Fulfillment, I’m sure, struck her as a rich person’s conceit. I doubt that my parents, in their thirty years together, had even once discussed it.
My mother didn’t judge me for being ponderous. She wasn’t one to give lectures or draw attention to her own sacrifices. She’d quietly supported every choice I’d ever made. This time, though, she gave me a wry, sideways look, hit her turn signal to get us off the highway and back to our neighborhood, and chuckled just a little. “If you’re asking me,” she said, “I say make the money first and worry about your happiness later.”
* * *
There are truths we face and truths we ignore. I spent the next six months quietly trying to empower myself without making any sort of abrupt change. At work, I met with the partner in charge of my division, asking to be given more challenging assignments. I tried to focus on the projects I found most meaningful, including my efforts to recruit a new and more diverse crop of summer associates. All the while, I kept an eye on job listings in the newspaper and did my best to network with more people who weren’t lawyers. One way or another, I figured I’d work myself toward some version of feeling whole.
At home on Euclid Avenue, I felt powerless in the face of a new reality. My father’s feet had started to swell for no obvious reason. His skin looked strangely mottled and dark. Anytime I asked how he was feeling, though, he gave me the same answer, with the same degree of insistence that he’d given me for years.
“I’m fine,” he’d say, as if the question were never worth asking. He’d then change the subject.
It was winter again in Chicago. I woke in the mornings to the sound of the neighbors chipping ice from their windshields on the street. The wind blew and the snow piled up. The sun stayed wan and weak. Through my office window on the forty-seventh floor at Sidley, I looked out at a tundra of gray ice on Lake Michigan and a gunmetal sky above. I wore my wool and hoped for a thaw. In the Midwest, as I’ve mentioned, winter is an exercise in waiting—for relief, for a bird to sing, for the first purple crocus to push up through the snow. You have no choice in the meantime but to pep-talk yourself through.
My dad hadn’t lost his jovial good humor. Craig came by for family dinners once in a while, and we sat around the table and laughed the same as always, though we were now joined by Janis, Craig’s wife. Janis was happy and hard-driving, a telecommunications analyst who worked downtown and was, like everyone else, completely smitten with my dad. Craig, meanwhile, was a poster child for the post-Princeton urban-professional dream. He was getting an MBA and had a job as a vice president at Continental Bank, and he and Janis had bought a nice condo in Hyde Park. He wore tailored suits and had driven over for dinner in his red Porsche 944 Turbo. I didn’t know it then, but none of this made him happy. Like me, he had his own crisis brewing and in coming years would wrestle with questions about whether his work was meaningful, whether the rewards he’d felt compelled to seek were the rewards he actually wanted. Knowing, though, how thrilled our father was by what his kids had managed to accomplish, neither of us ever brought up our discontent over dinner.
Saying good-bye at the end of a visit, Craig would give my dad a final, concerned look and pose the usual question about his health, only to be given the merry brush-off of “I’m fine.”
We accepted this, I believe, because it was steadying, and steady was how we liked to be. Dad had lived with MS for years and had managed always to be fine. We were happy to extend the rationalization, even as he was visibly declining. He was fine, we told each other, because he still got up and went to work every day. He was fine because we’d watched him have a second helping of meat loaf that night. He was fine, especially if you didn’t look too hard at his feet.
I had several tense conversations with my mom, asking why it was that Dad wouldn’t go to the doctor. But like me, she’d all but given up, having prodded him and been shut down enough times already. For my father, doctors had never brought good news and therefore were to be avoided. As much as he loved to talk, he didn’t want to talk about his problems. He viewed it as self-indulgent. He wanted to get by in his own way. To accommodate his bulging feet, he’d simply asked my mother to buy him a bigger pair of work boots.
The stalemate over a doctor’s visit continued through January and into February that year. My dad moved with a pained slowness, using an aluminum walker to get himself around the house, pausing often to catch his breath. It took longer in the mornings now for him to maneuver from bed to bathroom, bathroom to kitchen, and finally to the back door and down the three stairs to the garage so that he could drive himself to work. Despite what was happening at home, he insisted that all was well at the filtration plant. He used a motorized scooter to pilot himself from boiler to boiler and took pride in his own indispensability. In twenty-six years, he hadn’t missed a single shift. If a boiler happened to overheat, my dad claimed to be one of only a few workers with enough experience to swiftly and ably contain a disaster. In a true reflection of his optimism, he’d recently put his name in for a promotion.
My mom and I tried to reconcile what he told us with what we saw with our own eyes. It grew increasingly hard to do. At home in the evenings, my father spent much of his time watching basketball and hockey games on TV, appearing weak and exhausted in his chair. In addition to his feet, there seemed to be something swelling in his neck now, we’d noticed. It put an odd rattle in his voice.
We finally staged a sort of intervention one night. Craig was never one to be the bad cop, and my mother stuck to her self-imposed cease-fire on matters of my father’s health. In a conversation like this, the role of tough talker almost always fell to me. I told my dad that he owed it to us to get some help and that I planned to call his doctor in the morning. Grudgingly, my dad agreed, promising that if I made the appointment, he would go. I urged him to let himself sleep late the next morning, to give his body a rest.
We went to bed that night, my mother and I, feeling relieved that we’d finally gained some control.
* * *
My father, however, had divided loyalties. Rest, for him, was a form of giving in. I came downstairs in the morning to find my mother already departed for work and my dad sitting at the kitchen table with his walker parked next to him. He was dressed in his navy-blue city uniform and struggling to put on his shoes. He was going to work.
“Dad,” I said, “I thought you were going to rest. We’re getting you that doctor’s appointment…”
He shrugged. “I know, sweetie,” he said, his voice gravelly from whatever new thing was wrong in his neck. “But right now, I’m fine.”
His stubbornness was packed beneath so many layers of pride that it was impossible for me to be angry. There was no dissuading him. My parents had raised us to handle our own business, which meant that I had to trust him to handle his, even if he could, at that point, barely put on his shoes. So I let him handle it. I stuffed down my worries, gave my dad a kiss, and took myself back upstairs to get ready for my own workday. I figured I’d call my mother later at her office, telling her we’d need to strategize about how to force the man to take some time off.