The Last Year of My Father's Life

The year my father was dying we watched a great deal of television together. This is not what I expected to remember most, and for a long time it was not what I allowed myself to remember, because it seemed insufficient — too ordinary, too passive, not the right kind of material for the story I thought I should be constructing about the last year of his life.

But it is what happened, and it is what I remember with the most precision, so I have had to revise my ideas about what the right kind of material looks like.

He had been ill for two years before that last year, but the last year was different. The treatments had stopped working in the way they were supposed to, and the conversation with the doctors had shifted in register — from managing toward a goal to managing toward a conclusion. My father received this news with a steadiness that I admired and could not account for. I asked him, once, how he could be so calm about it. He said that he had had a good run, and that the important things had mostly worked out, and that there was no particular dignity in making a scene. I knew this was not the whole truth. But I also knew it was not a lie, and I let it stand.

We watched detective series, mostly. He had always liked them — the orderly revelation of hidden information, the satisfaction of a problem solved, the specific pleasure of watching a capable person do their job well in difficult circumstances. We watched the ones he had seen before and the ones he hadn't, without distinguishing between them. For the ones he had seen before, he would sometimes say what was about to happen, not as a spoiler but as a form of companionship — sharing what he knew, making me part of it.

I have thought about this. About the particular form of intimacy in sharing a story you already know with someone who doesn't. It requires a kind of generosity — the willingness to experience the story again through someone else's experiencing of it for the first time. He was doing that with the detective series and, I think, with other things.

My mother was in and out. She had her own way of handling it, which involved activity and arrangement and the continuous management of the house and its practical requirements. This was right for her and necessary and I did not judge it. It meant that the hours between visits fell to me, and that the hours became, over the year, a considerable number of hours, and that in those hours he and I arrived at a quality of conversation that I had not known we were capable of.

He told me things he had not told me before. Not dramatic revelations — nothing changed, nothing was confessed in the conventional sense. But texture. The texture of his life before I arrived in it: what he had wanted when he was young, what he had thought about during the years of early fatherhood when I was too small to know what he was thinking, what he was proudest of and what he wished he had done differently. The shape of his interior life, which I had never known, because we had been so busy for so long being the functional versions of ourselves — the working father, the growing son — that the interior versions had not been introduced.

He talked about his own father, who had died before I was born and who remained, in the family mythology, a largely abstract figure. He spoke of him with the complexity that attaches to real people: the qualities that had been admirable, the ones that had been difficult, the specific mix of gratitude and unresolved feeling that most people carry about their parents and rarely articulate. I listened carefully. I understood that I was hearing something I was supposed to pass on.

There was an afternoon in April when the light came through the window at a particular angle and fell across the arm of his chair, and he was talking about something I have since forgotten, and I had the very clear thought: I will miss this. Not in the future tense — I will miss this when he is gone. In some more immediate tense, as though the missing was already present, running alongside the moment rather than following it. As though I was already in both times at once.

I have tried to describe this experience to people and found it difficult to translate. The nearest I have come is this: it was the feeling of a moment being fully present to itself. Not held at a distance, not processed for future use, but simply happening, with a completeness and a weight that most moments do not have.

He died in July, at home, in his own bed, which was what he had wanted and which was accomplished by a considerable amount of unremarked effort on my mother's part. I was not in the room when it happened. I had stepped out, which is a fact I have spent time with. It happened while I was in the kitchen, making tea that neither of us would drink.

The detective series we had been watching had three episodes remaining. I watched them, alone, over the following week. He had known how they ended. I didn't, yet.

The endings were, as expected, satisfying. The problem was solved. The capable person had done their job in difficult circumstances. I thought of him each time the credits rolled, which is perhaps the closest thing to a ritual that I have been able to construct.

The year was ordinary in the most important sense: it was a year in which nothing was dramatised and nothing was resolved except the one thing, and the one thing was handled as he would have wanted — without a scene, with the important things having mostly worked out. I was there for most of it. I am glad I was there.

The television played on. We watched it together. I still miss it in the way that I didn't expect: not as loss but as an ache of gratitude for the ordinary hours, the ones that seemed insufficient at the time and turned out to have been the substance of the whole thing.I want to say something about the quality of the time, because time in that year had a different quality than time usually has and I don't think I have described it adequately.

The usual experience of time is forward-directed. You are moving through it toward something — a deadline, an event, a future state — and the present is always slightly shadowed by the next thing. The present moment is a waypoint rather than a destination. You pass through it efficiently and move on.

The year my father was dying, time stopped being forward-directed. Not because we were in denial — we were not — but because there was nothing to move toward except the end, and the end was not an event you moved toward in the usual purposive way. You simply continued to exist, day by day, in the time that remained.

This changed the experience of each day. The day was complete in itself. The afternoon was complete in itself. The hour was complete in itself. I found that I was more present in each moment than I had been in years, possibly ever — not because I had cultivated this quality deliberately but because the circumstances had removed the forward-directedness that usually makes the present feel insufficient.

The detective series. The tea. The light through the window. The particular way he laughed at something in the programme — a short, silent laugh, the shoulders moving, the eyes closing briefly. These are the things I retain. Not the larger narrative of the year, which I could not have told you while it was happening and which I am only partially able to tell you now. The specific texture of the afternoons.

I have tried to recover something of that quality of time since he died. I have not been fully successful. The forward-directedness returns quickly once the circumstances that removed it are gone. The present becomes a waypoint again. But I know, now, that the other kind of time is available — that it exists, that it can be inhabited, that the afternoons can be complete in themselves if you let them be.

This is perhaps the most practical thing the year gave me: the knowledge that presence is a real quality, not a metaphor, and that it has a specific texture that is different from the ordinary forward-moving experience, and that it is worth more than the forward motion it replaces. He taught me this by dying slowly enough for me to learn it.

I did not understand it at the time. I understand it now. I think he would find this satisfactory — the delayed comprehension, the lesson arriving at its own pace. He was, in general, a patient man.