The summer of 1946. The war had ended the year before, my father was a war hero, and I was twelve. He told me stories sometimes, stories about what it was like to be in battle, fighting for those who couldn’t fight for themselves. We spent the summer together, vacationing at the beach as a family, having barbeques for the neighbors, exploring the woods behind the house. Time felt endless, like nothing could ever get better than that summer. Looking back on it now, the memories seem surreal, like a dream I woke up from abruptly. I could only gather fuzzy pieces, hazy memories of a different life. My father was a great man who I loved more than anything, but he had too many secrets. None of which I ever wanted to know.

            What he never told me were the things that left him scarred, that lead to his suicide a mere two years after that surreal summer. I found his journals and letters to my mom, only these were letters she never received. They described brutal acts of violence, the guilt he felt, but more than anything, the fear. I learned the day my father killed himself with a single gunshot to the head that he was a broken man. I realized later that he didn’t kill himself, the war did. I grew up quickly that year, having to learn how to take care of my mother and deal with the anger. And if I’m being completely honest, I don’t think I ever did.

            I spent a lot of time in the room my father died in. My mother couldn’t stand to be there any longer and so she chose a different bedroom, but we never moved from that house. The bed remained, the furniture too, and the memory of my father hung over the place like a ghost. It was the quietest room in the house after he died. The dog never went in there and the window stood a stark contrast against the dark, maroon walls. No birds ever landed on the tree outside the window, no curious squirrels ever found their way to the sill. It was as if they knew the place was poison, that a man was trapped there, screaming in a pitch none of us could hear. I suppose in a way, I became trapped there too.

            I liked to sit at the foot of my father’s bed and dream of the days I spent in there with him, reading the stories he knew I liked or me badgering him to tell me one of his war stories. I loved those stories, the idea of my father leading all those men into the glorious final days of war. To me, in those days, my father was invincible, a hero. And in every way, he was. I thought of those stories a lot, trying to understand where his secrets lay. I was haunted by the images I found in his letters, the letters he was either too afraid or too ashamed to send. The amount of times I read those letters left their contents seared across my mind, the memories practically my own. I tried to imagine my father telling me none of it was true, that the world couldn’t really be that horrific. I liked to imagine it was his hand wiping the tears off my chin instead of my own. His memory helped me heal, but I would forever remain haunted by what killed him.

            When not in my father’s room, which was often when the silence became too unbearable, too ear-splittingly awful, I found my way to the attic. The attic was much like any other, but it held more than just old clothes and unwanted things. It held the books my father spent years collecting before going off to war, books my mother could no longer stand to look at. When they were moved to the attic, I followed. Many of them sat collecting dust, ones I wasn’t too interested in. Others were well-loved, with tattered, yellowing pages. I often spent hours going through my father’s favorite books, tracing my fingers over his notes in the margins, reading his favorite sections. If there was anything my father loved as much as he loved us, it was his books. Much like in his bedroom, the thought of him hung over his collection. His shadow remained on the wall, and sometimes I thought I saw it. In a way, I tried to forget my father by remembering him. I tried to forget the man I came to know through his letters and just remember the man who raised me. I tried to find him in the books, but every time I came across a note he had written in red ink, I could think of nothing but the blood on his hands. The books lined in scarlet scrawls were ones I rarely picked up twice. My father was in these pages, but the man who came home was someone else. The line between them was blurring, and one day I lost myself in hysterics, sobbing, and ripping pages out of books. I tore, and I tore, and I tore until I could no longer hear anything but the loud hiss of a page tearing and my own angry sobs. I didn’t go into the attic for a long time after that.

            As is most likely obvious by this point, my biggest struggle after my father’s death was coming to grips with who he was. He wasn’t perfect, as nobody is, but in my mind he was. To learn your parents aren’t who you believe long before you’re meant to can destroy you. In my mind, the perfectly painted portrait of my father had started to become stained. Sometimes with blood, other times with ink, a few times even with fire. The worst of all was the bullet hole that became a constant fixture in that mental image. I choked on that image for a long time, silently suffocating in my own mind. My mother hadn’t handled anything well, and I had to remain strong for her. So I did. I got her through her grief as best as I could, took care of my younger siblings, did everything to help while I grew numb. The blood in my mind fell to the ground, both my own and my father’s. I saw no way out through the thick clouds of his tainted memory. I was bleeding, coughing, choking. I was dying in my own body, my own head, and kept a straight face the entire time, never letting my family in.

            There were days I didn’t leave my bed and others where I didn’t leave his. I tried to find other ways of coping with the man in my head, but none seemed to work. I would write about him, write letters to him, but nothing ever changed. I needed answers that I would never get from my father. I came to realize not long after his death that my father was not alone in his silent crisis. So many returned from that war, having survived the most horrific events of their lives, only to be lost once they came back.

            There was a man who lived across the street from us, a fellow veteran, friends with my father. He attended the funeral, said his condolences, and that was the last I’d seen of him for a long time. About a year or two after my father’s death, I knocked on the man’s door. I stood on his doorstep for a while with no answer and turned to leave as the door creaked open slowly behind me. When I turned to face the man, I wasn’t prepared for what greeted me. Sunken, blood-shot eyes, a yellowish tinge to his skin, a tooth missing. He was hunched over and probably spent too much time on the couch. He managed a small smile before inviting me in, asking me how I’d been since my father’s death. His eyes were kind, but something cold and distant sat behind them. I was honest with him, and I told him I came to ask him what it was like, what really goes through the mind of someone like my father to possess them to leave everyone behind. Though I wasn’t sure what type of answer I’d get, if any, he gave me an honest one.

            The man told me that war is like a disease that takes hold of your brain and never lets go. He told me that the atrocities he and others like him saw become the only thing you can see when you close your eyes at night, that everything haunts you. You come home to a hero’s welcome and are expected to act that way. He told me that these heroes feel like anything but and have to live with that. Sometimes they can’t.

            I left the man’s house that day trying to understand why my father never spoke to me about what happened to him. I suppose some of it was shame, and some was fear. I had wanted to go back to the man’s house and speak with him about it, but I never got the chance. He died of liver failure not too long after I went to see him. He was crying for help that he would never get, and after knowing what happened to my father, I wish I had seen that. I now had the deaths of two war-torn men on my conscience. Though neither was my fault, I felt the weight of their trauma before I’d even turned sixteen.

            Many years later, I have come to terms with the deaths of both men. I was glad to have had the time with my father that I did. And in many ways, I was glad I was too young to see the war eating away at him long after he returned home. With time, I found a separation between the image of my father that I adored and the broken one. I was broken too, completely shattered for a long time, but I had to make my peace with it eventually. For a while I couldn’t understand why what broke my father also left me in pieces, almost claiming my life too, but now I think I understand. My father taught me a great many things after he died about people and compassion, but mostly about the illusion of glory. It always comes a cost.