The Silence Of Pawns

The Silence of Pawns

When my father had the stroke on Father's Day five years ago, I was neither crying nor did I have a wet lump lodged in the forefront of my throat. I was atypically calm. After the event (when my father tried to get up from his recliner, only to fall to his knees, unable to stand), the doctors had said it was a reasonably minor attack, and that, for the most part, he would be fine and maintain all of his cognitive faculties. I have never cried due to the events from this episode, but I certainly had my way with expressing the anger and depression that came afterward.

I no longer spoke to my parents. I answered their questions with nods or the shaking of my head, and never instigated a conversation. I did not hate my mother or father, but I had hated what my father had become, and how my mother was dealing with the situation. My mom is, and always has been, a protestant so naturally her beliefs reside strongly near monotheism. It is not the fact that she believes such things that infuriated me, but the simple action of talking with a higher power. I found the idea of her sitting in the foyer by herself, speaking with no one, quite silly. She would lie on the couch, her left arm pressed against her face, covering her eyes, while her right one did the ups and downs that are typical of a person who is making conversation. I didn't think this mad, or unhealthy, but in the darkest wells of my mind I thought of it as a weakness. She didn't have the fortitude to convince herself to Ð''let go' like her only son had; no, she had to look for a Ð''higher' plane of existence for help, a place I didn't believe even existed. My father was then and is now an Eckest. You won't find the word in any dictionary nor the religion itself in most textbooks, but the basic philosophy is the belief in reincarnation. Think of it as Buddhists might believe in life connecting all creatures, but add to that equation rocks, trees, and minerals; all natural things of the Earth.

My dad was slower. He was slower to speak, slower to walk, slower to drive, slower to eat, and slower to drink; I hated him for it. I loved the man that used to tease and tickle me, and help me walk Page, our dog. The man I loved was the figure I once held as mighty, and truly an avatar of what greatness really was. This man, this imposter, could not possibly be that person, nor could he replace him. His smile was a crooked grin that leaned to the left of his face, while the right was stone skin; unmoving and void, a perfect representation of what he really was: half the man I once knew.

After a period of one and a half weeks, my parents forced me to see a psychologist. I hadn't been doing well in my first year of high school and wasn't talking at home. I resisted heavily and wrote Ð''I'm not going' on a piece of paper. This turned out to be less helpful that I had thought.

The doctor's name was Michael Bell, and I'll remember it for the rest of my life. His office was in the back of a smallish, white office building. It was on the second floor behind an old door with paint peeling off of it. Despite the poor condition of the door, the office was somewhat attractive. The waiting room he had was small and simple, but it was clean and had recent magazines to read while you waited your turn to get your head shrunk.

When the lady he had been helping in his office left, he came out to greet us. He was a short man with neat, black hair. His glasses were thick, but had no rims on the frames. He wore a white shirt and black pants every time I met him (I am sad to say I don't remember if he wore the same tie every time or not). But the most noticeable feature about him was the large wart that was planted directly between his eyes, right on the bridge of his nose. I always found it amazing that it never interfered with his spectacles.

"Hi there, my name's Dr. Michael Bell" was the first thing he said to me. I shook his hand and nodded my head, but gave no inkling to respond verbally. He asked my parents to come in to his office privately while I waited in the small room with People Magazine as my only window of escape. Ever since my father's stroke I had become an avid reader. It was most unusual for both me and my parents. This is not to say that I did not enjoy reading previously, quite the contrary is true, but I began to devour any text I could get my hands on since my dad had Ð''died'. Gone was the jovial Boy Scout who liked to go on camping trips, the person in his place was a boy who liked to read and maintain his thoughts on a private level, scarcely sharing them with others. In a way, the night I was forced to sit alone with my father as he cradled his arm and looked at me with a loss of words, and my mother sobbed on the phone with her sister after dialing 9-1-1, I died too. After my parents came out and sat beside me, Dr. Michael Bell asked me to come into his office.

This is where the fun part begins. It lasted longer than I care to write, but the following events are, I believe, in chronological order. I realized early on that when one goes to the shrink it's all based on actions and only a portion on actual dialogue. The first question that caught my attention was in his office (small just like his waiting room).

"Please, take a seat." He motioned with one of his hands, and the other grabbed that brown clipboard that all students of psychology are required to equip.

The first question you should be asking is "How is that a question?" Well, directly it isn't, but the point was that in front of him was not a chair or a couch, but both. To this day I don't know the answers to who sits in the chair and who sits in the couch, but I hesitated for a moment and decided I'd stand.

He looked at me expectedly, his gold pen clicked open and ready to scribble. I didn't want to cause an immediate stir since my parents were right outside, so I finally chose the chair. He made no motion with his pen, but he did manage the slightest of smiles (which I thought at the time was obnoxious).

Each session we had was one hour long, right to the end of our relationship. And for over half of these meetings I would sit and stare at the bronze fan he had laid on floor, probably when he first started his own practice (to this day I have no idea why such a small fan was on the floor, especially since he never used it). He would ask me simple questions, such as "how I felt about my father's