The Dead Are Never Dead

“Today was busy wall to wall: far too hectic to craft a substantive entry,” I wrote last night. “And yet I feel somehow that I can't just skip a day, whereas just a few days ago I would have had no problem with doing so. That means something. I don't yet know what.”

Well, I now know what. It came to me as soon as I awoke.

I am still my father’s son.

I’m not going to get mushy about this, because Dad never wanted me to get mushy about anything. In the immediate aftermath of my manic episode in September 1986—the one that, among other results, led my employer to immediately fire me lest I axe murder his family—I was destitute and for a few months had to go live with my father and step-mother.

During that time I met a psychiatrist several times. I recall his name but nothing else about him except that he made one of the most astounding statements I ever heard. I was at a session whose purpose was to take a detailed history of me, The task included a lot of questions concerning my childhood which, not to put too fine a point on it, did not much resemble the childhood which Katherine (my daughter’s mother) and I have made it our business in life to provide for our daughter Chloe.

After the psychiatrist had asked questions for about fifteen minutes, he paused to say that my “affect” and the things I was describing did not line up. I seemed out of touch with my feelings.

When I got home after the appointment my father was there. I told him briefly about the appointment—very briefly, because his demeanor suggested that he was not all that interested—and then related with a kind of pride the psychiatrist’s opinion that I seemed out of touch with my feelings. I thought my father would surely approve of that.

Well, not so much.

He said that in his opinion I was morbidly in touch with my feelings already.

That was the beginning of a new wisdom for me. I suppose, in a sense, it was also the day I embarked upon a journey that has sent me many places, shown me many things, had its moments of glory and hardship and emptiness, and finally brought me to this place, on the cusp of writing a manuscript that many people will regard as kind of gonzo. So be it. I am not quite certain how I am going to do this, but I am now quite certain why I am doing this.

I have mentioned before that my first and perhaps only claim to professional fame is my first book, “The Hard Hand of War.” The book received very strong reviews. One critic called it “one of the best books of Civil War military history published in twenty-five years.” Another wrote, “Grimsley’s evaluation of the Union’s evolving policy toward Confederate civilians is detailed, balanced, and persuasive. His prose is taut and polished, his research impressively thorough.” You get the point.

But the best and most perceptive review of the book came from my sister, who said it was an allegory of our parents’ marriage.

In my late 30’s I relayed this to my therapist and she said that my sister was correct, that the book was centrally concerned with finding a balance between justice and power and that, given my childhood history, it was natural for me to have selected a project that allowed me to explore that.

After hearing her explanation its truth seemed obvious. Among historians, out of the endless array of research problems we could choose, what causes us to select one in particular? I suppose it’s possible that an historian could select a project for purely intellectual reasons—I’m certain that it’s possible they might think that’s what they’re doing—but I think we choose research problems that speak to us personally, in some deep way that may forever lie outside our conscious awareness but that nonetheless animates our quest.

In the case of “The Struggle for Peace,” the source of my compulsion is obvious.

It comes from 22 years of observing two people, fruitlessly in the end, struggle to build a love between them that both so desperately needed. The analogy between that dynamic and the toxic hyper partisanship that characterizes contemporary politics is so blatant that no one could miss it.

I said at the beginning of this entry that I had figured the root of my strange compulsion to knock out at least some sort of entry for yesterday. It was simple. My father would have expected it of me.

I don’t think in a million years my father would have approved of this project—or more precisely, of the way I am handling it, which is to say to pursue it in my own way, using my own voice so blatantly, drawing upon my life experiences so heavily, and, for pity’s sake, coming across as so emotional about it (which is a deliberate narrative strategy, in case you’ve been starting to squirm).

But my father would have insisted that, having embarked on this project, I must execute it responsibly and professionally. On countless occasions, seeing him trapped between weariness and tasks still to be done, he always chose to finish the tasks. He was just that kind of man.

The dead are never really dead. Not as long as we remember them. Not as long as they retain the power to touch our lives.