A Special Day

When Everything Changed

My father and me against the world, circa 1965

When writing a biography, I always keep an eye out for the exact moment when the life of my subject shifts without warning.

For Stephen Colbert, it was September 11, 1974, when his father and two brothers were killed in a plane crash in Charlotte, North Carolina.

For Stephen King, the day came towards the end of 1949, when his father walked out for a pack of cigarettes, and never returned. Stephen was two years old.

For Betty MacDonald, it came on December 7, 1941, when she was a newspaper reporter in Honolulu and the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

All were a total surprise, and all distinctly different events that forever shifted their lives into uncharted waters.

I suppose I have been particularly tenacious about trying to find that day in the lives of my subjects because for me, that day came 50 years ago today, December 4, 1974, when my father suddenly died.

He was 50. I had just turned twelve.

After that, I was never really the same. The rug had been suddenly pulled out from under me and I never managed to regain my footing when it came to people I was close to. After all, they might die without warning.

It didn’t take long before I realized that the best way to deal with such human uncertainty was to turn to what I alone could control…which is turning out to be quite the handy mantra these days. ;-)

Colbert became a comedian in large part because he wanted to cheer up his mother after their horrific loss. King became a writer in part because telling himself stories helped him to escape the realization that his father didn’t think he mattered enough to stick around. And MacDonald joined the OSS because she wanted to help her country after a lifetime of newspaper reporting. She would continue her career as a spy after the war ended.

Around 1971, my father and I teamed up because the other people in the family had largely turned away from us. We were left to ourselves and so we became very very close, which wasn’t always the case when it came to fathers and daughters at the time.

He never talked to me like I was a child, but as one adult to another. We’d read the paper together and I’d ask him questions that he always answered without translating it into child-speak. And we went for long aimless drives through western Jersey and Pennsylvania, always stopping at some greasy diner first so I could have my usual cheeseburger for breakfast.

When the school nurse Mrs. Koch called me out of my sixth-grade classroom and into the hallway fifty years ago today and told me that my father was dead, I literally felt the floor drop away from me. I needed to grasp onto something to keep from being carried away so I stared at her white shoes, rather, at the slight smudge on the side of her right shoe. That smudge was my life preserver, it would keep me afloat. I never took my eyes off it even as we made it down the hallway, down the stairs, and into the principal Mr. Ritz’s office where I found my crying mother, my red-faced sister, and where I almost blurted out Mr. Ritz Cracker, which had brought countless students afterschool detentions.

In the coming years, I would always look for the smudge that would keep me focused and protected from other people. For the rest of the time that I spent under my mother’s roof, that smudge came in the form of the closed door to my bedroom. And then, a year after I moved out on my own, it came in the form of writing.

Writing came easily to me and provided an awful lot of smudges to distract me. It allowed me to solve puzzles — I love puzzles! — and to get close to people only on a very temporary basis so that I didn’t have to worry about them dying. I had gotten very used to that closed bedroom door, so being able to work by myself without having to deal with the outside world was a huge bonus. I rarely came up for air. Writing also turned out to be a good fit for me because it depended on being able to ask other people the questions that I could never could ask myself.

I’ve often pondered what my life would have looked like if my father had lived, even for a few extra years. Would I have still become a writer? Impossible to say. But while someone else would have eventually written a biography of Rachel Maddow or Jon Stewart, who knows if New England Farm Vacations or The Cat on my Shoulder would have ever seen the light of day if my father hadn’t died when we were both still so young.

Of course, I also see the strengths he gave to me. He was a dentist who had his own practice and was instrumental in launching the dental program at Fairleigh Dickinson University back in the early 1960s; he taught there until just before his death. Like him, I’ve always been lousy at working for someone else and whenever I write something I always hope that people will come away learning just one new thing.

I’ve finally learned how to become close to another person, though I think I’m permanently stuck with imagining that every time my husband leaves the house it’ll be the last time I’ll ever see him.

In terms of the anniversary of the day when everything changed — December 4th — I am usually okay, though the two or three weeks leading up to it can be pretty fraught; anticipatory grief can be a real mind bender.

The best remedy is to go to the coast of Maine — my truly happy place — to stare at the ocean and pay homage to the man who shaped me.

The Takeaway. When researching other people’s lives, try to pinpoint the one day in their lives when everything changed. Of course, it may not be a single day, but rather a brief period of time. In any case, really try to put yourself into their shoes. Why did the change hit them so hard? Sit with it for a bit; it could possibly put a lot of other things into context, helping you to understand them just a bit more.

What’s the day that has most shaped you? Please leave a comment below. Thanks.