Pain

My father was never one to complain. On the morning of the day he died, an ulcer he’d suffered from for years, and left untreated, ruptured and began to bleed. Two days later I met with the town coroner. He told me the end had been painless, that, as his life leached away, my father would only have felt increasingly weak and light-headed. The coroner, trying to make me feel better, was lying. By any other account, when an ulcer perforates and blood, bile, bacteria, and partially digested food begin to spill into the abdominal cavity, you feel as if a knife has just been buried in your guts. You might faint. You might vomit blood or something that looks like coffee grounds—blood oxidized black by stom ach acid. Or your body shuts down completely, total collapse its only remaining response to the shock and agony.

But my father, on the day he died, carried his burning, pleading stomach with him on his morning commute and worked his usual day at the plant, seven in the morning till seven at night. He told one of the other engineers he wasn’t feeling well and then, schematics piled on his desk, worked straight through lunch. I don’t imagine he would’ve felt much like eating. On the way home, a twenty-minute drive, no longer able to endure his pain—or finally, in privacy, willing to succumb to it—he pulled to a soft shoulder and came to a stop.

Six months earlier he’d leased a brand new Chevy Impala. He loved that car. It was one of the few indulgences he allowed himself, and on my last visit home to Wisconsin, he’d been proud to show it off, especially the builtin phone, which could be activated simply by saying, “Dial.” Another feature of the system: It could instantly connect you to emergency assistance. You only had to push a red button and say, “Help.”

But my father sat behind the wheel of his car—pale, sweating, aching, losing his vision—and did nothing. A passerby found him hours later, slumped back in the driver’s seat.

Growing up, I thought he was unbreakable. My younger brother, Rory, and I wrestled with him on the grape-juice-stained shag carpet of the living room. Kick him, punch him, jump on his back, pull his hair (what little he had left)—we could never hurt him. In the backyard, sawing old railway ties to make raised flowerbeds for Mom, he cut himself with his ripsaw, looked down impassively at his meaty, calloused hand, now torn open and bloody, as if it were a thing unconnected to him. In the kitchen, he picked up hot saucepans by their bare handles. When I tried, my hand shot back. On the coldest Wisconsin winter days, he went out gloveless and hatless, his face and fingers gone angry red in the frigid, prickling wind. Never bothered him. Freeze him, burn him, cut him, kiss him—he wouldn’t even flinch.

His stories about his schoolboy days back in England were litanies of brutality. His English master at Bishop Wordsworth’s Church of England Grammar School for Boys, to give it its full name, was the author William Golding. Golding would later use his dreary tenure at Bishop Wordsworth’s as inspiration and research for Lord of the Flies, in his boredom conducting social experiments on the boys, pitting them against one another in schoolyard battles. My father and his classmates—who had nicknames like “Knocker” Nokes, “Taff” Thomas, and “Tarzan” Taylor—not-so-affectionately referred to Golding as “Scruff,” because of his scraggly beard. In the island-tight schoolyard hierarchy, my father didn’t fare badly. He wasn’t Ralph or Jack—and he definitely wasn’t Piggy—but I have little doubt that he ran with the choirboys and the hunters. He was on the boxing team and fought bare-knuckle. By age thirteen, he was beating even the fifth-form boys; he knew how to take a blow. As for a nickname, his classmates...