Lights Out

When Imma died, or just before she died, I wrote her a love letter. I read it to her on her last day. And then I read it the next day, at her funeral.

So, it’s not by accident that I did not do the same with Abba. I kept asking myself if I wanted to. But the truth is that in the time between their deaths I had come to understand that all there was to say was this: You are my Abba, and I love you.

I said that to him, over and over again, for the last few months—when I said goodbye before I left for Portugal, as I sat with him dying, as I sat with him, already dead. I think I’ve been saying it to him my entire life. And I have no intention of stopping.

At the very end, I sang it, without words—it became a lullaby, or a Nigun—and after the end, when I stood over him, his spirit lingering near, one of my hands on the top of his head, one hand on his heart, it became only two notes, hummed. Tonika, dominante, tonika, dominante. I sang them over and over and over again, and I swear every time I hit that low note, I could hear him harmonizing.

Abba was a man of many contradictions. He idolized Gaudi and his curves, but upon seeing the design of our future home, he would ask me time and time again if we were sure we didn’t want it to be square. He would speak so enthusiastically about the school of unschooling he had envisioned in his youth, but was ever-critical when I practiced that exact thing with my children.

He beseeched me to write or create, whenever he could. The message was, implicitly and explicitly, that a life, undocumented, untheorized, unmemorialized, was not worth living—was not well lived. He continued to tell me I should write, even when it was basically all I was doing, even at his deathbed, telling people how strange a thing it was that he could only understand life through writing, and yet here was his daughter, who was so different from him, and would just live. He would say this with equal parts criticism, jealousy, awe, and admiration.

He couldn’t see certain parts of me clearly, to the very end, no matter how hard I would jump up and down right in front of him, waving shiny flags in his face, reading him the stuff I was writing, showing him the literal marks I was leaving on the walls. Or, more accurately, he would get flickering glimpses of them, of me—he would go, Oh, I see it now, I’m sorry I couldn’t see it earlier, I see you! It’s so beautiful! And then he would lose sight of it again, until the next time.

He would admonish me for not writing, but he had a hard time reading the stuff I did. One time, recently, when I confronted him about it, he admitted that it hurt him too much. He said I wrote so lovingly about Imma, and not about him. He could not see that nothing that I wrote about Imma was ever simple or adoring in an unqualified way—he was blinded by the love that shone through the murky words a grieving daughter writes about her dead mother.

So, I told him, Abba, I write about her like this, because she’s dead. You just wait and see.

He would implore me, almost daily, to be at the core of my life. To live life to its fullest. To find its heart, and stay there. I would often take offense to this, because, I felt, and still feel, that if there is something that I do pretty darn well, it’s that. And I wanted to be seen.

And yet he himself lived on the outskirts of his own life, by design. I don’t think there’s a person who knew him well who hasn’t heard him say he experienced life as a theater. That he didn’t quite believe, to the end, that this was actually happening to him. He was a healthy person, dying of cancer.

On his last day speaking—we didn’t know that it was, then—he told me how close he had come to death just before I arrived. He told me he still felt like it was happening to someone else. He told me it was immensely helpful for him. So we talked about his friend, Ugi, who was feeling a little apprehensive about death.

All of this is to say, I think he would have approved that I waited to say all of this about him, instead of to him. 

Ugi was a big fan of theories, especially about perception and reality. He had a whole set that grew out of Plato’s Cave—he loved that image of the shadows on the wall. I myself am a disciple of the Elephant and his Blind: each person reaching out to feel a different part, never quite capturing the beast in the room.

And I want to capture him here, to keep him with me, as he was. I don’t want just his tail, or his ears—I want to remember all of him, my Abba. That ineffable combination of parts that made him, him. So as we remember him, I wish for me, for us, that we manage to leave space for all of his parts, even as we focus on the particular one we’ve each palpated in the dark. We keep him robust and round, like he actually was, for most of his life.

My father was many things. And yet I think there is not a person here today who would disagree that he was very possibly the most generous and deeply kind person they had ever known. And all of this while often behaving in deeply contradictory ways. He was far from perfect. But he cared deeply, and he really, really tried.

He cared deeply about being a father—he would often say we were his life. And as opposed to Imma, whose motherhood had mostly ascended long before her body left, he was a father to the very, very end. His last words were, I love you. We didn’t know they were going to be his last. But as far as last words go, it doesn’t get better than that.

And then he couldn’t talk. Occasionally he would open an eye, and I would say—I see you! I see you! And you could see he would try to look at me back, so I could also be seen.

And he could still hear, to the extent that he could ever hear, which was admittedly, not much. But somehow Abba had a talent for hearing between the words, for tuning into the music of meaning. I could never understand how he managed so well, with so little hearing. It made no sense. And yet, he did.

I know he could hear to the end, among other things, because he stopped breathing immediately after I whispered in his ear, “It’s okay, you can stop breathing.” I think it simply didn’t occur to him that he could. He was still trying so hard to do the right thing.

I know he could hear me also because his very last hand gesture was a raised hand. I had started singing him that Nigun again—in my defense, I said he could file a complaint with the Achra’i if I was driving him crazy with my music—but he had raised his hand, quite sharply, and with meaning.

I don’t know for sure what the meaning was, but he did it twice, and I decided to err on the side of quiet. It is one of the saddest things not to be able to tell if your dying father is trying to tell you he wants to be lullabied to sleep, or if he wants you to shut the fuck up. 

Still, please don’t wish me to not know more sorrow. I will. We all will. There is no sorrow without love. There is no love without sorrow. Please don’t tell me he was one of a kind, a special snowflake. He was, of course, we all are. But that was not his worth.

Tell me you loved him, and he loved you. That’s enough. That is everything.

You are my Abba, and I love you.