Highest Duty_ My Search for What Really Matters - Chesley B. Sullenberger [106]
My father, especially, remains in my mind.
I learned a great many things from him about the importance of being a man of your word, about serving your community, about valuing family and the precious time spent with your children. I smile at my warmest memories of him, including those days when he would close down his dental office for the day so he could lead us on a hooky-playing pirate adventure in Dallas.
I am grateful for the faith he had in me. From the time I was about twelve years old, he’d let me take a rifle and go out in the woods for target practice. He knew the best way to learn responsibility was to be given the opportunity to be responsible, and at as young an age as possible.
In his own life, my dad was content on a lot of fronts. He was content with his modest income, content with living a provincial life in Texas, content with a house that was far from perfect but pleased him because we built it with our own hands. I think of my father when I hear Sheryl Crow sing “Soak Up the Sun.” He lived a line from that song: “It’s not having what you want/It’s wanting what you’ve got.”
But there are darker memories, too, when I think of my father. He wouldn’t talk much about his depression—what he lightly called his “blue funk”—and my family never knew the depths to which his inner demons took him.
In the mid-1990s, my father began having gallbladder problems, but he didn’t go to the doctor until the pain was fairly acute. Then his gallbladder burst and he needed surgery. He spent weeks in intensive care and was put on a strong course of antibiotics. Some of his organs began to fail. My dad was in pain, and he knew it would take many months to regain his strength, but he was expected to make a complete recovery.
When he was finally sent home from the hospital on December 7, 1995, my mom got him settled in their bedroom. Then she went into the kitchen at the other end of the house to get him some juice, leaving him alone in their room. She heard a noise, a muffled pop. She thought she might have recognized the noise, and then she thought she knew exactly what it was. She dropped the glass of juice, letting it shatter on the floor, and ran across the house back toward the bedroom.
As she was running, she was hoping and wishing that she was wrong about that noise. She entered the bedroom, shouting, “Oh no! Oh no!” It was too late.
My dad had shot himself with a handgun.
He was seventy-eight years old, and he had given no indication that he was planning to do this. He left no note.
It was so distressing that my mom had to be the one who found him and called 911. She had to be the one who washed the bedspread, who got the stain out of the carpet, who called the handyman to fix the glass which the bullet had cracked.
I can’t begin to fathom my father’s pain, or why he made the decision he did. I assume that like so many suffering from depression, he couldn’t help but become inwardly focused. His view of the world was skewed and he probably had tunnel vision, seeing only his problems, unable to have a wider perspective. I think my father just felt so much psychic pain that he couldn’t stand it.
He may have believed that he was protecting my mother from having to look after an aging man who likely would need long-term care. Maybe he thought he was acting nobly by saving her from that responsibility. He was also a proud man. It was hard for him to imagine not being self-sufficient.
At the time of his suicide, I was forty-three years old. Naturally, I was distraught, angry, and upset with myself. I thought that I should have been paying closer attention to him. Intellectually, my mom, my sister, and I knew better. As with so many suicides, I don’t think any of us who loved him could have prevented him from doing what he did.
My mother chose not to have a memorial service for my dad. She was probably worried about what their friends and neighbors would think, and was