If/Then
by Sophia Laurenzi
Eleven months after my father chose to kill himself, I sat with another man who, in some ways, had also chosen to die. “I don’t want to get off death row,” the man said, the number on his prison uniform graying down his pant leg.
The man was not named Alan, but that is what I will call him. Alan was one of my clients in my job as an investigator helping people who had been sentenced to death with their legal appeals. He wore heavy boots and a clean white t-shirt and a watch with a broken face. He was angry with me.
“I want to be free. And you bothering my family about things that happened to me isn’t going to help me get out of here. If you try to talk to them, I’ll write the judge and get you off my case.”
“I’m going to have to try and talk to your family,” I said, folding my hands in my lap to stop myself from thrumming my fingers against my knee. I was insistent, nervous, clawing for the next right thing to say. The chair I sat on was bolted to the wall, and blue.
I needed to talk to Alan’s family because it was my job, but also because it really could help Alan get out of the windowless walls of the visitation room where we met. Who Alan was and how he ended up on death row made a difference in how guilty the courts thought he was, and how severe of a punishment they deemed he deserved.
“I don’t see how it’s relevant to my case,” Alan said, folding his arms.
“It’s relevant because we need to show the judge everything that didn’t come up at your trial. Your trial attorneys barely talked about who you are. And yes, that includes bad things that have happened to you, but also good things you’ve done,” I said. I was convinced it was a matter of wording, that one day, I would land on just the right phrase to make Alan understand.
I was twenty-four. I had only been an investigator for six months. In those months, I had moved nine hundred miles from my family, signed off on the sale of my dead father’s condo, and learned which of my clients liked Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and which liked Little Debbie Honey Buns from the vending machine at the prison. But I had not made any of my clients angry until that day.
“My family has been through enough, they don’t need to talk about all that,” Alan said. “You’re too focused on my sentence, y’all need to be challenging my conviction. I’ve told you what I want you to investigate. Why aren’t you out there working on that?”
If I only investigated the problems Alan fixated on in his case—the prosecutor’s interference with a witness, the coroner’s history of misconduct—then he would probably be executed. But the courts might possibly, hopefully, seriously consider how much the heaviness of Alan’s early life (his little sister murdered; his mother battered; his father molesting children) weighed on the adult he became. I was too afraid to say that out loud, though, so instead I said to Alan, “It’s my job to do a thorough investigation, and that includes understanding your life story.”
“Right, my life story. Anything you want to know about, you can ask me. I’ll decide if I want to tell you.”
I nodded, but I knew I was only punting the argument to another day. I wasn’t supposed to do what Alan wanted. I was supposed to do whatever would give him the best chance at staying alive. When I left the cold, tangy walls of death row that day, that was my only priority. If I could understand the full circumstances of why he fired his gun that night, then I could do something to keep him alive. Everything I thought about funneled toward that one, unlikely pinprick of a goal: to stop Alan from being executed. Which is to say, everything I thought about also tunneled to my father. I had not stopped him from killing himself. But if I can make sense of why he did, I thought, over and over like a hymn, then I can pin him in my memory as the man I knew him to be.
The man was not named Alan, but that is what I will call him. Alan was one of my clients in my job as an investigator helping people who had been sentenced to death with their legal appeals. He wore heavy boots and a clean white t-shirt and a watch with a broken face. He was angry with me.
“I want to be free. And you bothering my family about things that happened to me isn’t going to help me get out of here. If you try to talk to them, I’ll write the judge and get you off my case.”
“I’m going to have to try and talk to your family,” I said, folding my hands in my lap to stop myself from thrumming my fingers against my knee. I was insistent, nervous, clawing for the next right thing to say. The chair I sat on was bolted to the wall, and blue.
I needed to talk to Alan’s family because it was my job, but also because it really could help Alan get out of the windowless walls of the visitation room where we met. Who Alan was and how he ended up on death row made a difference in how guilty the courts thought he was, and how severe of a punishment they deemed he deserved.
“I don’t see how it’s relevant to my case,” Alan said, folding his arms.
“It’s relevant because we need to show the judge everything that didn’t come up at your trial. Your trial attorneys barely talked about who you are. And yes, that includes bad things that have happened to you, but also good things you’ve done,” I said. I was convinced it was a matter of wording, that one day, I would land on just the right phrase to make Alan understand.
I was twenty-four. I had only been an investigator for six months. In those months, I had moved nine hundred miles from my family, signed off on the sale of my dead father’s condo, and learned which of my clients liked Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and which liked Little Debbie Honey Buns from the vending machine at the prison. But I had not made any of my clients angry until that day.
“My family has been through enough, they don’t need to talk about all that,” Alan said. “You’re too focused on my sentence, y’all need to be challenging my conviction. I’ve told you what I want you to investigate. Why aren’t you out there working on that?”
If I only investigated the problems Alan fixated on in his case—the prosecutor’s interference with a witness, the coroner’s history of misconduct—then he would probably be executed. But the courts might possibly, hopefully, seriously consider how much the heaviness of Alan’s early life (his little sister murdered; his mother battered; his father molesting children) weighed on the adult he became. I was too afraid to say that out loud, though, so instead I said to Alan, “It’s my job to do a thorough investigation, and that includes understanding your life story.”
“Right, my life story. Anything you want to know about, you can ask me. I’ll decide if I want to tell you.”
I nodded, but I knew I was only punting the argument to another day. I wasn’t supposed to do what Alan wanted. I was supposed to do whatever would give him the best chance at staying alive. When I left the cold, tangy walls of death row that day, that was my only priority. If I could understand the full circumstances of why he fired his gun that night, then I could do something to keep him alive. Everything I thought about funneled toward that one, unlikely pinprick of a goal: to stop Alan from being executed. Which is to say, everything I thought about also tunneled to my father. I had not stopped him from killing himself. But if I can make sense of why he did, I thought, over and over like a hymn, then I can pin him in my memory as the man I knew him to be.
*
After my father ended his life, everyone I knew told me how futile it would be to look for an explanation. My brother likened our father’s depression to cancer, a disease some people survive and others do not. My aunt urged me not to search for someone or something to blame. My therapist said that even under 24/7 psychiatric care, those who want to die often find a way to do so.
I could accept the wisdom in these sentiments; the part of me that used logic and reason and words agreed with them. But that part of me was hard and smoldering, flecking into smaller and smaller bits of ash with each day that passed. Shock flooded where reason once lived. It made me wide-eyed and porous. My body buzzed with awe at what it was doing: learning how to exist in a world void of the person I couldn’t live without, at the same time it put its legs into jeans and brushed its teeth and remembered to drink water. Then grief bit at shock’s heels and ripped me right down the center of my sternum. My chest burned and burned, so incessantly that I researched the symptoms of a heart attack obsessively. My father was dead, and I felt like I was dying without him.
At my father’s funeral, I gave his eulogy; it was not enough. I could not put into words everything he was to me: confidant, friend, hero. Flawed, unfinished, evolving, after he came out as gay when I was fifteen. No matter what time of night I called him, he answered. Simpatico, he would say about the two of us, and my whole life I’d been told how alike we were. We had the same black eyebrows (which we got waxed at the same salon), and we were both warm, staccato creatures, tender with our questions and sharp with our insights. I knew who I was because I knew who he was.
Four days after I gave the eulogy, I applied to this investigator position in the death belt: the block of Southern states where the death penalty is embedded into the bloody soil. My grief was too ravenous; it had to be contained. I did what I always did when I needed to keep something neat and tucked away: I followed a plan. Just because my father died, I reasoned, I did not need to alter my plan of working with people on death row. It was what I had worked toward after getting my psychology degree and finishing a smattering of internships in the prison system. I could channel this vast and wild anguish into understanding what happened not only to my future clients, but to my father. I did my first interview for the investigator job over Zoom. While I waited for news, I called the local police department for an update on when I could have my father’s phone, iPad, and notebooks they had collected as evidence. I coiled my grief tight inside me. For a while, having a plan was enough.
I could accept the wisdom in these sentiments; the part of me that used logic and reason and words agreed with them. But that part of me was hard and smoldering, flecking into smaller and smaller bits of ash with each day that passed. Shock flooded where reason once lived. It made me wide-eyed and porous. My body buzzed with awe at what it was doing: learning how to exist in a world void of the person I couldn’t live without, at the same time it put its legs into jeans and brushed its teeth and remembered to drink water. Then grief bit at shock’s heels and ripped me right down the center of my sternum. My chest burned and burned, so incessantly that I researched the symptoms of a heart attack obsessively. My father was dead, and I felt like I was dying without him.
At my father’s funeral, I gave his eulogy; it was not enough. I could not put into words everything he was to me: confidant, friend, hero. Flawed, unfinished, evolving, after he came out as gay when I was fifteen. No matter what time of night I called him, he answered. Simpatico, he would say about the two of us, and my whole life I’d been told how alike we were. We had the same black eyebrows (which we got waxed at the same salon), and we were both warm, staccato creatures, tender with our questions and sharp with our insights. I knew who I was because I knew who he was.
Four days after I gave the eulogy, I applied to this investigator position in the death belt: the block of Southern states where the death penalty is embedded into the bloody soil. My grief was too ravenous; it had to be contained. I did what I always did when I needed to keep something neat and tucked away: I followed a plan. Just because my father died, I reasoned, I did not need to alter my plan of working with people on death row. It was what I had worked toward after getting my psychology degree and finishing a smattering of internships in the prison system. I could channel this vast and wild anguish into understanding what happened not only to my future clients, but to my father. I did my first interview for the investigator job over Zoom. While I waited for news, I called the local police department for an update on when I could have my father’s phone, iPad, and notebooks they had collected as evidence. I coiled my grief tight inside me. For a while, having a plan was enough.
*
I had wanted to help people on death row long before my father’s suicide. When I was eleven, I saw a teaser for an episode of the television show Prison Break. In the scene, a man, sweat like bullets on his brow, was marched down a dark hallway toward a room where an empty electric chair waited for him. I ran into the bathroom and pressed my forehead to the cold tile walls. My lungs were sinking, useless things, foreign in my body as they desperately grasped for the memory of how to breathe.
What my body was remembering, though, was one year earlier. I was sitting in the chair I always sat in when my family watched television together, the same chair where I later watched the Prison Break scene. Except instead of rushing to the bathroom at the sight of the electric chair, I turned my head toward the couch at the muffled sound of my father sobbing. A few days later he was gone. He was in the hospital for depression, my mother told me, and he would be back when he was better. While my father was away, I waited. I learned what dread felt like (gravel under my skin); what it sounded like (clanking silverware at the dinner table); what it looked like (untouched loafers lined up by the door).
Dread crept its way into my dreams. First I dreamt of my father, drifting away from me on an ice shelf as I shouted to him from the shore. Later, after seeing the electric chair on TV, I dreamed that I was locked in a prison cell, waiting. It was often the same dream: a long hallway, a ticking clock, a heartbeat thudding so loudly it scratched at my eardrums like chalk. Before I fell asleep at night, I would squeeze my eyes as tight as I could and try to change the ending. Sometimes it worked. I was marched down the hallway in the other direction, toward an open door. I got out; it had all been a big misunderstanding. Sometimes, I woke up before I got to the end of the hall. Most of the time, though, I didn’t.
What my body was remembering, though, was one year earlier. I was sitting in the chair I always sat in when my family watched television together, the same chair where I later watched the Prison Break scene. Except instead of rushing to the bathroom at the sight of the electric chair, I turned my head toward the couch at the muffled sound of my father sobbing. A few days later he was gone. He was in the hospital for depression, my mother told me, and he would be back when he was better. While my father was away, I waited. I learned what dread felt like (gravel under my skin); what it sounded like (clanking silverware at the dinner table); what it looked like (untouched loafers lined up by the door).
Dread crept its way into my dreams. First I dreamt of my father, drifting away from me on an ice shelf as I shouted to him from the shore. Later, after seeing the electric chair on TV, I dreamed that I was locked in a prison cell, waiting. It was often the same dream: a long hallway, a ticking clock, a heartbeat thudding so loudly it scratched at my eardrums like chalk. Before I fell asleep at night, I would squeeze my eyes as tight as I could and try to change the ending. Sometimes it worked. I was marched down the hallway in the other direction, toward an open door. I got out; it had all been a big misunderstanding. Sometimes, I woke up before I got to the end of the hall. Most of the time, though, I didn’t.
*
We want to believe in good and evil, maybe because we hope that in some parallel reality, good will be met with good and bad will be met with bad. No matter how many times we see that the world does not work this way, we want it to be orderly and logical. And even when it’s not, we can at least agree on a common denominator: killing is evil. Whether you support the death penalty or you don’t, there are greater injustices than the murder of murderers.
After my dreams started, I read articles about executions for hours. When I couldn’t sleep because my heart started thundering before I even had the chance to dream, I tried to reason my way out of the fear. And it confirmed what I had felt in my gut the minute I realized we kill people behind prison walls: if a human being killed another human being, something must have happened to them. Something must be wrong with them, and something was wrong with us for responding to killing with more killing.
I believed that if only we understood who these people are—flawed, unfinished, evolving humans—then we would do better than executing them. I believed there was always a way to change the ending.
After my dreams started, I read articles about executions for hours. When I couldn’t sleep because my heart started thundering before I even had the chance to dream, I tried to reason my way out of the fear. And it confirmed what I had felt in my gut the minute I realized we kill people behind prison walls: if a human being killed another human being, something must have happened to them. Something must be wrong with them, and something was wrong with us for responding to killing with more killing.
I believed that if only we understood who these people are—flawed, unfinished, evolving humans—then we would do better than executing them. I believed there was always a way to change the ending.
*
I thought I could learn my way out of the fear that I would fail Alan. At every conference or training I attended, I picked the sessions about how trauma impacts decision-making, and how to work with complex family dynamics, and how to handle when a client only sees one way forward. I filled notebooks with charts and diagrams. I transcribed the talks furiously. These were issues, I learned, that I could overcome.
When I went west for college, I registered for my sandstone-studded university’s most famous class, an introduction to computer programming. Even though I was over a year into a psychology degree, I wanted to prove to myself that the logical side of my brain was just as capable as the side that craved to understand why humans did the things we do and felt the ways we feel. For our first coding assignment, we had to direct a small square robot named Karel to accomplish tasks: move(); turnRight(); pickBeeper();. Karel’s 2D life was dictated by her need to collect a series of diamond-shaped beepers that popped up in her small square world.
Karel was like a stubborn and dumb Roomba, at least under my instructions. She walked into and through walls. She did not turnRight. She rotated in place, happily looping on my screen until I rewrote her directions again. I was terrible at coding. It should have been so straightforward: {
if (beepersPresent()) {
pickUpBeeper() ;
}
}
Beepers were present. But Karel did not pickThemUp. There was a bug in my code, which is also called a logic error. A logic error occurs when the programmer writes code that is syntactically correct but doesn’t lead to the correct result. In other words, the instructions make perfect sense. But they generate the wrong ending.
I stayed up well past midnight on the faded couch in my sorority house common room trying to debug Karel. I changed the input dozens of times, convinced that I would eventually get the result I wanted. This is exactly what the professors tell you not to do. They tell you to step back from trying to solve what your program isn’t doing, and instead pay attention to what it is doing. But all I could see was that Karel would not pickUpBeeper, so I would try a million different ways to get her to do it.
As I tried to learn as much as I could about being a good investigator, I focused on everything Alan was not doing: he was not telling me about his glass-shard memories, he was not letting me talk to his family, and he was not prioritizing survival above everything else. The more I learned about working with clients on death row, the more capable I would be of finding the right bug in the system. I figured if I input the right combination of knowledge and empathy and logic, then I could help Alan reason his way out of the fears and distrust that kept our investigation at an impasse, relentlessly looping in place.
When I went west for college, I registered for my sandstone-studded university’s most famous class, an introduction to computer programming. Even though I was over a year into a psychology degree, I wanted to prove to myself that the logical side of my brain was just as capable as the side that craved to understand why humans did the things we do and felt the ways we feel. For our first coding assignment, we had to direct a small square robot named Karel to accomplish tasks: move(); turnRight(); pickBeeper();. Karel’s 2D life was dictated by her need to collect a series of diamond-shaped beepers that popped up in her small square world.
Karel was like a stubborn and dumb Roomba, at least under my instructions. She walked into and through walls. She did not turnRight. She rotated in place, happily looping on my screen until I rewrote her directions again. I was terrible at coding. It should have been so straightforward: {
if (beepersPresent()) {
pickUpBeeper() ;
}
}
Beepers were present. But Karel did not pickThemUp. There was a bug in my code, which is also called a logic error. A logic error occurs when the programmer writes code that is syntactically correct but doesn’t lead to the correct result. In other words, the instructions make perfect sense. But they generate the wrong ending.
I stayed up well past midnight on the faded couch in my sorority house common room trying to debug Karel. I changed the input dozens of times, convinced that I would eventually get the result I wanted. This is exactly what the professors tell you not to do. They tell you to step back from trying to solve what your program isn’t doing, and instead pay attention to what it is doing. But all I could see was that Karel would not pickUpBeeper, so I would try a million different ways to get her to do it.
As I tried to learn as much as I could about being a good investigator, I focused on everything Alan was not doing: he was not telling me about his glass-shard memories, he was not letting me talk to his family, and he was not prioritizing survival above everything else. The more I learned about working with clients on death row, the more capable I would be of finding the right bug in the system. I figured if I input the right combination of knowledge and empathy and logic, then I could help Alan reason his way out of the fears and distrust that kept our investigation at an impasse, relentlessly looping in place.
*
When I returned to my office after my visit with Alan, I felt depleted and frustrated. The attorneys and paralegals on my team reassured me. They had been working with Alan longer than I had, and they’d had different versions of the same conversation many times.
“Let’s not push it,” the lead attorney said. “We don’t want to upset him more. Let’s give him some space.”
I understood why we didn’t want to push Alan away. It had happened to colleagues in my office before: a client became so despondent that they gave up their appeals, effectively choosing suicide by execution.
It was obvious Alan was protecting himself, and probably trying to protect his family the one way he could from his cell hundreds of miles from them on death row. They had secrets he did not want to force into the light. Even though I didn’t have confirmation yet, I did something a good investigator should never do. I made an assumption based on the files I read and the hard, flitting expressions of family members I talked to, which was that Alan had been molested by his father when he was a child. If it was true, it was a major mitigating factor that should have been brought up at Alan’s trial. It could have changed the jury’s understanding of who he was and how he became someone who could react to fear with violence; it could have stopped them from sentencing him to death. But maybe Alan did not feel safe enough with his trial lawyers to tell them. Maybe he had not felt safe for decades.
“Let’s not push it,” the lead attorney said. “We don’t want to upset him more. Let’s give him some space.”
I understood why we didn’t want to push Alan away. It had happened to colleagues in my office before: a client became so despondent that they gave up their appeals, effectively choosing suicide by execution.
It was obvious Alan was protecting himself, and probably trying to protect his family the one way he could from his cell hundreds of miles from them on death row. They had secrets he did not want to force into the light. Even though I didn’t have confirmation yet, I did something a good investigator should never do. I made an assumption based on the files I read and the hard, flitting expressions of family members I talked to, which was that Alan had been molested by his father when he was a child. If it was true, it was a major mitigating factor that should have been brought up at Alan’s trial. It could have changed the jury’s understanding of who he was and how he became someone who could react to fear with violence; it could have stopped them from sentencing him to death. But maybe Alan did not feel safe enough with his trial lawyers to tell them. Maybe he had not felt safe for decades.
*
My father was twelve years old when his brother-in-law, more than twenty years his senior, molested him for the first time. He told me and my brother about it just like that: straightforward, hollow, devastating.
“When I was twelve, Gene molested me.”
I was eighteen and in shock. I’d grown up close to my aunt, who had yogurt-soft skin and a laugh like a question-mark, and my older, magazine-cool cousins, who drove us around on ATVs and wore lilac contact lenses. I posed beside them, toothless and delighted, as they took photos before their prom nights. Then suddenly, we stopped seeing them. All I knew was that their father had done something illegal. He owned a business, so I assumed he had laundered money or not paid taxes. He was oily and quiet, the way cartoon villains are.
When my father told me he had been molested, I was too stunned to ask questions, too afraid of my father splintering to bits in front of me. So I made assumptions again: first, that he was abused one time, when he was twelve. Second, that he told my whole family at the same time, right around when we became mysteriously estranged.
After my father died, I didn’t want to make assumptions about his life again. I learned by accident that he had attempted suicide before; the truth had slid, red and wet, from a different aunt who assumed I knew. The night I had heard him crying on the couch, just before he went to the hospital, he was not only depressed. He was suicidal. After he didn’t show up to work a few days later, my mother called a friend in the fire department, who tracked my father’s credit card to a nearby three-star hotel. When the police burst through the door, they found empty orange pill bottles strewn on the bedside table and my father, barely breathing, on the bed. I never knew. I was angry that I didn’t know, and I was adamant that I would not be blindsided again.
By the next time I went home to visit New Jersey, I was ready to ask the kind of questions I was learning to ask as an investigator.
“How long did the abuse go on?” I asked yet another aunt and uncle, the ones I trusted most.
From when he was twelve to when he was seventeen.
“Did his sister know?”
Yes, she walked in and saw something, and she closed the door.
“How did the family react?” I asked my mother.
Your grandparents didn’t want anyone to know. It took Dad years to tell anyone, even his own sisters.
“Why did he attempt suicide the first time?”
I don’t know. All of this was going on for years. He just wanted it to be over.
“I am ready to move on,” my father wrote in a letter to his abuser, a letter that I discovered amidst the meticulous files he’d kept of his life. “I can’t begin to tell you how great an impact your offense has had on my life. Sometimes, I don’t realize how many aspects of my existence it has tainted. I still don’t know if I hate you or feel sorry for you. At this point, it doesn’t matter. What matters is I have a happy life. What matters is that I can be a great husband and father, and that I am not burdened with this for the rest of my life.”
I had read the letter once before, just after my father died, and promptly folded it back in the pile of paperwork I’d taken ownership of from his condo. Then, it had been too much to bear: three pages of my father putting into words how desperately he wanted to be free, how, after twenty years, he had finally stopped blaming himself. But now I smoothed the pages down, looking for clues. I jotted down dates he mentioned, sketching out a timeline of events. This was the theory I had the most confidence in: when my father was abused, he irrevocably, perpetually, unjustly lost the sense that his body was safe in the world. He tried everything to get that groundedness back, until he couldn’t anymore.
“When I was twelve, Gene molested me.”
I was eighteen and in shock. I’d grown up close to my aunt, who had yogurt-soft skin and a laugh like a question-mark, and my older, magazine-cool cousins, who drove us around on ATVs and wore lilac contact lenses. I posed beside them, toothless and delighted, as they took photos before their prom nights. Then suddenly, we stopped seeing them. All I knew was that their father had done something illegal. He owned a business, so I assumed he had laundered money or not paid taxes. He was oily and quiet, the way cartoon villains are.
When my father told me he had been molested, I was too stunned to ask questions, too afraid of my father splintering to bits in front of me. So I made assumptions again: first, that he was abused one time, when he was twelve. Second, that he told my whole family at the same time, right around when we became mysteriously estranged.
After my father died, I didn’t want to make assumptions about his life again. I learned by accident that he had attempted suicide before; the truth had slid, red and wet, from a different aunt who assumed I knew. The night I had heard him crying on the couch, just before he went to the hospital, he was not only depressed. He was suicidal. After he didn’t show up to work a few days later, my mother called a friend in the fire department, who tracked my father’s credit card to a nearby three-star hotel. When the police burst through the door, they found empty orange pill bottles strewn on the bedside table and my father, barely breathing, on the bed. I never knew. I was angry that I didn’t know, and I was adamant that I would not be blindsided again.
By the next time I went home to visit New Jersey, I was ready to ask the kind of questions I was learning to ask as an investigator.
“How long did the abuse go on?” I asked yet another aunt and uncle, the ones I trusted most.
From when he was twelve to when he was seventeen.
“Did his sister know?”
Yes, she walked in and saw something, and she closed the door.
“How did the family react?” I asked my mother.
Your grandparents didn’t want anyone to know. It took Dad years to tell anyone, even his own sisters.
“Why did he attempt suicide the first time?”
I don’t know. All of this was going on for years. He just wanted it to be over.
“I am ready to move on,” my father wrote in a letter to his abuser, a letter that I discovered amidst the meticulous files he’d kept of his life. “I can’t begin to tell you how great an impact your offense has had on my life. Sometimes, I don’t realize how many aspects of my existence it has tainted. I still don’t know if I hate you or feel sorry for you. At this point, it doesn’t matter. What matters is I have a happy life. What matters is that I can be a great husband and father, and that I am not burdened with this for the rest of my life.”
I had read the letter once before, just after my father died, and promptly folded it back in the pile of paperwork I’d taken ownership of from his condo. Then, it had been too much to bear: three pages of my father putting into words how desperately he wanted to be free, how, after twenty years, he had finally stopped blaming himself. But now I smoothed the pages down, looking for clues. I jotted down dates he mentioned, sketching out a timeline of events. This was the theory I had the most confidence in: when my father was abused, he irrevocably, perpetually, unjustly lost the sense that his body was safe in the world. He tried everything to get that groundedness back, until he couldn’t anymore.
*
It was the wrong decision to withdraw from Alan. As the last weeks of winter blurred together, it quickly became months since anyone visited him. We all signed a Christmas card that we mailed to the prison, but when Alan called the office, no one was available to answer. Every time I likened Alan’s life to my father’s, I scolded myself. I was being unprofessional. I didn’t have the boundaries that everyone said you needed to do this kind of work. But whether it was because I felt the echo of my father’s long, lonely search for healing or because I wasn’t being the tenacious investigator I wanted to be, I insisted we start visiting Alan again. I did not want to abandon him. When no one else volunteered to be the first one back, I emailed the warden’s assistant to set up a meeting.
“Well, it’s been a minute,” Alan said before I had a chance to sit down. “Where have y’all been? What’s going on with my case?”
I tap-danced for a moment, pulling at the edges of my oversized sweater sleeves, before I started to apologize for disappearing the way I knew countless others had in his life.
“I wasn’t upset with you wanting to talk to my family,” Alan said. “I’m upset that y’all don’t talk to me. I respect that you have to do your jobs. But you’ve gotta start listening to me. This is my life, not yours.”
“Well, it’s been a minute,” Alan said before I had a chance to sit down. “Where have y’all been? What’s going on with my case?”
I tap-danced for a moment, pulling at the edges of my oversized sweater sleeves, before I started to apologize for disappearing the way I knew countless others had in his life.
“I wasn’t upset with you wanting to talk to my family,” Alan said. “I’m upset that y’all don’t talk to me. I respect that you have to do your jobs. But you’ve gotta start listening to me. This is my life, not yours.”
*
My investigation into my father’s death had become an endless loop. I felt like Karel, colliding against the same walls of her small square world. I read and reread his letter; I researched the psychological impact of childhood sexual abuse; I opened the evidence envelopes with his journals, but though he wrote about gratitude and anxiety and hope, he never wrote about despondency. I’m proud of myself, I have so much to offer the world. These were in his final journal entry the day before he killed himself, the opposite of an explanation as to why.
I felt stuck, until I found what I considered proof in another stack of my father’s files. The paperwork started with a series of faxes and emails, all referencing a vague legal agreement. As I scanned the dozens of pages, I found what was at their spiny core: a settlement between my father and his abuser, wherein Gene would pay my father $500,000 toward mental health treatment and the mortgage of our new house, and my father would relinquish the right to any criminal or legal restitution for “anything that may have transpired between them.”
I yelped when I read through the files. Here, finally, was proof: Gene’s signature, my father’s acquiescence. With these papers, I had evidence of how severe the impact of the abuse had been on my father; even Gene admitted it with his hush money. I could continue building my case. I prepared all my next steps. At work, I was accustomed to collecting and organizing thousands of pages of medical records from my clients and their family members. As the next-of-kin on my father’s death certificate, I would be able to get access to his. Every time he had been hospitalized, every group therapy program, every psychiatrist visit. I was sure somewhere in those records, there would be a flat, unbroken line between my father’s abuse and his suicide.
I made a list of the places I knew he had received treatment and I asked my mother about any I might have missed. She also gave me the name of a lawyer who was willing to help me, too. I didn’t want to sue my father’s abuser because I wanted his money. I wanted him to sit in a public courtroom and answer every question I had. I wanted accountability, to know with certainty that this was why my father died. If my father had not been molested, then he would not have killed himself.
I felt stuck, until I found what I considered proof in another stack of my father’s files. The paperwork started with a series of faxes and emails, all referencing a vague legal agreement. As I scanned the dozens of pages, I found what was at their spiny core: a settlement between my father and his abuser, wherein Gene would pay my father $500,000 toward mental health treatment and the mortgage of our new house, and my father would relinquish the right to any criminal or legal restitution for “anything that may have transpired between them.”
I yelped when I read through the files. Here, finally, was proof: Gene’s signature, my father’s acquiescence. With these papers, I had evidence of how severe the impact of the abuse had been on my father; even Gene admitted it with his hush money. I could continue building my case. I prepared all my next steps. At work, I was accustomed to collecting and organizing thousands of pages of medical records from my clients and their family members. As the next-of-kin on my father’s death certificate, I would be able to get access to his. Every time he had been hospitalized, every group therapy program, every psychiatrist visit. I was sure somewhere in those records, there would be a flat, unbroken line between my father’s abuse and his suicide.
I made a list of the places I knew he had received treatment and I asked my mother about any I might have missed. She also gave me the name of a lawyer who was willing to help me, too. I didn’t want to sue my father’s abuser because I wanted his money. I wanted him to sit in a public courtroom and answer every question I had. I wanted accountability, to know with certainty that this was why my father died. If my father had not been molested, then he would not have killed himself.
*
For a while, I didn’t think about what would happen after I found a concrete explanation for my father’s suicide; I didn’t ask myself, and then what? All I could say was that it mattered. But what I really wanted was a crystalline vision of the parallel world where my father didn’t die. If I could extract the thing that killed him, I could imagine what I could have done differently to save him. I could picture what it would be like to tell him about my new investigator job, and I could pick out the cookbook I would buy him for Christmas, and I could hear what he would say when I asked him how to roast a chicken without it getting slimy. I knew this world didn’t exist, but I still wanted it; to get as close as possible to this gossamer refraction of my reality, where he was still alive.
The closest I got was in my dreams. The premise was always the same. Once or twice a week, I discovered that my father had not died, after all. Another man had wandered into my father’s condo and ended his life; it was a tragedy of mistaken identity. I had come home—or it was my brother, or the neighbor—and we found my father still breathing, and got to call his family from the hospital to say in breathless relief, Thank God we found him in time. My father was in treatment, far away without a phone, out of reach but very much alive.
The dreams were more real than waking. For months and then years I dreamed of explanations for why my father had never even died, and every time I woke up limp and blissful with relief. I knew that couldn’t have been right, I thought to myself in the bleary moments between sleep and consciousness. The part where my father killed himself was the bug. It was too terrible; the ending had to change. But then my brain caught up with my fluttering eyelids and I had to remember, again and again, that there was only one way his story ended.
The closest I got was in my dreams. The premise was always the same. Once or twice a week, I discovered that my father had not died, after all. Another man had wandered into my father’s condo and ended his life; it was a tragedy of mistaken identity. I had come home—or it was my brother, or the neighbor—and we found my father still breathing, and got to call his family from the hospital to say in breathless relief, Thank God we found him in time. My father was in treatment, far away without a phone, out of reach but very much alive.
The dreams were more real than waking. For months and then years I dreamed of explanations for why my father had never even died, and every time I woke up limp and blissful with relief. I knew that couldn’t have been right, I thought to myself in the bleary moments between sleep and consciousness. The part where my father killed himself was the bug. It was too terrible; the ending had to change. But then my brain caught up with my fluttering eyelids and I had to remember, again and again, that there was only one way his story ended.
*
The more time I spent with Alan, the more he began to trust me. He told me the name of his favorite dog; his dream car; how nervous he had been to hold his baby when he was born. He was only sixteen, and he held her as he asked himself, how am I going to make sure this baby has enough to eat?
But we still had the same conversation over and over. Why did I need to talk to people from his past, when I could ask him anything I wanted? Why did I need to know about his childhood, when it wasn’t important to his case? Why did he get a call from his sister, when I had knocked on her door and asked her personal questions? I became braver. One day I said the words out loud.
“Alan, you probably don’t want to hear this, but you know it’s already really difficult to win an appeal when you’ve already been convicted,” I said to him. “If we don’t try every possible angle, we lower your chances even more. You’re that much more likely to be executed.”
“It won’t be a problem if we win on other issues,” he said.
“But we might not win on other issues. We might not win on any issues. We have to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.”
“Why? Yes, my father abused me. So what? How does that help get me out of here?”
“It might not. But it might stop you from dying. The courts won’t listen to this kind of evidence later. You can’t change your mind. And they will really kill you.”
Alan paused for a moment, but he didn’t look away from me.
“I know,” he said, his back slouched down his seat, his eyes holding mine. “I can live with that.”
First I wanted to scream at him: you don’t know what you’re saying. But he did know. He knew what he had lived through better than anyone else. He knew his family better than I did. He knew what it was like to make decisions while living inside the constant, lazy jaws of institutionalized death, a killing machine.
Maybe if Alan did not have a brain trying to stay afloat in a sea of trauma and cognitive deficits and years of staring at concrete prison walls, then he would understand why it was so important to tell his story to the courts.
If he had not been hurt by the people who raised him, then he would not try to stop me from speaking to them.
If he could envision a life that was more than endless days and nights behind bars, then he would not wager his already slim chance at escaping death by the state.
My father knew the deepest reaches of his own suffering, too: better than me, better than his siblings, better than his doctors. If he hadn’t been abused or depressed or alone, then maybe he would still be alive. If, if, if.
None of those scenarios were the reality. The reality was that my father had felt enough pain that he decided to end his own life. The reality was that Alan was on death row, away from his family, and he could not separate that from the decisions he made about his life. Their choices were a product of their experiences that I could never really understand, no matter how many questions I asked or documents I memorized.
When Alan told me he could live with his own choices, I finally decided to believe him.
But we still had the same conversation over and over. Why did I need to talk to people from his past, when I could ask him anything I wanted? Why did I need to know about his childhood, when it wasn’t important to his case? Why did he get a call from his sister, when I had knocked on her door and asked her personal questions? I became braver. One day I said the words out loud.
“Alan, you probably don’t want to hear this, but you know it’s already really difficult to win an appeal when you’ve already been convicted,” I said to him. “If we don’t try every possible angle, we lower your chances even more. You’re that much more likely to be executed.”
“It won’t be a problem if we win on other issues,” he said.
“But we might not win on other issues. We might not win on any issues. We have to throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.”
“Why? Yes, my father abused me. So what? How does that help get me out of here?”
“It might not. But it might stop you from dying. The courts won’t listen to this kind of evidence later. You can’t change your mind. And they will really kill you.”
Alan paused for a moment, but he didn’t look away from me.
“I know,” he said, his back slouched down his seat, his eyes holding mine. “I can live with that.”
First I wanted to scream at him: you don’t know what you’re saying. But he did know. He knew what he had lived through better than anyone else. He knew his family better than I did. He knew what it was like to make decisions while living inside the constant, lazy jaws of institutionalized death, a killing machine.
Maybe if Alan did not have a brain trying to stay afloat in a sea of trauma and cognitive deficits and years of staring at concrete prison walls, then he would understand why it was so important to tell his story to the courts.
If he had not been hurt by the people who raised him, then he would not try to stop me from speaking to them.
If he could envision a life that was more than endless days and nights behind bars, then he would not wager his already slim chance at escaping death by the state.
My father knew the deepest reaches of his own suffering, too: better than me, better than his siblings, better than his doctors. If he hadn’t been abused or depressed or alone, then maybe he would still be alive. If, if, if.
None of those scenarios were the reality. The reality was that my father had felt enough pain that he decided to end his own life. The reality was that Alan was on death row, away from his family, and he could not separate that from the decisions he made about his life. Their choices were a product of their experiences that I could never really understand, no matter how many questions I asked or documents I memorized.
When Alan told me he could live with his own choices, I finally decided to believe him.
*
Sometimes a line of code falters not because of a logic error, but because of a syntax error: the language the programmer has input simply does not exist in the world of the program. It does not have the words, so it cannot understand. Karel could not putDownBeeper(); danceSalsaWithBeeper(); hurtleBeeperOutTheWindow(). She could only pickUpBeeper. And in fact, she couldn’t even do that: I had the words wrong. Karel did not know the instruction pickUpBeeper; she only knew pickBeeper. Syntax errors are supposed to be easier to fix than logic errors. They are right in front of you, saying “This is not possible! This option does not exist!”
I utterly failed the computer programming midterm. Afterwards, I called my father, spiraling about whether I should drop out of college. I visited my academic advisor, a kind, storybook witch of a woman with a broad face and short gray hairs splattered under her chin like freckles. I cried in her office. I would either tank my GPA with this class, or if I dropped out, my transcript would forever be marked with a w: withdrawn.
Kindly, tritely, confidently, my advisor said, “Sometimes, a w can also stand for the wisdom to do what is right for you.”
W: wisdom, which is also what my name means, which my father loved to remind me, which I loved when he did. “You were just born wise,” he would say, beaming.
I did not feel wise when, six months after that conversation with Alan, I gave a very tearful, very unprofessional notice to my supervisor that I was leaving my investigator job. Instead of only looking at what Alan was not doing, I finally saw what he was doing. Once I did, I tried and tried to create a world where I could be a great investigator and honor my clients’ agency, but I could not get there. I did not know how to do both. I did not know how to make my job stop feeling like my life and my life stop feeling like my job.
I figured that I could just mash the two into complete devotion to unraveling the rest of my father’s story. I sent an email to the lawyer my mother had put me in touch with, where I spelled out my theory, a summary of every piece of evidence I had, and additional avenues of investigation I thought we could pursue. I attached many documents. A few weeks later, the lawyer called me while I was out running errands. I pulled over to an empty parking lot to take the call, my adrenaline hopscotching. He didn’t sugarcoat his thoughts: we didn’t have a strong enough case.
“Maybe if your father had left a suicide note that said, ‘I’m doing this because Gene abused me,’” he told me. I rolled my eyes. If he had left a note like that, then I wouldn’t have been compelled to search for the answer to why. Then I would have known. But there had been no note.
I rubbed my eyes in frustration before I returned to my list of next steps: request records, pitch a newspaper story, investigate leads on potential other victims of my father’s abuser. But then I let the list sit untouched on my desk. I still had the police envelopes containing my father’s phone and iPad, sealed beneath the ones I’d carefully slit open to retrieve his journals. I had always planned to try to unlock them, to scour his browsing history and all his messages for any evidence. But I put it off, and put it off. Without consciously doing so, I decided I was not going to dig through his devices. Weeks, then months went by with no new thing crossed off my list. Somewhere, I had let my investigation go.
If I had continued a dogged investigation into my father, then maybe I would have found an explanation for why he made the decision to leave me. Maybe that explanation would have been enough to absolve me of the blame I put on myself, the redemption I craved.
If I had stayed at my job as an investigator, then maybe I would have been able to, eventually, conduct a thorough and brilliant investigation on Alan’s case. Maybe I could have changed his still uncertain ending: five years later, he is still on death row.
Any number of mirrored realities like these would have been a more satisfying, more triumphant, more impressive ending. But they are not what happened. Sometimes it is not a matter of finding the right explanation. Sometimes the option simply does not exist; the words are not there. What did happen is this: I sent Alan a card on the anniversary of his sister’s death, and I put money on his phone books, and I visited him and we played cards in the family and friends visitation room. I stopped obsessing over why my father died, and, instead, I walked in the woods with his best friend, and I added anchovy paste to his favorite pasta recipe, and I gave away his beloved, ugly cow-print bar stools I once thought I could never part with. When my aunt, the one with the soft skin who remained married to Gene, offered to meet up and talk, I told her no.
I was no longer an investigator, in name or in effort. I was just a young woman who still felt like that little girl waiting for her father to come home. I could not bear the reality that he never would, and yet I had to bear it; to stop smashing myself against the walls of my world without him.
I had to accept that I had not been the investigator I dreamed of being. I had not saved Alan’s life; I probably will never save any person’s life. I still feel pangs of guilt over not doing more to help my father. But they are more muffled, now, wrapped in cotton, because when I stopped trying to change the ending of other people’s stories, I could witness what I had done. I had given dignity to my father’s choices, and to Alan’s. I had let myself forget logic so that I could feel anger and mercy and forgiveness, which are all also other names for love. I had accepted that to know someone is not to solve them, but to see them.
I understood that the only ending I could try to change, in bits of stumbling and ordinary and very uncertain wisdom, is my own. And I could live with that.
I utterly failed the computer programming midterm. Afterwards, I called my father, spiraling about whether I should drop out of college. I visited my academic advisor, a kind, storybook witch of a woman with a broad face and short gray hairs splattered under her chin like freckles. I cried in her office. I would either tank my GPA with this class, or if I dropped out, my transcript would forever be marked with a w: withdrawn.
Kindly, tritely, confidently, my advisor said, “Sometimes, a w can also stand for the wisdom to do what is right for you.”
W: wisdom, which is also what my name means, which my father loved to remind me, which I loved when he did. “You were just born wise,” he would say, beaming.
I did not feel wise when, six months after that conversation with Alan, I gave a very tearful, very unprofessional notice to my supervisor that I was leaving my investigator job. Instead of only looking at what Alan was not doing, I finally saw what he was doing. Once I did, I tried and tried to create a world where I could be a great investigator and honor my clients’ agency, but I could not get there. I did not know how to do both. I did not know how to make my job stop feeling like my life and my life stop feeling like my job.
I figured that I could just mash the two into complete devotion to unraveling the rest of my father’s story. I sent an email to the lawyer my mother had put me in touch with, where I spelled out my theory, a summary of every piece of evidence I had, and additional avenues of investigation I thought we could pursue. I attached many documents. A few weeks later, the lawyer called me while I was out running errands. I pulled over to an empty parking lot to take the call, my adrenaline hopscotching. He didn’t sugarcoat his thoughts: we didn’t have a strong enough case.
“Maybe if your father had left a suicide note that said, ‘I’m doing this because Gene abused me,’” he told me. I rolled my eyes. If he had left a note like that, then I wouldn’t have been compelled to search for the answer to why. Then I would have known. But there had been no note.
I rubbed my eyes in frustration before I returned to my list of next steps: request records, pitch a newspaper story, investigate leads on potential other victims of my father’s abuser. But then I let the list sit untouched on my desk. I still had the police envelopes containing my father’s phone and iPad, sealed beneath the ones I’d carefully slit open to retrieve his journals. I had always planned to try to unlock them, to scour his browsing history and all his messages for any evidence. But I put it off, and put it off. Without consciously doing so, I decided I was not going to dig through his devices. Weeks, then months went by with no new thing crossed off my list. Somewhere, I had let my investigation go.
If I had continued a dogged investigation into my father, then maybe I would have found an explanation for why he made the decision to leave me. Maybe that explanation would have been enough to absolve me of the blame I put on myself, the redemption I craved.
If I had stayed at my job as an investigator, then maybe I would have been able to, eventually, conduct a thorough and brilliant investigation on Alan’s case. Maybe I could have changed his still uncertain ending: five years later, he is still on death row.
Any number of mirrored realities like these would have been a more satisfying, more triumphant, more impressive ending. But they are not what happened. Sometimes it is not a matter of finding the right explanation. Sometimes the option simply does not exist; the words are not there. What did happen is this: I sent Alan a card on the anniversary of his sister’s death, and I put money on his phone books, and I visited him and we played cards in the family and friends visitation room. I stopped obsessing over why my father died, and, instead, I walked in the woods with his best friend, and I added anchovy paste to his favorite pasta recipe, and I gave away his beloved, ugly cow-print bar stools I once thought I could never part with. When my aunt, the one with the soft skin who remained married to Gene, offered to meet up and talk, I told her no.
I was no longer an investigator, in name or in effort. I was just a young woman who still felt like that little girl waiting for her father to come home. I could not bear the reality that he never would, and yet I had to bear it; to stop smashing myself against the walls of my world without him.
I had to accept that I had not been the investigator I dreamed of being. I had not saved Alan’s life; I probably will never save any person’s life. I still feel pangs of guilt over not doing more to help my father. But they are more muffled, now, wrapped in cotton, because when I stopped trying to change the ending of other people’s stories, I could witness what I had done. I had given dignity to my father’s choices, and to Alan’s. I had let myself forget logic so that I could feel anger and mercy and forgiveness, which are all also other names for love. I had accepted that to know someone is not to solve them, but to see them.
I understood that the only ending I could try to change, in bits of stumbling and ordinary and very uncertain wisdom, is my own. And I could live with that.