of honor, we had to put our beloved Lakeland terrier in a back room, so insistent was she at barking at said guest. Usually, she barked only at hippies and mailmen.

 Life was like a dream.

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He was in Acapulco, Mexico on the first real vacation in seven years. He and my stepmother had been to the Yucatan Peninsula to see the Mayan ruins. On that afternoon on Saturday, December 7, 1971, they had been hiking in the mountains.

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I was in my student apartment at McGill. My stepbrother knocked on my door, awakening me.

Don is gone, said he. I asked him to repeat, because I didn't quite hear him. Don is gone, he said. I kept hearing him say my father was lost until he finally said, "Don is dead."

The seconds were a blur. I ran down the hall and  screamed like a banshee, until one of my roommates said she it was OK, that she knew how I felt.  I screamed back at her, 'No, you don't. You don't know. You can't know', and she looked as if I had slapped her across the face.

The last time I had seen my father was on my 20^th birthday, a few weeks earlier.

During the next few hours, I returned home, then back downtown, where friends fed me Percodan and we watched some dumb movie, the name of which or the content of which I never actually knew, so oblivious was I to my surroundings.

I knew that this was not the worst. The worst was yet to come. This much I knew.

 My stepmother was still in Mexico. She wanted the secret to be kept until she came home, a few days later. 

My youngest sister came home from school one day and asked simply: "Is it true?"

The young son of one of my parents' colleagues had overheard the news, and was too young to keep it to himself.

So, the three of us, my stepbrother, my youngest sister and I kept the secret from my middle sister. Secrets were like gold in our house, more valuable than anything imaginable.

So repressed were we, our hair and our home so tidy, the gloss of our life a perfect shining veneer over lives so fragile, our hearts like jelly, that the veneer could break with the slightest provocation, and send our souls into chaos.

In Poland, when someone died, people would joke about the bureaucracy in Poland and say, 'at least, it's not Mexico.' 

My stepmother was alone in Mexico, after my father died, and she did not speak Spanish. So suspicious were the authorities, they needed to question her about foul play.

She was beside herself with grief. She managed to telephone a doctor in Mexico City, a former student of my father, who arranged for an elderly lady to sit with my stepmother, while he made the appropriate arrangements with the Mexican authorities.

Oh, there were nights of my stepmother's Seconal and alcohol, so much so that she couldn't sleep, then so much she couldn't awaken, and her lit cigarette torched the daybed and nearly set the basement on fire.

We quashed the fire, tossed the ruined daybed and did not call 911. We knew not to call the authorities.

There were nights my stepmother railed in hysterics and anger at my father, and how could he leave her to pick up this mess, of dying in testate, of four children to take care of, three of whom were not hers.

It was December in Montreal, the snow lay thick on the ground. There would be no funeral until summer, when my grandmother could travel. My stepmother kept the urn in her room, as if a comfort to her.

 Of all this, I felt numb. I wrote poetry about my father, for him to wake from his sleep, to come to dinner at the empty place waiting for him, to rise from his ashes.

I nearly lost my mind imagining him in that urn, no form, no body, just ash.

The six months of waiting, barely able to breathe or sleep, until the funeral.

I walked down the street and on every corner it was as if I saw him walking ahead of me. That tousled, grey hair. That slouch, all of it seemed to beckon me, stir up my subconscious and shout, 'it's him, he's there, it's not true, he is alive.'

When people would ask, I would reply: 'He died.' As in the past tense, something that has happened but is no longer true. 'He's dead' had such a sharp, staccato finality that I could not bear to utter those words.

June 22, 1972 , was sunny and warm. The cemetery had recently been redone, with street signs and grassy knolls. Birds chirped, and a gentle fragrance hung in the air.

I had bought a black dress and pumps for the occasion. I changed my name from Kira to Kathryn. There was comfort, real comfort, however small, in being together with the extended family for the funeral. My father's mother, aged as she was, was there to bury her child.

My father's two sisters were there, too, having made the trip from New Mexico and California.

Through all this, I never shed a tear. Still so numb was I to the death of the man from whom I had learned everything. I went through the motions for the next two decades, resolved to carry on his work in science. Not as a scientist, but as someone who knew how important he was, and what a loss for society his death was.

I finished college and grad school, settled down and got married. I had been raised an atheist, yet I always felt a pull toward Catholicism. I decided to become a Catholic and enrolled at The Paulist Center, in Boston.

It was during those times when we read scripture and related the passage to our lives that the floodgates opened; tears flowed and would not stop. In front of a dozen people I was, and still the tears rolled down my cheeks.

I had learned so much from my father - how he had died so that I could learn from his mistakes, his successes, his life.

It was then that I could finally let go and rejoice at being alive.