Chapter Thirty-Three An Education
Thirty-Three
An Education
During the final weeks of my father’s life David and I talked throughout each day. Most nights we also sent each other—and I don’t know how this started, only that it was the best thing I’d ever seen on a screen, better than Clueless , better than The Wire —short instructional videos we made each other, presented in a community college lecture format.
There were lessons explaining the buttons on flannel shirts, the clasps of a bra. As a teacher, I was exasperated with the administration, which continued to refuse me a parking spot closer to campus, and with my hapless students, who stumbled over basic skills like unzipping a zipper: “Because this has been a recurring question in office hours: No, you don’t pull it up, you pull it down , like this.”
He played the part of a fresh-out-of-a-master’s-program sincere instructor who believed deeply in his students’ potential, espousing lofty aphorisms about the power of education as he pulled off a blazer, exposing his muscular arms: “Did you know that a C minus can be the best thing that ever happened to you if you take it in the right spirit?”
We both showed up for class even when we were tired, because it was our job and because deep down we really did feel for those dumb kids who needed twenty lessons in how to take off a shirt.
The morning before my father died, David had Zoomed in, clothed, while I was making pancakes. I told him to talk to my mother and aunt for a minute while I got the last ones off the griddle. Then I grabbed my laptop and whisked him into the other room. When I returned, the two women were aflutter.
“He’s very handsome!” Kath said. “He looks like a boarding-school headmaster who could also build you shelves.”
“Yes, and you just like him immediately!” my mother said.
When I told him the Auden line that my father in his delirium had dismissed, he said, “I’d always prefer to be the lover than the beloved. The lover gets to love .”
Again, so sweet. So sincere. He kept after me about considering Petrarch.
At the end of the day my father died, Nate arrived at what was now just my mother’s house along with more members of the family. We sat around and ate and talked. While I refilled coffee cups and listened to everyone’s stories, I realized that my relationship with my father hadn’t changed very much over time, but by the time he died I had changed.
In college, my flirtatious astronomy professor had told me on the phone one night that NASA had sent a capsule into space, Voyager II, with messages in many languages, photos of human beings, and a map of our DNA, “basically everything they’d need to wipe us off the map.” Sharing my inner thoughts and hopes with my father had often felt like this—handing him the tools to hurt my feelings. And again and again, he did.
He had a talent for uttering lapidary phrases that stuck in my head and took on the weight of scripture. Some were elegant and funny. Of a county fair demolition derby: “Your whole life you try not to run into other cars. And then for a few glorious moments that’s the goal.” Others were confusing. He’d say, of something I’d written that he didn’t like, “It doesn’t seem like you had fun writing it.”
What does that mean ? I’d wonder. Am I having fun writing this? I’d ask myself as I looked at my computer screen for years, for decades. If I asked him what he’d meant by a line like that he rarely remembered saying it. But what he said continued to matter to me even when it became clear that he’d just liked the sound of those particular words coming out of his mouth in that moment.
In Oceania, a Vanuatu tribe formed a cargo cult around Prince Philip in the middle of the last century, believing him to be the son of a mountain spirit. That was like me and my father. I never could stop hoping for his affection and approval. I was repeatedly popping up out of a Whac-A-Mole board like it was my job to get hit.
That ended the week he died. Where in the past I would have told him what I was thinking about, even knowing he’d probably say something that would hurt my feelings, I held back. Many times in those final days, I almost said, “I’m in love. He’s wonderful. He’s so smart and kind. You don’t need to worry about me being alone.”
But I didn’t. Because the truth was he wasn’t worried about me; he wasn’t thinking about me at all. If my whole life I’d been Charlie Brown running to kick Lucy’s football, now, for the first and last time, I was hugging Lucy and saying, “I love you, so I’m going to spare us this depressing charade.”
At the last possible moment I learned that to be the more loving one to him I had to stop being vulnerable. I learned, at last, to pay the fuck attention, to love him for who he was, not to set him up to disappoint me and then blame him for doing exactly what we both knew he would do.
I stayed silent. I fed him berries. I tucked him into bed. I played him Beethoven. I felt his heart beating and then not beating. I buried him. That would have to do.