Dad

This post is dedicated to my older sister Chavi. She is kind enough to discuss baby health matters with my wife. And, of course, as new parents that is a thing that we are always scared about. I'm glad I can offer my wife, through no work of my own, the generosity of my sister. And I'm sure in more than one dimension Chavi's solicitude is inherited from my father.

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I remember the day my father told me he had cancer. I was twenty and I must have been in University of Maryland. My father asked me to go on a walk with him. That was something we didn't do much, certainly not as a pair. (In later life I got my father on a few walks alone and that was the wisest thing I have ever done. If only I had done it more. But he balks at certain things with his kids. Complicated.). We walked around the Kersey block; it was a short walk. I can't remember anything specific of the conversation only that I was so angry at him for his tone. Everything he said about the cancer was spoken in a gentle, mild, fully-digested tone. Now that I am older, and I am a father who must work to dismiss anxieties around my daughter, I know it must have taken him hours/days/weeks of constant and uncomfortable reflection and meditation to distill that terrible news, that anxiety-twisting and gut-wrenching bunch of emotions, into an even and balanced explanation for his children. Though no doubt terrified, he refused to communicate off-centeredness to his family. A priority for him was that his family should continue, and not worry, especially over things out of our control.

I yelled or maybe complained. His tone was too even, maddeningly resigned. I quoted the poem by Dylan Thomas: "Rage against the dying of the light!" I can't imagine I made much sense. I was not a good communicator at that point in my life.

I know he took all my siblings on that same walk. He was very democratic sometimes.

Even though he reassured me that the doctors estimated that he would live "another five to thirty years," I began preparing for his death immediately. I spent many years feeling the impending shadow of his death. I thought I would be prepared, anyway. Pretty arrogant. When he died, as bad as he looked and as much as he was suffering, I could not have been more unprepared. Total shock, like a swoon. Sickness and death, how can you really prepare for them. How can I allow the people I love to die.