If a man falls in his apartment, and nobody’s there to catch him, is he still dead?
November 28, 2006: according to my bedside alarm clock, it was 11:14 p.m. when the banging on the kitchen door started.
“Jack, someone’s knocking at the door,” I whispered, shaking my husband awake. “What do we do?” It was too late for anyone to be dropping in, and we didn’t live in the kind of neighbourhood where you open the door in the middle of the night just because somebody knocks.
We stood in the kitchen, lights off, listening as the rhythmic beating continued, intermixed with the sound of freezing rain hitting our windows. I think we were hoping that whoever it was would just go away. Then the phone rang, pushing me from unease to terror.
“Is this Linda Bayley?” the voice on the phone asked.
“Yes.”
“The police are at your door. They need to speak with you.”
“Okay,” I stammered, and hung up. “It’s the cops,” I told my husband as I turned on the lights and headed to the door.
“What in the hell,” he muttered.
I opened the door to find two young, male officers staring back at me. “Linda Bayley?” one of them asked.
“Yes,” I said. This seemed to be the question of the night.
“Are you the daughter of Merle Bayley?”
Suddenly, my knees weakened. I reached out to the kitchen counter. Just tell me, I thought. “Yes,” I said again.
“May we come in?”
I let go of the counter and stepped aside. I think I swayed, already feeling dizzy.
Most of the details are blurred at this point. He was dead, had been so for seven days. I couldn’t understand; we had received a phone call from his number just that evening, but though I kept saying “Dad? Dad?” he didn’t reply, and I hung up, assuming that it was a bad connection, given the weather and the potential fragility of the hundreds of miles of phone line making up the tenuous link between Sudbury and Belleville. “He’ll call back,” I had said to Jack then. I remember thinking that it couldn’t have been that important, because he didn’t call back. Sometimes he was funny that way.
When my daughter, then 3 years old, came to visit me she wanted to squeeze the toothpaste tube to brush her teeth. About 3 inches of toothpaste came flying out and landed on the floor.
“It always does that!” she exclaimed.
My father left Sudbury suddenly, overnight, in September 2003. He had been beaten and robbed in his own home, “by a native,” he told me later, who he said had been looking for alcohol; it turned out my father was a bootlegger, a fact well known to everyone but me. His upstairs tenant knocked on our door the next day, holding out my father’s keys.
“I have some bad news,” he said.
Too scared to think, my father had thrown what he could into his van and ran, leaving his cats, Daisy and Player, along with the rest of his life, behind.
We got the police involved, filed a missing person’s report. It was a day before they found him. He had gone to his aunt’s house in Nepean, the one place I hadn’t thought to call.
When we finally spoke on the phone I said, “I just want you to come home.”
He said, “There is no home, honey.” He even tried to convince me that we should get out as well, that by living only a few streets away from his house, we were in just as much danger as he had been.
By the time we got off the phone I had a sense of relief (he was alive); a sense of despair (he wasn’t coming back, and he now had a deeply embedded fear of indigenous people); and instructions to clear out his house and sell the contents.
My father had been living in a house full of yard sale treasures; he called it his Museum. I salvaged what mementoes I could, sent him what I was able to, and called in an auctioneer to sell the rest. We found a home for the cats.
Five days before the police banged on our door to tell us about my father’s death, my mother had been telling me about a cousin of mine who was the executor of her aunt’s will, and was currently cleaning out her aunt’s cluttered house, piece by piece.
“Man, I know what that’s like,” I said. “I never want to go through that again.”
Courage to face death — I ran from death. There’s no point facing it in that case. Fight or Flight — I resisted (fought) and FLEW!
There were things I had been keeping from him, reasons I had for not calling that week. A mammogram that I didn’t want to be questioned about. The murder in our neighbourhood of one indigenous man by another, which in his mind would only have served to prove his point about just how dangerous the neighbourhood and “those people” were.
I had sent him an email that week, but didn’t question it when he didn’t reply; he rarely did. Once, a couple of years earlier, when my father didn’t answer his phone for two days, I sent the Belleville police around to knock on his door, only to discover that he’d accidentally turned the ringer off and didn’t even know I’d been calling.
That week, he didn’t reply to my email, I didn’t call him, I didn’t call the police to check up on him. Newspapers piled up under his door for seven days, and nobody noticed. In my heart, I knew that he died because I had been a bad daughter.
“I need to see him,” I wailed to my husband once the police had finally left. I was ready to take the next bus to Toronto, that night if I could, first thing in the morning if I couldn’t. Get to Belleville as soon as I possibly could, just to be there for my father.
“You don’t want to see him like that,” Jack told me.
When we did finally get there, all that was left of him were a box of ashes and a stain on the floor. And the stench of a life lived, and ended, alone.
What do I want people to say about me when I’m gone?
I remember my last conversation with him. It was around the time of the 2006 municipal elections in Ontario, about nine or 10 days before his death. We mostly talked about nothing, until he told me he wasn’t planning to vote.
“For shame!” I cried. “It’s your civic duty!”
“I never use city services,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
When his body was discovered, the police, the fire department, and the coroner’s office were all involved.
If love means never having to say you’re sorry, death means never getting to say I told you so.
When I was driving with my daughter, then age 4, I started doing a takeoff on one of the furniture store ads.
“PAY NO money down! Pay no money this year! Pay no money next year! Pay no money ever! Let your children pay for it when you die!”
My daughter asked, “When did they start that?”
The last time I visited him in Belleville, I begged him to make a will.
“What do I need to make a will for? You’re my only heir.” He gestured expansively around his cluttered apartment, at the beginnings of his new Museum. “All of this is yours!”
Try explaining that to the bank. Try explaining that to the landlord, who, although he has left the apartment key for you at your hotel, questions your authority to be there, while the stench of death wafts into the hallway through the open door.
One morning I went into Tim Hortons. I ordered a Coke and 2 donuts (I don’t drink coffee). A police man next in line just ordered coffee.
I turned to him. “What, no donuts? You’ll be ruining your reputation!”
He said, “I took one look at your, and I swore off!”
My father was too fat, though he exercised, and what I knew to be a beer belly he claimed to be all muscle. His feet were swollen, purple and scabbed, and he couldn’t reach them to put on socks. There was a spot on his bald pate that concerned me.
“Have you seen a doctor about that?” I asked him.
“I’m not going to bother with any doctors,” he said. “I figure I’ll just keep going until I collapse.”
I wonder sometimes whether he would have been so flippant if he’d known that collapse was only 10 weeks away.
I also wonder whether he knew the collapse was coming. Whether he wanted it.
Retirement Haiku — No girls, no friends, no money. Just sitting quietly, waiting for Death.
My last visit to his apartment invariably melds in my memories with my last visit to him in his apartment. The chair where he sprawled to watch TV is the same chair we had to tiptoe to get to, holding our breaths, past the no-man’s land of greasy, stained carpet, in order to retrieve the quilt I’d made him. The door whose knob had been braced with a step stool for safety is the same door we know propped open for ventilation, until the neighbours complained about the escaping smell. The balcony door, now blocked to me by the thought of crossing his shadow, is where I slid my bare feet into his oversize slippers to go outside. Feeling some emotion I couldn’t name, I looked back at him.
“I get it,” he told me.
Ray — I met Ray and knew him as a friend for about 2 years — between his ages of 62 and 64. Ray had a bad heart and 3 adult children. He wore a patch on his arm to keep his heart pumping. He loved to shoot pool with his beer in the pub. In his final year he began to get dizzy when he bent over the pool table. I told him he didn’t have an all-position heart.
One night Ray complained that he was so tired and that his children weren’t caring for him or helping him. “How many times should I try,” he asked.
I replied, “There’s no number.” I said, “You try every time until you die.”
One night I went to the pub. He never. I miss him.
In that last visit to his apartment, I packed up every piece of writing I could find, every photograph, every piece of my father’s art. I have parcelled out the words and images over the years: there are notebooks I still haven’t read, a folder of drawings I can’t bring myself to open.
I tell myself that he isn’t dead until his words run out.
Is he?
– 30 –
Italicized text from the notebooks of the late M.C. “Bill Bayley”
Schrödinger’s Dad was originally published in the Winter 20018 volume of Open Minds Quarterly.