I look like my father.
Everyone says so; I’ve been hearing it for years.
While my sisters and I all share the same blue Bayne eyes, the two of them inherited more of my mother’s heart-shaped face and delicate features. My long nose and small mouth and the set of my sturdy chin, on the other hand, are unmistakably his.
It’s OK though. He was handsome in his youth and I’ve never minded having what I thought of as a masculine face. But the other day I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror – bald, a little puffy from the ‘roids – and thought, “Oh wow. I look like Dad.” In his later years, that is, when his once-healthy body was compromised by COPD, diabetes, gout, and edema.
I’m writing this on what would have been his 83rd birthday. He died the day after his 76th, seven years ago, in 2015. I was with him when he died, holding his right hand, my mother on his left, and in that moment when the breath left his body and he just … stopped … I felt some essence of him fly across the space between us and down my throat. It changed me, and cast me in a literal heartbeat across the chasm into the not-so-secret society of children with dead parents. I think about it, and him, more often than anyone knows, except maybe everyone else in this club.
After he died I was so grateful for every small act of kindness directed toward me and toward our family, but I also fought back a choking tide of shame when I recognized my own incuriosity towards friends who had lost a parent before me, had preceded me into the club. I didn’t know. I didn’t understand, at all. I don’t think you can, really, until you’ve been shoved through that veil yourself.
He struggled physically for years before the collapse that precipitated a swift six-month decline. In those six months he see-sawed in and out of the hospital with one complication or another, and I watched, a little awed, as a vast entourage of medical specialists converged to manage and calm his unwieldy body, for which walking across the room had become an insurmountable challenge. For a time afterward I even considered chucking my career and going back to school to become a physical therapist, an actually useful profession.
Now, seven years later, here I am in the valley of the sick myself and I’m having visceral memories of that period of my life. I have new layers of empathy for my father’s mobility struggles, as on bad days I get winded and dizzy climbing the stairs. I think deep thoughts about how only a few months ago I took the power of my body for granted. I am wondering if it is too late to study kinesthesiology. And I blush with shame when I think of how little I understood what friends with cancer were going through, as recently as a year ago.
But really, no one can really know and, honestly, that’s OK. I’m trying to make peace with the inexplicable parts of this process. How to narratively reconcile that one day I can’t get off the couch and two days later I decide to go to crew practice and a rock show? Or that occasional acquaintances have offered up comfort and succor that others, closer, can’t sometimes locate? It’s all OK.
I am in a spate of many trips to the hospital myself this past week: for chemo, of course; for a last-minute shot when the first one malfunctioned; to get rehydrated; to meet with surgeons; to get a whole new round of scans that will tell me what, exactly, happens next. It’s that phase when a lot is happening but it’s all so much, or so boring, or too tiring, to get into.
And it’s all OK. There shouldn’t be shame in not understanding what can’t be explained.
During the last six months of my father’s life I sat for days with him in his room at Virginia Mason Hospital in Seattle, recording his voice as he narrated the story of his life. “She’s helping me write my memoirs,” he quipped to the endless parade of nurses passing through to change the dressings on his legs, take his blood pressure, administer meds. It wasn’t the first time he’d been in one of these rooms, and it wasn’t going to be the last, but by then he was well known to the staff on the eighth floor, as well as their allies down in the ER and upstairs in the CCU, and they took my winking iPhone in stride.
My dad had actually started writing his life story a few years back, inspired in turn by a slim account written years before that by his father that traced his family history back to medieval Scotland, with a healthy degree of fancy. My grandfather, a prolific writer and a great fan of Trollope, wrote in the slyly satirical vein of the Barchester Chronicles, crossed with the genteel tone of a Talk of the Town columnist, circa 1935. My father’s voice, by contrast, was franker, less polished, but equally observant.
It was intimate there on the cardiac ward, listening to him talk, reminding him where he had left off before he’d been interrupted by lunch, or a visitor, or yet another wailing machine. I learned a lot of things I hadn’t known—facts about his younger life, such as the Navy days spent monitoring H-bomb tests in the South Pacific, and the trip he took to Italy with debonair Uncle Ned, who may or may not have been in the CIA. But what really stuck with me was how very large his own dynamic father, who died in 1974, at sixty-five, the day after my sixth birthday, loomed over his story, even forty-one years later.
My father and I walked a rocky road at times. He could be difficult. Demanding. Bossy and infuriating. But I never once doubted that he loved me, and these days, with toxic masculinity the national pastime and women’s rights being gleefully smashed by the patriarchs on Capitol Hill, I remember how gentle he was beneath the bombast and bluster. How he, himself, felt on some level misunderstood.
All that summer we passed transcripts of our hospital conversations back and forth through the ether, as I edited them down and then he added details he had forgotten in the moment. As he lay dying at home, I read aloud the story of his life from those pages. It seemed to soothe him to hear his words repeated back in his daughter’s voice. In the darkened room his restless legs calmed and his agitated mind grew quiet, and when, in time, he died it was perhaps his stories I felt cut loose with his last breath to fly into my chest and settle near my diaphragm, so that I could continue to breathe them in and out.
I look like my father, even at our worst, and that’s OK.
*Some of this is adapted from a piece I wrote for the Rumpus in 2016. I also wrote about this period with my dad, and about being heard, or understood, as it was happening in 2015 – so I guess it’s officially a theme.
We are all misunderstood so much of the time. That’s the crux of it. Why we keep writing, talking, pining. “And it’s all okay.”
Thanks for writing Martha.
I'm glad I read this.