Early Loss: John Robert Hegmann (my father)
My favorite photo: the prison chaplain ID.
I’m now years older than you ever got to be. I guess what I remember is that you got me. You brought me Elfquest comic books with their gentle wolf (dog)-loving elves. I have become a kind of gentle dog-loving elf.
One of your friends wrote about you after you died, “John’s sense of humor was unique. I have never met anyone other than John who could make me laugh for a solid 40 minutes to and from Columbus.” In my memories, you are a funny guy, a talented raconteur. I don’t remember specifics of your stories. I remember only the feel of them, the funny sound effects you made, and your laugh, and other people laughing. I do remember some of the John-isms. I still say, “Anybody get the number of that truck?” when I feel lousy. When I teach citation to my students, I use the old aviation saying, “Any landing you walk away from is a good one.” I assign gratitude letters as my students’ first writing project, and I tell them how after you died, people sent letters to my mom about the impact you had them – your intellect, your humor, your desire to do good, and your disillusionment when good failed – and that this is one of the only ways I know you. I tell them so they understand writing as legacy and memory.
I tell about the anxiety I felt at age ten returning to my peers after you died and I’d been out of school for a week; that I can still feel the visceral panic walking toward the classroom door, the weight of the backpack on my shoulders, not knowing how others would act toward me; and that as soon as I entered the room, a classmate, Ty, joked with me about how long I’d been gone, which was the only thing that brought me any normalcy and relief during those weeks. I also tell how later that day, another kid who had mocked and bullied me over the years walked up to me, muttered something insincere, and handed me a small silk flower arrangement – obviously a task forced on him by his mother. I understand that the inauthentic solemnity we all carry out when someone dies is because we don’t know how to deal with death in our culture, and we’re well-meaning, and we’re awkward. But that I experienced that awkward insincerity so early on is partly what drove me to humor for the rest of my life, I think. Humor in absolute darkness. Humor to cut out all the lying bullshit.
I remember you out of the hospital, ravaged by the chemo, in the living room at the farm praying to God with a kind of fervent terror of death in your voice. Out of your mind with the horror of it. How did anyone think it was a good idea to leave me alone with you that day? Or more importantly, to leave you alone with yourself? I hid on the back stairs, not knowing whether to approach or run. Those whole nine months while you were dying were like that, really.
When a parent dies early, it becomes difficult to separate fact from legend. An admiration for Winston Churchill, Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes – are these apocryphal? There are other things I’m certain of: aquariums, Native American arrowheads, Bruce Springsteen, Star Trek, working on car engines, a subscription to Soldier of Fortune magazine (as a child, I boredly flipped through its pages, not understanding what it was about). I know you were an ordained minister, but almost never had an official church appointment; I know that people ostensibly paid you for piano lessons, but what they really came for and received was professional counseling – a much more affordable version of it with no need for insurance coverage.
When I was 22, I reached out to people on your side of the family to tell me what they knew about you. Your mother put together some photo albums for me, which I pored through, looking for clues. I did find some answers, but they were at the surface, just as photos are at the surface. You had a younger brother, my uncle David, which of course I always knew. But I learned you’d also had a twin brother, Louis Jones, who died in a Brooklyn hospital of a staph infection a few months after you both were born. You went home. He never did. What I couldn’t learn was how you felt about that, if you felt any way about it at all. But how could you not? He was gone very early. Ultimately, you were gone early, too.
The Lord of the Rings, which you re-read once a year, somehow haunted my own psyche from as early as I can remember – especially the scene at Mount Doom with Frodo and Gollum – though I don’t understand how the transference took place since you never read it to me. I only read it years later when you were long gone in some clumsy attempt to try to get to know you. Instead, it showed me that I was a coward in my own writing and needed to get straight with my artistic integrity. Or maybe you did that, in some long reach across space and time, in the way that story and music cancel out those limitations on our short human lives. Reading it when I did was the right time. I sorely needed a father pushing me, even only in such metaphysical forms.
You had grown up in Hialeah, had been a competitive swimmer, and you did teach me to swim before you were gone. Swimming is so natural to me, as natural as walking, that I’m always surprised to learn there are people who can’t swim. On the other hand, no one ever taught me to ride a bike, which is unthinkable to most people. But for the swimming, I’m grateful. It was a more natural fit for me than bike-riding. To hide away under water was some of my only real happiness in childhood.
You were surly with me sometimes and especially wanted me to vanish if there was a Miami Dolphins football game on. I also remember how ashamed of me you looked at times, because my health was not all right and I was often an unhappy child. I disappointed. That left its marks. There was so much freakishly odd about me as a child. I wish you’d lived long enough to see me work much of this out. Not that I have achieved enlightenment – but that I am at least not the self-loathing, anxiety-filled, thumb-sucking, suicidal, encopresis-ridden, obsessive-compulsive wreck of a human being that I was as a ten-year-old, which was the last time you ever saw me. I think all that could be said in my favor as a child is that I got good grades. Alas, no other redeeming qualities presented themselves. I wasn’t beautiful, sociable, caring, friendly, likable, athletic, outgoing, musically or artistically talented, or anything else that people seem to admire in others. I like to think I was a bit of an ugly duckling and that, if no transmogrification into a swan ever took place, I at least became a better-realized duck. Something in me wants to find some way to track you down, flag you to the side, yell out to you, “Wait, look – maybe there is more to be proud of here now: a better-realized duck.”
The rooster. The dog got him, ran off with him in its mouth, and you ran after the dog, yelling and cursing, furious. You wrested the rooster back from the dog, but the dog had mauled its neck. You took the rooster to the tree and tied him there and got your machete from the shed. I was standing at the back door screaming and crying and begging you not to chop his head off. We’d only moved to the farm that year. I was a town kid, not used to the slaughtering of animals; have always been closer to animals than to people. To me, the rooster was a pet, or just some poor soul to be saved, I guess.
You were pure and seething fury as I sobbed. I think it was me that made you rageful as much as what had happened to the rooster. I think you wondered why you couldn’t have had an easier kid, one with better health, one who wasn’t over-sensitive, over-emotional.
I wailed and begged you not to kill the rooster. You relented. You cursed at me but spared the rooster. You were not kind about it, nor gentle, nor comforting, nor understanding, nor empathetic. But you took the rooster back to the enclosure, and for I don’t know how many mornings after that, you got up at 5:30, mixed together water and chicken feed, and fed the rooster through the hole in his torn neck with an eyedropper, plus additional feedings throughout each day. This you did for me, out of love, because I couldn’t stand to see him die.
Impossibly, he recovered. He lived. He always had a limp after that, and you jokingly (and without any hint of political correctness) named him Gimpy.
That rooster outlived you. Mom found new homes for the dogs and the chickens and we moved back into town. I must say I was happier there. Having a farm had been your dream, but everything about it ended up unhappy and ill-fated, as though we’d briefly touched down on cursed land.
When someone important is gone forever from the life of a young child, you later mourn what you never got to have more than what you briefly did have. The mourning is that the relationship continues without the other person there. I think you and I would have had a lot to talk about had you known me as a teen, a young adult, a middle-aged adult. I wonder most of all what you would have thought of my writing, of course – and of the fact that I write fantasy, the deepest touchstone between us. What would you say to me if you knew that what happens in that place is the central core of me? Just after you died, I told Mom, “Now I’ll never have anyone to talk to again.” In many ways, this was wise and true, as the words of children so often are. Robbed of knowing what you think, I never could seem to get the conversations started with others.
I guess as I get on in years what I think of most often is being very small and you singing me to sleep – “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and “Turn Around.” From very early, I understood – in fact, preferred – all the ironic sadness in the songs you chose; and I heard that in your voice – the deep sensibility of those things. Maybe even then, I knew my path would look strange, would lack the rites of passage of normal mortals. Searching and searching for my Mount Doom moment instead.
In my head, I sometimes hear Harry Belafonte’s voice on “Turn Around,” and I recall your story about how you once brushed by him in a nightclub in Miami, starstruck. But even in the peace of funny stories and lullabies, in what should be pure and happy memories, I disappoint: I did not go on as “Turn Around” portends to have “babes of my own.” I was going to name my son after you. I had no son. No daughter. I was your only child, the end of your line. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what happened with that. It’s all been like one of those accidents you see coming but you just can’t stop: Anybody get the number of that truck?
I’ll always use Hegmann as my pen name in your honor – but since I never married, it’s moot. I’m married to the writing, to the sensibilities you imparted me with. The writing is all I have left to honor you with. Hegmann, it is. Hegmann, it stays.
What stays: The humor. The irony. The sadness. No, actually – all my sensibilities. Those were from you, though you never got to see them formed. In so many ways, the writing, all of it, is for you. It’s for many, but in some magical way, things can be all for one person, and yet all for another, and another, and another.
A few weeks ago, I did a character trait assessment. Humor was identified as my top strength – a trait the test associated with resilience, transcendence. I imagine you’d be pleased with this about me – but imagining is all I’ve got.
John far right with serious face and outlandish hat.
Birth announcement for Louis Jones and John Robert postmarked from Brooklyn 1946.
