Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [134]
TOWARD THE END or THE MONTH, my mother had Gaylen come up to Seattle to stay with my father and help him with his work. She and I went back to our home in Milwaukie. I don’t remember what my father said to me or how he looked the last time I saw him alive. I wish I could, but I can’t.
A few days later, Gaylen called us early one morning. Our father’s condition had grown much worse during the night and he had taken him back to the hospital. Gaylen had stayed with him all night, but his condition continued to deteriorate, and at about 5 A.M. he slipped into a coma. Gaylen had just returned to the apartment to get some sleep.
Maybe an hour later, the phone rang again. I answered. “Give me Mom,” said Gaylen.
“Is it Father?” I asked.
“Give me Mom.”
My mother took the phone. When she heard the news, she cried out: “Frank, my God, where are you? Where have you gone to?”
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERE SPENT with the business of making funeral arrangements, getting my father’s body back from Seattle, picking out a cemetery plot. My mother tried to find Robert Ingram to give him the news, but she did not have a current address for him. We had lost him, and we would never find him again.
The day before the funeral, we went to view my father’s body as it lay in state at the funeral parlor. My father was in an elegant bronze casket, surrounded with bouquets of flowers. He was dressed in a handsome brown suit and his head was propped up on a cream-satin pillow. His arms were folded across his chest. His eyes were closed. Striations of decay were already starting to line the lower part of his face. My mother broke down and cried, and Gaylen sagged against a wall, looking like he was in pain. My brother Frank put his arm around me and held me close. “Are you all right?” he asked. I nodded. I couldn’t take my eyes off my dead father’s face. I thought he no longer looked much like the man I had known—the man who had once held me on his lap, or saved me from the dog, or yelled at my mother and brothers. I thought: There’s nothing there. When you die, you leave your body, and it no longer holds any memory of you. In death, your face could not show any of the love or anger it had known in life. I did not think this was a good thing.
As we left the funeral home, Gaylen said: “Man, seeing something like that takes a lot out of you. I need a drink.” He left us, and the rest of us went back home.
GARY WAS IN ROCKY BUTTE JAIL at the time of his father’s death. He later told us that a guard had awakened him and said: “Your son-of-a-bitching father just died. That should make you happy.” Gary went berserk. He tore his cell apart; he smashed a lightbulb and slashed his wrist.
My mother begged the jail officials and a county judge to let Gary attend the funeral. She offered to pay double-time for guards to accompany him, as a guarantee that he would not attempt an escape. But the officials and judge refused. Gary was placed in “the hole”—solitary confinement—on the day of his father’s funeral.
I don’t remember much about the funeral itself. We sat a few yards to the side of the bier, behind a veil. Afterward, as I rode to the cemetery with Gaylen in his car, a rock & roll song played on the radio. It was “Point of No Return,” by Gene McDaniels. The disc jockey announced that it was a new song, just released that day. “I’m at the point of no return,” sang McDaniels, “and for me there’ll be no turning back.” I was spellbound. In the months that followed, every time the song came on the air, I’d rush to the radio and turn it up.
That July afternoon, we stood beside the casket at the graveyard, while a Catholic priest said a prayer. I was surprised that we would not be there as my father’s coffin was lowered into its grave. My mother said, “No, that’s not the way these things are done. The families can’t stand those last moments.” Somehow, it didn’t seem right to me, him having to go down into the ground alone.
I remember I was surprised at how hard my mother and brothers took my father’s death. I was surprised they still loved him enough to cry