The Voice of the Tree House

The whispers from the trees began ten minutes ago to lure us into the forest like a siren's call. Halloween night and me just ten years old as my friends gathered at our house in their costumes and full of candy from the night’s scavagings and roamings from the neighborhood homes lit with pumpkins as the paper ghosts wraithed in the cooling breeze that rattled the leaves that sounded like applause the of bones. The whispers continued tin-like and distant as my friends with their plastic flashlights huddled terrified. “Long is the night, and deep is the forest where mysteries lie! Come find me!”

But I knew this voice. I had known it for a long time. I knew its tones and variations, its highs and lows and cadences. But it had never come from the forest before. This was new and tonight we were going to find it. My brother Shaun and his friend Tim were too scared to go and watched from a distance as the rest of us headed tentatively out into the night for this mystery must be found.

The path began just past the clearing where we split wood for the winter and wound its way through the low ferns and snapping twigs and turned right. I knew exactly where we were going. “I see you, children! Come to my lair…” the voice cackled. It was just up ahead. “I’m not doing this!” Dave shuddered. “No, we have to!” I exclaimed.

The tree house sat some twelve feet up and held securely between the enormous branches of the grand oak that formed its canopy with 2x4 steps nailed to its trunk. It was a simple but sturdy platform with a hearty rail and thick trapdoor that was a beast to push open. “It’s up there,” I whispered. “I’ll go first. It’s okay.” And first I went, pushing the trap door open till it landed with a heavy thud. One by one we all made it up safely as we looked about. Danny spoke up first. “There’s no one here!” Indeed the small span was empty save for us four. Then seemingly from the air itself, came a cackling laugh as everyone lurched. “You fell for my plan!” the voice spoke.

The intercom was a new addition to the tree house with its wires woven through a hundred yards of branches back to the house which sat warm windowed through the clutches of oaks and elms. I get on the intercom. “Nice one, Dad,” as my friends suddenly laughed with a chorus of, “Okay, that was awesome!”

And it was awesome as we wound our way back through the night trail and returned to the house where hot chocolate was waiting as Dad grinned beside the intercom which was mounted next to the walnut cabinets that he too had installed just a summer ago. Dad crafted most things in the house but the most important thing he built was my childhood.

Dad was a prankster and wooed my mother with stolen jokes and a soaring tenor voice that could fill a cathedral. My mother fell madly in love and after his initial reluctance, they married and soon had my brother and me. We moved onto seven acres surrounded with trees which ringed the property and in the night I imagined they were wooden soldiers standing guard over my family. Dad planted a half acre garden teaming with cabbage and tomatoes and where the broccoli and cauliflower were a foot across. There were blueberry bushes and the splitting of wood. He gave me my first guitar, first camera and he never raised his voice unless he was swearing at the car. He was a man of character and kindness and with my mother, brought my brother and me up to be the same.

But Dad bore a secret that was deeper than the trees that Halloween night. A nascent thing buried below the surface like the vegetables in our garden yet never coming to fruition and which would haunt him for decades.

For you see, one was never gay in the 1950’s so my father decided - he wasn’t either. Being gay was an orientation haunted with derision, shame and could be potentially fatal - and in the case of his best friend Patrick, it was all three. Patrick was stabbed to death in a Boston alley and left like street garbage. Few details were ever revealed other than he was murdered for being queer in a culture that loathed his existence. My father was young then, barely in his twenties and just out of the military following the Korean war. He never saw combat but suffered the loss of his military friend not by enemy bullets but by violent prejudice.

So he was not going to suffer the same fate. He was not gay in his mind. Period. Full stop. He would marry, have children and not just closeted his queerness away, but fire-walled it behind an intellectual barrier that he believed could never be broken, never be discovered and kept it buried away in a perpetual latency.

But life doesn’t obey our rules or desires. The hidden things in our souls will eventually find a way to manifest and never at a time of our choosing. And so it was for my father.

On October 6, 1998 Matthew Sheppard was brutally tortured and beaten by Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson and left to die. According to reports, McKinney and Henderson offered Matthew a ride home from the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, Texas but instead lured him to a field where they robbed, tortured and pistol whipped him so severely that it shattered his skull. They then tied him to a barbed wire fence in the frigid night air – and set him on fire, leaving him for dead. He wasn’t discovered for eighteen hours. But he didn’t die, not then at least and he suffered for days on end and was ultimately moved to the trauma unit of Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado where he never regained consciousness. Death took him at 12:53 a.m. on October 12, 1998. He was only 21.

McKinney and Henderson were arrested and each given two life sentences. They couldn’t be charged with a hate crime for none such thing existed. The case awoke a nation to anti-gay hatred like it never had before as multitudes asked, “What if that was my son? What if that was my brother or my friend?” And for people like my father, “What if that was me?” For it could just as easily had been.

His murdered friend Patrick became Matthew and Matthew became him. And somewhere in the hidden chamber of my father’s mind, a light long extinguished finally flickered on and my father came out at the age of 70.

Not that I was made aware of this. In fact it was purposefully kept from me. I had been living in Los Angeles for seven years far away from my family in Pittsburgh unaware of what was transpiring 2700 miles away. It was Christmas when I returned to hugs from family but I could tell something was off. My mother and brother were guarded and hesitant around me, something they had never been. Dad was overly quiet. My mother took me aside and requested that I be especially gentle and kind to my Dad this year. I sort of blinked at this, thinking when I have not? He’s my Dad. Yeah, he could occasionally be infuriatingly stubborn, but why this request now? I asked if he was sick, which my Mom insisted he wasn’t. So what then?

The holidays were lovely and passed without incident. And yes, I was kind and yes, I was gentle but this vague tension in the house never left. It was like something spoiled in the fridge but I couldn’t find it. I returned to LA in bafflement.

I ruminated over this for a week, trying to fill in the puzzle with no pieces available. But there were pieces there, I just didn’t recognize them. What could be so new and important about my Dad that it was being kept from me in particular? Then the re-framing of a life began to take shape. Dad talked a lot about Matthew Shepard and the horror of it over Christmas. It was uncharacteristic of him since he was rarely so passionate about something like this.

Then a lifetime of memories began to bob to the surface. Moments that were incongruous at the time and which I filed away as such, slowly reemerged and formed a picture I was too oblivious to recognize at the time – That time in the 1980’s where my mother suddenly went on a crash diet and was obsessing over a man who was openly gay. That time we were at our local community theatre and my father jumped down onto stage and kissed his friend who was the male lead for the sake of comedy. And it was comedy – just not entirely. It was an expression of his desires that could not safely be expressed in any other context. For him it was harmless, for me it was...weird. My Dad just kissed a guy on stage. Where do you put that?

I put it where all such moments lacking context and which held drastic implications for my family go – in the closet. Buried away just as my father buried his identity away. My father being gay could simply not be a reality. But reality demands itself to be and I had now figured out why they hid this from me. I call my brother.

“Shaun, is Dad gay?” His immediate silence registers as shock.

“Mom told me not to tell you!”

“Shaun, I…”

“She made me promise. She’s gonna kill me if she thinks I told.”

“Look, you didn’t tell. I just figured it out. I’m just a little slow.”

And the heartbreaking reason they kept this from me? Because I was a Christian and they thought I’d reject my father.

That’s how deep the fear lies. Despite decades of a loving relationship where my father was my hero, the bigotry in society is so prevalent that he believed that it would shatter an unbreakable familial bond. Because in multitudes of previously loving families it has. But it wasn’t going to be with me. My father was my father and I loved him regardless. And I needed to say so. And I pick up the phone.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Hey, sweetie.”

“So, Mom...I know about Dad.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I know about Dad. What you weren’t telling me at Christmas when you were all being weird.”

“Did Shaun tell you??”

“No, Mom I just…”

“I made him promise me not to tell you.”

“I know, I know, just...look, I just know okay. It’s alright. Why didn’t you tell me?” I needed to hear it for myself. She pauses.

“Your father thought you’d hate him. He was terrified that he’d lose you.”

“Mom, do you really think that was possible?”

“It happens all the time. It’s in the news.”

“But with me? With me, Mom? Seriously? After all this time, seriously?”

She thinks for a long time. “Do you want to talk to your father?”

“I would love to.”

I can hear her tearing up. “That...that would mean the world to him.”

So, I talk with my father. I talk with my father for a long time. How could I possibly disown him? He was the father of guitars and first cameras. He was the man who taught my brother and I that only cowards disparage others and to lift up those who were put down. The one with arms like oak branches spinning me in summer, my feet exalting to the horizon. Me his little boy and never would I forsake him. The voice of the tree house.

Dad’s voice was trembling, a lifetime of hidden shame and sorrow all coming to the fore. The life he chose not to have yet never regretting marrying my mother and having my brother and me. A family chosen despite his own desires yet yielding a garden named “Us.” The Rolly’s. And I told my father I loved him. I had never said those words before.

My parents would stay together however. Now entering their latter years with decades of marriage invested, it seemed absurd to them to go their separate ways. Not at seventy years old. Some things abide deeper than certain desires and, at least for my parents, they were still very much in love, were best friends and had journeyed so far over troublesome roads to arrive here. And here is where they would stay. No one gets everything they want. Not ever.

Yet there is a beauty in finding a completeness in the incompleteness. A quiet grace that enters in as bodies age and stays on the couch grow longer. My parent’s love never diminished, but there are forces that also enter in that can erode even the beautiful things.

My father’s dementia began like it does for most – bit by bit, like a receding hairline which takes months to recognize. It was the forgetting of small things and then came the big things. The slow erosive tide, spanning a decade, as thoughts grew softer and competencies were incrementally stolen away like mice raiding an untended pantry. I’d return home at Christmas to see the aftermath of Dad having tried to put up a simple shelf – the multiple marker lines scratched out, only to be replaced and then scratched out again. Drill holes next to one another, none quite right and each set forming their own confused constellation. The shelf sat awkwardly nonparallel and only hanging from three points and ready to fall. My father was an engineer.

I felt a deep sadness for him. He couldn’t help this thing happening to him. For Mom, it was the slow vanishing of her companion and what were once vibrant conversations over politics and the theatre were slowly being supplanted by nights of Dad staring at the TV with the sound off.

But in a strange way dementia protected him from some of the harsher realities of the world. Wars were farther away, life’s tragedies were dulled. Not that Dad had entirely lost his faculties, but the condition was a speed-bump from experiencing the full depths of emotion and namely that of loss. Old friends were dying and his last sister had just passed, yet these losses were met with a kind of stoicism that would not have been present just a decade ago. “Well, there’s nothing I can do that can bring them back,” he’d quietly say. But there would be one exception to this.

When my brother took his life.

Lives forever alter then and never return to what they were. The catastrophic derecho crushes you into splinters, drags you out to sea and then throws you back onto shore only to do it again. A category of sorrow unknown until you are thrust into it. And that was Us now. And from this Dad would never recover.

His stoicism protected him for some time, even when the newspapers carried the story. Even when my mother and I were heaving masses of sorrow and he would ask, “What’s wrong?” as if it needed to be discerned. Then in his quietude one day, I watched as he sat in his favorite chair, pinching his eyes shut, his lip trembling. Of course I knew what this was and I went over to sit gently beside him.

“Talk to me, Dad. What’s going on?”

“I just...can’t.”

“What can’t you, Dad?”

“I just can’t...let him go.”

Then you don’t have to, Dad. You hang onto him as long as you want. You hold onto your little boy with the golden hair and the wooden sword as you hold him aloft in the September sun. In this sorrow we are all children with the precious balloons. The ones we cannot hold forever. The sky takes them all eventually and when you let go you will still remain.

And remain he did - I just wish it had been longer.

Over the next two years he ate less, drank more and spoke more infrequently. He lost ninety pounds and shrank into his chair as if he were sublimating into the very air. Washing away in an internal sorrow that he could never fully express but internalized in continuous rumination. The arms that had swung me in the tall grass had grown so painfully thin that I could almost grasp my hand around them.

So, I tried to do a good thing. A reprieve from all the sadness and give them something to look forward to and that was to take them on a twelve day cruise up the east coast through Nova Scotia and into Quebec. For it was my parents’ 55th anniversary and I knew it would be my Dad’s last vacation.

But it wasn’t the dream trip I had hoped for them...for him. Dad was arguably too old to be traveling now and it was my fault for not truly recognizing his fragility. I just wanted so badly to give my parents something lovely that I unwittingly put him in jeopardy. And on the day after their anniversary, just as we were sailing past the rich green lands of Nova Scotia, Dad got sick.

Pneumonia…

When we first arrived on the ship I thought it was a bad portend that our cabin was adjacent to the infirmary. I wasn’t wrong. Four days on oxygen, x-rays and tubes in his arms which he would often tear out as if they were leaches and leaving the sheets stained with blood. He was forcibly admitted into a hospital in Quebec and with that, their last dream trip was over. We were only half way through the cruise. Flights were canceled and with Dad too sick to travel there was now no way home. So, I called the American Embassy and they had a solution - An emergency medical repatriation. It’s when the direly ill need to return home by jet. It could fly him and only him back - but it would cost $150,000 and Mom and I would have to find our own way back. Then we discovered that the ship’s infirmary had maxed out our credit card leaving us with nothing. And our bank cards suddenly ceased working. It was the weekend and it would take three days to sort out but we didn’t have three days. If I didn’t think of something right then, Dad could likely die in Canada. I leaned over his bed.

“Dad? You’re really expensive.”

And with his inexorable humor he replied, “But I’m worth it!”

And you were worth it, Dad. Just get you home...And declare bankruptcy.

But bankruptcy wasn’t on the menu just yet. A well traveled friend remembered a company whose sole purpose is to get sick Americans home and they were likely listed in fine print on our insurance. Miraculously they were and they ultimately saved us. I urgently called and they said they could get us all back except for our luggage, just meet them at 9am the next day. Little time left now and a rush to find luggage shippers with their overly demanding labeling and rummaging through stores about to close and just enough cash for the taxi the next morning.

They had the medical Lear jet waiting for us as they wheeled my aging parents in an aged line onto the tarmac. Dad looked frightened and confused as they gently heaved him up into the fuselage. And as I trailed behind, my own sense of mortality arose as I wondered how long before that would be me. No wife, no children. Who would ship me back from Canada and hold my hand?

Packed in like a child’s sock drawer we lifted into the cold October air and throttled home, Dad pressed next to me to my right with crushed Mom behind me. Three hours and we’d be at our front door in a miracle of air flight and waiting ambulances. Home and Chinese takeout, a night of reprieve, but the doctor insisted on getting Dad to the hospital immediately. Stubbornly he refused but with our begging he relented and was admitted. A special mask was locked to his face sucking the accumulating CO2 from his lungs as he grasped at it in desperation. It seemed to be working as we told him in tears to bear with it just for tonight and maybe in the morning it will be better. But in the morning I could see the nurses faces and we knew. Dad had survived many a brush with death, but it was clear he was not going to pull out of this one. His body was simply dying and there was nothing to be done.

Hospice is a creature of great gentleness which transforms your home into a small cathedral of waiting. It’s a time of quiet vigil and hushed voices while the oxygen machine pulses in its own slow staccato as the cats in their mysteries nestle at my Dad’s feet keeping guard against the invisible forces that would take him. There is no more food now, just Haloperidol and Morphine and the wetting of drying lips with a blue sponge on a stick. “He knows he’s dying,” the nurse speaks hushed in the living room. “But he can hear you. Tell him the good things. The stories of him, of all of you. I know there must be many. I can tell.”

More than you know.

And in the soft afternoon I held his hand as I regaled him with memories of snow hills and sleds, of wooden swords and the time he nearly electrocuted me when I was ten while priming the pool filter. Electrical engineer and electrician? Different skill sets it turns out. We always laughed about that one. He never apologized though and I reminded him. He was never wrong about anything. I thought I saw him smile as he squeezed my hand.

3:14am, Dad and you chose the time of your leaving. You waited till I was on the porch with my friends who consoled me with beer and cigarettes knowing this would be the night of your passing. You waited for Mom who lay by your side to just nod off for a moment. And it was then. You didn’t want to burden anyone, even with your death.

Oh, Dad...you were stubborn and kind, merciful and frustrating. But you chose to sacrifice your personal desires to make a family. I don’t know how your life would have turned out to be had you chosen otherwise. Would you have been happier? I don’t know. In the end everyone knew anyways and loved you regardless. You never had to hide. You were my father and I would have wanted for no other. Teller of others jokes and Brigadoon maker. The voice of the tree house.

*All images by author