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The Death of My Father

By Steve Martin

The New Yorker , June 17, 2002 P. 84

FAMILY HISTORY about the narrator’s recollection of his strained relationship with his father. After the death of his father, the narrator, Steve, is surprised by his friends’complimentary descriptions of him. All he remembers of his father was his anger. Steve recalls his father’s desire to be in show biz, the bit parts he proudly took on. Of Steve’s show biz career, however, his father was critical. After the premier of his first movie, "The Jerk," he said nothing about Steve’s performance. Steve’s friends noted his silence and were horrified. Finally, one friend said, ìWhat did you think of Steve in the movie?" His father said, "Well he’s no Charlie Chaplin." In the early eighties, after speaking with a friend whose mother committed suicide on Mother’s Day and whose father was killed crossing a street, Steve decided to work through his relationship with his parents: he’d take them to lunch every Sunday: Steve recalls one particular Sunday lunch, after his father’s quadruple-bypass operation. His father held the menu in one hand and his newly prescribed list of dietary restrictions in the other. He glanced back and forth between the standard restaurant fare on his left and the healthy suggestions on his right, looked up at the waiter, and said resignedly, "Oh, I’ll just have the fettucini Alfredo." It was their routine that after their lunches, Steve’s mother and father would walk him to the car and Steve would kiss his mother and wave at his father. One time, though, as Steve went to say goodbye, his father whispered, "I love you," in a barely audible voice. Steve convinced his father that he should see a psychologist. Steve’s mother was also enlisted to visit the psychologist in the hope of shedding some light on their relationship. "Well," she said, "I didn’t say anything bad." With the agreement to see a psychologist, Steve noticed in his father a new-found willingness to try different things. Once, a male nurse produced a bag of pot and Steve’s father, per the advice of his son, took several hits. His eyes glazed over and his leg stopped shaking. He looked around the room with dilated pupils and said, "I don’t feel anything." Only a few months after the pot-testing episode, Steve found himself back at his parent’s home to see his father who, according to Steve’s weeping sister was, "saying goodbye to everyone." Steve walked into the bedroom and the two looked into each other’s eyes for a long, unbroken time. At last his father said, "You did everything I wanted to do." Steve replied, "I did it because of you." After another pause his father said, "I wish I could cry, I wish I could cry for all the love I received and couldn’t return." Here, at his father’s deathbed, Steve realizes that his father had kept this secret, his desire to love his family, from him and his mother his whole life.

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The Death of My Father, Essay Example

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Two years ago, just a few weeks before Christmas, my roommate, who was clearly upset, sat me down on the couch in our living room and broke the news to me that my father had died earlier that afternoon.

My father had been ill for a long time.  He had a long history of cardiac disease which was exacerbated by the fact that he was a chronic smoker, was overweight, and did not much care either or exercise or for healthy food (something which, I am sorry to say, I seem to have inherited from him!).  I knew he was in the hospital in New York, where his second wife was taking care of him as he prepared to have cardiac surgery to try to repair the damage that a lifetime’s worth of misuse had done to his heart.  He never made it through the surgery, dying right there on the operating table in spite of the surgical team’s attempts to save his life.

When my roommate first told me the news, I remember almost having difficulty putting the words together in that simple sentence to give it meaning. “Your father is dead” is not a difficult sentence to say, but it takes a while to wrap your head around it. And then the sharpest pain hit me as the words drove home and I remember bursting into tears and crying on my into a pillow for a long time.  I remember being offered a glass of wine to calm my nerves down – it was a blood-red Cabernet Sauvignon – and it tasted bitter and sweet and lovely all at once.  I remember calling my brother – he was half-way across the country, going to graduate school in Michigan, and I hadn’t seen him for a while since we had both been so busy with school – and I remember him saying “This sucks”, which summed up the situation pretty nicely.  I remember we cried together, and I drank more wine, and a sick and sour sort of feeling settled in the pit of my stomach.  I also remember I went to bed and slept really heavily that night.

It was financially impossible for me to get to the funeral on such short notice, and my father had decided to be cremated and to forego any kind of memorial service, so there wouldn’t have been anything to attend even if I had been able to go.  But I took the next couple of days off and I remember, those first few days, feeling very tender, as though I had been sunburned and the skin had just peeled off.  I slept a lot those first few days, and ate very little, and took several walks out in the woods on my own.

My father and I had been estranged for a long time. He had been abusive and I was glad when he and my mother divorced and he was finally out of my life. I did not have any contact with him for a long time after the marriage broke up.  But in the last few years of his life, we had started emailing back and forth and even had had a few phone calls. He was planning to visit me next fall for  vacation, only he died before we got to see each other again.

That has been two years ago now.  I do not feel raw like I did when I first got the news, but it is not something I like to think about, either.  I do, though, have all the emails from the last few years that we sent back and forth to each other and I have a box of photographs that my mother sent me of the two of us when I was just a kid, before things went sour. Eventually, I will be brave enough to read through those emails and look through those pictures. But it is something that I know I am not ready for yet. In a way, though, I think part of me is almost looking forward to it, as I feel like it will cauterize a wound that has never quite closed up for me.  And I know that his death has given me a lot more sympathy for other people who are grieving, since I know now that it can take so many forms – some pretty conventional, some wildly inappropriate – and that even though you feel you have “gotten over it” with the passage of time, you know that it is always somewhere just below the surface of your skin.

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A Father's Legacy: Reflecting on the Narrative of Losing My Dad

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Home — Application Essay — Medical School — About Death of a Father: My Reflecting on Life and Loss

About Death of a Father: My Reflecting on Life and Loss

• University: Iowa State University

About this sample

Words: 691 |

Updated: Nov 30, 2023

Words: 691 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

This essay delves into the profound and transformative experience of losing a father, a pivotal event that reshaped my perspective on life and purpose. "There is goodness in everything that happens," a maxim instilled by my parents, became a beacon of resilience and hope through various challenges. Yet, the true test of this belief came with the hardest loss I've ever faced – the death of a father. His passing not only left a void but also imparted invaluable lessons about love, strength, and the importance of living fully. Herein, I explore the indelible impact of this life-altering event and the enduring lessons it taught me about overcoming adversity and finding purpose amidst grief.

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April 30, 2016 was the day I truly thought I could no longer see any good in life anymore. In every harsh situation, my dad had always been there to remind me that everything will be better- something I lost all too quickly. To be able to accept the fact that he’s no longer on earth was just too much. Pancreatic cancer cost my father his life. However, this disease managed to changed everything I ever knew. For the remainder of 2014, I was in a bubble of memories, I keep remembering every inconvenient I went through and how my father helped me get through it. But one memory, that never happened to leave my mind was the simplest and perhaps oldest memory. I remember getting my first D ever, and going back home in tears and the only person who managed to make me smile was him. He told me “Getting a D isn’t the end of the world, in fact, that D will motivate you to work harder and put more effort.” Fortunately, he was right, the second semester I changed that D to a C and I can still remember the excitement and happiness in his face telling me “I knew you could do it.” That memory woke me up, I realized that the life I was living was not the one Dad would have wanted for me. He wouldn’t want me to stay upset and give up on myself or my life in that case. He wants me to live and learn, not grieve and lose sight of everything else that I still have around me. From my birth to his dying breath, he was the perfect example of someone who loved life; he made the most out of everyday he had, even during his chemotherapy treatments. Not once have I seen my father with a frown on his face, he endured all the pain and smiled. Whether it was to keep himself stronger, or to encourage us to never stop believing, it worked. Remembering all those moments, those memories and those lessons from my father changed my perspective in life. I felt guilty that the end of his life caused me to stop living mine. Following this realization, I woke up each morning with my Dad’s simple philosophy of life in my mind: live. And so I lived.

My father’s death, undoubtedly the worst thing I have ever experiences, ultimately made me stronger. Once I was able to learn how to exist without him, life got less lonely. In fact, I was more motivated to live, to work hard, to achieve my goals and make my family proud. I stopped feeling sorry for myself, as life could always get worse - but could also get better, just like my dad taught me. His death taught me to love deeper, to appreciate what I have rather than what I had, and inspired me to make a lasting impact. His death taught me that we all have some sort of purpose on this earth, and his was to show people how to truly live. A huge lesson I learnt however, was based on the concept of last words. It’s impossible to know when you are speaking to someone for the last time. I can’t begin to express how grateful I am that the last words my father ever heard me say were that I’m here if you need anything. Therefore, the last words of this essay are the most important. I will work hard, I will never stop believing in myself, I will do my best to make my father proud. I will live my life and I endure to make a difference.

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Dear Therapist Writes to Herself in Her Grief

My father died, there’s a pandemic, and I’m overcome by my feeling of loss.

Dear Therapist,

I know that everyone is going through loss during the coronavirus pandemic, but in the midst of all this, my beloved father died two weeks ago, and I’m reeling.

He was 85 years old and in great pain from complications due to congestive heart failure. After years of invasive procedures and frequent hospitalizations, he decided to go into home hospice to live out the rest of his life surrounded by family. We didn’t know whether it would be weeks or months, but we expected his death, and had prepared for it in the time leading up to it. We had the conversations we wanted to have, and the day he died, I was there to kiss his cheeks and massage his forehead, to hold his hand and say goodbye. I was at his bedside when he took his last breath.

And yet, nothing prepared me for this loss. Can you help me understand my grief?

Lori Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear Readers,

This week, I decided to submit my own “Dear Therapist” letter following my father’s death. As a therapist, I’m no stranger to grief, and I’ve written about its varied manifestations in this column many times .

Even so, I wanted to write about the grief I’m now experiencing personally, because I know this is something that affects everyone. You can’t get through life without experiencing loss. The question is, how do we live with loss?

In the months before my father died, I asked him a version of that question: How will I live without you? If this sounds strange—asking a person you love to give you tips on how to grieve his death—let me offer some context.

My dad was a phenomenal father, grandfather, husband, and loyal friend to many. He had a dry sense of humor, a hearty laugh, boundless compassion, an uncanny ability to fix anything around the house, and a deep knowledge of the world (he was my Siri before there was a Siri). Mostly, though, he was known for his emotional generosity. He cared deeply about others; when we returned to my mom’s house after his burial, we were greeted by a gigantic box of paper towels on her doorstep, ordered by my father the day before he died so that she wouldn’t have to worry about going out during the pandemic.

His greatest act of emotional generosity, though, was talking me through my grief. He said many comforting things in recent months—how I’ll carry him inside me, how my memories of him will live forever, how he believes in my resilience. A few years earlier, he had taken me aside after one of my son’s basketball games and said that he’d just been to a friend’s funeral, told the friend’s adult daughter how proud her father had been of her, and was heartbroken when she said her father had never said that to her.

“So,” my father said outside the gym, “I want to make sure that I’ve told you how proud of you I am. I want to make sure you know.” It was the first time we’d had a conversation like that, and the subtext was clear: I’m going to die sooner rather than later. We stood there, the two of us, hugging and crying as people passing by tried not to stare, because we both knew that this was the beginning of my father’s goodbye.

But of all the ways my father tried to prepare me for his loss, what has stayed with me most was when he talked about what he learned from grieving his own parents’ deaths: that grief was unavoidable, and that I would grieve this loss forever.

“I can’t make this less painful for you,” he said one night when I started crying over the idea—still so theoretical to me—of his death. “But when you feel the pain, remember that it comes from a place of having loved and been loved deeply.” Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “Beyond that—you’re the therapist. Think about how you’ve helped other people with their grief.”

So I have. Five days before he died, I developed a cough that would wake me from sleep. I didn’t have the other symptoms of COVID-19—fever, fatigue—but still, I thought: I’d better not go near Dad . I spoke with him every day, as usual, except for Saturday, when time got away from me. I called the next day—the day when suddenly he could barely talk and all we could say was “I love you” to each other before he lost consciousness. He never said another word; our family sat vigil until he died the next afternoon.

Afterward, I was racked with guilt. While I’d told myself that I hadn’t seen him in his last days because of my cough, and that I hadn’t called Saturday because of the upheaval of getting supplies for the lockdown, maybe I wasn’t there and didn’t call because I was in denial—I couldn’t tolerate the idea of him dying, so I found a way to avoid confronting it.

Soon this became all I thought about—how I wished I’d gone over with my cough and a mask; how I wished I’d called on Saturday when he was still cogent—until I remembered something I wrote in this column to a woman who felt guilty about the way she had treated her dying husband in his last week. “One way to deal with intense grief is to focus the pain elsewhere,” I had written then. “It might be easier to distract yourself from the pain of missing your husband by turning the pain inward and beating yourself up over what you did or didn’t do for him.”

Like my father, her husband had suffered for a long time, and like her, I felt I had failed him in his final days.

I wrote to her:

Grief doesn’t begin the day a person dies. We experience the loss while the person is alive, and because our energy is focused on doctor appointments and tests and treatments—and because the person is still here—we might not be aware that we’ve already begun grieving the loss of someone we love … So what happens to their feelings of helplessness, sadness, fear, or rage? It’s not uncommon for people with a terminally ill partner to push their partner away in order to protect themselves from the pain of the loss they’re already experiencing and the bigger one they’re about to endure. They might pick fights with their partner … They might avoid their partner, and busy themselves with other interests or people. They might not be as helpful as they had imagined they would be, not only because of the exhaustion that sets in during these situations, but also because of the resentment: How dare you show me so much love, even in your suffering, and then leave me .

Another “Dear Therapist” letter came to mind this week, this one from a man grieving the loss of his wife of 47 years . He wanted to know how long this would go on. I replied:

Many people don’t know that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s well-known stages of grieving—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—were conceived in the context of terminally ill patients coming to terms with their own deaths … It’s one thing to “accept” the end of your own life. But for those who keep on living, the idea that they should reach “acceptance” might make them feel worse (“I should be past this by now”; “I don’t know why I still cry at random times, all these years later”) … The grief psychologist William Worden looks at grieving in this light, replacing “stages” with “tasks” of mourning. In the fourth of his tasks, the goal is to integrate the loss into our lives and create an ongoing connection with the person who died—while also finding a way to continue living.

Just like my father suggested, these columns helped. And so did my own therapist, the person I called Wendell in my recent book, Maybe You Should Talk to Someone . He sat with me (from a coronavirus-safe distance, of course) as I tried to minimize my grief— look at all of these relatively young people dying from the coronavirus when my father got to live to 85 ; look at the all the people who weren’t lucky enough to have a father like mine —and he reminded me that I always tell others that there’s no hierarchy of pain, that pain is pain and not a contest.

And so I stopped apologizing for my pain and shared it with Wendell. I told him how, after my father died and we were waiting for his body to be taken to the mortuary, I kissed my father’s cheek, knowing that it would be the last time I would ever kiss him, and I noticed how soft and warm his cheek still was, and I tried to remember what he felt like, because I knew I would never feel my father’s skin again. I told Wendell how I stared at my father’s face and tried to memorize every detail, knowing it would be the last time I’d ever see the face I’d looked at my entire life. I told him how gutted I was by the physical markers that jolted me out of denial and made this goodbye so horribly real—seeing my father’s lifeless body being wrapped in a sheet and placed in a van ( Wait, where are you taking my dad? I silently screamed), carrying the casket to the hearse, shoveling dirt into his grave, watching the shiva candle melt for seven days until the flame was jarringly gone. Mostly, though, I cried, deep and guttural, the way my patients do when they’re in the throes of grief.

Since leaving Wendell’s office, I have cried and also laughed. I’ve felt pain and joy; I’ve felt numb and alive. I’ve lost track of the days, and found purpose in helping people through our global pandemic. I’ve hugged my son, also reeling from the loss of his grandfather, tighter than usual, and let him share his pain with me. I’ve spent some days FaceTiming with friends and family, and other days choosing not to engage.

But the thing that has helped me the most is what my father did for me and also what Wendell did for me. They couldn’t take away my pain, but they sat with me in my loss in a way that said: I see you, I hear you, I’m with you. This is exactly what we need in grief, and what we can do for one another—now more than ever.

Related Podcast

Listen to Lori Gottlieb share her advice on dealing with grief and answer listener questions on Social Distance , The Atlantic ’s new podcast about living through a pandemic:

Dear Therapist is for informational purposes only, does not constitute medical advice, and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician, mental-health professional, or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. By submitting a letter, you are agreeing to let The Atlantic use it—in part or in full—and we may edit it for length and/or clarity.

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How to Start the Essay About My Father’s Death

By Cynthia Kaplan

1. Here’s a piece of advice. While spending the afternoon with your dying father, don’t ask Alexa to play the songs of Judy Collins which, once upon a time, he loved, because the first song out of the gate might be this:

Across the morning sky

All the birds are leaving

Ah, how can they know it’s time for them to go?

Before the winter fire

We’ll still be dreaming

I do not count the time

Who knows where the time goes?

2. If you’re wondering how to get a very ill man in his late 80s to the Sloan Kettering emergency room without taking an ambulance, because they don’t accept patients who arrive in ambulances, because dying of cancer is not an emergency, per se , I’ll tell you: bundle him up (it’s early November), secure him upright by tying him to the wheelchair with the arms of a sweater—not the one he’s wearing, he’s not insane—and wheel him through the street. Do this because the Sloan Kettering emergency room is the Lamborghini of emergency rooms. It is the place where they have your father on a gurney within two minutes of arrival and evaluated by a team of doctors within 10 minutes. It is the place where a doctor finally tells us to our faces that he is dying.

3. One summer day, my husband and I were playing tennis with our teenage kids when our friends Paul and Rachel came to meet us. While David and I left the court to greet them, my father, who had been watching the game, walked onto the court without his cane and asked the kids if he could take a swing or two. Paul, hugging me hello, looked over my shoulder and asked, “Is it possible that there is an old man lying on the tennis court?”

4. Once, I said to my mother, “If you die before Dad, I will kill you.”

5. My father’s night table was a wonder of bedside efficiency, while at the same time a textbook example of what an electrician would call a fire hazard. The double outlet behind it somehow managed to power no fewer than eight electrical appliances. They were as follows: a lamp, an iPhone, an iPad, an Apple watch, a laptop computer, a Mophie charger, a smaller lamp for reading after lights out, and a rechargeable battery charger. There is a metaphor, somewhere here, in which my father, who has been at or near death’s door several times in the past six years, not to mention that time back in 2003 when he drove himself to the hospital while having a heart attack, is, himself, rechargeable.

When he returned home from Sloan Kettering for what we knew would be the last time, my brother dutifully laid a powerstrip beneath the hospital bed, plugging it in behind the couch and taping it down with gaffer’s tape to the rug, as though we were all on a film set. In addition, a little folding table was placed next to the bed for thermoses, cups of rechargeable batteries labeled “charged” and “to charge”, and a pulse oximeter, which actually belongs to me because I have a congenital lung thing. My father consulted it twice hourly, and it may have been the most suitable and well enjoyed gift I have ever given him.

6. After my father died, I found four quarter-sized items that looked like blobs of white clay sitting in a box in his desk drawer. Each had a small indent on the top and a disc of waxy paper, the kind that protects a sticky surface, on the bottom. I brought them home, pulled the paper off, and stuck one each onto the side of my night table, David’s night table, and our children’s night tables, just below the surface. I picked our phone cords up off the floor and pressed them into the indents. My father was a genius.

7. On one of the final days of my father’s life, while confined to a hospital bed in the center of my parents’ Upper East Side living room, he set his Apple watch to time the life span of two ordinary, single-use AAA batteries so he could compare them to rechargeable AAA batteries. I said, “Dad, that could take hours.” “That’s okay,” he said.

8. Here is how I found myself, one night in the summer of 2019, alone in the emergency room of New York Presbyterian Hospital with each of my parents unconscious on a gurney. Late that afternoon, my mother, then upright, called and asked me to come over. “Your father doesn’t look right, and I’m going to call an ambulance.”        

When the EMS people arrived, my father awoke and, despite the fact that he was very ill, asked them how their night was going so far and thanked them very much for coming. He made them each guess his pulse oxygen level, and he made jokes at his own expense throughout the ambulance ride. This was his way. It was both his nature and a contrivance. The gratitude, the charm, they were genuine, but they also got him whatever he wanted. The hospital he preferred, the nurses he liked. When he asked for more ice water or blankets from the blanket warmer, he got them.

After an hour-long wait in a hallway, we were taken into a curtained bay, and my father, now feverish and incoherent, was hooked up to an IV and a heart monitor. He awoke briefly to insist my mother change his ileostomy bag. He prided himself on the care he took with it, and even in his delirium he knew it should be checked. I stepped outside the curtain and texted my brother an update.

When my mother was through she was done in. It was now around 9 p.m. and I suspected she hadn’t eaten since noon. I offered her the Clif Bar I had in my backpack, but she pulled a granola bar from her purse and said, “For emergencies.” “Me, too,” I said. We ate in silence. Then she looked at me and said, “You know, I’m feeling a little off.” Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped down in the chair.

I yelled toward the nurses station. “My mother has fainted!”

Doctors and nurses rushed over, swooped her onto a gurney, and rolled her next to my father.

When my brother arrived, I held up my phone to take a picture of him sitting on a chair between our supine parents, casually reading the paper. Just as I pointed my phone, my father bolted upright, eyes wide, looking straight ahead at nothing, like an extra in a zombie movie. I texted the picture to my best friend.

9. If I write the essay about my father’s death, it will mean he has died.

10. My brother, my mother, my husband, and I sat outside a curtained area at Sloan Kettering’s emergency room and, while my father was being examined, we discussed our most pressing issue: how to bring an unconscious man to consciousness long enough to find out his iPhone password.

When the doctors left, we hovered over our father, waiting for any sign of consciousness. I was tempted to press my fingertips into his sternum, rubbing back and forth, something I’d seen TV doctors do to rouse patients. I could imagine my father himself suggesting this, as he was an avid observer of his own care. He demanded bloodwork and any other diagnostic information be emailed to him from each of his doctors, so he, a man with no medical training whatsoever, could interpret it.

Dad. Dad. Jack. Pop, wake up. Dad. We stood on either side of him and took turns throwing pennies down the well, hoping to hear one go kerplunk. His eyelids fluttered.

Steve held up the phone. “Dad, what’s the password?” Dad moved his mouth a bit but no sound came out. He closed his eyes and then opened them again. “Dad, can you tell us the password for your phone?”

He held up his right hand, typing the air. Steve put the phone in his left hand and helped him hold it. He punched the code. 189585. “189585, is it 189585, Dad?” I asked. “What is that?” “Grandpa’s birthday.” His father’s birthday, year first, then month, then day. Even if we’d guessed the date, we would never have guessed the sequence. Genius.

11. When someone in your home is in hospice care and you think the patient is in need of medical assistance, you call the hospice hotline. You do not touch the box of drugs in the fridge, the one they gave you at the start of hospice care, because you were told not to touch it without a nurse’s express instructions. I imagine my mother in navy slacks and an old beige cashmere turtleneck, standing in a blast of cold air, eyeing the box with consternation. Why don’t they tell her the thing they don’t tell her until it is too late, that when the end is near she should just throw everything in the box at her husband to make his suffering stop. Because, what is she going to do? Kill him?

12. It is late November, and Marc Maron’s cat, LaFonda, is unwell. I know this because I have been listening to his twice-weekly podcast as I walk through Central Park to my parents’ apartment. LaFonda is old and, like my father, she is not taking her infirmity well. She is weak and listless and has all but stopped eating. The vet says you never know, she could have a year. He doesn’t suggest heroic measures, so Marc gives her fluids and meds and tries to soothe her. He is told that LaFonda will let him know when it is time.

A week after my father dies, LaFonda tells Marc. She has some crazy energy, flying around, howling and agitated, trying first, as Marc reports in his typically trenchant way, to climb onto the toilet before finally shitting in the shower. He and his girlfriend take her to the vet, comforting her and each other. They know they will leave without her. Marc tells LaFonda it’s OK, and she dies in his arms.

If you were to ask me to describe the end of my father’s life, I would tell you to listen to Marc Maron’s account of his last days with La Fonda. They were just the same, except for the shitting in the shower. 

13. At 6:30 a.m., my mother woke me with a phone call. I got dressed in the dark and took a taxi across town.

13a. On the last morning of my father’s life, he was awake and wrestling with the air. His covers were thrown aside. He was clutching at the bars of the hospital bed, pulling himself up, trying with all his might to stay alive. He asked for help from his father, who hovered near the bookshelves.

My mother had called the hospice hotline about an hour earlier, and they’d instructed her to give him a dose of Ativan. He continued to rage, so we called again and were told the nurse would come. When she finally did, she gave him more Ativan and an antipsychotic and then another dose of Ativan. As she packed up her bag and prepared to leave, she said, “His heart sounds strong, so it could be a few days. Or it could be five minutes. Who knows?”

13b. No one tells you that when a person stops breathing and you think it’s over, 30 seconds later they might take another breath. If I could crystalize in one image my father’s gargantuan life force, his unequivocal desire to not die, his uncanny ability to come back from the edge, from the edge of the edge, from a heart attack, from a stroke, from cancer, from sepsis, to go from wheelchair to walker to cane over and over, it would be this second breath.

13c. The summer before my father died, my parents bought cemetery plots in a lovely cemetery in Connecticut, near where we’d lived when I was growing up. Go ahead and be shocked that a couple of old Jews didn’t have their place of rest lined up until the very last second, but my father could not envision his death, not ever, not even as he died. With his last words he begged my mother to call for an ambulance.

13d. Five minutes after the departure of the hospice nurse, my father took his last breaths. I called out, “Mom, he stopped breathing!” They say that the hearing is the last thing to go, and now I am haunted by the idea that my father heard me announce his death and was frightened.

13e. My father stopped breathing while I stood stroking his head, telling him everything would be alright. He would be alright. I said to my mother, “I think that’s it, Mom,” and she said to me, “Are you sure? What if he’s not dead?” And I said, “Go get a mirror, like in the movies,” and she did, and she came back and put it under his nose and there was nothing, no steam. We started to laugh. Then she said, “What if we killed him with all those drugs?” We laughed some more.

14. Who knows where the time goes?

15. When I was a little girl, we had a small motor boat called The Sparerib. My parents had a leather and wool satchel with matching thermoses, and my mother would pack it with sandwiches, ice water, and a single can of Tab for her, and we would motor out onto the Long Island Sound for the day. We would drop our anchor and jump in and swim around. Then my brother and I would eat our lunch on the prow, letting our suits dry on us in the sun. On the way home, we would take turns standing in the circle of our father’s arms helping him steer the boat.

I can see my parents now, in my mind’s eye. My mother sits on a square canvas boat cushion in the stern in her checked Bermuda shorts and white button-down shirt, her dark hair tied back with a scarf, like Jackie Kennedy. My father, with his sideburns and his Ray-Bans, is wearing khaki shorts and his cream-colored knit shirt with a navy binding at the edges of the neck and sleeves. He stands smiling, gazing out over the windshield, one hand on the wheel, the other on my brother’s shoulder. The late afternoon sun is in our faces as we head into the harbor.

Cynthia Kaplan C’85 is the author of two books of essays, some films, and a bit of TV. You can find her at  www.cynthiakaplan.com . Her father was Jack B. Kaplan W’53.

5 Responses

So beautiful and funny and moving and heartbreaking Like life. You have captured the fullness of it. Thank you

Beautiful. Thank you.

Brilliantly done, and so very moving. Thank you

Oh, my, lord, this is simply wonderful. What parent wouldn’t want to be loved like this?

Thank you for sharing this beautiful and moving “list.” Those of us who’ve been through similar experiences with dying loved ones can definitely empathize. Clearly you’re a devoted daughter who provided lots of loving care. I hope the memories of better times can give you some comfort.

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• The Death of My Father the Pope: A...

The Death of My Father the Pope: A Memoir

• About the Book

A man mourning his alcoholic father faces a choice: whether to pay tribute, lay scorn upon him, or pour a drink.

Weaving between preparations for his father’s funeral and memories of life on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border, Obed Silva chronicles his father’s alcoholism --- a lifelong love that ended only at his death at the age of 48, having poisoned himself one Carta Blanca at a time. Addiction respects no borders. The havoc Silva’s father wreaked on his family not only followed them north, where mother and son moved to escape his violent drunken rages, but would make itself felt even from the grave.

With a wry cynicism; a profane, profound anger; an antic, brutally honest voice; and a hard-won classical frame of reference, Silva channels the heartbreak of mourning while wrestling with the resentment and frustration resulting from addiction. THE DEATH OF MY FATHER THE POPE is a fluid and dynamic combination of memoir and examination of the power of language --- and the introduction of a unique and powerful literary voice.

The Death of My Father the Pope: A Memoir by Obed Silva

• Publication Date: December 6, 2022
• Genres: Memoir , Nonfiction
• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Picador
• ISBN-10: 1250858909
• ISBN-13: 9781250858900

Review: His father’s legacy was addiction and neglect. How Obed Silva lived to tell the tale

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The Death of My Father the Pope: A Memoir

By Obed Silva MCD: 304 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

“I take it death can’t be so bad, on account that we all must die,” Obed Silva observes in “ The Death of My Father the Pope .” “So why is it that we make such a fuss over life?” The question lingers beneath the surface of this memoir like a stain. Silva himself has come back from the brink more than once: A former gang member (a gunshot at 17 left him paralyzed from the waist down), he is now a professor at East Los Angeles College . “Seven times,” he writes, “I’ve almost died, and I’ll probably have a few more encounters with death by the time I finish telling this story. … But here I am still, for now.”

A sense of tenuousness — or, more specifically, of the fluid interplay between death and life — is a key factor in “The Death of My Father the Pope,” which opens with the death of the author’s father, Juan, an artist and alcoholic who drank himself to death in Chihuahua, Mexico, in 2009, at 48. Silva structures the book, his first, around his trip across the border for the wake and burial, but this is no linear reckoning. Instead, the memoir weaves back and forth in time, using memory and language to shade or expose the complexities of the father-son relationship.

Take the word “pope,” which for Silva carries multiple meanings. On the one hand, “In Spanish pope translates to papa, which is the same word used for dad.” On the other, his father was nothing if not larger than life: the Pope to a quasi-literal degree. “It’s all his doing, his work, his magnum opus,” Silva imagines saying to his younger sister. “Your father was the pope, didn’t you know, and everything he did was holy. This is why they cry for him, this is why they mourn his death.”

Silva’s observation is both direct and hyperbolic, which might also be said about “The Death of My Father the Pope” as a whole. The author loved his father but hated him as well, and his response to the death is elation and relief. He only goes to Mexico because of his mother’s insistence. “You need to heal,” she counsels, “and you can’t do that unless you forgive your father. It’s the only way you’re ever going to close those wounds.”

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Their exchange establishes the essential tensions of the memoir — between the past and present, the sins of the father and the sins of the son. “This woman,” Silva reflects, “who’d raised me all on her own without asking for anything from my father — not a cent — was showing me what real strength looked like. It wasn’t in muscles or in violence or in superiority; it was in meekness and humility, in simply saying I forgive you and moving on.”

For Silva, however, it’s not that simple. “Father, why can’t I cry for you?” he wonders. “Is it that you haven’t left me yet? Is it that I still carry you with me everywhere I go?” Silva makes such contradictions explicit when he views the body — “Remember the monster,” he reminds himself. “Remember the fury” — and cuts his thumb removing a protective sheet of plexiglass. “A drop of blood from my finger falls onto my father’s face,” he recalls, “and lands on his cheek just below his right eye.” Remembering the tattoo of his name on the dead man’s chest, Silva works open his father’s shirt and writes those letters again below the faded ink, this time etching them in blood. “You were my father, and I am of your blood,” he whispers. “I am your son. I am your son. Take it, Daddy, take your blood with you.”

What Silva is exploring is patrimony, which in his case is a minefield of loss. His memories, which keep rising to infuse the present, are fraught: if not always brutal then often charged. Every positive recollection — a trip to Ensenada with his father and half-brother Danny; a visit to Los Balnearios Robinson, a Chihuahua water park — comes tempered with its inverse: the night Silva’s father tried to enlist four friends to help beat his children, the evening that ended in a brothel after he took Silva to score drugs. “This is where I first buried my father,” the author notes. “I buried him here, where I found solace in a conversation with a prostitute. Here is where the funeral took place; here is where I laid him to rest.”

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This eulogy of sorts offers little room for grief. “My father loved us,” Silva concedes, “but he loved us in the way that only a sick man can love anybody: indelicately. … He would kiss us one minute, and ridicule us the next. He would hand us a dream with one hand and crush it with the other.”

Eventually, enough became enough — for Silva and also for his mother, who moved with him to California when he was a young boy after suffering escalating waves of violence and abuse. “Since he has caused her much emotional anguish and physical pain throughout her early adult life,” he writes in the acknowledgements, “my mother would like little to do with anything involving my father. By the end of this book, you will fully comprehend why.” The final chapter of the memoir, which details Silva’s conception, presents a creation myth that is the opposite of immaculate, a manifestation not of redemption but of his father’s primal sin.

The power of “The Death of My Father the Pope” lies in Silva’s willingness to address even this; he never looks away. His book is an unrequited love story, told in fragments, through the lens of death. “I wish that I could hug him,” Silva thinks as his father is being buried. “I wish I could feel the stubble on his cheeks.” Instead, he is left with something more elusive but also sharper: vindication.

“How ’bout it, son, we die together,” Silva imagines his father asking, while in his head, he provides the only answer: “You first, Dad, you first.”

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Ulin is a former book editor and book critic of The Times.

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Personal Narrative: The Death Of My Father Essay

Thave to say the death of my dad had a great impact on who | am now. My dad’s name was Elmo Lee he was about 35 when he died. He left behind 5 children my brothers Elmo,and Emerion and my sisters, Tiffany,Teja,and myself. I was never told what killed him or how he got it. It was over 3 years when he first started to get sick and become hospitalized, but i was not informed until it got worse. I was always a quiet child always stayed to myself. Just the vibe of being near people made me nervous I was even this way with my own family.

I feel my dad tried to get me to come out my shell and get me to open up to people by bringing me to his house in Flint,taking to his job, and take me to stay and meet my step mother, Tiffany Lee. It helped for a while, but then I started my first year of school and i went right back into my old ways. I was held back in the first grade by my grandma ,which I believe my dad had no knowledge of. It was tough dealing with the kids there. There were always talking about people’s appearances,which I never know why when they dress the same as them.

I was told to ignore them harder there was one girl that wouldn’t let me be the quiet girl. So one day she decided to push my buttons and pick on me. My dad told when someone hit you hit the back harder. So when she pushed me, I hit him as ard as a could, she was crying after seeing we were only 8 and 9, then she left me alone. Three years later came to harper woods. I hated it there, it was all the unwanted attention. Consent Group work or working with a partner,that wasn’t my thing.

I was always thinking of my dad,I still do today, he always made his way into my mind when I was was down or on a verge of a breakdown. In 5th grade I was put in speech class I didn’t know why, maybe they thought cause I don’t talk | have a speech problem. Once again, my dad came up my mind. At this time I have seen him lately and itt was not normal for him not to come see me. One morning out of the blue he came over I was sleep him and my grandma talk, then all of a sudden he was crying.

I had never seen him cry, he was a strong person,l never was told why he was crying, but just to give him a hug and tell him “it’s ok”. Then I was in the 8th that day still stuck with me seeing not everyone is strong and brave. I came to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to be the shy, quiet girl and more! was going to be a new person something no one has seen. It was a hard process, but itt was worth it. In 8th with a 3. 2 GPAI was becoming the smart girl,yeah most people didn’t know was even there but some did. That was another step in making my dad proud, not that he wasn’t.

I ran into along the way hang with the bad kids, but I still got my work done. l became a favorite favorite student in all my classes,I didn’t like that much. couldn’t wait to get to high school. To bad I hated it the moment I walked over to that side of the school. 9th grade was the worst year of my life the year my dad first started to get sick,I didn’t find out till 2012, and I meet the mean girls. That may have slowed me down, but once they found out I was smart and not falling into their trap they changed the way they acted toward me.

They actually started to be nice to me and we became friends, i often feel I changed them for the better. My grades just got better and better sadly my dad got sicker and sicker from what I was told he died 3 times and was brought back. When | finally got to the 10 grade, he passed away while I was visiting him and my brothers and sisters it was the scariest things ever i didn’t know what to do, but at that moment my shell was completely shattered my youngest sibling need me and I have to be brave for them.

Today I’m am in the 11th grade and am at the top of my game, my grades are great, and I loved by many friends. If you have seen me from when I was little and me now you would not believe the difference and I hate that he’s not here today to see how much of a difference he made in my life. If it was for him for him I wouldn’t even consider college let alone go to one. I know he is proud of me and the accomplishment | have made. I plan on continuing down the right path.

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Should I Be Loyal to My Father or My Dying Uncle?

A reader is torn between attending a final dinner with his uncle, who has terminal cancer, and supporting his father, who wasn’t invited because of an old grudge.

By Philip Galanes

My father’s brother was going through a rough patch financially, so my father offered him a room in his house. My uncle moved in, but they fought frequently over my uncle’s insistence that my father should be more religious. After months of tension, my father finally asked my uncle to leave, and my uncle stopped speaking to him. Later, he was diagnosed with cancer. My father made many attempts to repair their relationship, but my uncle wanted nothing to do with him. Now, we have learned that my uncle is terminally ill. He has invited the whole family — except for my father — to gather for one last Passover. I am torn: It feels wrong to exclude my father, but it also feels wrong to refuse the wish of a dying man. Thoughts?

I appreciate your sharing the back story of this conflict between your father and your uncle. Context is always helpful. Now, I urge you to set it aside: It is not your job to repair the relationship between these men or to judge them. In my experience, sibling relationships are often more layered and complex than any one story can convey.

Creating some emotional distance here may also help make your decision about attending Passover easier. On a purely humane level, there is no conflict between sympathizing with a man who is dying and feeling bad about your father’s exclusion from what may be a last gathering. I can also imagine your discomfort at feeling disloyal to your father. That’s a lot of emotion to layer onto one day!

Still, I would attend your uncle’s Seder. And I would tell your father that you feel sorry about his exclusion. Let him know that you love him and think he has been a good brother to your uncle. Your father already knows what a difficult situation this is. I doubt he would want you to boycott the Seder for him, and I bet he will be proud of your compassion.

Expanding the Old Boys’ Club

For 15 years, my best friend and I have hosted a monthly dinner meant to keep the ol’ crew together as we’ve aged, married and had kids. We call it the Man Dinner — intentionally coarse and noninclusive. There are 30 guys on the list and about 10 of them show up regularly. No woman has ever been invited or attended. The wrinkle: A longtime attendee is transitioning to be a woman. I am of the opinion that we should remove her from the Man Dinner list. We can see her separately. Your thoughts?

Listen, it’s not my dinner club, and you are free to socialize as you like. But isn’t this friend part of “the ol’ crew”? And isn’t the whole point of your club that it’s increasingly difficult to keep up with old friends as we age and take on new responsibilities? So you probably aren’t likely to see her separately — perhaps at the very moment she needs support the most.

It doesn’t sound as if society would collapse if you relaxed the gender requirement at these dinners to include men and those who were assigned male at birth. And adhering to the letter of the law here — by excluding a trans woman who has been a longtime member of the club — seems to belie the warmhearted spirit of your enterprise.

Fido’s Five-Second Rule

I was having brunch with my family at an indoor restaurant when my young daughter accidentally dropped a piece of fruit on the floor. At the next table, a woman had a dog with her that was a little unruly. The dog started sniffing the fruit, so I warned its owner. (I don’t know anything about the dietary restrictions of dogs.) The woman proceeded to give me an earful, telling me I should have picked up the fruit. Should I have?

Accidents happen! Even the best-mannered children (and adults) spill food occasionally. When I take kids to restaurants, I do a quick survey around our table after the meal to gather the detritus so the waiters don’t have to. But not every blueberry needs to be picked up immediately.

Here, I can’t help wondering what an unruly dog was doing inside a restaurant. In my experience, animals in restaurants are limited to service and emotional-support pets, and they are generally under the control of their owners — not wandering to other tables. Maybe put this episode down to a careless owner on a grouchy afternoon?

Call Me by My Name

I work with a woman who calls me by a nickname she gave me shortly after she started working here a year ago. I think of nicknames as arising out of longer or closer relationships. And I don’t like this one. It feels like she’s forcing a friendship and trying to be chummy with me. How can I ask her to stop without hurting her feelings?

I’m sorry you’ve spent more than two minutes thinking about this. We are all entitled to be called by our names. Period. Let her know there are no hard feelings, but you prefer your own name to her nickname. That shouldn’t hurt anyone’s feelings, right?

For help with your awkward situation, send a question to [email protected], Philip Galanes on Facebook or @SocialQPhilip on X.

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It should have been a dead giveaway.

The Brazilian woman who took her dead uncle into a bank to sign a loan in her name arrived there by taxi — with video even showing the driver helping her move the corpse from his car.

Érika de Souza Vieira Nunes was arrested Tuesday after taking the body of her 68-year-old uncle, Paulo Roberto Braga, into a bank and then moving his hand to sign a key document to get her a $3,400 loan.

Newly emerged video now shows Nunes — who reportedly told cops that she didn’t know her uncle was dead — arriving at the bank by taxi, with her motionless uncle in the front passenger seat next to the rideshare driver.

The footage, which has no sound, shows Nunes placing a wheelchair outside the car door and reaching inside to grab her late uncle.

The driver then helps her pull him out and into the wheelchair, where the uncle slumps with his head tilted to the right.

At one point, a man walks by and does a double-take. He turns around and appears to speak with Nunes while motioning to Braga, but then continues on his way.

Nunes then wheels Braga into an elevator, before another CCTV camera captures her making her away along a hallway.

Another video, taken the day before, showed Nunes bringing the visibly alive Braga to an emergency room.

Nunes insisted she did know her relative was dead when she took him to the bank to sign documents that would have allowed her to take out a $3,400 loan.

Braga’s autopsy found that he died between 11:30 am and 2:30 pm local time Tuesday, with his cause of death being determined as respiratory aspiration of stomach contents and heart failure.

Police Chief Fábio Luis said the way the man’s blood had pooled within his vessels suggests that Braga did not die seated but rather lying down.

Braga’s toxicology tests are still pending.

Nunes is now facing charges of theft by way of fraud and desecration of a corpse.

Her attorney claimed that Nunes suffers from mental health issues and might have experienced a mental breakdown.

“Érika undergoes psychological treatment and takes prescribed medications,” lawyer Ana Carla de Souza Correa said.

“I believe she was having a breakdown at that moment because of the medications. She appeared visibly disturbed.”

In a viral video recorded by a bank employee Tuesday and first aired by TV Globo, Brazil’s largest broadcaster, Nunes was seen talking to the dead man and lifting his drooping head.

“Uncle, are you listening? You need to sign [the loan contract]. If you don’t sign, there’s no way, because I can’t sign for you,” Nunes says in the clip, while thrusting a pen between his limp fingers.

“Sign so you don’t give me any more headaches, I can’t take it anymore,” she adds.

When a bank staffer notes that Braga’s color looks off and he appears unwell, Nunes replies.

“He is like that. He doesn’t say anything.”

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