father daughter dance
I reread Gilead by Marilynne Robinson this week, and it made me think of my father and my father's father
You can know a thing to death and be for all purposes completely ignorant of it. A man can know his father, or his son, and there might still be nothing between them but loyalty and love and mutual incomprehension.
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
My dad and I wait in the wings, me gripping his hand in anticipation. We’re both dressed like pirates. I couldn’t tell you what he’s thinking, except that he probably doesn’t want to be up there. He most likely wouldn’t have chosen to come to Lynn Beasely’s Studio after a long day of work every Thursday for the past month. I’m not grateful enough because I don’t understand what sacrifice means, I’m only seven.
Our moment comes at the end of the recital. We do the routine choreographed by Lynn Beasely, the one she changes completely every week. We probably mess up, but so do all the other fathers and daughters. It’s endearing. Then, each pair gets their chance in the spotlight – a mini solo. We know what to do here. We’ve been practicing for weeks. It’s the Pretzel, a swing dance move that involves a series of turns that delight me. I mostly just hold on for dear life, my short arms extended to reach my dad’s palms as he guides us through. It’s something he learned in Winston Salem Junior Cotillion that’s ingrained in his memory, unbounded by time or coast. Like the Southern accent that creeps in at the end of a phone call with Nana or the way he painted our first house Carolina blue. It’s a reminder that my dad has lived many lives before mine began, that he is a million things to a million people. For now though, in the heat of the spotlight at the rented theatre, hundreds of seats full of little ballerinas and their families, he is first and foremost my father.
No one looks after Shelton, Washington, not since the decline of the lumber industry. You can see it in the way mold streaks down the exterior of prefabricated homes. Dampness eating into walls of muted grey and blue and beige, leaving trails of blackened scars. Gas stations and signs that read Christmas Tree Capital of the Nation stick out in their bright, plastic color against the subdued backdrop in a way that induces a slight nausea. It’s probably just the hour and a half in the car. As you drive south from Seattle, the clouds creep down so as to make the world feel very small, like if you stood up your head would hit the ceiling of the sky. It’s just like Twilight, I remember saying once, when I was twelve. This may have felt true, but it’s also not a very nice thing to say, especially when it’s the place your grandfather has just decided to call home.
Grandpa Larry was born on October 22, 1942 in Yakima, Washington. It’s a couple hours east from Shelton, but only noting these two places betrays a myriad of experiences. He grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. He spent the summers of his youth in Iowa, the descendant of Free Soilers seeking to forge a state on the precipice of war. He went to Wake Forest on a ROTC scholarship and, after marrying my Nana, his high school sweetheart, saw Europe through a series of military postings. They moved to Winston Salem and had my aunt, my dad, my other aunt. Summers in the RV, almost every National Park in the contiguous United States. To him, there is never a stranger in an RV park or KOA campground, only a friend unmet. The divorce. The second wife and Wachovia Bank & Trust. The farm in South Carolina and Julie, a relationship either too simple or too complex to be recognized legally as marriage. An interlude breeding huskies. Years that preceded my life or were diluted with distance. A retirement in the Pacific Northwest. A third wife, Yuli, from the Internet. She moved across the Pacific Ocean to live with him and build a garden and a chicken coop and a home in Shelton, Washington. He showed her the Grand Canyon, she showed him Taipei. I got trinkets from both that I’ll probably never use nor throw away. I get that from him, the tendency to hoard. I think it alternates every generation.
When I was fourteen, we found out my dad had cancer in his brain. This was after a few weeks of minor seizures where his face would freeze or his lip would twitch. I didn’t really think anything of it, he would say later, Grandpa Larry twitches, you twitch, I thought it was a family thing. Grandpa Larry was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I hate sitting still. My dad was diagnosed with Stage IV melanoma, 13 metastases to the brain and a few in his lungs as well. Skin cancer in his brain, which is not the same as brain cancer but still, leaving the doctor the prognosis was a fifteen to twenty percent chance of survival. This number is only loosely personal, it has no idea how a given person will respond to their treatment. Still, it is terrifying to hear. Still, it was an encompassing, incomprehensible sadness – for him, for me, for the parts of us that live in each other that threatened to disappear. He took time off work, putting us in the closest physical proximity since I was a baby and he slept with his head at the foot of the bed, near my crib, just to make sure he could hear me breathe. All this proximity, yet again and again I met the bounds of my empathy. The saying is that as we age, we become more like our parents, that we may begin to understand them more. Yet holding his hand in the semi-private room of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, I knew that our paths were becoming increasingly divergent by the day. Empathy, which has been portrayed as a catch-all virtue, is not doing for me what I hoped it would. He is watching UNC basketball propped up on a hospital bed, immunotherapy drip in his veins. I couldn’t tell you what he’s thinking, except that he probably doesn’t want to be up here. A few months later, he wrote to me for my freshman year retreat. How can you begin to know the bounds of a father’s love? The letter began. He told me he was proud of me, that I was spirited, and that he knew I could become anything I wanted to be. That was especially funny, because all I’d ever wanted to be was like him.
It’s important I don’t pretend that these were all severe days. Some were, surely, the immunotherapy and the waiting and the emptiness of the house during long appointments that I was not privy to. The way the mood would change after the subsequent family debrief, CT scans of my dad’s brain on the dining room table. The pills that made him tired and the ones that made him angry. Like many patients, the symptoms of the treatment were more overtly oppressive than the sickness itself. But still, we laughed a lot. At terrible casserole and gifted t-shirts that read FUCK CANCER and the stories that friends from around the world would travel to tell at our dinner table. Chicken Soup for the Soul: Cancer Edition on the bookshelf in the bathroom. Once, at a family meeting, my dad took silence as an opportunity to shout, I’m cured! This was obviously untrue, we had the proof in front of us, and still the whole family doubled over in laughter. Sunday mornings bathed in light and Paul Simon songs. His body responding to the treatment. Responding, like a conversation where T-cells are knocking on the door of the body’s immune system. And my father, the reluctant but always gracious host, letting them in.
It wasn’t really meant to happen this way. I knew that my grandfather was unwell, but he had been unwell for a while. Parkinson’s, decades of smoking, and a myriad of other health issues suggested death had been thinking of him for some time. I was planning a visit at the end of the week. It was Senior fall, I had a paper I needed to write on John Quincy Adams. But admission into the hospital warranted my aunt’s flight from Chapel Hill and I offered to drive her down. I considered making it back to class after lunch. We drove through the world in greyscale and talked about my college applications. We met my other aunt, who had driven up from Portland and had always been the closest to him. The hospital took our names and photos and put them onto little visitor cards. We walked into his room and fifteen minutes later, my grandfather died.
I’d never seen anybody die before. What they don’t tell you about death, especially death when it happens like this, is that there’s a lot of waiting. I called my mom and my brother. My aunts called my dad. I sat for a while and I held his hand, which was still warm. I waited for Yuli and my dad and my brother to arrive. I told him everything I wanted to say and then I told him all about John Quincy Adams. I was surprised when Moises, his handyman, and a slew of other neighbors or acquaintances showed up and shed heartbreaking tears. There is so much that an obituary misses in its defining of people by their biographical facts. My grandfather survived by countless projects he started but never got around to finishing. His prefab house with the nonfunctional RV and a garage full of tools he could neither use nor afford. The way he made a friend anywhere he went and invited them over for dinner. That time he went to check on his neighbor, then spent years tracking down his next of kin. He was his visions, and his kindness, and the time he taught me how to ride bareback on a horse. These are the things that survive you. Under the winter sun of South Carolina he had lifted me onto the back of his old chestnut mare. Don’t worry, he reassured me, hand shaking, You’re not going to fall. I’ve got you.
For people like my father, there’s not really a finish line to treatment. The immunotherapy has left him with adrenal insufficiency, so he’ll probably be taking some steroid pill for the rest of his life. Scans every six months, but no more IV drip. I tell him that all the wellness influencers have been preaching about how terrible high cortisol is for you and he tells me that low cortisol isn’t a walk in the park either. But it’s a tentative truce. The tumors have shrunk and they have stabilized and Dr. Bhatia thinks he will be able to die around the same time everybody else does.
My dad finishes the projects he starts. They are all within reasonable bounds. He organizes the garage and throws out everything he doesn’t need. He walks into my room just to say hi and leaves the door open, shaking his head at the way I accumulate things and don’t finish what I start. Maybe that skips a generation, too. He jogs in the afternoon and feeds our dog under the table. He cries watching the ends of marathons but will never run one himself. This used to make me sad but I can’t remember if it was actually his dream at one point or something I've narrativized. Sometimes, sicknesses like these push people to the extremes. Fuck cancer, beat cancer, a tireless fight. My dad is lucky because this does not have to be his view of the world. My dad has chosen a gentler life.
Loss will inevitably find my dad, as it found my grandfather and will find each and every one of us. This is a fact of human life – we are destined to be losers of all that we have created and earned and faithfully pretended to be. This is why I’m wary of speaking in absolutes, because it feels like asking for fate to make a fool of me. So instead let me tell you what I hope will happen.
Someday in the future I hope the sky is blue but the air is cold. The band will play something soft and classic by Bob Dylan or James Taylor or maybe the Beatles. I hope my dad is there. We’d get up in front of all the people I love the most and dance to the soft and classic song. If I have my way, we’ll do the Pretzel at least twice. He’ll probably cry, then I will too. Hours before, I would have made a promise in sickness and in health, and I’d know the potential that sickness brings. I’d know that maybe the two aren’t always diametrically opposed, that they can live in tenuous harmony. Sickness exists as an affirmation of health. Fear of loss exists as an affirmation of all the beauty worth losing. Mornings full of song and leisure and empty mornings where the coffee goes cold, strung together in unequal measure. There is no justice to it, what will make you sob till your fingers go numb and what will fill you with such joy the world will shine in luminous color. How could there be? It’s all love, really.
[Love] makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?
– Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
This is so many wonderful, heart rendering, hopeful things.