Justin Taylor - Riding with the Ghost: A Memoir

My father had decided that he would end his life by throwing himself from the top of the parking garage at the Nashville airport, which he later told me had seemed like the best combination of conveniencethat is, he could get there easily, and unnoticedand sufficiencythat is, he was pretty sure it was tall enough to do the job. I never asked him what other venues he considered and rejected before settling on this plan. He probably did not actually use the word best. It was Mothers Day, 2013.

The date was not chosen for its symbolism. If anything, it was a rare instance of inattentiveness, strikingly out of character for a man who, generally speaking, had always been acutely sensitiveif not always appropriately responsiveto the feelings of others. Even now I cannot quite believe that he would neglect to consider the shadow his action would cast over future Mothers Days for his mother, children, and ex-wife, with whom by this point he was no longer actively acrimonious, though certain wounds of course had not yet healed (and still havent, and wont). It is impossible for me to imagine how he failed to grasp all this; how, as a matter of courtesy abetted by a desire to avoid further disgrace for his action, he didnt choose the day prior or the day after.

But then, it is not quite correct to say that he chose the day.

My father had been unemployed for a long timemy sister, six years my junior, has almost no memories of him as a workingmanand he had been sick with tremors that were later revealed, we think, to have been heralds of Parkinsons, though Parkinsons is what is often called an exclusion diagnosis, which means one cannot test positive for it or know with total certainty that one has it; one can only present symptoms that strongly suggest it and, all other reasonable medical possibilities having been ruled out, proceed with treatment as though the diagnosis were definitive.

All this plus, naturally, the depression that had come with the divorce itself, which my parents had each done their share to precipitate, but which my father had not sought and did not accept.

He got a bit of money from the sale of the house and everyone thought he would move back near his parents, to the part of Florida where I grew up. When I say everyone thought that he would do this, what I mean is that we all wanted him to do this and thought that he would, because we wanted him to, and because we felt it was the inevitable next step and expected him to join us in this view, though we knew that such a move was without question the very last thing that he himself would ever want.

Instead of doing what we thought he would, he moved into a modest extended-stay hotel in Nashville, joined their rewards program, and sought to make his money last as long as he could. He had no other aim in mind, as far as I know, besides forestalling the inevitable, which my sister and I each understood to be his move back to Florida but which, at a certain point, we now understand, had come to mean, to him, his suicide.

He grew accustomed to eating no more than twice a day, often less. Smaller portions, cheaper restaurants. Takeout and hot bar. Burger King. Two bananas and a pear. He liked saving the money, wasnt hungry anyway.

It was unsettling, to say the very least, but who was going to lecture a grown man over the phone about how to eat?

He rarely saw my mother during this period, and though at times when they did interactusually on the phone or via emailthey bickered or rehashed old points of contention, it can be fairly said that she was not what kept him in that city. Certainly, he caused her no more trouble. I seem to recall that on one occasion she had to go to a doctors appointment and be put under brief sedation there, and that he went with her and drove her home to the apartment she had, by this time, bought for herself.

She got some promotions at her jobthe job that had brought the family to Nashville in the first placeand looked for better jobs with other companies, some in far-flung states, but didnt find one. Eventually she got a boyfriend, put her apartment on the market, moved in with him.

My father must have begun to hatch his plan when he realized he was coming to the end of his savings, but he always had a head for numbers and so it may not be correct to say that he realized where he stood, vis--vis the timeframe, since that suggests a gradual or dawning understanding, and he probably understood from the very beginning, immediately and completely, the story the numbers told, the timeline that they setthough he likely had to adjust the schedule to account for having joined the hotels rewards program, the free nights he was accruing through it quite literally adding days to his life.

In any case, he decided, with what Im sure was blazing anguish but which I prefer to imagine as a kind of icy calmbecause imagining his misery is beyond me, or because it would be the easiest thing in the worldthat when all of his money and rewards points were spent and gone, he would check out of the hotel, wait for night to fall, drive to the airport, park the car, and throw himself off the parking garage.

He had kept his phone off all day, and so had not called his mother for the holiday, which was unusual enough in itself that it was cause for family discussion by early afternoon. Then my sister, who was in law school in Washington, DC, checked her email and saw a note from him suggesting that his record collectionat this point still in storage at my mothers apartment, which she had not yet soldmight be worth some real money if she, my sister, ever cared to sell it. He was not perhaps as obscure as he meant to be, but then, for obvious reasons, he was in an agitated state and not paying his typically rigorous attention to language. My sister alerted the rest of the family and they all spent the day calling him, leaving increasingly urgent voicemails, sending him emails, doing anything they could, which wasnt much. My sister called the Nashville police and filed a missing-persons report.