Questions

I fly down the freeway, relishing this chance to be alone in a vehicle, saying nothing, thinking nothing. But as the distance to my dad’s house diminishes, I know I need to gather my thoughts. Or at least have some thoughts. It surprises me, the mental effort it takes to reach over and turn off the radio.

Four days ago, I went with two of my brothers to visit my dad. He sat in his cushiony chair, smiling faintly as our conversation bounced around him. My brothers and I laughed about children, discussed current movies, and grasped at any topic that would fend off the approaching reality. But too soon my dad cleared his throat and frivolity floated away. He gently explained into the silence that he didn’t want the surgery. Chemo had done nothing but deplete him, he said, strip him of his usefulness, show him there is a kind of living worse than dying. This last-gasp pneumonectomy would only deepen his suffering and guarantee nothing. He wouldn’t do it.

But maybe, we pressed, when the chemo wears off. When you’ve gotten some strength back, maybe you’ll feel more hope. He just shook his head as we looked at each other through blurry eyes and our throats squeezed tight so the words couldn’t come.   

And now I’ve made arrangements for my preschooler and set off in my minivan on the sixty-minute drive back to his house. We’ll have four hours together, the two of us, while his wife, Michele, works in her home office. A block of time without distractions—no children to chase, no siblings to commandeer the conversation. When have I ever had four hours alone with my father?

As I stare at the road I can sense my future self—the fatherless me, the me with the clarity of hindsight—gazing reproachfully at my present self, demanding to know why I left words unspoken and questions unasked. But what are the words? What are the questions? My mind is like cotton and my chest is clanging and hollow. I turn the radio back on.

When I get to his house I find it’s not just me and my dad after all. It’s me and my dad and cancer, which has taken even more of him in the last four days and is yanking our time out from under us. He’s sitting in the same chair, but he’s smaller somehow, and I fidget for long moments as he grimaces and struggles to speak. I help him rearrange his pillow and heating pad, then sit back down and watch my father turn ancient before my eyes.

Maybe I look distressed, because he manages to mumble, “Don’t worry, Aim, I’m not dying or anything.” He glances at me sideways. “Not right this minute, I mean.”

After a while the pain seems to settle and he finds the strength to speak. But every word is an effort; every sentence costs him. I open a box Michele brought up from the basement and find stacks of loose photographs tossed together into a jumble of eras that make up his life. Snapshots of my childhood porch filled with grinning jack-o'-lanterns mingle with astounding black-and-white photos of my toddler dad in a round little snowsuit, beaming next to snowbanks twice his height.

I grab a pen from my bag and start to take notes, labeling the backs of pictures as he identifies unknown relatives and long-ago trips. He tells me stories and I write it all down—the name of his fourth-grade teacher, who wrote funny plays and gave him an “itch to perform” that lay dormant for almost half a century; the summer he spent in California visiting his grandma, who was “kind but a little bit scary”; the time he and his brother found a rifle in their dad’s car and his brother shot a hole clean through the door.

I could keep this up for hours, but my dad is diminishing. Michele comes out and gives him pills, helps him to his bedroom. “Just give me thirty minutes or so to rest while these pills kick in,” he says as he winces away. “Then we’ll talk.”

Alone, I flip through more photos. I mess with my phone. I stare at the clock that refuses to stop its damn march. I check in with my heart and feel nothing. Until I go into the bathroom. The click of the lock calls out tears I didn’t know were there. I turn on the fan to muffle the sound. I can’t even look in the mirror, at the me who is almost gone. The me with a father breathing in the next room. The me who should know what to do but instead holds her breath as she waits for the storm to hit.

Later, my dad calls me to his room. “Maybe we can talk in here?” he asks from the bed. It seems the pills aren’t doing their job. But he wants to tell me his wishes for funeral music. So I grab my notebook and sit in a chair next to him. Once again I’m furiously taking dictation.

“‘How Great Thou Art’ is my favorite hymn,” he says between sips of water from a hospital mug. “As a boy I’d lie on my back on the roof of the chicken coop at night and just stare at the sky. It thrilled me, the universe. The worlds that God created.” And questions start forming in my mind, questions I couldn’t find on the drive here. The questions I would ask right this minute if he had the stamina to answer them.

Did you ever want to be a scientist? Why did you go with construction management? I remember a bedroom in Grandpa’s house with old glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling—that was your old room, wasn’t it? Remember when you took us out on the back porch to look at Mars through some junky old telescope? Remember when I was working on a report about space and you got out a basketball for the sun and a baseball for the earth, and you made me hold the sun so you could make the baseball orbit and rotate at the same time? Did you ever want to be a teacher?

Can we go out in some field one more time, Dad, and you can show me again all the constellations you know? I’ll forget about the licorice you brought and the mosquitoes that won’t leave me alone, and I’ll lie on the blanket next to you and learn all the stars by heart so I’ll never forget. Can we?

The watch on my dad’s wrist tells me school will be out soon. I have to go back. I sit in that folding chair like a rock, watching his chest rise and fall, and my legs won’t let me move. I’m not finished here. I’m not ready. But he is struggling to stay awake and it hurts too much to talk. It hurts.

I keep the radio off the whole way home.