bathtub, administering a homeopathic for shock.
What I take from this is a correction, not to my memory but to my
understanding. We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are
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 911. 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.