A Conversation with My Father

 

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.