James Morrow McIlvaine, age about 18
Excerpt from "Fragments: A Portrait of My Father"
My father, James Morrow McIlvaine, died suddenly when he was forty-eight and I was twelve.
He died of a massive heart attack in a Port Huron, Michigan, hospital while away from home on business, at 4:20 a.m. on Friday, June l9, nine days after his birthday and two days before Father's Day, a bitter irony that struck me even at the time. My mother had given him a new leather suitcase embossed with his initials for his birthday the week before, and his parting words as he went down the stairs and out the door were, "I love my new suitcase." He got in his car, smiled and waved, drove away and never came back.
In two of my novels, In Another Country and Sailing, I wrote about his death and its impact on me through the eyes of a fictional narrator named Sara, whose father's sudden death at age forty left a lifelong impression on her so strong she was still reliving the event some thirty years later. But when, in my own forty-eighth year, I looked back over what I had written about the death of fathers, both Sara's and mine, it suddenly struck me as sad to think that, though in many ways my father's death has been the single most significant event of my life, what I had so far recorded as his greatest impression on me should be his death--not his too short presence in my life but his long absence from it.
In the first chapter of In Another Country, Sara says of her father's death:
I never stopped feeling bereft; knowing him only as a father, I had not known him at all as a man, and I never would.... I blamed him for never writing down his thoughts. He never wrote me a single letter, so there was no trace of him in his own words.... I tried to reconstruct the fragments he had left me, tried to make remembered words and movements, bits of conversation, take on coherence and show him whole. But I couldn't do it, and after a while I put my fragments away, old unsorted photographs yellowing in a dusty attic box.
After rereading these words, I decided to hunt out my own version of the dusty attic box, in reality the catch-all bottom drawer of an old desk where I keep my own collection of fragments pertaining to family life--clippings, papers, old letters, photographs, kids' drawings, locks of baby hair and so forth--to see what there was. I hadn't looked at or even thought of any of its contents in many years--usually whenever I need to put anything else in, I just open the drawer a crack and shove it in like a letter through a mail slot-- but as I hauled open the drawer and began to remove the accumulated layers, I was surprised to find see how much was actually there. In fact my father--unwittingly of course, for he, like Sara's father, never dreamed that he would die and leave me wondering-- had left behind more than just "odd bits of conversations, movements, old unsorted photographs," more than just my memories of him, the hearsay memories of those who knew and loved him. And without really thinking very much about it, I had kept it all, moved it from house to house to house in the same old desk drawer. I can't even remember the last time I looked at any of it over the last twenty-five years.
Yet here it all is, with what I once called the mindless persistence of objects, a two-pound Candy Cupboard box of oddments. Here are the yellowed photographs, here too others, newer, not so yellow, also old report cards, a few letters from and to him and about him, newspaper clippings, a job dossier, a 16mm movie reel, a few other things; this and that. Still not much, in fact not a great deal to show for forty-eight years of life. Words and pictures, the odd object or two, memories, associations, stories passed on from one generation to the next. Fragments, puzzle pieces. After all these years, can I reach into the silence, the stillness of both voice and movement, reconstruct the fragments and show him whole?