Guest Post – Ashes in California: A reflection on the end of my father

After I’d left for Oregon to attend college, Mum called. She had taken Father to the emergency room for chest pains. It was his first heart attack. In spite of all the time I’d spent trying to think my way around grief or fear, I was nervous, desolated, and a little excited by the drama of it all. Friends of mine drove up from Sacramento so they could give me a ride to the hospital. The sun sank behind the hills. We drove fast through the dark fields of rural northern California. The road ahead was foggy. The cabin of the tiny Volkswagen, where the blaring radio glowed, held the only visible light. My friends joked. I gripped the hand beside me.

Father was swaddled in hospital clothes and thin blankets, his hair a mad mess. I took a video to keep with my collection of his voicemails.

“This is what I was like before,” he said, looking into the lens. He smiled, and then stuck his tongue out.

After that crisis, my approach softened. I was more interested in setting aside time, though not all of it, to see him; in behaving with tenderness when it seemed honest; and in talking proudly about him, and in agreement with him. 

When I sat by his hospital bed the following year, I shared what feeble, obvious sentimentalities I could: That I loved him, that I would miss him, that I appreciated all he had made me. I tried to keep it simple, in part so my voice would quaver as little as possible, and in part because – for all my consideration – I wasn’t sure what I could add to our time together. I remember crying. Not a great flow, but one or two warm, constricted tears, and I think he held my hand.

The next day, his operation was postponed. A friend who had been visiting him to talk about poetry took me to a drive-thru coffee shack.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do when he’s gone,” my friend said as we waited for our turn, the car idling in line. “Life’s going to be so different.”

“No, it’s not. It’s going to be painfully the same,” I said. “That’s the tragedy: We want the death to be big and life-changing but nothing changes. Every once in a while, we’ll get an idea to go see him and then we’ll remember we can’t. The world’s the same. Just a little poorer.”

My father came out of the surgery fine: an indefinite reprieve, a little longer to figure out how to make his death matter.

In 2018, I was accepted to grad school in New York. I credit this acceptance in large part to a personal essay I wrote describing my father’s ascetic approach to life — an apartment empty of most luxuries, but verdant with books, where all of his waking life, more or less, was spent studying and writing about the subjects of his passion — and how I felt that,irrespective of our many differences, if I was “my father’s son,” it was because I had inherited his monastic devotion to the subjects of my interest (My father, whose own pater had died well before Father was old enough to go to university, in turn credited his acceptance to Oxford to an essay about Bach’s B Minor Mass)

However, this acceptance — in combination with my family’s finances — meant I was going to be far from my home state indefinitely. Because I would not see many old friends for quite some time, and because Father had relinquished the apartment in which we’d lived together in favor of a nursing home, I stayed most of that summer as a guest of friends throughout California. It was only near the end of that summer that I saw him.

I visited him in his nursing home. Most of his things had been moved to the storage unit, but he had brought some small shelves with him. Across from the electric hospital bed in which he slept and worked, these had been deployed along the wall and filled with books on Russia, drone strikes, religious extremism, and protest art. Above his head was a photograph of his father, an officer in the Royal Navy who’d died young of a heart attack. Next to Father’s bed was a swivel table built to slide over his bed to provide a surface for food. His laptop occupied it and left only so much room as was filled by notepads and a mug stained with instant coffee grounds. Mum liked to joke that all my father had ever wanted was to stay in bed, writing, while food was brought to him, and he’d finally arranged it. She joked too that, when the nursing home had received him they had not thought he had the look of a long staying tenant. But Father had some secret vitality that was loathe to give up his endless work.

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