A Life’s Ledger Forever Out of Balance : Father: He accounted for everything but a son’s need to know who he really was.

I know more about my father’s death than his life. Statements from a hospital, from Medicare, from Blue Cross furnish pages of details about his last four days. There’s very little to document his preceding 29,268 days.

He left behind a very brief as-told-to autobiography of sorts: a U.S. government form titled “Enlisted Record and Report of Separation--Honorable Discharge,” dated 24 August 1945. Typed up by a WAC lieutenant in spare government-issue language, that piece of paper remains the most comprehensive record I have of my father’s life.

He was living with his parents at the time of his induction into service--29 March 1941--at the age of 34. After Army Air Force training, he departed for Europe on 6 August 1942, and arrived 11 days later. I once asked him about the trip, about what must have been a harrowing landing in Normandy, he replied with the equivalent of “don’t ask.”

He served in northern France and in the Rhineland. The only “war story” I recall him telling was about his being on a routine trip as company clerk when he came upon two or three Germans walking on the road. They were, as he sketched it, ready to surrender to the first GI they met--him.

He left Europe on 18 December 1944, and arrived in the States on 27 December. After two years, four months and 22 days of service overseas, he returned with the Good Conduct Medal, the American Defense Service Medal, and the European African Middle Eastern Service Medal with three Bronze Stars.

Three Bronze Stars--it has a special sound, and I keep meaning to learn their significance, to research the battle/campaign references GO 33 and 40 WD 45. Maybe this year.

On 24 August 1945, after four years, four months and 26 days of “Honest and Faithful Service to this country,” he was separated from the Army. Two days later he married my mother. Two years later they had me, their only child.

Forty years later, we were separated by cardiogenic shock, acute myocardial infarction and arteriosclerotic heart disease. His last days were filled with nitroglycerin, Verapamil, Nipride, Valium, morphine, ventilators, IVs. Intensive care: people and machines crowded around him, on top of him. I imagine. They had asked me to wait outside.

“He tried,” said the cardiologist. “He wanted to come back, but the bottom kept dropping out.”

He died on Feb. 13, 1987, at 11:39 a.m., and that afternoon, sitting across from an employee of a funeral home, I had to become my father’s biographer. It was pathetic. My fumblings and guesses were reported to an Office of Vital Statistics and were then recorded, for all time, on a Certificate of Death.

Dates. A few addresses. Nothing of true substance. What were his fondest memories? What times would he have relived? What was his biggest disappointment?

I don’t know what his childhood was like. His high school diploma and college (night-school) associate’s degree in “accountancy” were set in black frames and then discarded. We uncovered them 20 years ago in a forgotten storage space, lost to mildew and lack of regard.

My father hated clutter. His diplomas weren’t important to him. Mine were, though. They hung on the wall over his desk. Maybe paying for all my tuition, books, rooms, meals, linen and housekeeping fees was the accomplishment he prized.

On a good but hardly grand salary he kept me in 14 semesters of Ivy League enrollment. And he had managed to put aside enough for his retirement and for my mother’s skilled nursing care after his death. He took financial accounting seriously, but he never made a real account of his life.

An older cousin remembers that my father was generous with his money, would pick up the tab for a night on the town. He did well enough as a traveling salesman for Warner Bros. Distributing Co. to have a new Buick or Oldsmobile every other year. He wore good suits, ties, shirts and shoes, but he was no dandy. Nothing pretentious. Subdued. Honest and direct. Closed a deal with a handshake, confirmed it with a simple, straightforward contract that attested to his being good to his word.

The movie business was changing in the early 1970s. He didn’t like the pictures he had to sell and didn’t enjoy some of the new people he had to sell to.

He retired in 1972, a few months after I got my last diploma. He graduated to chip-and-putt, and he actually kept a few score cards.

That’s what he left behind: service discharge papers, a complete set of balanced bank statements; tax returns that were neat enough to make a penmanship primer; a few golf score cards; and about a dozen birthday and Father’s Day cards.

I got a lot from him. Still, he could have left me more of himself.