Chapter 34: My Father, Beryl Donald Paullin, and a Life, Love, and Death Upon His Bandwidth
There are men who pass through the world quietly, leaving only the faintest impressions on those around them. My father, Beryl Donald Paullin, was not one of those men.
He was a force. A contradiction. A wound and a gift wrapped together in the skin of a man who never quite figured out how to be tender without being sharp, or how to love without also leaving a mark. If the preceding chapter belonged to André—a stranger who became, through the bandwidth of a documentary, a companion in my thinking about death—then this one belongs to the man whose current ran through mine before I ever had the language to describe it. André taught me how to watch a person die as themselves. My father taught me what it costs, across a lifetime, to learn that lesson at home.
This is not a tribute to a polished idol. It is an account of a profoundly human being whose complexity defied easy summary, and whose life took me a lifetime to begin to understand. If consciousness is a current, then my father was a current of unusual amperage—the kind that arcs across gaps, that overloads circuits, that leaves scorch marks on everything it touches and, against all odds, lights things up.
The Cultural and Familial Fire
My father was born in 1927, in the depths of the Great Depression, into a home that offered little comfort and even less safety. His father—also named Beryl, but known to most as Bruce—was a Fire Chief: respected in the community, feared in the home. An abusive alcoholic whose violence shaped every relationship he touched, Grandpa Bruce cast a long, oppressive shadow over my father’s earliest years.
Dad kept my sister Pam and me away from Grandpa Bruce until we were teenagers. That single fact says everything about the weight of that man’s presence, and everything about my father’s determination to protect us from what he himself had endured. When we did finally meet Bruce in his later, sober years, he seemed pleasant enough—a ghost of the brute my father had survived. The current that had once burned so destructively had, by then, mostly run to ground.
Dad’s mother, Elsie, was what he described simply as “the classic abused wife.” She suffered physically and emotionally, carrying wounds so deep they eventually hollowed her out. She died shortly after my own birth, and I have never truly known her—only the fragments my father carried, cautiously and rarely, like shards of something he was afraid to cut himself on again.
His older brother, Ed, was removed from the home at age six after a near-fatal beating from their father. And it was Susie—Dad’s younger sister—who carried a particularly poisoned story all the way to the end of my father’s life: that four-year-old Beryl, having accidentally knocked over a lamp and broken it, was responsible for triggering the attack that nearly killed Edward.
This is the kind of story that trauma produces. This is the kind of blame that breaks a child and follows a man into his grave. A lamp, of all things—an object that gives light—recast as the spark that nearly took a brother’s life. The metaphor is too cruel to have been invented; it could only have been lived.
And yet—my father emerged. Scarred, yes. Carrying the invisible architecture of a fractured boyhood, certainly. But upright, and moving forward.
The Making of a Man
At sixteen, convinced he was a “dummy” with no future and desperate to escape the walls of his family home, Dad enlisted in the Marines. His mother promptly had him retrieved. Undeterred, he re-enlisted in the Navy the moment he turned eighteen, serving aboard the USS West Virginia and the USS Wisconsin. When he returned in 1947, he made one final reckoning with his father—standing before the man who had terrorized his family and issuing a quiet, unambiguous ultimatum: lay a hand on my mother again, and I will kill you.
He meant it. And his father believed him.
From there, Dad turned toward the life of the mind, enrolling at the University of Portland for five years, where he studied Theology, Psychology, Logic, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Mind. He wanted—more than almost anything—to understand the human condition. To decode the machinery of suffering. To find some rational framework for the chaos he had been born into. He never finished his degree, but he never stopped asking the questions. In many ways, that search became the inheritance he passed on to me. The blueprint I have been working from my whole life was, I see now, partly his.
He found his career at the U.S. Postal Service, where his perfectionism, discipline, and relentless work ethic carried him over thirty-five years to the role of Operations Manager. His drive was not ambition for its own sake—it was a daily act of rebellion against the narrative his father had tried to write for him. Every promotion was a refusal. Every accomplishment a quiet declaration to his memory of his father:
I am more than what you told me I was.
I suppose that I came under the influence of that same intergenerational current—both the wound and the will to defy it.
His humor was never far from this undertow of defiance.
“I really took the system, didn’t I?” he would say—and the numbers proved him right. He contributed $22,742 to his pension and drew over a million dollars back across thirty-five years of retirement. The grin that accompanied that observation was one of pure, unrepentant satisfaction.
The Man He Was—In His Own Words
No tribute to my father could approach honesty without his voice in it. My sister Pam, my wife Sharon, and I spent years collecting what we came to call the “Beryl-isms”—a catalogue of his most repeated expressions, aphorisms, provocations, and observations. They were, collectively, a kind of portrait of his inner world: a fountainhead of wit, wisdom, insight, self-deprecation, sarcasm, and sometimes breathtaking philosophical candor.
He occupied some of the dark bandwidth of being, not just the flattering frequencies. Sometimes his judgments of others were unnecessarily hurtful and alienating. He was often critical of overweight people, who were, well, numerous. He was overly critical of anyone who did not measure up to his exacting standards. He lost a few friends over the years to his big mouth. The same current that illuminated also, at times, burned.
Here, then, is my father—in his own words, with my replies where they belong:
“Why would you ever want for me to change? No one would be able to recognize me!”
(Dad, hope springs eternal, though our patience with some of your antics doesn’t.)
“I am glad I finally realized that I was beating you children with a belt like my father beat me.”
(Some people learn their lessons late in life. My backside paid the price for your slow learning several years longer than I would have preferred.)
“Don’t wait too long to retire. People work that extra year or two, thinking they need the money, and death takes over, and they never make it to retirement.”
(Well, Dad, I retired early. We’ll have to wait and see if that has any beneficial effect on my longevity. Right now, my main goal is to try to outlive you, oh immortal one.)
“Oh, those rich people—all of that money, and they still have to die anyway!”
(And the rest of us have to die too, darn it.)
“Why do you need to know—are you writing a book?”
(Well, as a matter of fact, I am.)
“Come back again when you can’t stay so long.”
(I am working on that one.)
“Don’t you have something better to be doing?”
(Yes. But you are the priority of the moment, so try to enjoy it while I try not to suffer too much.)
“Sure am glad that I am retired. Or is it retarded?”
(I won’t touch that one.)
“I might be here, but I am not all here.”
(Then where is the rest of you?)
“You know, having a dog like Rocky adds seven years to my life.”
(Yes. But your dog took seven years off of mine.)
(To any waitress, without fail): “Say, you sure are looking good this evening. Would you like to come home with me and serve me my favorite meal?”
(Argh. So embarrassing.)
“I am not trying to be pretty, and I never will win any beauty contests.”
(I can’t argue with you on that one.)
“The doctor needed a urine, stool, and semen sample—so I just left him my underwear.”
(Oh, boy.)
“You couldn’t hit a beach ball with a banjo. You couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn!”
(This one was delivered to me as a child on the little league field, and again, decades later, on the golf course. Some things are consistent.)
“When I get to Heaven, I am going to have a talk with the ‘Old Man’ about my wife dying before me. Wives are supposed to outlive the husbands. Either I should have died first, or we should have died at the same time.”
(Maybe Mom finished her work before you did. In what form would you have wanted a simultaneous death—a murder-suicide, or a car wreck?)
“Son, will we all meet again in Heaven?”
(Are you sure you really want to hang out with the same crowd for eternity?)
“Heaven is not ready for me yet, and Hell is afraid that I will take it over—so that is why I am still here.”
(Maybe you are still here to provide a few more lessons for the living. I know I am getting quite the crash course.)
“I am in no hurry to die. Nobody I know has ever come back from the dead and told me what a great time they are having.”
(Yes—and wayward religions continue to capitalize on that mortal fear, ignoring the fact that heaven is here and now.)
“I provided care for you all of those years when you were young. Now it’s your turn to take care of this old man.”
(I should have read the contract more carefully before my birth.)
“You should always be best friends with your sister. Never let anything get in the way of that friendship—because she will find a way to love you to your death, as you should love her as well.”
(Well, Dad. You showed commitment to both your brother and your sister, especially over the last twenty years. Somehow, you all endeared yourselves to each other. Thank you for that. Pam and I will be just fine)
There are some who thought my father was a horse’s ass. But that is the view one sometimes gets while in second place, having just been passed by his racehorse of a mind.
The Homes He Built, the Ground He Loved
My father’s spirituality lived outdoors. He had no use for churches—”If I ever walked into one,” he said, “it would probably fall on me.” His sanctuary was the Columbia River Gorge, the Arizona desert, the mountain trail, the carefully tended garden. He built three homes over the course of his life, and at each one he devoted thousands of hours to transforming the surrounding landscape into something that could only be called a temple—not of doctrine, but of living. His body of work on this earth was his offering to whatever God he addressed only through beauty and dirt and the open sky.
He loved his dogs. There was his childhood favorite, Boy, and in our time a German Shepherd named Lassie, three Samoyeds across forty years named Heidi, Misty, and Peaches, and finally a Siberian Husky named Rocky. He cared for them with a kind of unconditional devotion that perhaps came more naturally to him than the complexities of loving people. They returned his love without condition or complication, supplying the warmth that the harder arithmetic of human relationship sometimes failed to provide.
He was also—first while working at the USPS and later in retirement—a square dancer, a stamp collector, a golfer, an avid fisherman, a highest-level pinochle player, a camper, a traveler, a storyteller, and a humorist of the first order. He and my mother, Corinne—whom he loved deeply, if often unskillfully—carried their verbal “Punch and Judy Show” around the world. They drove through America, hiked in Costa Rica, climbed pyramids in Mexico, cruised Alaska, wintered in Arizona, and celebrated their fiftieth anniversary on Maui. In retirement, he learned, slowly and imperfectly, to make her his best friend.
The Long Goodbye
After my mother died in 2009, something in my father began to dissolve. The grief was enormous, and the cognitive decline that had already been quietly setting in accelerated with a cruelty that felt almost deliberate. My wife Sharon and I had him over for dinner every evening. I took him to the doctor for depression—and the doctor ended up prescribing antidepressants for me instead.
By 2012, when his physician confirmed that he could no longer drive safely, my life as I had known it effectively ended. I became responsible for every dimension of his existence—his meals, his finances, his medications (none, as it turned out; he refused them all), his baths, his lawn, his spiritual wellbeing. He dressed himself. He smoked his cigars. He ate the food placed before him.
And he called out to his deceased dog Rocky—thirty times a day, every day, for the final year of his life—asking where the dog had gone.
Sharon made a sign for him that said Rocky had died of old age and was in heaven. He would read it, and five minutes later, call out to Rocky again.
When Rocky died in June of 2016, the last thread connecting my father to his past—other than Sharon, Pam, and me—was severed. I watched him grieve a loss he could not retain, over and over, an infinite loop of fresh sorrow. Here was the cruelest inversion of the bandwidth I have written about throughout this book: a man whose signal had not gone silent but had begun to repeat itself, looping the same broken transmission with no capacity to receive the reply. My heart broke for him—and breaks still.
One time, three months before his death, I felt overwhelmed and yelled at him while driving him home, fed up with his endless dwelling on the dog. I had not yelled at my father since I was an angry teenager, and it shook me to the core. I apologized. But he had already forgotten what the turmoil was based upon. Even my failure dissolved before it could be held against me. There is a strange and terrible mercy in that.
The Last Conversation
Six hours before his death, I sat with my father in his room. It was a Friday afternoon, September 15, 2017.
“Dad, you’re still in bed, and it’s 2:30 in the afternoon—what’s up? It’s such a beautiful day outside.”
“You know, son, I am always tired now. But I am about to get up.”
“Well, Dad—this might be the last sunny day in a long time. Why don’t you get up and go out on the porch and have a cigar? I’ll put a chocolate bar on your table, and a drink for you.”
“I’ll get right up, son. By the way—who is caring for me this evening?”
“Madison is caring for you this evening, Dad.”
“Oh, poor Madison!”
“Dad, Madison benefits by being with you. As you do with her.”
I told him I would be back Sunday morning, that I had to leave to prepare for Marty’s funeral the following day. He asked when he would see me again.
“OK, son. You know that I am dependent on you. Please take care of yourself.”
“Oh, Dad—you know that I am dependent on you, too. You be careful.”
“I love you, son.”
“I love you too, Dad.”
I left his room not knowing it was our last exchange. The following morning, as I stood behind a hearse as a pallbearer at my dear friend Marty’s funeral, Sharon answered the phone I could not take.
My father was gone.
As if one death were not enough, Dad made it a double play. Boy, he had a way of tattooing himself upon the skin of my life.
He died in his own bedroom, in his own home, on his own terms—which is precisely what he would have arranged had he had any say in the matter. And here, perhaps, is where his dying joins the company of all those Sharon attended in hospice: like David asking for his shoes, like Clara turning gently toward another light, my father chose his moment, his ground, his channel for the final discharge. When I came to his bedside, I told Sharon he wore a look of awe and wonder. He had found, at last, his promised land—where loneliness and dementia dissolve, and where battered souls are restored to the saints and angels they always were but were rarely recognized as being.
It took me nearly my entire life to release my own misunderstanding of my father—to stop seeing him through the lens of hurt and expectation, and to begin seeing him as a man: wounded, willful, brilliant, and trying, always trying, in the only ways he knew how.
I was my father’s primary caregiver for his final years, and that experience nearly broke me. But in the breaking, something was born that I could not have found any other way. I learned to love another human being unconditionally and completely.
The last lesson he taught me arrived not in any single conversation but across thousands of days of sitting with him in his diminishment—releasing my anger, releasing my need for him to be different, releasing the version of him I had carried in my chest since childhood. What remained, when I finally let all of that go, was simple and irreducible: love. The current, stripped of its noise, revealed at last the signal it had always been carrying.
My personality was so much less colorful than my father’s. I fashioned a quieter self, unconsciously, as a counterweight to his flamboyance—as if the world could only hold so much of that kind of energy. Perhaps I was wrong about that. I see now that I am, unmistakably, his son. I carry his curiosity, his passion for life, his irreverence, his refusal to accept the spiritual and philosophical authorities of the day, and his search—long ago aborted and, for him, unfinished—for the truth about the human mind and the chaos it creates when it does not cultivate a relationship to truth and love.
I’ve finished a book of well over 300,000 words capturing what I’ve discovered, with some of those words shaped by lessons from my relationship with Dad. Over the years, he shared at least fifty times that number of words with me, and I’m sure I overlooked much of his wisdom, just as he overlooked mine. The world has met my most profound and creative writing much like my father met my youthful, innocent spirit—with an indifference born of economic necessity and the distractions of family life. The frequency I put out was one the world neither knew nor cared to tune into.
My father’s outlook was shaped by humor and cynicism. In the end, we’ll probably be remembered with equal respect (or disrespect) though I’ll fade from memory more quickly, having made fewer waves and had two fewer children. I’ve committed myself to causing no harm to any sentient being, perhaps as a reaction to witnessing my father harm others a couple of times. Early in adulthood, I decided never to intentionally have children, aware of intergenerational trauma and determined not to be another conduit for it in this damaged world. I chose instead to let the family current end with me.
“Don’t wait too long to retire,” he told me, again and again.
I didn’t, Dad.
I retired to take care of you.
I retired to get in touch with myself, too.
And I would do it again.
What the Difficult Ones Leave Behind
There are some fathers who are easy to honor. Mine was not easy—but he was worth every difficult inch of the journey toward understanding him, and myself.
He was not an idol. He was a man forged in fire, shaped by trauma, and stubbornly, magnificently committed to living on his own terms. He was funny, difficult, tender in unguarded moments, a fine speaker and sharp-tongued by default, often a poor listener to anyone offering correction, and capable of a love that—once you understood its particular dialect—was entirely unmistakable.
In the chapter that preceded this one, I wrote that the end does not transform a person into someone else; it distills them. It burns away the performance and the self-protection and the carefully maintained surfaces, and what remains is whatever was always most essentially there. I wrote that watching André taught me this. But the truth is that I learned it first at my father’s bedside, over years rather than days, watching dementia perform its slow and terrible distillation. The current, on its way to ground, illuminated the filament one last time—and I saw clearly what he had always been.
“Heaven is not ready for me yet, and Hell is afraid that I will take it over.”
He was right, of course. Neither place was prepared. And I was never fully prepared for him either, no matter what spiritual state I occupied while contending with his complexities.
Beryl Donald Paullin, I miss you more than I have words for. Those who never took the time to know you missed one of life’s most precious, complicated gifts. Those of us who stayed—who endured the rough edges, translated the barbs, sat beside you through the long unraveling of your final years—we were given something rare.
We were given you.
And the current that was my father is not gone. It changed form. It seeks its ground in these pages, in the man I became, in the love that outlasted every wound. The lamp he broke at four years old has been relit, again and again, across the unlimited bandwidth of a life that refused to go quietly.
And Dad, I will love you until my final day.
