Last November, a week after I had last seen him, my father passed out while sweeping the driveway (he’s the kind of man who sweeps the driveway, the kind of man who thinks something like passing out is caused by having had either too much coffee or not enough coffee), and within 24 hours of being admitted to the emergency room, he was told he had leukaemia. The doctors said that without treatment he had about six weeks to live. He was 58.
He decided to go for it — of course he did. He felt fine, he said, bragging that he had never taken a sick day from work in his life, that he was otherwise exceptionally healthy. One doctor tried to warn us that my father would be receiving “the strongest chemotherapy on the planet”. Whatever, we thought: This doctor did not know my dad the way we knew him. He is tough, mean even; chemotherapy should be afraid of him, I thought.
We were so optimistic that our biggest worry early on was how we were going to keep my father entertained during the minimum four-week stay in the hospital. This was my father’s biggest worry as well. “I have no excuse now, huh?” he said to me just as this all started, weeks before he would end up on a ventilator and on dialysis, machines doing the work his lungs and kidneys couldn’t do. “I gotta read your books now, don’t I?” He didn’t mean because I might die. His excuse had always been that he was too busy to read my books, that his work as an electrical inspector for the city left him too drained.
The double whammy of his having cancer and his admitting he would have to read my work made me think, This is it. This is what it took. We will finally learn how to talk to each other and he will no longer be this cold mystery to me. I decided this was the kind of positive thinking the doctors were encouraging us to have.
Very soon after that, things got much worse, and so he never read the books. That makes it sound as if he died, but that’s not what happened (although he almost died a couple of times) — he is, in fact, as of May, in remission. But he never read my work because, ultimately, he just didn’t want to, for reasons he probably won’t ever explain to me, for reasons that will probably haunt everything I ever write.
Part of me understands his reluctance: I can say with confidence that literature has never brought him comfort (it was, after all, my mum who took me to the library and taught me how to read). What brings my father comfort is work. When the high carbon dioxide levels in his blood began to affect his brain function, he kept hallucinating that he was pressing buttons on an iPad, trying and failing to submit inspection reports. He feverishly warned us about a failed fire inspection, saying that there were problems with the ceiling tiles. One of the last things he said to me before becoming unresponsive was that he needed me to “hit the refresh button”, swearing as he thrashed in his bed, “It’s not up to code!”
“He’s going to a place where he feels confident,” the psychologist assigned to our family told us the day before my father had to be placed on a ventilator. We couldn’t believe it: Even in his delirium, even as he slipped closer to the possible end of his life, my father was going to work.
At the end of May, our family spent a week together at the beach, an impromptu celebration with the stated aim of helping us relax after everything we’d been through.
Over pizza one night, I got brave enough to ask my father what he planned on changing about his life now that he was healthy.
“I’m not healthy,” he said. “I have to get tested again in three months.”
Because one of the things I want to change about my life is my fear of him, I pressed on: “OK, fine, let’s go with that. Let’s say in three months, when you get tested, the cancer is back. What are you gonna do with the next three months, before you go into the hospital for more treatment?”
He looked away and said, all his patience gone, “Worry about having cancer again.”
I didn’t know what to say to this, so I posed the question to my sister: What about you, you have three months to really live — what would you do with it?
“I don’t know,” she said. “Watch TV? I’d probably just watch TV.”
“Are you serious?” I pressed my fingers to the sides of my nose.
My mum spoke up then: “I would go to Spain. I have always wanted to go there.”
“Spain is really cool. I love Spain,” my sister said. Of the four of us, she’s the only one who’s been there, and she tends to remind us of this fact whenever that country comes up in conversation.
“Wait, you guys should go to Spain!” I said. “You should go, like, tomorrow.”
My father leaned forward and rubbed his hands over his whole face and head, his palms scrubbing the hair that had already grown back.
My mum asked me, “What about you?”
Three months felt like nothing, and without warning and before I could articulate an answer, I started to cry. “What?” my mum said, laughing sweetly at my sudden tears.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I just thought about how there’s no way I could finish writing a book in three months, and even if I could, there’s no way I’d get to see it out in the world.”
My mum sat back from the table and said: “You’re crying like that about work? You wouldn’t spend those three months with your family?” I sputtered back, defensive as usual, “Uh, well, none of us said family, you didn’t say family, did you?” My dad stood up from the table and took his pizza slice to the couch, letting out a big burp followed by, “Whatever”.
When our time in the hospital started — while my dad was still relatively well, before the effects of chemo had floored him entirely — I found myself trying to keep us all entertained with a personality quiz. Reading from the list of questions, I asked my father what three things he was better at than most people.
His first, immediate answer: Driving.
After a little thought, he gave us his second answer: “Fixing almost anything.” (“That’s true,” my mum half whispered, not wanting to interrupt. “Remember that time he fixed the dryer after that rat got stuck in it?”)
His third answer, on the heels of my mum’s comment: “Holding my feelings in — no, keeping my emotions — putting them into work, putting them there.”
My sister and I tried to hide our surprise at how plainly he’d stated this, at the fact that he saw this as a strength. My mum nodded, not surprised at all. And I wrote all of this down as precisely as I could, as I always have, doing the work of filling more pages he will never make himself read.
— New York Times News Service
Jennine Capo Crucet, the author of the novel Make Your Home Among Strangers, is an assistant professor of English and Ethnic Studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln and a contributing opinion writer.
