Can you write about your father’s death?

Life in a moment of death

I tend to romanticize cities, and New York City, for all its irritations, obnoxious people, foul scents, dirt and grime never fails to remind me of my coming-of-age era in the late 90s. Then, it was a more dazzling, energetic time, and the City, a more available medium for these energies. The electric pop of potential lives crackled within my young imagination, and I have never felt freer. The kind of freedom that is full of life. A euphoria to be lived only once, a feeling more likely produced by biological vitality than material opportunities. I had very few of those, or so I had convinced myself.

I was never able to live here. At middle age, I’m glad I never attempted it. I don’t make a lot of money, and I would have been too susceptible to the underworld NYC disguises in the active shadows of its global import. As hard as it has been to get to this stable point in my life, I am fairly sure of a great chance that I would not have made it had I lived here at that eager, impressionable age.

I grew up in New Jersey, less than an hour from the City. I haven’t been back in years, but I am here now to be by my father’s side at his deathbed.

Death is not a thing to be romanticized. It is otherworldly, certainly, to see a loved one staring into the great above in a body ravaged by its inability to function. But it is not a literary experience of tragedy, not an epic final monologue on the triumphant end of a figure, but a devolution of life that forbids interpretation.

I love my father. Seeing him on the verge of death, fighting for one more chance to live, is difficult. We were not close, more estranged over my lifetime, and I almost didn’t come. So often, people use the death of a parent, especially, to showcase themselves. I am doing that here, in a way, but writing about him, our limited relationship, and his death is a method to sublimate sadness and the confusions that resound within my still greatest weaknesses.

My parents’ insensible marriage, their two families invariably in direct conflict, his limited interest in me and my life all return. And in fairness to him, I made sure to maintain those limitations over time. Death ushers these pains to center stage, and the past reforms itself, appearing as family I haven’t seen in decades, resentments I have lain to rest but whose ghosts still hover in the ether, sibling tensions we have worked so hard to overcome.

Because death is final for us all, the death of others and our own that approaches, it has the potential to relieve the burdens of things past. At middle age, far away from the young and foolishly ambitious man that I was, seeking myriad potential in my future self, I see instead the loving potential for deep acceptance at the cosmic cliff of life.