I saw on the news this morning that Anthony Bourdain took his own life. After that, I read that someone named Kate Spade did the same thing. I never met Anthony or Kate, but I knew someone like them once.
We had a bench by our pond. A pine-log bench. It sat near the edge of the water. Daddy called it his Thinking Bench. This afternoon, after twenty-five years, I sat in that bench. I remember the day he built it—using only a sharp axe and cuss words.
It’s funny, how I can remember things like benches, but not what I had for supper last night.
Salmon, I had the salmon. No, it was chicken.
Anyway, weeds grew around his bench. He trimmed the grass using a jack knife sometimes. I don’t know why he did that. Cody, his dog, would sit beside him when he used the bench.
One December morning, when the weather was unusually cold, I found him there. He’d been sitting all night. He wasn’t moving. Eyes open. There was a thin
layer of frost on his back and shoulders. His red hair stiff from the cold.
Mama ran outside with a blanket. He didn’t want it.
“You coulda froze to death,” she said. “You need serious help, John.”
“Help doing what?” he’d say with vinegar in his voice.
Because Daddy didn’t trust shrinks. After all, who could trust a medical man who had baby soft hands and wore silk underpants? How could a man like that help a body?
Besides, nobody from my father’s world seemed to KNOW what professional help was, exactly. At least not back then. Fewer understood words like “depression.” Back then, those were just modern ideas invented by folks who ate snails at dinner parties and talked about things like cubism, yoga, and frozen yogurt.
Daddy was the kind who made log benches. The kind who liked to sit. The kind…