In this last phase of life, he was routinely furious with someone who had wronged him. Increasingly, that person was me. After months of arguments, my father and I settled into a simmering détente. We would show up at the same family gatherings. We would communicate mostly through forcedly jovial exhortations to the children: “Look, it’s Grandpa!!” (My kids adored him and needed little encouragement.) Then, over Christmas break in 2012, while on a family vacation in Vermont, my mother got a phone call from my stepmother in New York. My father was in the hospital. He could no longer swallow food. They were doing tests.
The ghastliness my father had been coughing up, it turned out, was cancer. But it wasn’t diagnosed as such until it had spread from his esophagus to his liver, now so engorged with malignant tissue that it bulged out of his abdomen like a balloon. At the time of diagnosis, I hadn’t seen my father for weeks. The last time we’d exchanged words was at his apartment during a holiday celebration for the grandchildren, when I noticed how much weight he’d lost. “I can’t keep a thing down!” he said balefully, in what I assumed to be exaggeration for effect, before shuffling off to a lounge chair.
Upon returning from Vermont, I rushed to see him. Questions of wrongdoing and blame were moot; there was no time to negotiate the peace, it was simply assumed. He was no longer angry with me nor I with him. Our fight was over. We rode side by side to his next hospital visit in the backseat of my brother Brian’s car, holding hands as we hadn’t done since I was in elementary school. Chemo, the oncologist said, wouldn’t cure my father and it probably wouldn’t prolong his life either. Nonetheless, he recommended it. When I pressed the doctor for odds, he said the chemo had a 30 percent chance of working, though in the absence of curing or prolonging life I wasn’t sure what working meant. “Tell me the truth,” I said to the doctor in the hallway. “To me, it looks like he’ll be dead in weeks.” The doctor merely shrugged in response.
For two weeks, my father allowed visitors, and then he cut us all off. The last person to visit was Tobias, who spent an afternoon in his company. “I love that child so much,” my dad told me in what I didn’t know would be our last conversation. After that, he wouldn’t even come to the phone, no matter how much my brothers and I pleaded. My stepmother and a hospice nurse cared for him in his apartment. Every day, I’d call my stepmother, begging to see him. It wasn’t for my sake, it was for his. I had to tell him something. I had to tell him that I’d keep his stories alive forever, repeating them to his grandchildren so they would always know him. They would know that he played stickball in the streets of Brooklyn as a child and that his father, Tisme (nicknamed for answering the telephone with a spirited “Tis me!”), owned meat markets in the city. There really were meat-and-potatoes people; and these people were theirs.
I would tell them how Grandpa had wanted to go away to college, but had to stay home and commute to Hofstra, that he’d gone to law school but had to drop out when my mother got pregnant. I would tell them his stories about the corruption at Idlewild Airport (“You know, it wasn’t always called JFK, Pammy!”), the wads of cash and the unions but also the excitement of taking part in the building of the city, and the pride he’d taken in the floor work he’d done for Delta Airlines.
My children would laugh as I always laughed when I told them about the practical jokes he’d played in the army, many of them centered on the latrine. They would love the story about how he and my stepbrother Nicky mixed up a batch of fake vomit and spilled it all over the apartment so that when my stepmother came home she panicked at the sight of her son wiped out on the floor in a mess. How he never tired of depositing rubber rats and cockroaches and snakes around the house in Woodstock, then lying in wait. How he could inexplicably and repeatedly watch the movie Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, never losing interest. “That Lisa Kudrow, she’s really something,” he’d tell me after each viewing, as if he’d only just discovered her himself.
I wanted to promise him I’d frame the photographs he and the kids took of each other when he let them order gigantic milk shakes at the City Diner, their faces coated in chocolate. I would remind them about his days carpooling them home from school and giving them white Tic Tacs and spare change. The way his own father, Tisme, would offer me Five-Flavor Life Savers when I saw him. Even if I could do nothing to alleviate my father’s current pain, I needed him to know all of this, for him to hear it before he went. I had to convey the one message I could that would make him feel better.
“He doesn’t want to see anyone,” my stepmother said.
Finally, on the phone one night. I persuaded her to allow me to visit despite my father’s objections. Check with her in the morning, she said. When I called Friday morning, she said, “He can’t say no now.” I rushed to their apartment, where my father lay on a hospital cot surrounded by the detritus of the ailing—the wet wipes and salves and tissues. Years of accumulated body mass had evaporated and what remained was sunken into the bedsheets. His eyes fluttered intermittently, their surfaces milky and gray. I held the bare sheath of his hand and squeezed it as I delivered my final message. He moaned occasionally while I spoke; there was no telling whether in response to my words or in response to something that existed only for him. The uncertainty broke my heart, but I kept talking, repeating the important part, over and over. “I love you, Daddy, and your grandchildren love you, too. I will make sure you remain alive for them and be their grandpa forever.”
Then I went to work, where I dissolved into tears at the first friendly colleague I saw in the elevator. That night, at six o’clock, my stepmother called as I got out of the subway to say that my father was dead. It had been one month to the day between diagnosis and death.
After he died, my mind drifted. I would read pages over and over and over with eyes glazed. I wasn’t actually reading. Bob remained on his shelf, untouched, for weeks. With effort, I finally turned to my usual memoirs, the sadder the better: Christopher Hitchens’s Mortality, the writer’s account of his diagnosis and last days of cancer. Jaycee Dugard’s A Stolen Life, about her kidnapping and abuse. I needed to cry about someone else.
When I wasn’t soaking in dark memoirs, I looked to my other standby for solace: classic English novels. There is something reassuring and necessary about home literature—the books you grow up with, the ones you were taught in school, the cultural touchstones you consider your own. For me, this has always meant the great books I’d looked up to from an early age. No matter where I am, no matter what’s going on in my life, when I want something reliable, I reach for the Dickens, the Eliot, the Austen. The more boring the book title—The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Tess of the d’Urbervilles—the more stalwartly I cling to the familiar contours of its contents.