““The letter was a beautiful piece of writing, and one I was familiar with, a letter in which Steinbeck tried to define to his young son the nature of love.””
As far as I recall, my father’s last words were: ‘It doesn’t really matter.’ Which tells you as much about the pragmatic nature of the man as any poetry might have expressed, although it was clear in the moment that it was a bitter lament he was trying to convey not a sanguine acceptance of what he knew was in store for him, and soon. He had a weary, exasperated look on his face as he said it, as though he would have liked to accompany it with a bitter shrug, only he no longer had the energy for such an extravagant gesture. So what he did was look up at me, his eyes bleary and the lids unnaturally pink because of the drugs he was taking.
It was cancer, of course. He’d had it for a couple of years by then, without his knowledge, but it had fully taken hold of him fourteen months ago and now it was taking him elsewhere, wherever it wanted to lead him, in fact, as is its wont.
He might as well have said, ‘I’m going to die soon, and the crazy thing is I’m not frightened at all,’ because I saw as much etched into his face as he lay there breathing beneath the oxygen mask. There was no fear in him, there never had been. About anything in life, in fact. The only emotion he expressed was frustration at his body and at the world that had done this to him. He’d always been able to tap freely into anger. He’d get unreasonably angry at football matches, shout expletives at referees, players. He’d watch the TV and if an actor or celebrity he didn’t like came on he was unable to just sit and tolerate it. A raw, vehement anger would erupt from him and he’d take a good few minutes to call names at the screen before turning the channel. I always thought he looked down on me a little because I had no capacity for such outbursts. I was lacking in anger, or at least the ability to express it, and it worried him, I think, when I was young. Baffled him, too. He could not see the point in holding in such direct and easy emotions. And they were easy to him, and brief, because once he was done shouting, all that anger would leave him and he would carry on the rest of the day as though his little tirades had never happened. It was the same with arguments. He’d argue with you over the smallest things if you stood up to him, which in my teenage years I had the habit of doing, out of an adolescent self-righteousness, I suppose, or a need to define myself before him. I don’t know. Maybe I was just a royal pain in the arse. But we would argue about politics, about religion, about sport. No one would necessarily win these arguments, but their effect on me would linger for the rest of the day, maybe a couple of days. I would feel wronged and hurt, vaguely ashamed at myself for losing my temper, and it would simmer away inside, stopping me from sleeping or concentrating on work. My father, on the other hand, would slough off such emotions almost immediately. He wasn’t a sulker as such, but he would choose to go quiet for maybe a couple of hours, hiding behind his newspaper, noisily rustling the pages, making it plain he was no longer interested in petty squabbles. Sometime later he would emerge from behind the paper renewed, his face free of the colour that had flushed through it while he raged at me. I envied him greatly for this preternatural skill for disregarding upset, because to me, having struggled so hard to control my anger, once it was exposed it made me abashed, humiliated, and it was something, unfortunately, I took on into my relationship with my wife, and with all those I’ve loved since.
At the hospital there was an apparatus on the wall behind his bed with a little glass cylinder and gauge that could be raised or lowered by a turn of a small dial. The cylinder had numbered measurements on the side. Four and half meant he could breathe well, three not so well. They’d started him on two and half, but he’d struggled badly and so they’d relented and put it up to three, then four and half. Every now and then a nurse would come in, check his pulse and his blood pressure, and lower the gauge out of a stubborn professional curiosity, I imagine, back to two and a half, and I would simply get out of my seat when they were gone and discreetly raise the gauge again, so my father would breathe easier.
After he’d been taken into hospital, but while he was still relatively well, he’d read a letter from John Steinbeck to his son. It had been published in a newspaper someone had brought him. The letter was a beautiful piece of writing, and one I was familiar with, a letter in which Steinbeck tried to define the nature of love to his young son. My marriage had broken down the year before and I’d moved house and was training in a new job, and to put it simply there were a lot of changes going on. But I’d recently met and fallen in love with a woman, although I hadn’t told her how I felt and wouldn’t for a long time, and the letter when I read it had sparked something very familiar to what I was experiencing. So right then the idea that my father could come across this same piece of writing, and that it would affect him in such a way at the end of his life, that it would cause him to cut it out of the paper and hand it to me when he saw me next, was one that seemed to hold a particular power, if not of destiny, then of something pretty close, and assigned that sense of destiny to my own love for the woman in question.
A passage of the letter read:
‘The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.’
It ends with,
‘And don’t worry about losing it. If it is right, it happens – the main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.’
His gift to me of that letter was the single most beautiful thing he’d ever done, and it made me understand that we were closer to each other in spirit than either of us had ever realised before.
One day, after a particularly bad episode for my father that had left him in a deep sleep he would never wake from, I asked the nurses if there was anything we could do to help him. I was greeted with sympathy but the answer was clear that, no, we merely had to let nature take its course. He would be dead soon, everybody knew. We just had to wait. Nevertheless, I noticed in the afternoon that someone had reduced the gauge down to one, its lowest measure, and I understood enough not to alter it. The day before he died, while my mother was out of the room, I took a pen and spent an hour drawing his profile on one of the blank business cards I always keep in my coat pocket to jot down ideas for stories or resonant phrases that I overhear in the street. I drew him on the bed under the blue-white florescent light, with small wads of folded tissues propped beneath the elastic straps of his mask, which my mother would place there to stop the straps from biting into his ears and hurting him. A gesture that always struck me as incredibly touching, especially as he no longer felt any discomfort.
I didn’t tell my mother about the drawing and I never showed it to her. Occasionally, I would look at it and wonder at the man who read a letter written decades before by an author he never knew and published in a daily newspaper, which seemed to reach into his heart and pluck out the words he so wanted to speak in order to reassure and soothe his own son. And in my mind they are his words, because as far as I am concerned he was a man who lived out his poetry rather than wrote it.