I let go at last. I carried that responsibility — no, the blame, I decided, for 25 years. Dad died while I was on my Army adventure, his suicide wobbling the badminton birdie of family that we’d try to keep aloft in backyard games during the sticky Ohio nights. I was not coming back to that back yard and house. I nearly told him as much, straight out, on the last Christmas leave the I took to see him and Mom. I put up the net of my good reasons, staked it out with my logic of first going away to college on the GI Bill, then being an actor and living in NY, or LA, anywhere but his house. But while I kept that badminton birdie of my adventure in the air, I tripped over one of the net’s guy wires. Dad looked terrible on that Christmas, unlike the steely chieftain I escaped using the adventure of my enlistment. Dad was depressed and cryptic and as sullen as I ever had been on the day I stalked out of his house for good. Once I saw the badminton birdie fall, that game was lost — it was my loss, once he took his own life. Especially because he said, during our last hug, “Ronny, I’m so scared.”
Tag — I was it. This was my fault, my lack of forgiveness for his crime of love withheld. I counted away the years from his death like when we’d count off to start hide and seek. Three years, and my marriage. Five years on, my own fatherhood. Then my divorce and separation from my boy, at ten years beyond the suicide. At last in my hide and seek, I opened my eyes and the memories of Dad were nowhere to be seen. I’d lost the image of his gentler way of expression, his teaching electronics, or in the darkroom, or making fudge at the stove. Even the one and only ballgame he took me to, all hidden so deep I couldn’t seek. It was over, that hide and seek, and I’d lost my excuse that it was not my fault. I did this, making him disappear behind bushes of regrets and in the shadows of shame.
Sixteen years on from his death, I rescued my fatherhood — if a baseball vacation with my Little League son in a convertible can be called a rescue. There we were at one ballgame after another, a summer visitation to a lifetime of searching. I saw the gap of love that Dad tried to cross where I hadn’t looked before, inside a father’s heart, this time my own. I spotted him in the dim, deep centerfield of my memories. I swung the bat and swatted away my blame that I’d created. I didn’t make that happen or play a hand in suicide’s arrival. We did our best and everyone had failed. All was not lost, though. I could holler olly, olly, oxen free at last, and let go of the guilt. The game was not over, because like in baseball, nobody had made the final out. I learned to find the love for what Dad was not, as well as what he was. I was stealing home at last.