Playing Fair and Being Kind

My mother described to me the noise she heard when my father shot himself. She described the report of the pistol as a crack, a loud crack. She was downstairs in the kitchen when my father carefully held the business end of the pistol to the left side of his head. He was positioning the barrel of the gun carefully so as to hit the right spot a short distance forward of his ear and just above the eye. He was utilizing his shaving mirror, which he’d set up on the nightstand, to find his temple. 

She thought she had heard my father’s cane fall to the floor. She heard the noise and hesitated long enough to realize it could have been something else altogether. The noise was like something hitting the hardwood floor of the old house, wood slamming on wood. A wooden cane slapping hard on the floor.

A moment later she intuited that it was not a cane slapping against the floor. It was something far more sinister. Without another thought she stopped what she was doing and raced for the stairs that led to the second floor. She found him seated and lying back against the pillow and rumpled bedding. My father had successfully exited this realm as he had always said he would. He could no longer attend to his bodily needs on his own and his timetable dictated it was time to leave. I was nineteen years old then in 1958. I will carry this story until the day I leave. It stays with me in a secure and precious place.

I will be eighty-five years old next month on February nineteenth. Recently I was in a hardware store in San Diego shopping for hinges when someone dropped a broomstick on the floor making that noise my mother described to me so long ago. I didn’t jump or feel a leap of fear inside me. Those actions have disappeared over the many years thankfully. I looked up from my hardware inspection and said to the person responsible for the distraction, “You just heard my father shoot himself”.

G. M. Goodwin