It was a Spring Sunday morning this September and I was at the Linksfield Clinic visiting my father. He had been in hospital for weeks and was in a coma - 80 years old, dying of cancer and regret. We had a lousy relationship. He had a lousy relationship with most people, but he was my father, and watching him die was torturous. I couldn't bear to leave the hospital. I would sit there for hours, drinking takeaway cappuchinos from the hospital coffee shop, playing him Nat King Cole songs off my phone and holding his frail paw of a hand.
Every few hours, a nurse would come and take his blood pressure and prick his finger to check his sugars. It seemed vulgar and superfluous and I was so grateful that they kept doing it. As if the dark red blood they squeezed from his index finger meant that he was still alive. That there was still a chance that things could be different.
He wrestled with the coma, glossy and gaunt, like a ghoul, desperate to be released from Life; too unresolved for Life to let him go. That morning, my mom, long since divorced from my father, and her friend, a spiritual woman named Marilyn, stood with me at his bedside. We held hands and prayed and begged him to let go; begged the god we were not certain we believed in to have mercy and to let him try again in another incarnation.
Half an hour later, he stopped breathing.
He had come and gone, just like that. No more blood pressure cuffs or chances or drops of blood or possibilities. In our 35.9 years together, he never once told me he loved me. He never told me he was proud. He never told me I was pretty or clever. And now he never would.
Bam. We had missed it.
My Dad has been gone for two and half months and I haven’t missed him. Or maybe I’ve been missing him my whole life so this doesn’t feel much different. Today I went through dusty boxes of his things. He kept a file labelled ‘Family’ in Times New Roman font, full of family photos, organised with pastel alphabetical dividers. He had a wad of my photographs under ‘J’ and seeing that dissolved me.
Maybe he loved me. It never felt like it. I loved him. Maybe he didn't feel that either. Maybe he was as bad at being loved as he was at doing the loving.
When the torrent of sadness subsided that Sunday morning, I decided to reconfigure the way I fill my life.
2013 will look different because of my father. I will stop seeking him in everything else and try to start filling myself up. I will stop trying so bloody hard to be worthy and start working harder on being worthwhile.
Maybe then it will all make sense to me. John Mayer seems to have this father daughter thing figured, at least lyrically, and he's a knob.
