A farewell, a blessing, and an expectation (2018)

Our station wagon pulled to the curb. My mother leaned across me in the front seat and pointed up wide, white marble steps to the entrance of a hospital. I climbed out alone. It was early February 1973 in New Haven, Connecticut. I was eleven years old—so thin, with such a big head and so much thick hair, that I looked like a pencil with a novelty eraser at the top. I carried a traveling chess set.

My father was dying of cancer, and I came to play chess with him. He had been home a few times, for a few weeks, since last summer. Each time he returned to the hospital, they changed his room. Each time they changed his room, I learned to find him. Turn left here. Take a right there. This door. That stairwell. This floor. Trousers high above my ankles, shirt sleeves far from my wrists, I was the only child among gurneys and wheelchairs, doctors and nurses.

He would die in March. March was a few weeks away from where I stood now, in the doorway of his room, clutching the chess set. He lay in bed. He was so emaciated that his head looked huge on his body like mine did, except he wore a wig. I watched him until he noticed me.

Last spring, in the months before he fell sick, we started playing chess. A scrap of paper hung thumbtacked to the bulletin board in our kitchen where we marked how many games we each won. I passed the paper at eye level, morning and night, and every time it reminded me of how the kitchen felt with him in it. He used to sit leaning back in his chair, feet straight out in front of him, laughing and teasing and asking exactly the right questions. We would take the thumbtack out and mark the paper on the counter. One mark each time we won. I had won only once before.

I won today. Which I appreciated. Doctors came and went. Nurses came and went. There was no missing how sick he was, although I stared hard at the chessboard. I remember the brown and white squares, the crease in the middle where it folded into a box, and the tiny, tubular brass hinges.

Then the chess set was back together—board folded, clasp hooked, pieces rattling inside. I was leaving. He had been sitting up to play. He lay back in bed.

I tucked the box under my arm and remembered my coat. My arm was in the second sleeve when he said, “I will miss you.”

At that moment, I knew he was going to die. I stood holding the zipper. “I’ll miss you too.” As these words left my mouth, I saw the hole he would leave behind. Then I unsaw it.

But he saw. He saw very clearly how close to death he was, and he knew what he wanted me to hear. “I’ll miss seeing you grow up.”

The coat was zippered. I pressed the box against my chest and faced his head on the pillow. I saw and didn’t see again in an instant.

He watched me, solemn and careful. “You will be a good man,” he told me. “You’ll grow up to be a good man. And I wish—” He lost control of his voice. He choked and tried again. “I wish I could be here to see that.”

We cried together. I hugged him on the bed because he was too tired to sit up again. I basically lay on top of him. I felt the crinkle of my coat and the pressure of the zipper. I didn’t know what to do with the hand that held the chess set.

There is a strobe-light effect to knowledge at that age—or really any age, when the truth impacts you that much. Even in that split second when the light was on and I saw he was dying, I didn’t know what that knowledge meant. I had no concept of a lifetime, no way to understand what it would mean to miss someone for forty-five years—the day I graduated from college or the day I married, the birth of each of my children and the people they became, the decisions across the length and breadth of a career, or a simple summer evening on a porch, feet up on the railing, the first sip of cold beer together after hard work on a hot day.

He was thirty-nine. He had the concept of a lifetime, and he gave me what words he could in advance. What he gave me was his blessing. But because he was dying, I received his blessing before I earned it.

It was the best gift he could give me at the time, this vote of confidence. I am grateful for it still, though praise like this also sets an expectation. “You will be a good man” becomes “You must be a good man.” What is a good man? What kind of choices does a good man make? What does he say? What does he do? Within weeks of our conversation, he was no longer there to help me know what he had in mind by those words. All I had to guide me was my memory of him and the spectacle of how his death changed my mother.