On The Subject Of Fatherhood: My Grandfather, Pete Mora

A little over a month ago I wrote about my grandmother and grandfather and their volatile, often violent relationship and the attempted murder-suicide that ended my grandfather’s life. He died when I was about eleven, I think, and over the years I took the skimpiest of memories--things that, at the time of his death, I culled from overheard conversations and incomplete news reports--and concocted a story that was only tangentially related to the truth. After I wrote that story, my mother emailed me to correct a few of the more obvious misconceptions.

This was my take:

He died when I was about eleven and he was about sixty-one or so. He committed suicide after attempting to murder his girlfriend [Olga]. She was thirty-six years old and about eight months pregnant. In his mind, her crime was leaving him. Both she and the baby survived a shotgun blast. He used the same shotgun to blow off the top of his head. He was cremated and buried in Santa Fe, where he shares a grave with his oldest son, my uncle Floyd.

Here is my mother’s correction:

Grandfather Pete was born 3/10/1931 & named Jose Pedro Mora. He changed his name to Pete while serving in the Korean War. He lied about his age & joined at 16 y/o. Maybe that's why he was kind of tetched in the head. He was a poker shark & often that is how he & Gram made it through the month.

When he shot Olga, she was not pregnant. Elias was born in Jan. & he shot her in June. We found out about them when Floyd, Char & I were served with a restraining order the day we buried Pete. The orders were to refrain from touching Pete's estate/properties. My aunts thought Floyd had initiated the orders because the baby's name Elias Antonio Mora & Floyd Anthony Mora sounded very close to them. Go figure. But the order was initiated by Olga's dad who was an old crony of Pete's.

Olga said Pete treated her as bad as he treated Gram. He would check the mileage on the car & accuse her of being a whore when he wasn't around. She was afraid of him whereas Gram was not. At least after a while of being accused of all kinds of unsavory behavior. Strangely enough he wouldn't marry Olga 'cause he claimed to have only one wife. That being Gram.

Floyd & he are not buried in the same grave.

I didn't believe Gram when she called me at work to tell me that Pete had committed suicide. I always thought he was too narcissistic to hurt himself. But he had been in jail once for boot-legging & said he would never go back again.

Both he & Gram had colorful pasts & would egg each other on. Pity.

My mother actually sent that email a month ago, not too long after I wrote about my grandfather. For some reason I let it sit. Perhaps I was not yet willing to relinquish the story I had been telling myself about him for more than twenty years. Perhaps it was because I didn’t want to have to dredge up the memories of abusive relationships--or any familial relationship that was even remotely related.

There is this story, though:

I remember years ago, sitting at the table in my grandmother’s kitchen listening to my grandmother hold forth about how women who stayed in abusive relationships were so stupid. Finally fed up with her anti-feminist rhetoric, I--not very diplomatically--asked her, “So then why did you stay?”

And there is this story:

A couple of days after my grandfather shot himself, his oldest son, my uncle Floyd, came to my house. He was sitting at the dining room table and he took something out of his pocket and handed it to me, saying, “Look at this. Do you know what this is?” I turned the white, pebble-sized object over in my hand and said, “No. What is it?” He said, “It’s a piece of your grandfather’s skull.”

At the time I was more interested in the novelty of holding a piece of someone's skull than I was emotionally invested in that piece of skull having once been part of my grandfather. I wondered when and where my uncle had collected that macabre object, but I didn't wonder why he had even felt the need to bend over and pick it up off the floor. I didn't have any particular connection to my grandfather then or now, so I never wondered, until now, how my uncle felt about that small piece of his father.

Deprived of any real contact with my grandfather during the short years that our lives overlapped, I never wondered about or questioned his absence. It was a given, one of many in my childhood. I never, by extension, wondered what kind of father he had been to my uncle or aunt or mother, or, in fact, to any of his children. Now I see him as nothing more than yet another example of a runaway father, the kind of man who snatches the macho rewards for siring children and then leaves those children behind when fatherhood has lost its novelty. My mother, soon after he died, described him to me as having been the kind of person who always took the best--or, when he couldn't take the best, consoled himself by taking the most--for himself. That simple statement, I think, revealed not only a greater truth about runaway fathers, but also the deep, often unspoken dissatisfaction of a child who has spent their childhood having to make do with what is left when the best has been selfishly claimed by a father who never understood the primary parental necessity of sacrifice.

However when the chips are down, I feel as though I have no right to speak about my grandfather at all. I only met him once, on the street. He didn't get out of his car and I was too embarrassed to accept his proffered gift of cash. My family rarely spoke of him, except to note a passing resemblance in some relative or another or to tell stories of his abuses and excesses. As a result, most of what I know about him is based on stories that I myself made up over the years, stories that are mostly about his suicide. And now I find myself unable to muster even the smallest bit of compassion for him, certainly, but even that isn't why I find it hard to write about him. I could, if I wanted to put the least bit of effort into it, imagine the kind of life he had (or was deprived of) that made him leave home at sixteen (the same age, incidentally, that I left home), but I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that because I don't care. I don't.

I'm working with what I have left of him: This, a single digital image--this digital image and his blood, his blood and an emotional legacy of abandonment.