Running in the Family: Final Days Father Tongue Summary & Analysis

Jennifer remembers Mervyn in the days when his chicken farm was successful. When Jennifer is young, she helps Mervyn design posters and come up with marketing slogans. Mervyn always invents jobs for her and Susan to do that he can pay them a small wage for, such as catching beetles to feed the chickens. Mervyn has a way with children, keeping them in line by keeping them engaged. Jennifer is close with him, perhaps the closest of any of the children, and he is loving and protective of her. She knows Mervyn misses the children of his first marriage painfully. Whenever he drinks, Jennifer just disappears for a few days until he sobers up again. In Mervyn’s last days, Jennifer spends evenings on the verandah with him while he smokes cigarettes.

V.C. de Silva recalls that Mervyn was excellent at selling chickens, almost unnaturally good. After Doris leaves Mervyn in 1947, V.C. de Silva lives with Mervyn for a month. De Silva, Archer, and Mervyn become close friends, but Archer and de Silva never drink with him. In the end, Mervyn dies of a brain hemorrhage.

Archer Jayawardene remembers that Mervyn loved organizing things, even in his old age. Before his death, Mervyn decides that all the old people should start dancing again and sets up dancing lessons. However, Mervyn spends most of his time reading or listening to the radio. A year before he dies, Mervyn sinks into a depression so severe that when Archer and de Silva visit, Mervyn doesn't even speak to them. Mervyn is so fat when he dies that there is difficulty getting him into the coffin or the coffin through the doorway. The ordeal feels like a “tragicomedy.” But two days before Mervyn’s death, Archer sits with him in silence, both of them happy and content that nothing needs to be said.

Ondaatje resumes narrating. In his last two years, Mervyn bounces between “calmness and depression,” but is so private that he just keeps it inside himself. He suffers severe bouts of paranoia, but manages to hide it from his friends and children. When it overwhelms him, he drinks. In his last year, he completely breaks down and goes mostly silent. Mervyn’s friends are sad because it seems he does not trust them. Mervyn's children visit when he stays in a temporary nursing home, but he believes they are only “imitations.”

After Mervyn leaves the nursing home and returns to Rock Hill, he finally explains his mental state to Archer and his wife. Mervyn imagines that he sees poison gas surrounding Archer. Archer walks through it unscathed, but if Mervyn tells him about it, the gas will kill Archer. Ondaatje reflects that “there is so much to know and so much we can only guess.” In the end of his life, few things mattered to Mervyn, but they mattered immensely, and there is little for Ondaatje to go on. Ondaatje’s brother tells him he must do this story properly, but Ondaatje feels it will always be “incomplete.” They will never truly understand Mervyn, but they will love him. Whatever eased his pain, they will celebrate.