My father died as he had lived: not saying much.
He didn’t mention his twenty-year marriage with our mother, even though he was rushed into the hospital on what would have been their 38th wedding anniversary.
He didn’t mention how he had cheated on her for five years before divorcing her.
He didn’t mention refusing to divide his assets 50-50, even though the Massachusetts law books said he had to. He dragged her to court for four bitter years, during which time we children learned to recognize what hate looked like, tasted like, felt like. In the end, he lost. It would become his life project to construct an appeal to this decision, ambitious in scope and vision. The statute of limitations on appeals of family court divorce decisions is thirty days, but Dad’s magnus opum consumed him until he died, some thirteen years later.
He didn’t mention the mountains of junk we were about to unearth in storage units he had wasted thousands of dollars keeping over the years, full of empty boxes, broken speakers, and decades-old, yellowed newspapers and receipts.
He didn’t mention the loans, the debt, the tax liens, the house destroyed by a water leak he had been too sick to fix that with his death, he was bequeathing to his still-young daughters.
He didn’t apologize.
As I held Dad’s hand while he lay there taking his last breaths, my thoughts wandered to the relationship I had tried to foster with him even after he caused the great schism of our family. During phone calls, he would tell me that nothing was new in his life, which he spent working on the appeal or endlessly re-organizing his laserdisc, DVD, CD, and record collections. He would say little more than “Ok” in response to my own updates. I gave up calling him. He never protested.
Dad never paid me a compliment in his whole life. He told me that the only subjects worth studying were math and science, the ones that didn’t come naturally to me. I used to sit in front of tests staring helplessly at the problems, imagining my father’s head rearing up over the exam shaking back and forth in disapproval the whole time.
But when I was completing my PhD in Chinese literature, Dad asked me once to explain to him what I was researching. I almost fell out of my seat. You can say that about him, at least – he was always a good listener.
And when we were young, it was Dad who carried us into bed at night and tucked us in. It was dad who sat by our side and prayed “Our Father” and “Hail Mary” with us.
Somebody asked us if we wanted the hospital chaplain, and we said why not. One last chance for this weary soul to be saved. The chaplain laid a colourful hand-woven prayer shawl over my father’s feet. I murmured into his ear that even though we had had a difficult relationship, I had always loved him. Then I kissed the soft white curly hair at the side of his head, sat down near his feet, and stroked his big toe. The chaplain asked us what he was like. Never, I said right away, did my father ever make us feel like he wished he had sons, I said.
On the rare occasions Dad spoke at length, he was silent on the topic of his adult experiences after moving to Boston, which he did once he had graduated from college. Rather, he enjoyed reminiscing about his days at Monsignor Farrell High and Cornell University, some of the earliest episodes of his life. His father had assumed that both his sons would join him in his auto parts store. But my dad, despite being legally blind, had a different plan for himself. He asked his parents to send him to prep school Monsignor Farrell instead of the public school his brother had gone to. He applied to Cornell and got in. He got a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Chemical and Mechanical Engineering respectively and then moved to Boston to try something new. He got a second master’s degree in Nuclear Engineering while working as a designer of safety systems for nuclear power plants. He met my mother and fell in love. Together, they had three daughters, and a family was born. In the photo where Mom is in the hospital holding me, their first-born child, Dad is lying on his side on the bed next to her, gazing at us. He is smiling.
I look forward to spreading my father’s ashes at Cornell in the chapel gardens, which grow in the shadow of McGraw Clocktower. He will be returned to the place he loved best, where his future furled out before him bright and beautiful, and where he ate his meals among friends and attended class every day under McGraw’s bells. The bells are controlled by student chime-masters, who toll them on the hour and sometimes play sentimental tunes that ring throughout campus, such as “The Sound of Silence” by Dad’s favourite musical group, Simon and Garfunkel. They did that when my father attended Cornell in the late 1960s, they do it now, and they did it when I lived there as a student myself, following in my father’s footsteps.
About the author... Gina Elia, PhD
I am a writer and Mandarin Chinese high school teacher in the greater Miami, Florida region. My articles have been published in numerous outlets including Taiwan’s CommonWealth Magazine and, on the website, SupChina.
You can find Gina Elia on:
Twitter: @ginaelia22
Instagram: gina.elia
Website: ginamarieelia.net
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ginaelia/