Educated

assigned in the stories other people tell. This is especially true in families.
When one of my brothers first read my account of Shawn’s fall, he wrote to
me: “I can’t imagine Dad calling 9-11. Shawn would have died first.” But
maybe not. Maybe, after hearing his son’s skull crack, the desolate thud of
bone and brain on concrete, our father was not the man we thought he would
be, and assumed he had been for years after. I have always known that my
father loves his children and powerfully; I have always believed that his
hatred of doctors was more powerful. But maybe not. Maybe, in that
moment, a moment of real crisis, his love subdued his fear and hatred both.
Maybe the real tragedy is that he could live in our minds this way, in my
brother’s and mine, because his response in other moments—thousands of
smaller dramas and lesser crises—had led us to see him in that role. To
believe that should we fall, he would not intervene. We would die first.
We are all more complicated than the roles we are assigned in stories.
Nothing has revealed that truth to me more than writing this memoir—trying
to pin down the people I love on paper, to capture the whole meaning of them
in a few words, which is of course impossible. This is the best I can do: to tell
that other story next to the one I remember. Of a summer day, a fire, the
smell of charred flesh, and a father helping his son down the mountain.