The Truth About My
Parents' Deaths

Years ago I had a blog called My Dead Parents. For a while, it was anonymous. I started it after my mother died of alcoholism in 2010 to give myself a place to explore my ambivalence about her death and to examine the artifacts from my parents’ marriage that I’d discovered while cleaning out her house. My father died sixteen years earlier in a car crash in Ukraine, where he’d worked since the country gained independence in 1991. Both deaths left me feeling relieved, even grateful. I no longer had to endure my father’s temper and criticism, or the anxiety and helplessness that came with my mother’s disease.

But my relief was complicated by what I’d found among my mother’s belongings. There, I found letters and photographs that revealed aspects of my parents, and of their marriage, that I’d never seen. I thought my father was cold, incapable of love, but throughout his thirty-year relationship with my mother, he’d written her pages and pages of passionate, lyrical prose. I believed that my mother had never wanted to have kids, but when I read through the letters she wrote to her best friend after she gave birth to my sister, I learned that she cherished motherhood. What I discovered was confusing, and often, enraging. How could I have misunderstood my parents to the extent that I had? Why had it been so hard for them to make these parts of themselves visible to me? These were the questions I asked as I blogged and held their letters against my memories.  I wrote and wrote, but I didn’t get closer to finding answers. The questions only seemed to multiply.

I took boxes of my parents’ most personal belongings back with me to Brooklyn, where I organized their contents in piles on my bedroom floor. One was for the letters that my parents sent to each other. Another for those my mother exchanged with her lifelong friends Sylvia and Chip. There was a stack of my mother’s speeches and reports for the Sierra Club and a stack of articles about my father from The Economist and BusinessWeek. My father’s certificate of American citizenship, which he’d corrected by hand to read “UKRAINE” instead of Poland, my parents’ wedding invitation, and a soft doll, the size of my hand, that had belonged to my brother Yuri, who died before I was born, sat alone.

I sat among these piles and interrogated everything in them. I organized letters chronologically, then by topic. I spread out photographs like decks of cards, picked them up, shuffled them, and spread them out again to see if something new was revealed. I worked as if these things would form a complete picture if I arranged them the right way. One day, when my excavation again failed to produce answers, I studied my spread and, instead of seeing piles, I saw the spaces between them, and realized that what I wanted to know could only be found elsewhere. I had to expand the search and turn my questions to the living.

***

I spent a year researching what would eventually become a book. I began with my family, the only people who could tell me about my parents’ early lives. I interviewed my aunts, older sister, and a few other relatives, formally and exhaustively. Both of my aunts sat with me for days while they told my parents’ story from the very beginning, as I’d asked, and shared their memories. I assaulted them with questions both complex and embarrassingly basic. I didn’t know where in Ukraine my father was born or understand the circumstances of his family’s escape, or the details of my mother’s painful, complicated birth and the extent of her early relationship with her dad, who’d abandoned her family.

Soon, I broadened the scope to include everyone who’d known my parents—their friends, colleagues, and ex-lovers. Their closest friends were easy to track down, but everyone else was a challenge. I scoured the few work documents of theirs that I had and Googled every name on them. I made contact with my mother’s old Sierra Club coworkers, but it was harder to find people who’d worked with my father during his two-decade career at the Bank of Boston, which no longer existed. I searched for people on Facebook and LinkedIn and sent long messages of introduction. Just as I was starting to panic, I received a response from a woman who’d worked with my father in the 80’s. After we met, she connected me with a Bank of Boston “alumni group” that agreed to include a note about my book in their next newsletter. The response was enthusiastic and overwhelming. I spoke with over twenty of his formal colleagues, most of whom were sharp, jocular older men who were thrilled to share stories of my father’s wild adventures abroad.

I tugged on every thread as hard as I could. What else could I do? I asked everyone I talked to for names of others I should pursue, searched for those people and contacted everyone who seemed like they might be who I was seeking, then changed the spelling of their name and tried again. I ran an ad in a local Minnesota paper. I sent a letter to a man in Lagos who once worked with my father. Against the odds, I received responses and heard stories that no one else could tell about long-forgotten periods of my parents’ lives. That so many strangers wanted to speak with me was a testament to the people my parents had been, how deeply they’d been respected and cared for.

Research was different in the Ukraine. My inability to speak the language, and my ignorance of the ways the country operated were severe hindrances. I wanted to learn more about the place that had such a hold on my father. I also wanted to know more about the circumstances surrounding his death. At first, I did what I’d been doing for months—I reached out to people who knew him, interviewed them, and asked them to point me to others. Each conversation was full of revelations. I spoke with a Canadian-Ukrainian who’d moved to Kiev when my father had despite also having a family. He told me about the survivor’s guilt that many members of the diaspora experience and the obligation to “give back” that came with it. He vividly described what Ukraine was like at that time, and explained that effecting change was painfully frustrating, but participating in history as it unfolded made the challenges worthwhile. I left the interview thinking I’d gotten as close as I could to interviewing my father himself. He’d never told me why returning to Ukraine was important to him.

Looking into my father’s death hadn’t been a priority when I’d started. I figured it was an accident, as reported, and referred to it as one. But once I began asking people about it, I heard two competing theories. Most Ukrainians and Ukrainian Americans heard “murder” when I said, “car crash.” Some people offered vague evidence to support their belief: My father once worked for the government; as a venture capitalist, he could have angered the competitors of one of the business he’d funded. Others said my father wasn’t important enough to kill. He wasn’t supposed to be traveling that night and coordinating something so complicated would have been close to impossible. When I used the explanations of the second group to counter the arguments of the first, I was interrupted. They knew it was murder because they knew Ukraine. That’s how business was done back then. And, they added, how it was still done today.

It was surprisingly easy to connect with my father’s driver in Ukraine. Vitaly was the only person in my father’s car who survived the crash. An old coworker put us in touch, and we met a few days after I landed in Kiev. I asked my cousin, Larissa, to join us and to act as a translator. Before Vitaly arrived, I reviewed the few articles I had about the crash, ones published by Ukrainian publications as well as American, which I assumed I could trust.

When we met, Vitaly was the one who first brought up the crash. I was relieved; despite all the research, I wasn’t sure how to bring up this horrible incident with someone who’d actually lived through it. But Vitaly described it in detail. He described the moments leading up to the crash, telling me that the people in the other car had been drinking, and that the driver had drifted into oncoming traffic.

“Wait,” I said. “The people in the other vehicle were drinking. Was the driver drinking as well?” When he didn’t answer, I read from The Eastern Economist’s front-page article about the crash. “Both drivers were checked for blood alcohol content several hours after the incident, and neither registered as having been drinking.”

He sighed and suddenly seemed weary. “When they did the blood alcohol content, the results disappeared. The other driver was, by the way, a former policeman. He left the scene very quickly. A car drove up and they got in it. They didn’t even wait for the police. He really broke the law.”

“This article says that the driver of the van was a ‘reinforced concrete worker.’ If he left, how would anyone know who he was, or if he’d been drinking or not?”

Instead of answering my question, he said, “There were a lot of inquests and examinations, and the case was transferred.”

I pushed him for more details and he started to contradict himself. Not being able to speak to him directly became increasingly frustrating, but Larissa sensed my uneasiness, and kept at him. I asked if the other driver had gone to jail for killing three people—my father and two coworkers—and he said he didn’t know.

“But there must have at least have been a trial.” I stared at him. “Right? Three people died as a result of the crash.” “You must have been a part of the investigation,” I said. “How do you not know what eventually happened?”

“The investigation lasted a long time. The driver disappeared, and that’s it. Get it?”

***

After not thinking or caring about the crash for years, I became desperate to know more about it. I gave my problem over to Google, as always, and typed in “Private Investigator Kiev.” I reached out to my Eastern European friends and was put in touch with an ex- cop who said his friend Galya was the perfect person to hire as my PI.

Galya was a lawyer who worked in prisons, and she told me that she had a lot of police connections that she could leverage. She used wild gestures to convey her thoughts, and it only took a second for me to notice that she was missing half a finger.

“I can help,” she said. “Maybe.” She explained that there was an official way to request information from the police, but, “If they know you are looking, and something is there, then that thing is not there anymore. It is very possible there is nothing. But if I talk to the people I know, say I need a favor, make things a bit easier for them, maybe they can get information.” She paused. “I have to make them want to help. With favors, that is important.”

It took a moment for me to understand that “making things a bit easier” meant giving bribes.

She spoke with Vitaly and told me afterwards, “I don’t trust him.” When he stopped taking her calls, and mine as well, she became even more suspicious. She tracked down someone who had investigated the crash, a police investigator, and he admitted that evidence had been destroyed and that he had forced a witness to give a false confession, so that the case would be dismissed. She tried thanking him with cash and Cognac, but the man said he was dying and just wanted to tell the truth. Everyone else took what she offered.

I was obsessed obtaining the truth, and happily gave Galya cash to dole out. It wasn’t a lot of money to a comfortable American. I justified my participation in Ukraine’s pervasive shadow economy by telling myself that bribing people was the only way to achieve my goal. I wasn’t condoning the country’s corruption. I was simply acknowledging it and refusing, like most who could afford to, to let it paralyze me.

Throughout the rest of my trip, and in the months after I returned, Galya gave me updates on her activities and plans, told me what she’d learned, and what was still eluding her. I trusted her but hated that I needed her. I felt useless, which, in a sense, I was. I couldn’t join her for clandestine meetings or understand the calls she made in front of me.

Eventually, I felt we’d learned all that we could. I accepted what seemed to be the truth: that my father’s death had been covered up, and there was no way to bring the wrong-doers to justice. I told Galya I was satisfied, but she told me she wasn’t, and said she would keep at it. Finally, I began writing my book. I didn’t hear from her for months.

***

Over a year later, with a draft of my book already complete, Larissa emailed to say that Galya had contacted her with new information. When Larissa shared the news with me, I was shocked, not just by what I learned, but by how this information had been obtained. As I sat with it, I was forced to confront both what I’d been told and what I’d participated in. I had been part of the same corrupt system that helped the person who’d killed my father avoid punishment. My questions, slick with money, had led to more violence.

When I started my research, I thought only about what I wanted to know, and what I wanted to know was everything. I didn’t know how overwhelmed I’d be by all I took in, how much it would hurt, or that I’d come to question everything I knew about my family, and even my own integrity.

I got as close as I could to the answers, and when I finally transitioned from research to writing, I realized that though one investigation had ended, another had begun. Writing itself is an investigation, an act of excavation. Like many, I write to discover what I think and feel. When I start, my ideas feel fully formed, but as words land on the page, they find new depths and colors. I follow them almost passively, as if they’re expanding and developing without me. I’m usually surprised to see where I end up, as if I traveled there in a trance.

Writing a memoir required me to investigate myself and my life as thoroughly as I had my parents’. I continually interrogated my memories and perspective to ensure I was being honest and accountable; each word helped me uncover something new, toward a great reveal. Writing a book was as much of an investigation as the research I’d conducted. It was a search, a confrontation and dare, a challenge, and an invitation to better know my subject, and myself.