My father was dead because he had taken his own life. C. W. Post, the man who had built his fortune speaking about the healing powers of faith and the supreme strength of the mind, had pressed a pistol to his own temple.
The scandal, the hypocrisy of it, sent me—and all of America—reeling. Newspapers filled column after column in every city with the sordid details. They called Papa’s suicide a cowardly act. They roiled over the fact that C. W. Post would end such a glorious run with such an inglorious and selfish exit. They theorized that Papa must have lost his mind to have taken such a measure. They called him a fraud, mocking him for speaking about the quest for a healthy mind and body when behind the scenes he was a man of poor health and troubled nerves. As if they knew him. As if they had the right to pass their judgments on my daddy.
In truth, I was just as surprised and devastated as the rest of America. I’d been largely separated from him in recent years, as he and Leila had spent most of their time in California and Battle Creek. I’d ceded Papa’s day-to-day presence to his young wife, what with Eddie and the girls and our life so firmly ensconced on the East Coast. My relationship with Papa in the later years of his life had been largely in the form of the regular letters we exchanged—letters in which he’d never let on just how much he was suffering, both in mind and in body.
Shock—swirling and tearful shock—blurred the words as I read the grisly newspaper reports of Papa’s final days. Of course I would never have dreamed of asking Leila for details, so I got my news from the journals just like everyone else. And there was plenty to be had: Accounts of how he’d come down with a case of appendicitis in California. And then how, the papers panted, Papa had undertaken a “race against death” by private train to Rochester, Minnesota, to have the world-famous Mayo brothers perform lifesaving surgery, a procedure in which Papa, as a Christian Scientist, hadn’t believed. When the Mayo brothers had finally pulled out Papa’s bloated, rancid appendix, they had declared it “the worst looking thing you’ve ever seen.”
The surgery had provided temporary relief, and Papa was soon well enough to travel home to the sunny climate of California. But then the excruciating pain in his stomach came back and, with that, a fatal dilemma: How could Papa sit idly by, allowing death to slowly take him—he who had claimed that he could beat pain and cure all ailments with his mind and his lifestyle? No, he could not let pain and rot win. He would not allow his failing body to gradually and painfully waste away. He would act out against it, seize control, as he had always done.
But Papa, I railed, how could you abandon me, leaving me with this legacy of shame and cowardice? These were words I would never have been able to speak aloud, not even had I been given the chance to stare into his bright blue eyes one final time. Papa was gone, and once again, he’d left me not understanding. Feeling like a fool because all of my life I had thought that all of the answers could be found in his beautiful, indelible spirit.
* * *
—
Eddie and I took a New York City train bound for Chicago and then Battle Creek. Across the country, my father’s body was loaded onto a train in Santa Barbara, coming back to our midwestern hometown in the company of that woman.
Brilliant blue skies, a color not too far from the hue of Papa’s eyes, marked our arrival in Battle Creek. Uncle Cal was there to meet us at the train depot, pulling me in for a slow, wordless hug, and I held on to him for longer than usual, reluctant to let go. “How are you doing, Uncle Cal?” I asked, swallowing against the tight squeeze of my throat.
He shrugged, his eyes red, and answered, “Probably about the same as you, Budge.”
I pulled back my shoulders, but then, unable to fight off the impulse, knowing that this might be the only time in my life that I might pose this question, I breathed out the words: “Why, Uncle Cal? Why did he…？”
Uncle Cal took in a slow, ragged breath, his eyes falling to the ground as he answered, “He just…Well, no man can expect to hold up the entire world.”
It was my first time back in years, and the town was covered in its own black mourning garb, with the streetcars stopped, the storefronts and factories shuttered, and crowds lining the streets, half a dozen people thick. Hundreds of Papa’s workers formed an honor guard, with a dozen of his men joining Uncle Cal to bear the walnut coffin along the route and through the wide front doors of the Independent Congregational Church. Inside, the church was packed with flowers and people, and hundreds more crowded outside to stand their own vigil. A large portrait of Papa presided over the altar, beneath American flags and a massive arrangement of white flowers made to look like our white barn.