The Death of My Father, Essay Example

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.