The reverse of this tiny sepia-toned photograph reads “Paul Godfrey Easter 1949 Stewartstown, PA.” It was originally written in pencil but was later partially fleshed out in ink. The handwriting I immediately recognize as that of Mary Godfrey, my paternal grandmother. I’ve no recollection of how I came into possession of this photograph, but after moving to France it fell out of a book as I was unboxing and shelving stuff we’d had shipped from the USA. It’s possible Paul himself sent it. He used to mail me strange messages including Garfield or Far Side clippings from the newspaper and hand-scrawled notes on old receipts. Once he sent me a Polaroid of a woman he was then involved with–she was nude and far younger than he. He’d scrawled “daily vitamin pill” on the photo. I don’t know the name of the young woman but I heard later that she took Paul’s ATM card and emptied his bank account. A bit later Paul became unhoused.
On June 1st at 8:45 pm Paul Godfrey died in hospice care in Gettysburg PA, the town where I was born in 1969. He’d had a stroke a few weeks earlier which left him a bit weak on the left side. He was institutionalized to undergo rehab but refused to participate, refused food and water, and went into a rapid decline. Eventually staff gave up trying to engage him and instead medicated him against the pain of starvation. He was 80.
Paul Benjamin Godfrey was my biological father. Your inclination might be to offer sympathy in this circumstance; that’s kind and considerate but wholly unnecessary. We weren’t close, and were in fact estranged from one another for decades. I think we spoke a half-dozen times in 35 years. My younger sister heroically assisted him his last few years and had visited him in hospice without getting much response. I, on the other hand, had almost entirely excised him from my life quite some time ago. Due to the staid dictum don’t speak ill of the dead, I’ll refrain from cataloging the reasons here. I’ll simply state that my mother gathered our belongings into a few trash bags and left his house after calling the police one night in the 1970s, my sister and I in tow. She wanted the police there as she fled in case Paul showed up. He worked night shift and we escaped to shelter in a good samaritan’s house for a couple weeks before moving into the home of my maternal grandparents. Later, there was a brief attempt at reconciliation which failed and divorce procedings were engaged. I was 7 years old, my sister 5.
My sister asked if I’d write an obituary. I could barely come up with 500 words. It says something that a man of 56 years could know so little about his father’s life that minimal details were tough to scrape together into a brief narrative. But such was our relationship, or lack of.
There will come a time when I have more to write about Paul Godfrey. For now, however I’ll remain silent and allow that photo from 1949 to be my memory of him. It was taken 20 years before my birth, and it’s a very cute and charming photo of a presumably loveable little chap. May the conditions and torments which caused that young child to become the man I knew be laid to rest.
Mysterium Coniunctionis 