Next week it will be twenty three years since my father died.
That’s a long time.
I want to think about two things: what I remember of my dad, and how I feel about him today. Maybe also how life has been without a father. So, three things. I don’t think I’ll get through all of them today.
My father was a stern looking guy. He had classic male-pattern baldness, with a super high hairline, but hair along the sides of his head. He wore thick black plastic bifocal glasses. He took us to church, and went to a Bible College, and so I remember him wearing suits and ties a lot. He was slim, wiry. He was a forceful speaker, and his broken English took on a weight that made people take him seriously. I guess he was a serious person. I don’t remember him laughing much, though he did have a great smile when he did smile.
My earliest memory of my dad was in Chicago. We moved to Chicago from Seoul, where I was born, arriving in America on New Year’s Day, 1974. (We lived in a high rise apartment building, which I can’t remember, but which was featured in a recurring childhood dream, a cartoon landscape where the building flooded and crocodiles came into the apartment; not a nightmare, but a fantasy, which I can still see clearly to this day.) My mom told me this part: that he had gotten a job, and my mom too, and they were making money, the American dream–and that he bought a car. I don’t remember what kind of car, but I remember it being blue, and big, and shiny. So here’s the memory: I’m sitting in the back seat, with my sister, and my dad is driving–my mom is away, maybe at work. And there is a sound, a crunch, and the sound of brakes slamming. And being tossed forward. And then my dad turned to the back, and he looked at me, and maybe said “Are you okay?” (my memory of this is in English, but he probably said it in Korean) and as he looked at my sister and I in the back seat, a trickle of blood was running down his forhead, where he had hit the windshield.
I seem to recall that he rear-ended a UPS truck, but I could be wrong on that. Memory plays tricks on you. Anyway, he totalled the new car, but we were all okay, and (as my mom tells it) that’s when my dad realized that he wasn’t in America to pursue the American dream, but to do the Lord’s work, and so we packed up and moved to Wisconsin, where my dad attended a Bible college.
So my next memories of my father are in Wisconsin, from the house on the west side of the western-most subdivision, where I could walk down the gravel driveway and look at the setting sun, and see the fields of alfalfa stretching out in front of me. My dad went to college part time, and my mom worked, and my sister and I went to Sunday school and church and parochial school.
In the summer time, my father would take care of us while my mom was at work. I don’t know what he did, but I would go out and play. I do remember having a garden, and pulling lettuce up from the garden to eat with lunch. I remember my dad wearing a white tshirt during the hot summer months, and sandals; and his voice when he’d step out on the porch in the evenings and yell my name, to get me to come home. I remember him taking me to the Boy Blue ice cream shop, after he’d pick me up from preschool, and getting a ice cream bar dipped in chocolate.
Those are pretty decent memories.
-/-
But, I can recall my dad going into a rage. I remember playing a board game together (Survive!) with my parents and my sister, and my dad getting upset at one point and sweeping the board off the table and onto the carpet. I remember hiding in my room with the door shut and waiting for a fight between my mom and dad, or more and more frequently as we got older, between my sister and my dad, to blow over.
When my dad was finished with school, suddenly he was a missionary, “to Korean people living in the U.S.” It didn’t occur to me how strange this was, until much later. His slide show was of Korea–fighting during the Korean war, families in colorful customs for New Year’s–but he wanted to minister to Koreans in the U.S. Didn’t make much sense, but neither did much else, at the time. It was important that this country, Korea, probably the most evangelical of all the Asian countries, be cleansed of the errors of, well, not being exactly like my dad’s church. The slide show ended with a gruesome guilt trip: a quotation from a Bible passage along the lines of “if you don’t help those who need it, then their blood is on your hands” super-imposed on a slide of blood-drenched hands. The lights would come up, and the pastor would shuffle to the pulpit, and ask the congregation to open their hymnals. And they’d sing “Amazing Grace” as if they had all been kicked in the stomach.
My dad did not spare the rod, and I remember getting walloped in the downstairs bathroom (after we moved back to Chicago, when I was ten) for telling a dirty joke at school (yeah, I went to a school where you could get in trouble for telling a dirty joke). There was a moral element to the beating–I broke a rule, I did a bad thing. But there was also: you caused me shame. Humilation. And my dad would take it out on us, the family. Mostly on my sister.
Where did the anger come from? I don’t know.
I remember my dad driving like a madman, not stopping to ask for directions when lost, being incredibly, incredibly stubborn. Speeding. Petal to the metal. I remember his sonorous voice as he spoke from the pulpit of a church we were visiting. He’d pray in Korean before every meal at home. Same tone. The “I’m talking to God now” voice.
-/-
My father dying. Hepatitis C. That last year was terrible. He was taking iron pills for his liver; drinking carrot juice and drinking distilled water. Skin yellowed. Things were so bad that it was already after dinner when I realized that it was my twelfth birthday, and there were no presents or celebration, and that not only had everyone forgotten about it, but I had as well.
At the end, he was up in a hospice in Wisconsin. I remember driving up there with my mom one weekend. I was bored, reading a book. The book was a a shelter, a shield. I sat outside while my mom sat in the room with my dad. He asked to see me. I went in, but didn’t say much. Anxious to get back to the book. He let me go. That night, we stayed at a friend’s house in Wisconsin. I split the guestroom bed with my mom. She cried all night.
We drove back to Chicago. It was a Sunday. My mom was barely keeping it together, and then the car was full of steam. The hose on the radiator was leaking. We stopped to get a fix. December in the Midwest is hell on cars, especially on radiator hoses. I popped the hood. I was 13. We got to a service area, got some radiator fluid. Home.
The next day I went to school as usual. Somehow they brought my dad down from the hospice to the hospital. I went home. It was dark. The next morning, made my lunch and went to school. The there was the announcement. Come to the school office. My sister was there. The principal. Very serious. A woman from the church was going to drive us to the hospital. I-55. The Dan Ryan Expressway. Cold, dark clouds. Serious.
When we got to the hospital, we sat down in the hallway, my mom came and told us he was gone.
Tuesday, December 13th, 1983.
-/-
I’m thirty-six. Next year I’ll be the same age as when my dad was when I was born.
I haven’t thought about my dad much. When he was alive, there was so much tension that I just tried to stay out of the way. After he died, it was too painful, and mostly I was just trying to figure out how to grow up on my own. (My biggest worry actually, was that no one would teach my how to shave when the time came. I figured it out on my own.)
Now, I think about becoming a father myself. So there are questions about where my dad came from. Who his friends were. When was his first kiss. How did he feel about the future. How did he feel about his dad. What made him so angry. What things in myself do I get from him?
-/-
I went to visit his grave a couple summers ago, in Chicago. He’s buried in the Clarendon Hills cemetery, 6900 Cass Ave., Darien, IL. I wasn’t sure if I could find the gravesite, but it was easy. Enter the main gate, take the first right. Go about 3/5 of the way down the drive, before the curve, and look on the left-hand side (not the street side). The headstone is set flush into the ground, kind of a reddish color, and it reads:
CHARLES CHANGSIK SUH
1934-1983
Father – Husband
