A Pot from Shards by Joan Wexler

Click Here to Read: Review of A Pot from Shards by Joan Wexler Reviewed by Irene Smith Landsman in The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 69:6, 2021.

In June 2008, I logged on-line the name of my long-missing father who I barely knew. This time something came onto the screen I had never seen before, a blurry facsimile of his death certificate. Some of it was legible. I could read that he died in San Francisco in 1970 at age sixty-one. That was a complete surprise. I never imagined him in California, and I didn’t know when he died. There was clearly more information on the screen image, but I couldn’t make it out. Writing to the California Board of Health I requested a paper copy. They needed to know my relationship to the deceased. Writing in the word daughter in relation to my father was a unique experience. The paper certificate soon arrived and recorded his birth as December 1908 in New York City and his profession as actor. I already knew this information about him, so I was reassured this was the right person. His name was John Pote. I had come to believe that the only thing I had of him or from him was his name.

My mother left my father in 1940 when I was two years old. She and I continued to live in New York. There were a few visits with him that I can still remember. All visits stopped early in 1943 when I was about five. Then all contact with him ended. There were no letters, no birthday cards, no photographs, and no child support. A few years later when my mother legally divorced him, I heard from her that he moved out of New York City to live with his mother in Westchester County. In 1959, when I was a senior in college, I looked for and found his name in a Westchester phone book. I called him, and we met once, then nothing again until 2008 when I came upon his death certificate. Everything on the document other than the date of his birth and his profession was a surprise.

Suddenly I owned more than his name.

The cause of death is listed as “cirrhosis of the liver, chronic alcoholism, and heart failure.” I knew, from my mother that he drank heavily. The certificate also notes that the day before he died he was a patient at San Francisco General Hospital. His listed spouse is “Florence-maiden name unknown.” Why didn’t he know Florence’s maiden name? Now that I knew her first name I could search further. Ancestry.com revealed Florence Pote to be my father’s third wife. My mother, Marion, was his second wife. I knew he had been married before he married my mother. On-line census information revealed that at the time of John Pote’s death, Florence Pote lived in Modesto, California and had already lived there for several years. They must have been separated. I also learn that Florence Pote was ten years older than my father. She died in Modesto, California in 1980 and John Pote is recorded as her husband. They may have been separated, but they were not divorced.

Looking online at both the New York and California census information reveals he left New York in 1963 and moved to San Francisco.

Also appearing on the death certificate is an unexplained number and letter code from the San Francisco General Hospital. I called the hospital to learn the code indicates that the patient agreed that on his death his body is to be donated to The University of California Medical School to be used as a cadaver for medical students; to be dissected and the remains later cremated. Was there ever a funeral?

Although I barely knew him it still is startling to imagine my father’s body as a picked over nameless cadaver on some young medical students dissecting table. But I can also call up Rembrandt’s “The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp” and shift to a state of cold objectivity as I view that blue-white dead body. But maybe my father thought he was being useful or that he was giving himself as a gift. Or maybe he was utterly alone, and it was the only way he knew how to dispose of his own body.

The certificate gives the date and time of his death as October 11, 1970, at 10: pm. His address is 1082 Post Street, apartment number two.

Who was my father, John Pote? How did his brief presence and his long absence shape me? Does it still shape me? These are the questions behind all the major decisions of my life. Who do I love? Who do I avoid loving? What work should I do?  What makes a life worth living or not worth living?

I decide to go to San Francisco, find his apartment building and explore his neighborhood.  What more will I find?