A Conversation with My Father
Idea and title freely and shamelessly stolen
from Grace Paley’s short story
My father, a formerly robust man, a man who
lived hard, lived it up, never lived it down, lay dying. Having
lost nearly half of his body mass, he appeared as a fragile skeleton, an image
of weakness he would find appalling. The man who proudly served in WWII,
who could fix anything, and who always saw the possibility of a better tomorrow
could no longer walk 15 feet to the bathroom without help. He could not
sit without help. He could not stay awake for more than a few minutes at
a time.
He asked me, “What is it you’re trying to
prove? You know, in your research?” I was in my fourth year of
graduate school working on magnetic and electronic properties of intercalated
titanium diselenides. They exhibited this very cool magnetic behavior
mediated by conduction electrons but I didn’t really want to explain all
this to him. So, I answered vaguely,
“Dad, I am looking at some compounds that have
interesting magnetic properties.”
“What good is that?” he asked. He wasn’t the only one. “Why don’t you
study cancer and help people like me?”
What could I say? That there were already people
studying cancer? Lots of them? That my advisor was inspiring and
treated his graduate students like valued colleagues? That my research
was interesting to me because it probed fundamental interactions between
electrons and seemed to bring the philosophically fascinating, yet esoteric and
non-intuitive, field of quantum mechanics to the realm of concrete
reality?
I punted. Ignoring the fact that studying cancer would require me to
start grad school all over again, I just said, “Dad, I’ll think about
it.”
“Good. I hope you can find a cure in time
for me.”
Dad always thought I could do anything.
Even the impossible. As my number one fan, he thought I was charming and that
my life was charmed. He once said, “Deberini, you could reach into a
bucket of shit and pull out a gold watch. And it would still be
running.”
And he was right, in a way. I certainly
reached into my share of shit buckets and somehow things kept working out
ok. Working out well. Great even.
But there was no finding a gold watch in
the bucket of lung cancer that was destroying his 59 year-old body. Any
watch in there was running down and there was nothing that my mom, my brother,
my sister, or I could do. There was nothing the doctors could do.
Dad was not blessed with my apparent good
luck. It seemed like he could reach into a bucket of gold watches and
pull out a piece of shit. Nothing seemed to work in his favor. His
life seemed to be a series of disappointments and failures.
As Dad lay dying, it was easy to avoid those
conversations that might have helped him make peace with his life. We
lived a six hour drive away and only saw him on weekends. We were careful
to keep our conversations general. The weather. The news. The
dinner menu. He’d complain that my mom didn’t chop the onions
finely enough. That she was always putting that goddamned protein powder
in his food and it tasted bad. How he was trying to get her to quit
smoking because it could kill her too.
But nothing about his life. Nothing about
his years in Europe during WWII where he was ordered to kill people who spoke
his mother’s native language. Nothing about the anxiety and depression
that led him to smoke 2 packs of cigarettes each day and drink himself into a
stupor every night. Nothing about his dreams that never
materialized. Nothing about the house he lovingly built for his family
but then lost in a foreclosure when finances, as always, went south. Nothing
about his professional zenith and pride in being part of a team that launched
the first upper atmosphere weather balloon, or the humiliation of an abrupt
termination for cause soon after the successful launch. Nothing about his
shame and disappointment that he did not and could not reliably provide for his
family. Nothing about those nights he avoided us by sitting in the car
until we were all asleep and then sneaking in silently.
Nor did I tell Dad about the day we bicycled to
Crater Lake in Oregon and I cried for 100 miles as we coasted down the mountain
to Grants Pass because I wanted to show him beauty in the world but I knew he
would never regain strength. I did not tell him that my love for
bicycling started with the used red two-wheeler that he cleaned up for me,
adding training wheels so I wouldn’t fall. I didn’t mention that my
brother raised those training wheels whenever Dad wasn’t home and then lowered
them again so he wouldn’t worry about me falling. I didn’t
tell him that I was scared when he left me alone in the car at night while he
was inside a bar but that I loved the times he piled all the neighborhood
kids into that same car and took us to Carvel’s for soft serve ice cream with a
peppermint dip.
I did not tell Dad how much he hurt us- the
lies, the unkept promises, the stealing. I didn’t tell him how confused I was
on my tenth birthday when he hid in bed in the darkened bedroom and said he
didn’t deserve to join us for my birthday dinner. I didn’t tell him how
relieved I was when he finally came to the table.
I did not give him the chance to tell me that he
didn’t mean to hurt us, and that he was sorry. Letters addressed to my
mother, found decades after his death, revealed the depth of his shame,
humiliation and regret. I did not get to forgive him.
I regret that we never talked about any of these
things because the end came, and with it, the possibility of a conversation
with my father.
