On the surface, I had nothing in common with Patrick Melrose and his father had nothing in common with mine. But in that way of good fiction, Bad News prodded an uncomfortable personal question: What happens when an estranged parent dies? How do you tie up the complex emotions in a foreshortened amount of time? A deathbed reconciliation—too late, compromised, of questionable sincerity—might feel cheap or, worse, thwarted. There would be guilt, and regrets.
The year before, on New Year’s Day, my father had been diagnosed with stage IV esophageal cancer. People aren’t supposed to start dying when you’re angry at them, and my dad and I had barely been on speaking terms for months. He certainly wasn’t a monster like Patrick Melrose’s father; on the contrary, for most of my life, he and I had been close. But over the previous year we’d had a near-total falling-out; at times I felt like I hated him and, worse, that he hated me. Never do business with family is such a sensible maxim, it’s a wonder so few people follow it. I certainly didn’t, and instead made the mistake of hiring my dad, a commercial contractor nearing retirement, to renovate my house in Harlem. How much time and money and headache I’d save, was the deluded thought going in.
Ten months of construction later, a period in which my family shuffled from floor to floor, fleeing dust and heavy demolition, cursing the construction workers who left behind a trail of half-empty Snapple bottles with cigarette butts swimming in the murk and child hazards everywhere—staircases without banisters, abrupt holes in the floor, rusty nails in the hallway—my father and I could barely tolerate each other.
Our tense exchanges occasionally flared into fights in which we’d forcefully denounce each other from across the living room. I feel horrendous about it now and felt dreadful then, even if everyone agreed he had become impossible.
I wish I could rewrite this part. My father had always been an irrepressible storyteller, refining and repeating cherished anecdotes over the years; I’d like to brush this story up. My father could have continued to be the same character he’d always been—the raconteur and the indulger and the practical joker. His final years could have been marked by a growing kinship, my father imparting wisdom to his grandchildren and sharing memories of his own childhood and parents. I’d be able to say that our mutual affection only deepened with time. This is the story I would have liked to write, and I would have been a better character in it, too, a solace and a sweetness to my father in his years of decline.
He had been deteriorating for a long time. About ten years earlier, there had been three botched knee surgeries, one of which involved a nasty case of drug-resistant staphylococcus. Once an avid tennis player and hiker, he was no longer able to walk farther than a block, perpetually in search of a bench. Everything slowed down, including his curiosity, no longer free to roam. His default position was to splay his increasingly overweight form into a recliner, from which he’d only emerge accompanied by a stream of loud exertions. When he wasn’t complaining, he was coughing up a hair-raising amount of phlegm and spitting it out the car window to universal dismay.
In 2011 he had received a questionable diagnosis of Wegener’s granulomatosis, a rare autoimmune disorder. Even though tests were never able to confirm the diagnosis, his doctors prescribed all manner of antibiotics and sedatives; he sometimes fell asleep while driving, once with my children in the backseat. No more picking the kids up from school. Unable to climb stairs but deep in denial, he stopped overseeing the construction work in my house. Problems mounted; so did costs.
A creeping black mold began to fester underneath the freshly installed, opalescent green tiles in my kids’ newly renovated bathroom, creating dark garlands around their bottles of shampoo like an insidious omen. Each night, the murky growth wended its way beneath a new rectangle of artisanal, recycled glass, my one splurge in the renovation. “It’s just the color of the glass!” my father repeated angrily every time I mentioned the sprawling decay. Or alternately, “It’s settling in. That happens with tile over time!” The tile was three months old.
Sedated and autosuppressed, my father was no longer himself. Never what one would call an easy person, he had nonetheless been a character, the kind all my friends fell for and grew to love. People always wanted to spend Thanksgiving at our house, primarily, I think, for my father’s company. Everyone who knew him felt tremendous affection, and relished his all too imitable mannerisms. My brothers and I called it “speaking in Jerry” and we did so regularly among ourselves. A lot of it was about the Brooklyn accent and the hand gestures, usually indicating fatigue or dismissal, but there were also a few key phrases, such as:
???“I got Hank on the other line.” This was something you’d say when you needed to hang up the phone or were just ready to say good-bye. Hank was my father’s construction supervisor and the two of them back-and-forthed all day, first on a walkie-talkie, then on a car phone, and finally by cell. For maximum effect, my brothers and I would say it the moment the other person had begun sharing something deep or meaningful.
???“Horseshit!” This we would cry out in response to anything perfectly acceptable and true. You would have to say it with a decisive note, end of discussion.
???“Do you know what I find fascinating?” This could be Ulster County cemeteries, time dilation, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Powell and Pressburger, Balinese handicrafts, or the crazy people who still attended meetings of the Lincoln Brigade. My brothers and I would use it as a preface to anything deserving of time and attention.
???“Seriously, Pammy.” This is what my father did when he reprimanded me or delivered tough counsel. My brothers would use it to indicate I’d said something foolish.
As my father grew sicker with a disease he didn’t know he had and increasingly medicated for a disease he probably didn’t, his Jerryisms waned. He became depressed, less conversational, more easily frustrated, and prone to outbursts. When his own mother had been alive, he’d ridiculed her for her gratuitously explicit descriptions of physical ailments; now he offered up the same vivid detail. At first, we thought he was imitating her as a joke, but he either became serious over time or had been serious all along. I was regularly treated to a lurid blow-by-blow of his most recent colonoscopy or toenail gone awry.