You died and never knew me — so how did I know you?
By: Andrew Atkins
Tags: Fatherhood, Alcoholism, Trauma, Abuse, Artist

You died and never knew me — so how did I know you? Andrew Atkins Just now·13 min read

A self portrait by Doug Atkins against a backdrop of his other work from his life.

TW: This piece explores subjects of substance abuse, death and domestic violence.

You died folded against the wall of a liquor store, and my stomach turns when I think about how stray dogs die the same. You made your home and burnt ours in a bottle, so I suppose it stands to reason you found your grave there, too, in Maricopa County, Arizona.

You had one brown shoe on.

Somehow, years later, you still come back to me in pieces.

Papa’s in Florida, leaving the next day, and he asked if he could come down to see me and drop off the last of your things. You were an artist. Those things are your pieces. Those things are all that are left.

He drops your things off and I drop them, in turn, on the living room floor while my dog clamors for attention, jumping up and down my grandpa’s pant legs.

You’ve been dead since I was 20. Since Grandma called and I turned the phone over and a few minutes later it vibrated again with a voicemail. Since my throat snapped shut and I breezed into the same shelter of silence I find when you come back to me in ghosts of violence and ideas of you I never knew.

I know you through a voicemail I still have saved on my phone, rambling incoherencies and stories you told me a million times but I don’t remember. This is something you taught me: How to listen without hearing. How to reflect their expectations when they tell me how our noses trumpet when we blow them, how we sit on the edge of laughter, how our jaws set in anger.

I know you through the coroner’s report that says you died of chronic ethanolism. But we knew that. I wish I didn’t.

The coroner wrote, at the bottom of the page: “The manner death was natural.”

And now I know you through the work of your life, boiled down to a tote and a few cardboard boxes on my living room floor, years and a thousand miles away from the context that would have made them mean anything at all.

When I come back from dinner, I sit down with the boxes and start shuffling through colored pencil drawings and mark-ups and portraits and caricatures. I pore over all of it, hoping to glean one more idea of who you were.

A collage shows a hand depositing a pocket watch in a piggy bank. A football player, lightning bolt jagging down his helmet, leers in ink from behind his faceguard. A fish holds a foamy beer mug, cigar bit between gigantic pearly whites, a cheeseburger floating in the water behind him.

A self portrait in a cracked picture frame, red, with a wash of yellow behind your right ear. I can’t make out your expression.

I make it through a small stack before I lean back on the couch, a sudden wave of exhaustion washing over me. My hand stifles a yawn and I smell the cat piss staining my fingertips.

My memories of you come back to me much the same way your artwork does, now: unwanted but not unasked for, painful and strange and irrevocably part of my story, anyway. I have labored through the depths of my unconcious to retrieve everything you were to me, and still your absence peppers the walls of my mind with unknowing.

I am the last person to hold these pieces of you. I am somehow your son and somehow the arbiter of the summation of your life’s work. I knew you less than the people who give me memories and artworks and photo albums of this person you were and yet, here I am, a repository of ideas of who you should be to me.

I’d really rather be none of these things.