from Suzanne Ohlmann's "Shadow Migration"

Suzanne Ohlmann | Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life | University of Nebraska Press | March 2022 | 192 Pages

Shadow Dad

As a member of the St. Olaf Choir, I spent a lot of time on concert stages in a purple velvet robe, nude hose, and a pair of black, smelly flats—smelly because all the women’s shoes traveled in the same trunk from tour venue to tour venue, to limit the risk of someone violating the strict dress code during performance. The choir maintained a uniform appearance because, though made up of seventy-five members, it functioned as one, vibrant organism. We held hands, we sang from memory, and we swayed as we sang. Not wild movement—we were young Lutherans following in the footsteps of a century-long tradition—but if you attended a performance, you couldn’t help but notice the way the music moved in subtle waves through the group.

I made it into choir my junior and senior years at St. Olaf and found it a welcome community in which to pursue my study and development as a musician. During my senior year, Dr. Armstrong, the conductor, appointed me soprano section leader as well as one of three student conductors of the group, both high honors. But I’d also stumbled into my first bout of clinical depression, and by early December, when we taped the pbs broadcast of our 1997 Christmas Festival, I was barely making it to rehearsals and classes, surviving on a twenty-milligram daily dose of Paxil, an antidepressant.

Two months later, in early February, we embarked on our Southwest tour, and our first stop was a weekend of concerts in and around Phoenix. The area held no significance for me at the time, but I now know that my birth father lived the final years of his life in Chandler, a Phoenix suburb, and would have been living there at the time of the tour. I wish he could have come to the show, but by my senior year, I’d all but given up on finding anyone in my biological family. More than two years had passed since my last conversation with the social worker, Babs, at Lutheran Family Services. Her final report, written just before my sophomore year at St. Olaf, said that my birth mom was supposed to reveal my secret existence to her family and that I’d be welcomed at Christmas with open arms. Her silence made it clear she hadn’t. 

We sang a Sunday afternoon concert at Symphony Hall in downtown Phoenix. My very old and generous Uncle Don and Aunt Ruth, snowbirds from Iowa, came to the performance with their friends from church, Blanche and Paul. Afterward, they drove me east for dinner in Fountain Hills, their retirement community. I sat in the back of Don’s pearly white Cadillac sedan and became Blanche’s captive audience while Paul slept and Aunt Ruth daydreamed. Uncle Don never could hear so well. 

“Suzy,” Blanche beamed, “I want you to look straight ahead at those red rock mountains.” 

I followed her gaze. 

“Do you see anything?” she asked.

The sun had begun its descent behind us, the rock formations ahead blazing a bright burnt sienna in the late afternoon light. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for.

“They say that when the sun hits those mountains just right, you can see the face of Jesus the Christ.” Blanche smiled with such fervor that I could hear saliva crackling behind her teeth.

I sat with my mouth open.

“Isn’t that just wonderful?” 

I love Aunt Ruth and Uncle Don, and I have to giggle at anyone who ups the ante of a story by inserting “the” between “Jesus” and “Christ.” However, giggling makes me feel like a bad Lutheran, because we all know that Christ was not his actual last name, and thus “the Christ” is 65 Shadow Dad correct. But it’s kind of like saying “the cancer.” It just sounds funny, and when Blanche said it, I found myself looking for an eject button in the back of Don’s Cadillac.

Why couldn’t Mike Erpelding have come to hear me sing in Phoenix and saved me from Blanche’s messianic vision? My favorite piece from the concert was by Mendelssohn, “For God Commanded Angels to Watch Over You,” and I have to wonder if those angels couldn’t have done something more to intervene and give Mike and me the chance to meet, take a walk, snap some photos, feel each other’s presence in that dry, desert air; or even just sneak out early one morning for a quick breakfast at Denny’s. He’d order some godawful Grand Slam number with piles of bacon and hash browns, and I’d get the oatmeal or raisin bran, something ridden with fiber to try to keep my bowels moving as I sat in awe, with a slight touch of panic, watching my dad eat and drink and laugh and look back at me. 

I have this fantasy that if I could have met him that weekend, somehow the trajectory of both of our lives would have been altered for the better. All the darkness that had begun to consume me that fall, but for my weekly therapy sessions and the Paxil, the dread that had seeped into my life in such an insidious manner—affecting my appetite, sleep, concentration, and moods, my menstrual cycle, and even my will—surely it had come from an old, inherited sadness that I would have to wait twenty years to comprehend. 

And what about Mike? When I finally found the Erpeldings—first through letters, then emails, then phone calls and repeated, welcoming visits—they didn’t want to state the truth about Mike in plain English. But I don’t share their name. I carry the weight of loss but am freed by never having known him. So I can say that my father died alone just after his fifty-first birthday. He was found in the bedroom of his trailer at the Sunshine Valley Mobile Home Park on South Arizona Avenue in Chandler, his death caused by alcoholism and hepatitis C cirrhosis of the liver, the result of a lifelong addiction to Old Milwaukee and all that heroin in the 1970s.

Surely I could have helped him. We were the same person, just in different incarnations. At least that’s what I wanted to believe as I uncovered the layers surrounding his life and death. He wasn’t my soulmate but the author of my existence, creator of my core, and, even dead, fantastical sustainer of my belief that what I had lost in him had meant something. He’d even provided an excuse for my accident-prone nature. An entire page of his fiftieth birthday book was devoted to his calamities, including:

 • cut off his thumb with a saw

 • put a barrel through the rear window of his Vega 

• burned Vega to a crisp in front of girlfriend’s house

 • started Kearney Livestock on fire

 • broke his back twice

 Or as noted in this text conversation between Uncle Greg and me: 

Me: Hi, Uncle Greg! Random question: Do you remember the car Mike was driving around 1975? I’m trying to picture him the summer he and my mom were together and I was conceived. 

Uncle Greg: How you doing, girl? Mike had so many cars in that time of his life. It could have been a ’57 Chevy, a ’66 Impala. A ’72 Vega wagon is what I think it was. He had many cars and wrecked every one of them. 

But back in Arizona, in February of my senior year, I was twenty-one and Mike forty-two. Had I been more tenacious or even demanding with Lutheran Family Services, just maybe they could have gotten his name from Leah in that single phone call she had with Babs. I could have kept his name a secret. I could have chased away my depression just knowing that my father was in Phoenix and that on the day of our downtown concert, I’d make my escape to meet him, with or without the help of angels.  

St. Olaf Choir has a way of caring for its own. If a member should grow faint during a performance, she signals her peril to the singers on either side of her with a series of quick hand squeezes. The other two move in a stealth manner to step in front and around her so she can sit down on the risers and hang her head between her knees—all of this without a moment’s rest from the music.

I could have “fainted,” gone down on the risers, the choir surrounding me in a wall of velvet, and slipped under the stage through the trap door. In seconds I could have exited onto Third Street in downtown Phoenix, hailed a cab, and been on my way to Chandler. I would have laughed the whole way at my costume for our first father-daughter meeting. 

I was so pale and pure then, still a virgin, not that keen on booze, and a music major worried most about singing in tune and remembering the dates of Beethoven’s early, middle, and late periods for Music History exams. I had my senior recital to plan, graduate school auditions to prepare for, and a very loving boyfriend who’d somehow stuck with me through the crying spells and incessant napping that had overcome me. 

I had no business meeting Mike Erpelding that day in Phoenix, but what if I had? What if I’d walked up to trailer number 275, knocked on the screen door, and found a way to explain both the reason I was there and the fact that I was dressed in a purple velvet robe with nothing underneath but Hanes Her Way underpants and my stinky shoes? 

Maybe Mike could have lived a little longer. 

Maybe I could have lived a little lighter. 

My Erpelding family never lied to me about Mike, but they were cautious in their portrayal of their beloved brother, almost curating his image in the wake of his early death. Though Mike lived and died under the shadow of addiction, I would learn over the years that he was a loving, cherished, charismatic, present force in the lives of his family and friends. My first step toward finding him, before I revealed the surprise of my existence to his family, was to visit his grave. Before I gathered the courage to write to them, I had to see for myself that this long-imagined man was already gone. 

Excerpted from Shadow Migration: Mapping a Life by Suzanne Ohlmann by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. © 2021 by Suzanne Ohlmann.

Suzanne Ohlmann is a registered nurse. A native Nebraskan, she currently lives in San Antonio with her husband and a quintet of dogs and cats. Her work has been published by the Associated Press, Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Longreads, and Texas Monthly.