The last week of his life, I spent just about every minute at my dad's side. I'm still struggling to process the rapidity of the decline. We're talking barely more than a week. Much of the time, especially when we were alone, I stared at his face, his hands, his shoulders, his feet. I was trying to keep what I could forever, knowing that these features would soon be gone from my sight. His essential personhood was literally draining away, and I needed to be with as much of my dad as was still available to me, knowing I would have to make it last the rest of my own life.
I remember mentioning this to someone - my wife maybe, a friend maybe, I'm not sure anymore - and he or she asked why I would want to devote my energy to remembering the last days, of all things. I couldn't put it together at the time, but it makes sense now. I wasn't concentrating on remembering those last days. I was taking what I had left and using it to try and gather in all the good memories and good feelings from all the time long past. Time that now felt squandered, because it had become extremely limited. I didn't see how withered and pale his features had become. To me, they represented what he had been in his prime.
Years ago I had a temp at my office who was studying to go into a real estate career. His fascination was with its finite supply. Never mind that at the time there were huge piles of cash in real estate. He told me again and again that the thing that interested him in real estate was that, "They aren't making any more of it." I think that's debatable, but it helps explain why it was so important to me that last week to take in every contour of what my dad looked like.
Of course, in terms of genetics, they did make more of my dad. They made me. We all get older and examine our behavior, and many of us recoil in mock-terror when we see that we're acting like our parents once did. Some of us see their faces in the mirror. Whole careers in entertainment have been built on this. Myself, I see little reminders all over the place. My hands are my dad's. My knees. My unfortunate belly. The tone of my voice sometimes. My habits, good and bad. My inclinations and attitudes, again, the good and the bad. A lot of small things, too.
I wish I believed in some form of afterlife, but I really don't. I sincerely crave the comfort so many people get from trusting that we'll all be together again somewhere, somehow. I'm just not wired for that kind of faith. But absent the hope of spending time with my dad again - a hope I assume I would have to nurture for decades - I can take a little comfort in feeling like he is with me all the time. He's baked right in. As he went through his sixties, naturally he started looking much more like my grandpa. As I make my way through my thirties, I am definitely looking more like my dad when he was my age. George Clooney and Brad Pitt are probably reading this and shitting themselves.
