I wish it had been otherwise; I wish that all doctors spoke honestly about death when it is imminent. But I can’t wholly blame those who fail to do so, because, on my own, I would have served my father and my family just as poorly. I am badly built for the kind of wisdom required in extremis: I love life too much, am too willing to gamble on terrible odds, too inclined to hope against hope for more hope. But I knew my sister was right on the day when she sat down beside me and told me, very gently, that even if by drastic intervention my father could be brought back from his precarious place out there on the edge of the end, we would be getting, in all the ways that mattered to us, less of him, not more. And I wept with gratitude when, finally, two doctors who were not on my father’s medical team but were simply his friends came by to see him and told us, when we asked, that if it were up to them, as people who also loved him very much, they would let him go.
And so, one afternoon, instead of continuing to try to stave off death, we unbarred the door and began to wait. It was a relief to watch a nurse bandage up the dialysis port in my father’s arm, remove the many sticky-backed sensors with their tangle of wires from his skin, and detach him from all his machines. She was infinitely gentle, with him and with us, the last of a thousand kindnesses from the nursing staff—all those blankets, all those compassionate words, all those questions answered and doctors summoned and extra chairs procured—before they transferred him to hospice care. When she was done, the rest of us gathered up our belongings and went down the hallway and up the elevator and settled, alongside my father, into his new and final room.
It was smaller and simpler than the one in the ICU, and much quieter. A few times a day, a nurse slipped in to check on him, but otherwise, we were alone with our thoughts and each other and, for one final spell, with my father. To my surprise, I found it comforting to be with him during this time, to sit by his side and hold his hand and watch his chest rise and fall with a familiar little riffle of snore. It was not, as they say, unbearably sad; on the contrary, it was bearably sad—a tranquil, contemplative, lapping kind of sorrow. I thought, as it turns out mistakenly, that what I was doing during those days was making my peace with his death. But I have learned since then that even one’s unresponsive and dying father is, in some extremely salient way, still alive.
And then, very early one morning, he was not. I remember the way my mind absented itself immediately, so that the few cool syllables to which I had access seemed almost to have formed outside of me: so this is it. I remember feeling simultaneously heavy and empty, like a steel safe with nothing inside. I remember seeing my little niece place a letter she had written to her grandpa on his chest, where, for all the long moments that I looked at it, it failed to move. But what I remember most from those first hours after my father died is watching my mother cradle the top of his bald head in her hand. A wife holding her dead husband, without trepidation, without denial, without any possibility of being cared for in return, just for the chance to be tender toward him one last time: it was the purest act of love I’d ever seen. She looked bereft, beautiful, unimaginably calm. He did not yet look dead. He looked like my father. I could not stop picturing the way he used to push his glasses up onto his forehead to read. It struck me, right before everything else struck me much harder, that I should set them by his bed in case he needed them.
* * *
—
So began my long sojourn in the Valley of Lost Things. Three weeks after my father died, I lost another family member, this one to cancer. Three weeks after that, in the tenth inning of the seventh game, my hometown baseball team lost the World Series—an outcome that wouldn’t have particularly affected me if my father hadn’t been such a passionate fan. One week later, Hillary Clinton, together with a little over half this nation’s voters, lost the presidential election.
Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom during that difficult fall could I distinguish my distress over these other losses from my sadness about my father. I had maintained my composure during his memorial service, even while delivering the eulogy. But when the son of the deceased stood up to speak at the second funeral, I wept. Afterward, I couldn’t shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop—that I would learn at any moment that someone else close to me had died. The morning after the election, I cried again, missing my refugee father, missing the future I had thought would unfold. In its place, other kinds of losses suddenly seemed imminent as well: of civil rights, personal safety, financial security, the foundational American values of respect for dissent and difference, the institutions and protections of democracy.
For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of both actual and imagined grief. I couldn’t stop picturing catastrophes, both political and personal. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn’t answer her phone, hated to see my sister board an airplane, could barely let my partner get in a car. “So many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and as much or more than my specific unhappiness, it was just that—the sheer quantity and inevitability of further suffering—that undid me.
Yet for all that I wanted to keep those I loved close, even their presence occasioned a certain amount of pain. One consequence of losing a parent—obvious enough, although it hadn’t occurred to me beforehand—is that it reconfigures the rest of your family. All my life, it had been the four of us; to the extent that had ever changed, it had only been joyfully, in the direction of more. But part of mourning my father involved acclimating to a new family geometry, a triangle instead of a square. As a unit, we were smaller, differently balanced, and, at first, unavoidably sadder.
A large part of that sadness was the terrible severing of my father from my mother. I had spent a decade worrying about him, but almost immediately after he died, as if by some law of conservation of anxiety, my fears redirected themselves toward my mother. These were not, for the most part, about her physical health, which was considerably better than his had been. Instead, what worried me was the gaping emptiness in her life after a half century of my father’s steadfast presence. “I can’t imagine her without him,” people routinely say of those who have lost a spouse, but my problem was that I imagined it constantly. As often as not, in those early days, my own grief took the form of being undone by the thought of my mother going about her days alone.