My Father's Sadness
I ride in my dad's black car to my grandparents house. I am seven or eight years old, too young to know who they really are beyond their namesake. It is a Sunday afternoon. I watch the summer sun rays disappear and reappear between passing trees and houses. A lot of the houses in the neighborhood are unkempt and smaller than the house I live in.
Glitter like stars beckon on her stucco ceiling. I call it her house still but it belongs to her husband, the old man hunching over the kitchen table awash in cigarette smoke. He is huge but not strong or able-bodied. As I grow older he remains the same. Obese and stony and unclean. Perpetually confined within that chasm of a home, echoing at times with so much love and grief in equal parts.
We are not surprised when he dies. The consensus is that he had it coming with his stubborn negligence and myriad of health troubles, unknown and untreated. At the funeral the preacher speaks on the mercy of God. My father weeps. I don't fully understand why. Maybe it is because he knows he didn't go to heaven.
His daughter dies before he does. Pancreatic cancer. Sudden, unjustified. In the hospital rooms we pray and pray for her but he doesn't. He wears a black suit to the memorial, emerging out of the car like some fabled cave creature. His wife falters from the loss, never to stand upright again. Army men fold an American flag and bestow it to her by his casket. It is supposed to be a monument to old bravery and decorum.
Dad takes his antique pistols from the war. I take one of his knives. Among his belongings is a photograph of a man's severed head in a field. It doesn't look real. I see an image of the old man's fear, always locked inside but in truth not well hidden. He is a man born of the greatest generation but without any in him. Without affection.
My cousin speaks paternally of him at the graveyard. I knew he preferred him to me. When I was still in my mother's stomach he would say that he didn't approve of my given name. He'd call it a nigger name. And in that moment I would hate him, as I know his son must have. But my heritage is still his, even now. I must swallow indignation and honor him like a good boy when they put him in the ground.
I do not cry when his loving wife is suffocated by the same exact fate that befell her daughter. She is the last one to go, having endured the prolonged years of suffering and deaths of her loved ones. She spits up blood on the hospital bed with family and children gathered around to see it but I am not there. I receive a phone call that she is dead. I am not particularly hurt. A harsh numbness. My God. Am I like him?
All are gone now save their son. It seems that child is to be a pillar weathering the most hopeless inevitabilities of life. Of death, mistake, anguish. But he stands, however shakily and awkwardly. He will be dead before I am his age. In the car ride away from their house I am relieved and eager to go home. Somehow, looking back, I am grateful. For everything.
Glitter like stars beckon on her stucco ceiling. I call it her house still but it belongs to her husband, the old man hunching over the kitchen table awash in cigarette smoke. He is huge but not strong or able-bodied. As I grow older he remains the same. Obese and stony and unclean. Perpetually confined within that chasm of a home, echoing at times with so much love and grief in equal parts.
We are not surprised when he dies. The consensus is that he had it coming with his stubborn negligence and myriad of health troubles, unknown and untreated. At the funeral the preacher speaks on the mercy of God. My father weeps. I don't fully understand why. Maybe it is because he knows he didn't go to heaven.
His daughter dies before he does. Pancreatic cancer. Sudden, unjustified. In the hospital rooms we pray and pray for her but he doesn't. He wears a black suit to the memorial, emerging out of the car like some fabled cave creature. His wife falters from the loss, never to stand upright again. Army men fold an American flag and bestow it to her by his casket. It is supposed to be a monument to old bravery and decorum.
Dad takes his antique pistols from the war. I take one of his knives. Among his belongings is a photograph of a man's severed head in a field. It doesn't look real. I see an image of the old man's fear, always locked inside but in truth not well hidden. He is a man born of the greatest generation but without any in him. Without affection.
My cousin speaks paternally of him at the graveyard. I knew he preferred him to me. When I was still in my mother's stomach he would say that he didn't approve of my given name. He'd call it a nigger name. And in that moment I would hate him, as I know his son must have. But my heritage is still his, even now. I must swallow indignation and honor him like a good boy when they put him in the ground.
I do not cry when his loving wife is suffocated by the same exact fate that befell her daughter. She is the last one to go, having endured the prolonged years of suffering and deaths of her loved ones. She spits up blood on the hospital bed with family and children gathered around to see it but I am not there. I receive a phone call that she is dead. I am not particularly hurt. A harsh numbness. My God. Am I like him?
All are gone now save their son. It seems that child is to be a pillar weathering the most hopeless inevitabilities of life. Of death, mistake, anguish. But he stands, however shakily and awkwardly. He will be dead before I am his age. In the car ride away from their house I am relieved and eager to go home. Somehow, looking back, I am grateful. For everything.
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