Some stories are birthed in pitch black darkness.

They are the writings of a lunatic under a full moon that reflects

no light because the sun has vanquished.

They are the recollections of unexpressed howling

during a full eclipse of the sun at midnight.

To some, they are inconsequential retrospective ramblings of an

aging woman who would do well to stop

thinking back on that long ago May day…

To others, this is a story of intrigue and resilience.

Looking into this pitch black sky under the full moon,

there is no light. Nothingness.

Only what is ineffably burned into the internal retina

of the mind’s eye and the hard drive of one’s operating system.

This is that story, brought forth in pain and travail,

solitude and profound aloneness –

– in the emotional space of inward contemplation –

the hidden room where one stares at walls on a sofa

after others have long gone on to bed, lost in one’s own mind,

frowning, with no comedy to be found.

In some ways, my father remains frozen in my mind

from those early spring May days of 1979…

It was a Friday night in our home when my father began his dance of death.

I knew it somehow.

I feared it and I knew it.

I was a few days short of sixteen-years-old and no doctor, but I knew.

During the night time on that Friday, I was awoken to the voices of my parents arguing in the kitchen. We had a small house and the kitchen sink was against the same wall as my bedroom, the same side the head of my bed stood against.

It was the first Friday in May of 1979; my father was 65.

Three years earlier he had suffered a heart attack due to the immense stress in our home and health issues. After that heart attack he had lost weight, stopped smoking and reduced cholesterol intake.

But he continued to suffer from angina pains that were brought on by stressful interactions with my mother and arguments in our home between her and I.

He had nitroglycerin tablets he put under his tongue when he’d have angina pain.

The previous December for his 65th birthday, my mother had drafted up a new and improved “Power of Attorney” document and a “Last Will and Testament” and presented it to him to sign, giving her full control over any legal matters and saying that if he died that she would inherit all he had, and that I was intentionally left out, as she worded that he had “full repose and confidence in her to distribute to his daughter according to verbal instructions he had given her.”

The things I wanted after he died, as I went off to college and in my early adult life, were photos and other items that were personal. I was never allowed to freely look through these things and have what I wanted.

I wanted the piano, but my mother insisted she “wasn’t done with it” and would not let me have it.

It was 10 years into my first marriage before someone gave us a piano and I could start playing again. I only got the piano from our home when she died in 2001.

That evening of my father’s December birthday in 1978, found he and I sitting in a car at night on Main Street while my mother went into Bing’s Bakery to get a cake to celebrate. Earlier that evening we went somewhere in public (I think it was in the Newark Shopping Center pharmacy) and she found three people who would sign and witness the legal documents she gave him his “gift.”

And then, on to Bing’s Bakery.

Because, she said he was an invalid and couldn’t handle his own affairs and that this would relieve him of stress of having to be involved in any lawsuits she might need to file or anything else.

__________

I called my dad “Daddy” longer than my friends called their dad “Daddy.” By December of 1978 I had been in the practice of calling him “dad” for probably a few years.

But that night, I sat in that dark car with my Daddy.

He was depressed and told me that she was going to drive him to his grave.

That since he retired the year before it was more stress than he could stand, basically, having to be home everyday rather than leave for work.

For the life of me I cannot recall his exact statements.

Just impressions of what he seemed to want to communicate.

I can picture myself sitting in the back seat, with the Christmas lights and illuminated sign of the town landmark of old Bing’s Bakery.

He was communicating to me that he probably wouldn’t live too much longer and that I should understand that one day he would die.

I think he also may have made statements about me needing to “get along with her” if he died but I really don’t know.

For the life of me – dear God – I don’t know what he said that night – all I can do is simply reconstruct recollections of the expressions of a depressed and hopeless man to his fifteen-year-old daughter. The reality of his words were like a horrifying black hole of inevitability and I only remember telling him (maybe, telling him) that “that wouldn’t happen.”

Maybe I said that. I don’t know if I cried.

I think I said, “don’t talk like that.”

But, maybe that’s some vague recollection of something I may have said to some other person…years later…

But I know what I fantasized.

Maybe it began then or maybe even earlier…I can recall in middle school sitting in the car with him between Sunday School and Church and talking about my mother’s craziness.

I don’t recall the details of the conversations, only that gradually as I grew older there was some sort of commiseratory discussions over how she acted, what was wrong with her, how it upset him and me – along with warnings or instructions to me on how to behave and interact with her.

Dear God I can’t even remember it all.

I can remember asking my Daddy why he married her and “was she always that way?”

I can remember him saying that she got much worse after I was born because she didn’t have anything to occupy her mind, that when she worked it wasn’t as bad – although my Daddy also told me that after I was born and she tried to work she kept getting fired because she bossed everyone else in the office around.

I can remember around middle school maybe even before asking my Daddy why he just didn’t divorce her. I had heard of something called “divorce” and I thought it made sense.

I remember my Daddy telling me that he couldn’t, because she would “take him for everything he had (including me).”

The “including me” part I think he may have told me directly, that if he did that I’d probably have to live with her, which scared me, but I know for sure when I visited with my dad’s best friend when I was 26 he told me many things that he knew.

I know he clearly told me as well, that my dad was afraid of her, that indeed with her legal mumbo jumbo and personality she would in fact, take him for everything – including me. He feared her getting custody of me.

But back to my fantasy….that night at Bing’s Bakery I probably even voiced it to him….that when I turned 18 I would move out and get an apartment and he could come live with me.

That would save my Daddy and me.

So that Friday night the following May 1979, as I was awoken to argument through the walls, there was something about it that alarmed me.

I recall him raising his voice but sounding strange saying, “Margaret just leave me alone. Go away.”

I wondered why he was up during the middle of the night in the kitchen.

My mother was yelling at him, demandingly wanting to know what was wrong and saying she was going to call an ambulance.

I would be willing to bet she said to him “Rodney Slifer I’m calling an ambulance.”

He sounded adamant that he just wanted her to leave him alone, like an animal trying to fend off an attack.

I sensed something was really wrong and the loud argument continued.

Dear God I can’t recall if I got up and went in the kitchen or if I’m visualizing him standing there at the sink from what my mother talked about afterward…

I think I may have gone in…I can picture the blindingly bright light in the kitchen after being in my dark room.

Certainly if I did, I was told by my Daddy to go back to bed.

Yes, I think I did.

Because I can recall my Daddy wore pajamas in later years and in my mind’s eye seeing him standing there over the sink in his pajamas.

I remember being in bed again hearing the commotion continue and being very fearful. I don’t know what happened. I guess I fell asleep or he went back to bed and it stopped. Dear God I don’t know…

__________

Saturday morning my father was in one of the bedrooms, I don’t recall if they were sleeping together then, or if he normally slept in that room.

I vaguely recall there were a lot of papers piled on that double bed, but my Daddy was in that room propped up with pillows.

I can remember the daylight of a Saturday in May streaming into the room.

My Daddy didn’t look well, he was pale and seemed weak and seemed in pain of some sort.

He said he could breathe better when he was propped up with pillows.

I came in to talk with him on and off that day, wanting to know what was wrong.

He was telling me he didn’t feel well.

I believe later he came out in the living room and sat in a chair for a bit, but I don’t recall for sure. I just remember him being in the bedroom.

It was Saturday and my Daddy must have bought a

strawberry cake mix perhaps the week before.

I loved baking with my Daddy on Saturdays and

had done it since elementary school.

We usually made cakes, occasionally cookies

and sometimes pies. Those were my favorite.

We’d roll out crusts and fill them with canned cherry or

blueberry filling and then he’d lay the top crust on and

show me how to crimp them together.

I remember that day – that first Saturday of May 1979 –

as he lay propped up in bed,

telling my Daddy I was going to make the strawberry cake.

I made the cake, and later in the day

I took him a piece and he ate a bit.

I don’t think he had been able to eat anything,

but he took the cake and tasted it.

My mother was insisting she would call the family doctor but my father was telling her not to. Eventually he agreed to call if she let him talk privately and didn’t interfere.

She agreed and he got on the phone with the doctor to talk about his symptoms, but shortly into the call she picked up the other extension and started talking to the doctor. He hung up and went back to bed. The doctor said it sounded like he might have bronchitis and phoned in a prescription for him.

Beyond that phone call and her bringing back a prescription, the remainder of Saturday and Sunday is really something I cannot recall. I imagine I stayed in the house and did school work or watched TV. I may have cooked dinners (my mother never cooked) or perhaps by Sunday night he got up and cooked.

Yes I recall he may have been up and down for short times doing stuff but kept returning to bed. Maybe he got up and watched Saturday Night Live with me, maybe he didn’t.

He was old but I used to watch it and I can recall him starting to stay up sometimes and watch with me after the other Saturday night shows. I’d be laughing at it –Roseanne Rosannadanna and The Coneheads – and I’d steal glances at him to see if he was laughing. He’d be smirking sometimes. That was a significant reaction from him. I do recall watching the episode with “Jimmy Carter” visiting a nuclear waste plant with boots on with my Daddy. Not sure I got it all back then but it was funny…I do recall him laughing at that.

__________

When I got home from school on Monday, May 7, 1979, my father had a doctor’s appointment around 3:30 or 4 I believe. He absolutely insisted on driving himself and refused to go unless he did. I remember my mother getting ready to ride there with him, and my standing out on the driveway with my Daddy by his white Plymouth.

He was still not well and weak.

I knew this was very out of the ordinary.

I don’t recall our conversation, only that it was tense and awkward. I have no idea if he was angry at my mother and said he’d be better off dead or if he said he was OK.

I have no idea.

What I do recall is that my mother came back to the house alone in a whirlwind of manic emotion and phone calls. She began “notifying” people that “Rodney Slifer had an EKG and it showed he had a heart attack Friday night and that he had been airlifted from the doctor’s to Presbyterian Hospital in Philadelphia.”

I’m sure the talk about the “malpractice” of the family doctor begun right away.
My mother had a long history of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits.

I’m pretty sure I stayed home from school on Tuesday but I do not recall that day. I can only imagine I stayed shut in my room in fear listening to my mother make non-stop telephone calls to relatives and other people.

On Wednesday, however, my dad’s best friend Herb came to take my mother and I to see my Daddy in the hospital in Philadelphia, which was far enough away that my mother wouldn’t have driven there on a turnpike into a large city.

My Aunt Virginia and Uncle Bill, my father’s closest brother and my closest other relatives, drove three hours from western Maryland to Delaware. My mother would not ride with them up to Philadelphia and so she had said we’d ride separately with Herb.

My mother viewed my aunt and uncle with paranoia and beliefs that they were going to “interfere” in some way with the situation of “Rodney Slifer.”

I’m pretty sure I rode in Herb’s truck to Philadelphia with my mother, and my aunt and uncle drove separately to the hospital.

My dad was in intensive care and I am not certain but I think the visitors had to go in separately. Perhaps Herb went in first.

I remember going into the room and my mother was there.

I can’t picture it exactly, which side of the bed I stood by. Maybe I was to the right.

He was all hooked up to wires and monitors and couldn’t seem talk…he was looking at me.

Because I was a normal person, I was terribly upset and frightened and I remember my mother was storming around the room giving nurses commands and causing a commotion; it just felt so loud as I stood there looking at him all hooked up to wires and monitors, trying not to cry.

Then she came over and gave me a command:

“Tell your father you love him.

It may be the last time you ever see him.”

If there is just one vivid memory of this whole time – and there are actually many – it is this statement to me.

My manic mother commanded a terrified sixteen-year-old who was standing there stunned and beyond upset…in a surreal frightening medical situation with my dad unable to speak…she commanded and instructed me what to do without a single bit of empathy.

Because I was a normal person, I began to sob and I ran out of the room. My aunt and uncle were in the hallway and my dear aunt was trying to calm me down. She was a nurse by profession.

I am not sure what happened, whether they insisted that they were going to take me to the cafeteria and eat, with or without my mother’s permission, but I remember them taking me to the cafeteria and having lunch and I believe I even rode back to Delaware in their car.

I think before we went to the cafeteria I waited in the hall while they each went into my dad’s room.

Many years later my aunt told me (and maybe she did at the time, I don’t recall) that my father had sent a message to me by way of a nurse who gave it to her.

He had said to “tell her not to worry, everything will be OK.”

I don’t think my mother would even let my aunt and uncle in the house, perhaps just the kitchen. After they drove me back they left on the drive back to western Maryland.

__________

I may have gone to school on Thursday, I don’t recall.

But I do remember around 5 pm – I can see in my mind’s eye the late May afternoon quality of light coming into the house and recall the smell of a warm spring day – that my mother got a telephone call from the hospital.

My dad had taken a turn for the worse and they wanted her immediate permission (she had power of attorney, remember…) to take him into surgery and do a cardiac catherization up through the groin to explore his heart.

I’m sure the procedure was fairly new in 1979.

My mother was refusing and saying that they were not allowed to do anything without her approval and that she needed to find transportation to come there in person.

I have no idea how I knew what they were saying…perhaps from listening to her responses…but I perceived that they were telling her it could not wait, that he would die if they didn’t do it immediately and they were preparing him for the surgery as they spoke, and simply wanted her permission.

Because I was a normal person in a very abnormal situation,

I recall becoming hysterical and getting on the other phone line

and saying that they could do it, maybe begging them to do it.

Dear God I don’t know.

There was a lot of arguing and phone calls back and forth and to others…I don’t know…I was angry hysterical, for lack of better words. Eventually I think the hospital may have said they were going to do it anyway without her permission, or perhaps she finally conceded after asking every detail.

We got a phone call around 8 pm that he had passed away

on the operating table and

there was nothing they could have done for him.

I cannot say for sure what I mean that I was hysterical…..I remember kind of going nuts with crying and yelling at my mother that she “killed him”….I may have physically attacked her with my fists…I am not sure.

According to my mother, I was “out of control” emotionally….and my mother dialed Mrs. Moore and right in the midst of all her mania was “cool as a cucumber” as my mother herself used to say with this “expression.”

My mother (calmly and seemingly calculatedly) told Mrs. Moore something like “Eileen is having a nervous breakdown, she’s hysterical and I think we are going to have to send her to the Delaware State Hospital to get her under control.”

Because I was a normal person, I remember being in my room…maybe I went in and locked the door and was crying, listening to her call Mrs. Moore.

I think my mother said that “Barbara was going to come up and ‘straighten’ me out.”

__________

Mrs. Moore did come, and I recall her sitting in my room on my bed, right beside me, like some normal person, talking to me in an understanding way and probably commenting about my mother’s behavior and how truly and for good reason upsetting it was….

…I don’t think it was too long before I stopped sobbing and was listening to her, trying to get my breath.

I remember her asking my mother for a washcloth and she went in to the bathroom and wet it and brought it to me to put on my face.

This day was Thursday, May 10, 1979. After Mrs. Moore left I guess I went to bed. I remember lying in bed that night and my mother was making phone calls to notify people until midnight, including phone calls to life insurance companies, giving them all the information so she could get checks as quickly as possible.

But her first calls were to the hospital—angry calls threatening the doctors and hospital with malpractice lawsuits.

I heard her demand they do a full autopsy of “Rodney Slifer” (I have no idea why she would call her husband by his first and last name…no idea…) including his brain.¹

Because I was a normal person, this made me intensely angry to listen to, with my father’s body somewhere in Philadelphia probably not yet cold nor rigor mortis set in.

She wanted to know exactly why he died

and whose fault it was.

The following day I remember a lot of commotion.

My aunt and uncle were on their way to Delaware again from western Maryland. Because, they were normal people responding to a family crisis.

I remember my mother trying to gather up a suit and clothing to bury my Daddy in and I was arguing that he had to be buried in his WWII uniform. Because, actually, my Daddy used to go through his box of war stuff and show me different things and he told me once when I was younger that if he ever died, he wanted to be buried in his uniform.

My mother said that couldn’t – or wouldn’t – be done.

When my aunt and uncle arrived my mother would not let them in the house. They had come to help and I remember they brought food, specifically a fruit cocktail cake my aunt used to make. She later sent me the recipe for it, I have the card and I believe it was dated in 1979.

My mother may have let them only into the kitchen again, and she was really not behaving reasonably at all. She was angry, paranoid, controlling and vindictive.

My aunt and uncle said they would take my Daddy’s clothes and suit over to the funeral home, but my mother didn’t want them to have any contact with the funeral home or know where it was. She thought they were going to interfere with her “sole authority” to make plans.

It was a whirlwind, and I remember she called Mrs. Moore behind my aunt’s back and gave her the items to take to the funeral home.

When Mrs. Moore came up, my aunt and uncle were infuriated. It was beyond insulting to them and I can only see more clearly why as the years pass…

There were nasty words and they said they were going to leave. I have pictures where my mother followed them to the car at the curb and photographed them. My uncle was staring at her with anger in the photo, and my aunt was in the passenger seat with an angry disgusted look and her hand at her face.

I am thinking that there was some kind of viewing during the day on Saturday, with perhaps a funeral service that night or on Sunday. I think I was just in shock, it was surreal. I remember seeing him in the casket before people came and he looked like wax. I had seen my grandfather when I was in 4^th grade, but this was of course more shocking.

__________

I remember Mrs. Moore and neighbors being there and my friends Stacie, Anna and Susie…and perhaps Valerie and her mother. There were people who had worked with my dad and others.

It was really weird and surreal…I remember the awkward look on my friend’s faces and I remember being really afraid I was going to laugh. In fact, I think I did laugh and giggle sometimes. While this may sound like an abnormal response, people who are experiencing certain types of trauma and shock have been known to respond this way.

In fact, it was a response I had at other times before then, on occasion, when I felt emotions or thoughts I didn’t know how to control. I don’t recall crying. I wouldn’t doubt that I almost felt a disconnect like being in a dream, a feeling that I just couldn’t believe this was happening…

I think I felt kind of dazed and confused that Saturday….all this stuff was going on at home and all I knew is that I had to put on a dress and go to a “viewing” at the funeral home.

I’m sure Reverend Golden from the United Methodist Church in Elsmere, Delaware, performed the funeral, I didn’t fully understand the sequence of everything. The plan was to do two funerals, per my mother. One in Delaware and another in western Maryland.

Actually…maybe there was no funeral in Delaware, just a viewing that Saturday. I don’t know. I’m sure the Methodist minister was there somewhere regardless of whatever it was.
__________

My Daddy’s casket was then driven to the funeral home in Boonsboro, Maryland, near where he grew up and where my aunt and uncle lived. On Monday evening, May 14, there was another viewing there for family.

I remember this room much better than the one in Delaware. I remember wandering around and talking to people but periodically I would go over and look at my Daddy in the casket.

At the end of this viewing, when everyone had left and only my mother and I were there with the funeral director, he told us that he was going to let us say our final goodbyes and then he would close the casket and it would not be opened again the following day at the funeral.

I sort of remember my mother standing there with melodrama, her voice cracking and weird crying and saying “Oh Rodney, Rodney…” I think she said stuff to him. It was weird, just weird.

I stood there watching her crying and carrying on with all this and I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t cry. Because I was a normal person responding emotionally to a highly abnormal situation, I wouldn’t give her the benefit of seeing me shed a damned tear in front of her.

Because I was a normal person, I asked if I could be left alone with my dad by myself in the room and my mother didn’t want to do that – because she was not a normal person, she didn’t understand why I wanted to be alone and I almost recall her sounding suspicious of why I would ask her to leave…as though I was going to do something behind her back.

What on earth she thought I might do alone in a room with my father’s body in a casket, I can only surmise, because unfortunately, I was forced to be “in her head.” Growing up, I keenly observed the way she thought, and understood in intimate ways the details of her paranoid thought processes. To this day, I can tell mom stories that require a lot of backstory detail, just to make someone understand how she thought.

Thoughts lead to emotions which lead to behavior…so the cognitive therapists tell us. I must ask, what of someone embedded with paranoid and other thoughts, seemingly devoid of any normal human emotions, capable of acting with forceful behavior, so that even professionals are at her command?

Surely that is a topic for another piece(s).

I recall the funeral director having to

talk her into leaving the room just for a bit,

that it would be OK and she should let me alone in there.

He escorted her out.

I don’t know how long I was there, maybe ten or fifteen minutes or so.

I stood there staring at him at first.

I looked at his hands for familiar spots or features.

I remembered him pulling me on a sled when I was little and thought about those being the hands that had pulled me.

I thought a lot about his hands at first, all the things he used them for…in his workshop and cooking and gardening…I’m sure I thought about more than just pulling the sled.

Then, I was looking at his white hair and his face.

And then…I touched him.

I touched his hands.

I touched his hair.

I touched his face.

I think I said things to him, but I don’t remember what.

I think I told him I loved him.

I was crying.

And I remember giving him a kiss on his cold face and watching my tears roll down his make-upped cheeks….

And then I left and they closed it up.

This was Monday, May 14, 1979.

On Tuesday there was a funeral service and there was a flag draped over his casket. I remember being at the cemetery and they did a military gun salute at the end, although I can’t recall for sure.

I kind of remember my grandmother being there and weeping heavily, seated in a chair. I either remember her saying (or someone telling me she said) that it should not have been her first born son to die at age sixty-five, that it should have been her. But I cannot recall, for certain…

I could not believe this was happening.

Afterward we went back to my Uncle James’, whose backyard borders the cemetery near the section where my father was buried. Uncle James and Aunt Nadine owned 8 plots as I recall, and they sold 4 to my mother. We went to their house and I remember a lot of people there, and prepared foods.

Afterward we went to Uncle Bill and Aunt Virginia’s, the closest relatives I really knew, even though I would usually only see them once a year. I was close with my cousin Laura and we wrote letters. Their cat had had kittens and I remember playing with them. They needed to give them away and Laura said I should ask my mom for one.

I went in and asked and my mother didn’t want to do it. We never had any animal in the house. My aunt was saying it would be good for me...maybe I heard her say it or my mother said she said it, I don’t know…maybe they went in another room and discussed it…but I went home with a little black kitten that I named Chicklet. My dad’s friend Herb had driven us to Maryland and took us back to Delaware.

This was Tuesday, May 15, 1979.

__________

The next day was my sixteenth birthday. I turned 16 on May 16^th.

I had been inducted into the National Honor Society and the ceremony at school was that night and it was mandatory to be there to be inducted. During the days after my father had died, somehow I was put on the phone with the nurse at the family doctor’s office…I remember she asked to talk to me.

I don’t remember what all she said but she told me that my father had been so proud of me, that when he had gone into the appointment for the EKG on that Monday when he was later airlifted, that he was telling them all about me getting inducted into Honor Society.

So on that day, my birthday, Mrs. Moore took me to the mall during school hours (I did not go to school that day) and we found a mint green dress for me to wear that night to the Honor Society induction ceremony at Christiana High School.

__________

-This piece was written in 2018, and edited today, May 10, 2022.

There are two other pieces on my blog that are related to this piece.

YOU CAME TO ME

(written May 10, 2021)

HE WAS PROBABLY CHECKING ON HIS TOMATOES (AND) GETTING FIREWOOD

(Written MARCH 20, 2022)

I have written and re-written so many different versions/accounts (all basically the same, just different emphases and from different emotional places) over the years…

this is just one I picked to share today.

Footnotes

¹ Tonight, 5/22/22, I scanned parts of my father’s autopsy (below, the first three pages), which I have (in parts) have read before, and noticed for the first time that they did NOT examine his brain. All these years I assumed they did what my mother was demanding, but, they did not. There are pages of diagrams of heart/lungs and more with all kinds of notes…but…the page for neuropathology is unmarked. This is interesting to me, and slightly significant to know. When I viewed my father in the casket, one of the things that disturbed me was imagining his brain being cut open, and I could not figure out or understand how I saw no evidence of any cutting. My mind as a young girl, thought many many things…it was quite traumatic. Also, I do remember wondering if they had found the strawberry cake that I made, and he ate, on that Saturday before he ended up in the hospital. It was both emotional in thought, plus, the morbidity and confusion of it all…in my young mind, was a lot to process.