Three Years Later

On the approaching anniversary of my father's death

Age 19, inside the office of the Stony Brook Press. Potentially on the phone with my father. Photo: Roman Sheydvasser

This will always be a strange time of year for me. On the last day of August, three years ago, my father died. I had, for many months, been steeling myself for the possibility—years, really, if you consider what it means when your father is a half century older than you—but there is no serious way to prepare for death. There is no guidance that is worthwhile, no advice, no means to ready yourself for what it is for a person to never speak to you again. By that point, in the haze of August, the air and the days thick, my father could not speak to me anymore. A tracheostomy tube had been inserted into his neck to save his life; it was a decision my mother and I made several months prior, entirely defensible, and it’s one I wonder about now. He was about to die and the tracheostomy tube kept him with us. But it left him speechless, and this was a cruel fate for someone who loved to talk so much. He would go on, from May to June to July to August, like this, vacillating between hope—he was mentally sharp, and could jot notes to us in a wobbly script—and plain despair. I do not know what the answer is—or was. You try to prolong a life and you hope, somehow, it will work out.

The hardest part of death, the most obvious part, is that you can’t pick up the phone and talk to the person again. In my more disoriented moments, I’ve hoped for a loophole, a way to commune for a minute or an hour, one simple check-in, a bargain with God. I suppose that’s what séances are for, but I don’t believe in them, if I do believe in God. For a few months after my father died, I had vivid dreams about him, of a nature and charge that I have not known since. If I had visitation dreams, these were them. I’m convinced they ended in 2023, though I’ve dreamed about my father since. Those later dreams, I think, are a projection of my subconscious. In one, I told him about how I read a book where Paul Goodman and C. Wright Mills were mentioned, and I can’t recall what he said in reply. In all of these dreams, there is the sense that my father is back from a long trip.

What do the dead make of us? How they outnumber the living. My father was a rationalist, an atheist, so it is difficult for me to imagine meeting him in an afterlife, though I’d prefer a world where believers and non-believers can mingle anyway. In the interim, I have my memories. He was a loving, complicated man, possessed of many secrets. If I had resentments, they’ve melted away. He was a great friend to me, which is a curious thing to say about a father who was much older than you, but it was true. We talked about baseball, politics, and history just about every day, two motormouths, and I enjoyed rising in the world because it meant he could take pride in me. Why do we try to succeed? What do we yearn for? I never cared much for money. I wanted, certainly, to impress other people. Success, I suppose, mattered because it could make my parents happy. They did not demand it for me. They did not withhold love. What I wanted, rather, was to run home and show them what I had done. An eternal boy, waving around his arts and crafts. Both my parents read almost everything I wrote—my mother is very much with us, and still does—and it is strange, still, to know my father is not poring over an essay like this one. We spoke about the silliness of funerals, how the dead should be honored when they’re alive, and I wish I wrote about my father more when he could read the words. This now seems wasteful. Pay tribute, sure, but what of it? The man is somewhere else. He’s not coming back.

I had no intention of writing the first piece about my father’s death. I actively avoided it. On August 31st, 2023, I made no social media post, no public mention. It seemed gauche to me, dishonorable somehow. Death is a private affair. Friends and family knew, and that was enough. In September, his birthday approached, what would have been his eighty-fourth. I was at a Yankee game and thinking again of what I wanted to tell him—an anecdote about a ballplayer—and tears began trickling down my face. I knew, then, I would have to write. I waited for September 21st, his birthday. Another birthday approaches, one empty of the celebrant, and I don’t quite know what to do. I silently note it and move on. Three years. At one point is someone no longer recently departed? I think of all the events piling up without him, the ballgames and the gossip and the politics, and I sigh. There are moments when I am glad he is not around to witness what has befallen the world. At the same time, I know he would have reveled in Zohran Mamdani’s ascent, since he spent hours volunteering in my campaign office, Zohran at his side. I can hear him, were he still here, exclaim in wonder over Mayor Mamdani. I hear his voice often still, softly in my head.

I was thirty-three when my father died. This is young to lose a parent, though not that young. I was grateful he did not die when I was a teen or in my early twenties. One speaks of “handling” death and if there is a way to do this—to curl up, to clench your fists, to wait—I was better at it at thirty-three than twenty-three or thirteen. I was surer of who I was; I was not so afraid. I was lucky, too, to have my partner at the time with me, who saw me through the grief. She was a wonder. As a child, I would have crumbled. I would have reached adulthood broken. Plenty of people stronger than me lose parents when they’re very young; I was not someone who could have strode forward, into the world. I needed my father to watch me graduate high school, watch me graduate college, and read his batch of newspapers in his armchair as the television hissed and I talked loudly about some trivia of the day. I needed all of it. I needed to smell the scent of his pipe tobacco and hear WFAN playing through his car radio. I needed him to read my early fiction, and I needed to feel a shyness creep in me as he made sense of it. I needed him in his beach chair at my softball games, lounging next to my mother. I thank God it was three years ago he died and not thirteen. I thank God he did not die on September 11th as he very well could have, if he chose to take a breakfast meeting at Windows on the World.

My perception of time, as I’ve aged, has come closer to that found among the aliens of Slaughterhouse-Five, who perceive existence in four dimensions and can see, simultaneously, all points of the space-time continuum. This does not mean I am fatalistic like the Tralfamadorians, muttering “so it goes” each time a terrible event takes place. Rather, I’ve started to weigh events on the spectrum more evenly, assigning them the same amount of significance. If my father had a terrible end to his life, it was no more relevant than a wonderful moment he had with me. Now that he’s dead, his life’s arc finished, his last year, 2023, can be considered as relevant as 1998 or 2004 or 2011. The memories, the images, they are all contained within me, and I can brush against them whenever I’d like. The latest version of him, dying in a seaside rehabilitation facility, matters no more than when he was a baby or twelve or fifty-eight. This bare fact is comforting. I regret the times I rushed him off the phone, rushed through the apartment, rushed headlong through life as if there would always be more of him for me. I do think, though, I gave it my all as a son in the way he gave it his all as a father. He was not a perfect father—who is?—and I was not a perfect son. There’s a quote from the famed boxer Joe Louis, one my father was fond of, that goes: “I did the best I could with what I had.” My father did. And he taught me, as I raced onward, to do the same. Through trials, through setbacks, through the harshest moments, through failure—you do your absolute best. You keep trying.

A memory summoned: I am five, walking the sidewalks of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, with my father. I want to see inside a fire hydrant. I am a cherubic, curly-headed little boy, and it matters a great deal to know what waits inside of them. My father, fifty-five, stoops down and begins unscrewing one of the caps. It comes loose. I can peer into the darkness and find what I am looking for, even if I do not know what it is. When I wanted to watch a streetlight change—to see red on one side, green on the other—he stood with me, and walked with me across the street so I could try to understand a traffic signal. It all must have amused him. To me, it was vital, a duty, and I never forgot. That was one manifestation of love: his indulgence of me. I hope I loved him as much, gave him as much, made him feel like he had done well as a father. I only wish we were more direct with each other. We said “I love you” but we were not the men who shared feelings with each other, who became vulnerable, who allowed either of us to see the other cry. Once I was an adult, I would never cry in front of my father. My emotions were belted up against me. With him, I’d rather talk about the Mets or the midterms or another drama that had nothing to do with how I felt that day.

I did not expect him to die. He was ill. I did not believe, really, he could die. I spoke for the final time to him about the Mets and a Robert F. Kennedy Jr. event I was going to cover in Brooklyn. He was supposed to live longer, to get the trach out, to head to another facility or maybe, someday, come home. I did not like ever saying goodbye to him. The conversations would unspool, an endless thread, one topic to the next. I do not, as a rule, like saying goodbye to anyone. I didn’t believe in goodbyes, and I still don’t.

The call came from my mother in the early morning, after the facility had called her. He had died overnight, alone, as he probably preferred; he did not like to be seen the way he was, and as I’ve aged, I’ve understood this more fully. He was a prideful man. This was not him, decrepit, shriveling, bound to a bed. He was a vibrant, vigorous, and handsome man, a dynamo despite his type one diabetes. Not him. We are not merely the latest versions of ourselves. I suppose I wish I could have made a speech, to remind him that I loved him. Did I waste our last moments? I don’t know—our final time together was true to us, who we were, me gesturing to a New Yorker article and saying something inane about the Mets-Rangers series. I’ve been someone, over the years, too obsessed with the epaulets of a professional life. Books, publications, awards, glittering gold stars that marked me in the firmament. My father urged me towards these things. But, to his credit, he taught me the importance of friends and family, people who will be there for you, who will ensure you do not lead an empty life. I’ve rarely felt alone. I don’t think he did, either. He was a great friend to many people. I’ve tried to be, and failed at it plenty, I’m sure. I’ve been a rougher version of myself at times, too curt, too nasty, too arrogant, too preening. My father was not this way.

What would I talk about with him today? If he strode through my front door? Books, politics, society. Gossip. We’d catch up. I’d tell him about Ohtani to the Dodgers, the chaos in Iran, and the unprecedented mayor of New York. I’d hope, too, that talk would die down. We’d move on. I’d tell him how much he’s missed, how much he mattered, how voids do not get filled, only worked around. We’d say goodbye and promise to catch up again. I might let him see me cry.