Back to Issue Fifty-Nine

I WISH TO SPEAK OF HIM

by SUMMER WROBEL

In his goodbye letter, my father references a conversation we had about commercial fishing. It had been August, early evening, and I was researching the effects of long line fishing on sharks, skates, and rays. I wanted to be a marine biologist, and I hoped to impress my father, who had once dreamed of being a marine engineer.

Earlier that summer, my father had developed a strange habit of opening and closing his mouth without saying a word. I couldn’t tell if he had nothing to say or just no way to say it, but the unfamiliarity of his silences bothered me. I became a walking radio, trying to make enough noise for the both of us.

Listen to this, I said, eager to read my research aloud. I liked the words I was learning, words like elasmobranchii and byproduct, and the length of their vowels. I thought the right fact or story would bring him back to me, that he would get up from the edge of his bed, and smile, as he did when he was curious. Remind me, what are the elasmobranchii? I wanted him to say. What fishing methods do you recommend?

He didn’t ask, but I must have told him anyway. For it surprised me to see him write about it months later, to consider how my words must have stayed in his mind.

It is like what you told me, my father wrote of his depression, about the shark who is stuck on the line.

 

My father died by suicide when I was sixteen years old. On a late December night, he slipped out of our apartment and into his car where he ended his life by asphyxiation. The next morning, I woke up to two officers in the living room, waiting for me to join them.

It had been a difficult year for my father—one of unemployment, shame, and financial loss. I can say this in retrospect. At the time, there was only disbelief.

No, my mother said when she heard the news, as if refusing could summon him from the dead. A close friend of my father’s accepted he was dead, but not that he killed himself. I will find out who did this, the friend declared.

My father’s suicide asked too much of those who loved him. It was one thing to believe he was gone and another to believe he chose this. No, my mother said again, but the police had found letters on the dashboard of his car. Each one had been typed up and printed. One of the letters was for me.

 

In my first months of grieving, I dreamed of my father almost every night. In my dreams, I walked along a crowded New York block, somewhere with the density of Times Square, until I spotted the backside of my father—thin black hair, a set of wide shoulders in a gray overcoat—zigzagging through the crowd. Wait, I shouted. You’re alive! I hurried towards him, but I could never touch him. As soon as I reached the corner he stood on, the distance between us grew another block long.

I often awoke from these dreams with a lingering shame. For a split second, I forgot which reality I belonged to. I’ve lied about his death, I first thought. When the confusion cleared, it was replaced with fear. I became afraid of my mind’s capacity for imaginative thinking. Some evenings, I laid out across my bed and unfolded his letter just to remind myself he was gone.

Without the familiarity of his handwriting, my father’s typed up letter felt disembodied. I wanted the intimacy of his large looping cursive, the same handwriting he had taught me, guiding my fingers across dotted lines. I wanted the blueness of his favorite pen. Instead, I had this parting analogy, and I kept it like a secret between us. I didn’t understand how my father could end his life, and I had an uneasy relationship with the way his letter tried to offer an answer. I felt a conflicting desire to believe every word he said and to deny the things he articulated at his greatest moment of despair. I didn’t know what to put faith in and what to discard. But when I wanted to dream his death away, or when I wanted to believe my mother’s theories, which were becoming stranger under grief—maybe he was set up, maybe he was murdered, the letters were typed after all, she murmured late into the night—I felt grateful for a sentence only he could have written.

 

There is a painting by Vincent Van Gogh, the Almond Blossom, that Van Gogh made on the occasion of his nephew’s birth. He painted it in February of 1890, just five months before he died by suicide. In the painting, you see the fragment of a blossoming almond tree angled against a blue sky. The eyeline of the painting feels like childhood, a time when most of the world requires you to tilt your head up.

Almond Blossom holds all the hope of new life and when I first saw it, I found that hope heartbreaking. It reminded me of my father in the weeks leading up to his death. Between long days of silence, he had bursts of plans. He called his mom on the phone and promised to take her to Paris in the spring. He told my mother, his ex-wife of over ten years, that they should remarry. He spent the week before he died looking at apartment listings with me as if we were preparing to move together.

Now I know that these tendencies—possible emotional highs or attempts to soothe—are not uncommon in people contemplating suicide. Still, they are hard to accept.

I don’t understand, my grandmother said to me after his funeral. We had plans. I felt the same cruel irony when I looked at Almond Blossom. The painting with its wobbly but determined branches, pink buds opening toward spring, felt like an acknowledgement of life’s continuance and potential for beauty.

 

Here is a part of grief I feel embarrassed to admit: the self-centeredness of it. Years after my father’s death, I stood in the Van Gogh Museum and surprised myself with a kind of possessive sadness. I rushed through the exhibit, past sunflowers that blurred to suns, scanning the plaques for any mention of Van Gogh’s death. When I sat down in the museum bookshop, it was not art or beauty I was after. I had heard there were letters, and I wanted to read them.

Van Gogh’s letters are fascinating in the way all great stories are—they show a mind at work in the world. Alongside the reality of trying to survive as an artist, and the catalog of colors that permeated Van Gogh’s world, are questions about God, and sorrow, and hope. I prefer the melancholy that hopes and aspires and searches, Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, to the one that despairs, mournful and stagnant. In another letter to his friend, the painter Émile Bernard, he writes, we’re still on the position of believing that life is flat and goes from birth to death. But life too is probably round.

When Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Van Gogh’s sister in law, first published his letters, she was asking the European art world to look at art in tandem with the life of the artist, then an avant-garde request. I can love Van Gogh’s letters for this reason alone. In their circulation, I see a faith in the quotidian, in life as material for revelation.

Today, the 903 surviving letters from Van Gogh’s correspondences are organized chronologically and available online thanks to a fifteen-year undertaking by the Van Gogh Museum and Huygens, ING. Of the surviving letters, 651 are addressed to Van Gogh’s brother, Theo. It was Theo who provided Van Gogh with the support—money, housing, paint—to continue working despite his lifetime struggle to sell his art. And it was Van Gogh that Theo consulted on his career, sharing both insecurities and dreams. At times they argued, but we only know of their disagreements through their letters of reconciliation.

In the end, Van Gogh did not leave a suicide note. What letter was found was an unfinished response to Theo. But maybe that is why I am so attracted to this story—for all the reasons the comparison fails. Where there could have been one letter, there are hundreds.

 

A sculpture of the two Van Gogh brothers, created by Ossip Zadkine, stands in Zundert, not far from where the brothers were born. In eight feet of bronze, two thin and angular men walk forward. Their shoulders and legs touch so that their torsos create a triangle of open space. The effect is that they look like one body, bound by the emptiness or opening between them. The statue feels melancholy in its precarity—remove one brother and the other would fall down.

For years, I fantasized about finding my father in his car, still alive, preparing for his death. If you do this, I imagined saying in this alternative universe, yanking the passenger door open, then you are going to have to take me with you. Of course, the fantasy was that in order to save me, he would save himself. But there was also something I was trying to articulate about my present in this fantasy, something about grief that I wished my father understood. Yes, I was still living, but he had done something irreversible to the both of us.

Theo would die six months after his brother’s suicide. While he was suffering from syphilis, those close to the family thought it was heartbreak that killed him in the end. When I think about Theo, I can’t help but think about the desire to help those you love. Some days, I am not sure what hurts more—my father’s absence or the fact that I was unable to save him.

 

For most of our childhood, my brothers and I lived with my mother, and my father took us every other weekend. It was a custody arrangement built around his work, and one that would stay until I was old enough to take the subway on my own and decide when and where I wanted to go. But in those long stretches of not seeing him, he always called at night. I didn’t understand the work he did yet, how he was traveling to pitch telecommunication infrastructure, how he wanted to build a fiber optic cable that ran along the ocean floor. Hi Dad, I said each night into the phone.

Now I wonder: When he called to say goodnight, was he sitting in a hotel room? Was the TV on? Was he lonely? I imagine him lonely. I wonder if he ever got home sick and how he cured it; if he ate his feelings away or wandered in the evenings like me. Why had it never occurred to me to ask him? I’d like to walk with you there, Van Gogh wrote to Theo about the rainy docks of Antwerp, to find out whether we look at things the same.

It is hard to separate my father’s absence from my memories of him, and so he appears, just out of my periphery, a kind of blurry presence in the doorway, a voice without a body. I can’t tell if my memories are tainted by the fact of his death. If his life were a puzzle, his suicide became the picture on the box. If there was a betrayal in my grieving, I think it was this.

 

What does time do to a letter that a letter cannot do to time? In March of 2024, David Zwirner Books published, My Friend Van Gogh, as part of their ekphrasis series. The book is from the perspective of Émile Bernard, one of Van Gogh’s closest friends, who championed Van Gogh’s work long before he held the acclaim he has today.

My Friend Van Gogh isn’t really a collection of letters though. Rather it is a collection of Bernard’s prefaces to former publications of Van Gogh’s letters. Bernard’s task was in many ways repetitive, to introduce a great artist and friend, but time renewed it.

It is interesting to read Bernard’s writing in chronological order as he reflects on the letters of Van Gogh. Bernard makes several attempts to reach a satisfying ending to his writing. I think I have said everything I need to say about the painter, he wrote in 1893. That is all it remains for me to say about Vincent’s letters and the two Van Gogh brothers, he says again, in an introduction published five months later. We know this isn’t true. Bernard will go on to write about Van Gogh again and again.

I wanted more from my father—more letters, more relics, more of him. His suicide note is the only letter from him that I possess. Maybe he wrote others, but I don’t remember them. I have one more letter, but it is from me to him for Father’s Day. On the inside of a hallmark card, in a childish font, I list all the reasons I am grateful for him. I don’t know when it came into my possession, but it must have been returned to me with his other belongings.

How do we grieve when our grief is ordinary? Maybe this is an unfair question. All grief is extraordinary. Only in his death, could I make my father Van Gogh.

Here is a line I try to hold on to. It is the opening of Bernard’s first article on Van Gogh, published one year after Van Gogh’s death. He was my beloved friend, Bernard begins, and I wish to speak of him. Bernard was committed to the legacy of his friend. He believed deeply in Van Gogh’s genius, in his artistic vision, but that opening sentence holds an impulse so simple, so honest, what other justification does one need?

 

The day before he died, my father and I got into an argument. After my father lost his job, we moved into the first floor of a wealthy friend’s brownstone. While it was generous of them to allow us to live rent free during a period of financial distress, I could tell the gift of housing was making my father feel ashamed. He held too much pride in the role of provider. I thought he would be happier if we lived in a smaller apartment, perhaps not as nice, but one we could pay for on our own.

It was a childish dream, one divorced from a realistic understanding of what my father was going through or money, but at first he agreed. We looked at apartments online and I began to imagine our move as a stand in for the future. But that day, when I pushed him for a timeline, he became unwilling to engage in the idea. He seemed apathetic. He opened his mouth, then he closed it. I was scared. I can see that now.

This house, I yelled, is killing you.

The next night, as I walked home, the December sky already set in its darkness, I felt embarrassed for how I had reacted. I called my father on my cellphone, but he did not pick up.

I’m sorry, Dad, I said in a voicemail. It doesn’t matter where we live. I didn’t want him to think I was ungrateful. I just wanted things to change.

At some point on my walk home, I must have passed his car. I know now from the police report that it was parked across the street, a few houses up from where we lived, but I didn’t see it. Did he see me? Would it have mattered if he did?

I’ve found grief closes one door in reality and opens fifteen more in the brain. Fact, unchangeable fact, grinds against imagined possibility—all the alternatives where he is still living. It is hard to close the doors of the mind.

I do not know if my voicemail reached him in the end. He could not know what would become of me. The two of us, on opposite sides of the street, had no choice but to put our faith in words. I love you, I said to his answering machine. I’m on my way home.

 

 

Summer Wrobel is a writer and editor from Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and has provided editorial support for magazines such as Ecotone, Conjunctions, and The Boiler. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Palisades Review, among elsewhere, and has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and Vermont Studio Center. She currently lives in Crown Heights, where she co-hosts The Cusp Reading Series, and is at work on a memoir.

 

Next (Roxana Crisólogo, trans. by Kim Jensen and José Luis Rico) >
< Previous (Charles Michael Fischer)