It's Hard to Mourn an Estranged Father
What I told my dad before he died.
I wrote the following piece a year ago, about five months before my dad died. Even though we had a complicated relationship and I hadn’t seen him in more than five years, I’m still struggling to process his death. Maybe it’s because of our estrangement that his passing still doesn’t seem real. There was no bedside farewell. No wake. No casket. No last-minute confession, apology, revelation, or catharsis. No shock to the system. No way to prove to my brain that it was time to reclassify him. Just a tearful call from my aunt 5,000 miles away confirming his final act and a heartfelt post by my sister a few days later. In my mind, he’s still idling away his days at his sister’s house in Mendoza, Argentina, bickering with her and her husband, until something breaches that looping daydream: a billboard for the next Powerball drawing, a remake of a science fiction classic, or a Formula 1 race—things that occupied his time. Then, I remember everything all at once. This Wednesday, July 23, he would have turned 79.
My father tugged on my sister’s hair with one hand while pummeling her head with the other. My mother, five feet flat, inserted herself in between them in an effort to protect my sister, but caught stray hammer fists instead. I watched from the doorway of my sister’s bedroom. She was 18. I was 7.
Years later, my sister told me I was wailing at the door. I don’t remember that. I remember running outside, standing on the brick stoop of our little house in North Bergen, New Jersey, and thinking that if I ran away, they would forget about whatever had made them fight. They would set aside their differences to come look for me. But I was too scared to leave that stoop.
My sister eventually broke free of my father’s grip and fled to our next-door neighbor’s house. The next thing I remember is cops in our living room, milling about casually, as if they’d always been there. I’m sure they interviewed my dad, but I don’t have any recollection of that. I just remember him sitting on a chair in the living room, hunched over, head in hand, with a cloudy look in his eyes.
“Why did you have to do that?” I asked.
“If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” he barked.
I kept quiet.
My father has cancer. Doctors found a lump on his tongue a few months ago but couldn’t investigate further or operate because of the diseased state of his mouth. He’d neglected oral hygiene for as long as I can remember.
When I was little, he had a greenish-brown, furry growth on the bottom row of his teeth, like algae on a sunken ship. Over the years, his teeth fell apart, leaving jagged, putrid fragments that cut into his gums and tongue. The oral surgeon removed his rotten teeth in twos and threes so as to not overwhelm his system. The only thing he could eat was cold soup and yogurt. He dropped from 210 pounds to 150 pounds.
I asked him if he wanted to talk on the phone. We hadn’t spoken on the phone since he was deported to Argentina by way of Spain five years ago. He told me he couldn’t speak, only able to communicate by text. I didn’t have the heart to ask him if the condition of his speech was permanent. He’d spent his life talking over everyone, but now he could only listen. It was jarring to see a man who lorded power over his family reduced to such a humble state.
When his mouth healed, the doctors did a biopsy. The tumor was malignant. They removed a part of his tongue, which meant he would have to relearn how to speak, if he could even speak at all. Before he went in for surgery, he asked me if there was anything of his I would want. It was too late for him to give me the only thing I’d ever wanted from him, but I didn’t tell him that. Instead, I told him he didn’t have to think about that now. It was a simple surgery, I said, not knowing if that was true. That was two months ago.
I haven’t spoken with him since the surgery. I hear how he’s doing through my cousin and my aunt, with whom my father has been living. He’s not doing well. One night, he collapsed in the bathroom, smashing the porcelain sink to pieces on the way down. He wasn’t injured, but he couldn’t get up, and my aunt and uncle couldn’t pick him up. They had to call my cousin, who is a new father, in the middle of the night to come lift my dad up from the bathroom floor. They took him back to the hospital, where he remains.
We haven’t gotten along for a long time. He was tough on me, but it’s how he treated my sister and my mother that I can’t forgive — or maybe it’s never showing remorse that I can’t forgive. It’s hard to forgive someone who thinks there isn’t anything that needs forgiving.
I got off easy by comparison. I don’t know if it was because I was a boy or because by the time I grew up, middle age had softened him. Either way, my mom and my sister bore the brunt of his wrath, lies, and incessant gaslighting.
Living in Argentina, my dad lost whatever tenuous ties he had with them. Our own communication was limited to Facebook messages, where we exchanged perfunctory well wishes for birthdays and holidays and had brief conversations about finances (I’ve been sending him money for medicine and other things he needs).
I kept in touch less for him and more for my mom and my sister. If I didn’t help him, he would reach out to them. I couldn’t shield them back then, but I could at least do this small thing now.
If no one on the U.S. side helped him, the burden would fall on my aunt, who is barely ambulatory and has Parkinson’s; my uncle, who’s in his 80s; and my cousin, who has a three-month-old to care for. It wouldn’t be fair.
Still, I wasn’t only doing it to shoulder the financial and emotional burden that would otherwise affect my family. There wasn’t something else drawing me to my dad.
My aunt, who has been keeping me apprised of my dad’s situation, suggested I leave him a voice message. She told me that whenever they mention me to him, his “eyes light up.” I would’ve never guessed. I’ve never so much as received an “attaboy” from him. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t matter to me. I’ve been waiting for that my whole life.
I have this crazy idea. I think about renting an apartment in Mendoza, hiring a nurse to care for him, and spending a few months with my dad. I imagine watching movies together, some of the ones we watched together when I was a kid, like Midnight Run and Goodfellas (lots of DeNiro in my upbringing). I imagine reading books to him, old science fiction stories, the ones I never read because he spoiled the endings for me, like Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Nine Billion Names of God” or Fredric Brown’s “Arena.” I’d definitely have to read him some Isaac Asimov, whom he’d driven in a taxi in the 70s, which he proudly told me on multiple occasions. Maybe we’d even play a video game, like The Legend of Zelda, reprising our roles as general — my dad would figure out puzzles and uncover secrets — and soldier — I’d be on the controller executing the game plan. Before all the ugliness, we were a team.
I sent him a voice message today. I don’t know if he’s in a condition to hear it, but it would be his first time hearing my voice in five years. I rambled for a bit because I didn’t know what to say. Among other things, I said I hoped he would get better and that maybe I could go visit him. I’m not sure why I sent the message, but I meant what I said. Maybe I sent the message because after all these years, I finally had something nice to say.
Epilogue
Around the time the picture in this piece was taken, my father sent me A History of the Andreu Family, a 47,000-word biography of our family that he wrote. When he sent it to me, he and I weren’t getting along, so I didn’t read it. I opened it up for the first time in the days after he died, more than 20 years after he sent it to me. I skipped to the end, which I never do. Here are a handful of excerpts:
My next to last trip was in December of 2000 so I could meet the millennium with the only family that cared about me.
Three months later my father died and as you know I didn’t go to his funeral because they couldn’t wait for me.
From this point on the story is fresh in your minds and I don’t know that I could add much to it. My connection to la Yaya seems to be gaining in strength but I let my guard down too many times with her not to be a little wary, and Pablo is in another continent.
Love you both very much even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes.
For people who didn’t know my father, these excerpts may seem unremarkable if a bit sad, but to me, they’re surprising. They suggest regret, loneliness, feeling rejected, and even an acknowledgement of not knowing how to show love—none of which he divulged in person.
These sentiments don’t exonerate him of the things he did, especially to my sister and my mother, but they tell me he had an interior life to which I was not privy. It disabused me of a notion I harbored my whole adult life up to his death: That I knew everything about him, that he was so predictable in his spite and selfishness. I was wrong.
It’s hard to say I miss him, because there’s such a disorienting welter of emotions swirling inside of me for him, but I regret not giving him the chance to be vulnerable. I regret not having read that family history earlier. Maybe that was the only way he knew how to share those feelings—feelings that died with him, unacknowledged.
Really moving writing, thank you for sharing this.
Damn you!!!! Been thinking of writing about my mom.