I heard the back door click shut. A few minutes later, I returned to the kitchen to find it empty. My father’s walker sat by the back door. On an impulse, I went over and looked through the little glass peephole in the door, which gave a wide-angle view of the back stoop and pathway to the garage, just to confirm that his van was gone.
But the van was there, and so, too, was my dad. He was dressed in a cap and his winter jacket and had his back to me. He’d made it only partway down the stairs before needing to sit down. I could see the exhaustion in the angle of his body, in the sideways droop of his head and the half-collapsed heaviness with which he was resting against the wooden railing. He wasn’t in a crisis so much as he looked just too weary to carry on. It seemed clear he was trying to summon enough strength to turn around and come back inside.
I was seeing him, I realized, in a moment of pure defeat.
How lonely it must have been to live twenty-some years with such a disease, to persist without complaint as your body is slowly and inexorably consumed. Seeing my dad on the stoop, I ached in a way I never had. My instinct was to rush outside and help him back into the warm house, but I fought it, knowing it would be just another blow to his dignity. I took a breath and turned away from the door.
I’d see him when he came back in, I thought. I’d help take off his work boots, get him some water, and usher him to his chair, with the silent acknowledgment between us that now without question he would need to accept some help.
Upstairs in my apartment again, I sat listening for the sound of the back door. I waited for five minutes and then five minutes more, before finally I went downstairs and back to the peephole to make sure he’d made it to his feet. But the stoop was empty now. Somehow my father, in defiance of everything that was swollen and off-kilter in his body, had willed himself down those stairs and across the icy walkway and into his van, which was now probably almost halfway to the filtration plant. He was not giving in.
* * *
For months now, Barack and I had danced around the idea of marriage. We’d been together a year and a half and remained, it seemed, unshakably in love. He was in his final semester at Harvard and caught up in his Law Review work but would soon head back my way to take the Illinois bar and look for a job. The plan was that he’d move back to Euclid Avenue, this time in a way that felt more permanent. For me, it was another reason why winter couldn’t end soon enough.
We’d talked in abstract ways about how each of us viewed marriage, and it worried me sometimes how different those views seemed to be. For me, getting married had been a given, something I’d grown up expecting to do someday—the same way having children had always been a given, dating back to the attention I’d heaped on my baby dolls as a girl. Barack wasn’t opposed to getting married, but he was in no particular rush. For him, our love meant everything already. It was foundation enough for a full and happy life together—with or without rings.
We were both, of course, products of how we’d been raised. Barack had experienced marriage as ephemeral: His mother had married twice, divorced twice, and in each instance managed to move on with her life, career, and young children intact. My parents, meanwhile, had locked in early and for life. For them, every decision was a joint decision, every endeavor a joint endeavor. In thirty years, they’d hardly spent a night apart.
What did Barack and I want? We wanted a modern partnership that suited us both. He saw marriage as the loving alignment of two people who could lead parallel lives but without forgoing any independent dreams or ambitions. For me, marriage was more like a full-on merger, a reconfiguring of two lives into one, with the well-being of a family taking precedence over any one agenda or goal. I didn’t exactly want a life like my parents had. I didn’t want to live in the same house forever, work the same job, and never claim any space for myself, but I did want the year-to-year, decade-to-decade steadiness they had. “I do recognize the value of individuals having their own interests, ambitions, and dreams,” I wrote in my journal. “But I don’t believe that the pursuit of one person’s dreams should come at the expense of the couple.”
We’d work out our feelings, I figured, when Barack came back to Chicago, when the weather warmed up, when we had the luxury of spending weekends together again. I just had to wait, though waiting was hard. I craved permanence. From the living room of my apartment, I could sometimes hear the murmur of my parents talking on the floor below. I heard my mother laughing as my father told some sort of story. I heard them shutting off the TV to get ready for bed. I was twenty-seven years old now, and there were days when all I wanted was to feel complete. I wanted to grab every last thing I loved and stake it ruthlessly to the ground. I’d known just enough loss by then to know that there was more coming.
* * *
It was I who made the appointment for my father to see a doctor, but it was my mother who ultimately got him there—by ambulance, as it turned out. His feet had ballooned and grown tender to the point that he finally admitted that walking on them felt like walking on needles. When it was time to go, he couldn’t stand on them at all. I was at work that day, but my mother described it to me later—Dad being carried out of the house by burly paramedics, trying to joke with them as they went.
He was taken directly to the hospital at the University of Chicago. What followed was a string of lost days spent in the purgatory of blood draws, pulse checks, untouched meal trays, and squads of doctors making rounds. All the while, my father continued to swell. His face puffed up, his neck got thicker, his voice grew weak. Cushing’s syndrome was the official diagnosis, possibly related to his MS and possibly not. Either way, we were well past the point of any sort of stopgap treatment. His endocrine system was now going fully haywire. A scan showed that he had a growth in his throat that had become so enlarged he was practically choking on it.
“I don’t know how I missed that,” my father said to the doctor, sounding genuinely perplexed, as if he hadn’t felt a single symptom leading up to this point, as if he hadn’t spent weeks and months, if not years, ignoring his pain.
We cycled through hospital visits to be with him—my mom, Craig, Janis, and me. We came and went over days as the doctors blasted him with medicine, as tubes were added and machines were hooked up. We tried to grasp what the specialists were telling us but could make little sense of it. We rearranged my dad’s pillows and talked uselessly about college basketball and the weather outside, knowing that he was listening, though it exhausted him now to speak. We were a family of planners, but now everything seemed unplanned. Slowly, my father was sinking away from us, enveloped by some invisible sea. We called him back with old memories, seeing how they put a little brightness in his eyes. Remember the Deuce and a Quarter and how we used to roll around in that giant backseat on our summer outings to the drive-in? Remember the boxing gloves you gave us, and the swimming pool at Dukes Happy Holiday Resort? What about how you used to build the props for Robbie’s Operetta Workshop? What about dinners at Dandy’s house? Remember when Mom made us fried shrimp on New Year’s Eve?
One evening I stopped by and found my father alone, my mother having gone home for the night, the nurses clustered outside at their hallway station. The room was quiet. The whole floor of the hospital was quiet. It was the first week of March, the winter snow having just melted, leaving the city in what felt like a perpetual state of dampness. My dad had been in the hospital about ten days then. He was fifty-five years old, but he looked like an old man, with yellowed eyes and arms too heavy to move. He was awake but unable to speak, whether due to the swelling or due to emotion, I’ll never know.