Closure, Pt. 6
Series finale (357/365)
When I was twenty-five, I started writing an autobiographical novel titled The Sphere. Here’s the main idea according to a document I found from that time:
A 25-year-old young man decides to confront his dad, whom he thinks caused the origin of his psychological problems. His main trauma stems (he thinks) from his relationship with his father.
His father listens in silence. They part ways and the relationship cools off.
About eight years go by. The young man finds out that his father is about to die. He goes to talk to him. He does not arrive in time and his father dies.
The young man is left with a more or less negative idea of his father. Then he begins to realize that his father raised him that way because that is how he himself was raised.
I’m going to let go of the weird fact that I predicted what was going to happen (not arriving in time to talk to him before he passed), and will focus on the trauma and confrontation part.
Some years before, my dad and I had gotten into what I think was our worst argument ever. He was yelling at my sister about something while at a restaurant (Dad, can I go to Cancun with my friends?). When I intervened, he redirected his anger against me.
Why do you always oppose what I say? he said.
I escalated the argument by saying something hurtful like whatever, you’ve never cared about me, or it’s your fault that we don’t have a personal connection.
He didn’t back down, and both confirmed and justified my comment:
My parents never spent time with me. I don’t know how to raise kids or deal with emotions. I’m just emulating what I saw. I don’t know how to do this.
So, why The Sphere? The tl;dr of the book idea was to tell the story of the narrator and how, over the decades, he realizes that he is more similar to his father than he originally thought.
Here’s that old document again:
Sometimes we meet people so different from us that, if we could place them on a line according to their personality, we would find them extremely far away from us.
One day it became clear that this representation should be drawn as a circle, not as a line. Like colors, personalities cannot be placed one behind another. Rather, they should be mapped over an area. This would allow some to be closer to others in a way that is not so categorical.
However, if one goes a bit deeper into the human being, it becomes clear that this image would still need to be modified to better match the impressive diversity of characters that exist. And then one would have to speak of a sphere.
I wrote forty pages of the book, and then lost them when my hard drive died on June 20, 2009. So it goes.
What do I think about my father now, more than ten years after he passed away?
Well, first of all, that it sucks that my kids won’t ever meet him. I think both Eva and Gabriel would get along great with Dad: Gabriel via his acid sense of humor and books, and Eva through her energy and rebel attitude.
This hard truth haunts me and messes with my mind every now and then, like when I had that dream where I saw Gabriel and dad talking and I couldn’t hear what they were saying.
The other thing is that I now understand how hard it is to change your ways, beliefs, and behaviors. Dad did his best with the cards he was dealt, and I’m trying to do the same, with the heightened accountability that comes from being exposed to more information, a broader worldview, and years of education and learning.
Finally, that I won’t stop missing him. The pain subsides and shifts but never disappears, even as years turn into decades.
This year I spent time with Heriberto and Gus, both close friends who lost their fathers recently, and we came to the conclusion that it is impossible to let go of the influence (mostly good) they have had in our lives. They continue to guide us and help us make better decisions.
As I conclude this year-long experiment and this six-part series around him, I want to share two last stories about his passing.
In the third part of this series I shared how we interrupted our honeymoon and flew back to find him in a coma, breathing through a respirator.
As the hours passed and the doctors confirmed that his lungs were basically wasted, we slowly accepted his fate. Still, he was not letting go. In his defense, he was a stubborn guy and proved it until the end.
Eventually, Mom decided to act. We saw her wearing some make-up, and then told us that she was going to go in and convince him.
She went in the room with dad. She told him:
We’re going to be OK. Let go. You’ve been amazing. It’s time.
In minutes, Dad’s vitals began to fade.
Some minutes later she came out crying peacefully and we knew.
Yes, she said.
I remember that I teared up but didn’t really sob, nor did I while we buried him.
After the burial, the three siblings and our spouses took mom to a Mexican restaurant. There we told her and my siblings that we were expecting a baby.
That night, Vivi and I—who weren’t living together until the wedding—went to our house to sleep there for the first time.
We opened the door and brought our honeymoon luggage in.
I entered the kitchen and it hit me: I was about to start a complete new chapter in my life as a husband, and as a father, but my dad would never be a part of that.
I was on my own.
I started sobbing inconsolably.
Vivi hugged me from behind.
Well, maybe not on my own.
#day357