"I Have a Message"

Friday night about 8:00 a county constable came to our door.  The dogs were barking wildly and so he asked Susan and me to step outside so that he could talk to us.  Deputy Constable Trevino was very young and seemed very nervous.  That’s a first – usually I’m the one nervous when talking to a cop.

 

He began to tell me that he had a message for me.  Since when are cops messengers?  It felt like a scene from a mob movie but with a suburban twist. I expected to hear something like, “I have a message for you Mr. Green.  You need to keep your dogs on a leash when you walk them around the lake.  If you don’t, I can’t be responsible for what happens.”  And that’s what I really thought he was going to tell me --  that one of my neighbors had filed a complaint about my dog-walking habits.

He continued: “I have a message,” he glanced at a piece of paper, “that Douglas Eugene Green has passed away.” Oh good, I thought, no dog complaints.  Wait, what?  Dad died?  What happened?  I can’t remember his exact works, but he let us know that Dad had shot and killed himself that morning between 8:00 and 8:30 a.m.  He gave us a name and a number to call at the Harris County Medical Examiner's Office.

We called the M.E. and got a case number.  The young woman whom I spoke with was very sympathetic and kind.  She asked me questions about his health and his frame of mind.   I told her what I knew and that he had told me frequently that if he became ill enough that he would kill himself.  I knew that he was in pain and hadn’t been sleeping well for a few months.  I told her that he had been an alcoholic his whole life and used alcohol as a sedative.  He had told me that in recent months that he didn’t drink that much anymore because it made him too sick to function the next day at all. 

All of Dad’s siblings had died of cancer in their 60s and he expected to get it as well.   He said that he’d be damned if he let cancer slowly kill him.  His brother Red (yes, he was called Red Green) died of cancer back in the early 90s and Dad was pissed that Red’s son wouldn’t let Red have his gun so that he could end his pain.  The not-so-implied message to me was that I was not supposed to stop Dad from killing himself if that was what he wanted. 

And there lies one of the aspects of our relationship that had haunted me more and more as he got older and more infirm.  What if he had a stroke or something else that otherwise left him unable to care for himself.  

What would I do when he asked me to help him die?

Earliest Memories of Dad

Born in December, 1963, I spent the first five years of my life in Greenville, South Carolina.  Dad worked for the Friden Calculating Machine Company. He ended up in Greenville because of Friden.  When he hired on with them they asked him where he wanted to go.  They gave him three locations to choose from and he ranked Greenville as the lowest in preference.  

We lived in a split level three bedroom home at 116 Folkstone Rd.  My earliest memories of Dad were waking up to spend time with him in the morning.  Since he worked so much, that was th only time I was guaranteed to have with him.  I have been a morning person ever since.  He would be in the kitchen reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, and smoking cigarettes.  It was his smoker's hack that woke me up every morning.  

When he started with Friden he was a service technician. Sometimes he would bring home a machine to work on it over night or over the weekend.  I have never forgotten the sounds and smells of those clunking electromechanical calculators. 

I have vague memories of watching Star Trek with him on our color(!) television set.

Links:  

Friden 

116 Folkstone 

More Things Should Be Treated Like a Dead Body

My brother passed away a few years ago.  I tried unsuccessfully to take title to a ten-year old motorcycle that he owned at the time of his death.  I didn't have paperwork that Fort Bend County deemed to be adequate and the hurdles to even try to produce what they wanted was not worth my time.

In contrast, taking possession of a my Dad's body (through the agent of a funeral home) has been much easier. So far all it has taken is a few signatures. I don't need a notarized document with DNA results proving that he is my Dad.  I don't have to provide a title search that shows that I'm the closest living relative. All that it has taken is my word that I'm his son. It seems that the county coroner's office really wants to get it off of their hands. They said that I could take up to 30 days.  I didn't ask what would happen if I didn't have the body claimed by then.

Hell, I don't even really know if that is my Dad's body they are giving me.  I haven't seen it (I don't want to see it, don't want to see it, don't want to see it!).  I'll send a scan of his drivers license to the funeral home and they will make sure that it is him, but maybe they are in on the conspiracy to give me the wrong body too?

Back to reality and common sense.  He lived where they found the body, and common sense says it is him.

This is not an anti-government post.  There are too many of us living together in a very complicated society.  We need government.  But the bureaucracy could always use a little streamlining and Fort Bend County could just have used a little more common sense when I tried to re-title that worthless old motorcycle . . .

Beginning At The End

Douglas Eugene Green, Sr. died a violent and lonely death on June 24, 2016 at 8:12 a.m.  He was 80 years and 5 months old.

He took his own life with a shotgun in his mouth in the driveway of his mobile home.  He kept guns for self-protection but always knew -- we both knew -- that the gun would be most likely be used for him to have the power over when his time on this earth would end.

I've called this blog, "He's Not My Hero -- He's My Dad," because unlike so many of my Facebook friends, I cannot exclaim to the world that this man was someone I looked up to. He wasn't even beloved.  But he is my Dad.

There may be some catharsis in writing about my relationship with him, or this blog may just die on the internet like so many others.  But today I am starting it.