There's more to say

I was sixteen when I watched my mother shoot and kill my father. I got caught in the crossfire-shot in the leg, the bullet nearly missing my kneecap. 

Trauma takes many forms. A piece of mine-a bullet-still rests in my leg. The doctors figured leaving it in was less trouble than the alternative-a scar running up the back of my thigh that would make shorts season awkward.

I received no therapy, no counseling, no help processing what happened...just a sixteen-year-old in a wheelchair, trying to make sense of what had just happened and what would come next.

No matter how bad things are, they become your normal. And when that normal is ripped away in an instant, survival requires a kind of adaptability most adults don't have, let alone a teenager.

In the days after, I asked myself endless questions-the kind that don't have answers but beg to be asked anyway. Did he know I'd wished him dead? Would he forgive me? Would he try to reach me, the way Houdini promised his wife he would after death? We watched that film together, and I'd stay up through the wee hours watching old movies, hoping he wouldn't notice I was still in the club chair next to the sofa past my bedtime.

My father was a devout atheist-the kind who wore it like armor, unshakable in his belief that there was nothing after this life. But I still wondered: was there an event, a moment, that made him stop believing? Did something happen that turned his faith into certainty? And if he was wrong, would he try to contact me?

Did he know what was happening? Was he aware in those final moments? Did he die instantly, or was he conscious as Bootsie and Tut Tut, the family dogs, ran up to him as he lay on the floor? Did he know I loved him?

My father was many things: a brilliant broadcaster who rubbed shoulders with celebrities, a civil rights crusader who fought powerful politicians, a man suffering from mental illness who tormented his family, a simple soul who found pleasure in his Waterpik, a complex spirit who died in the same house where he was born.

He was the man who stood up for what he believed in even when it cost him everything. He was the father who taught me to be strong, smart, funny, and non-judgmental, even as his own demons destroyed him.

The house on Pennway Street-5174 Pennway-held it all. The intellectual brilliance and the domestic chaos. The political discourse and the roach infestations. The civil rights battles. The visits from the Jewish Defense League and Black Panthers wielding nunchucks to plot our protection. And the family explosions. The love and the terror. The beginning and the end.

Those walls, if they could talk, would tell you about a man who refused to be silenced until silence was forced upon him. They would tell you about a family that survived firebombs and persecution, that wore both peace signs and Black Power symbols, that entertained doctors and radicals in equal measure.

They would tell you about a daughter still trying to find answers about the brilliant, troubled man who shaped her life in ways both beautiful and devastating.

Back in the day, when a broadcaster's sign-off was everything, my father's was: "I ain't got nothing more to say."

His jingle went: "Spread the word, spread the word, Marvin Burak can be heard..."

I have a feeling that if he were alive during the current administration, he'd have a lot more to say.