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going to be far from my home state indefinitely because i would not see many old friends for quite some time and because father had relinquished the apartment in which we d lived together in favor of a nursing home i stayed most of that summer as a guest of friends throughout california it was only near the end of that summer that i saw him i visited him in his nursing home most of his things had been moved to the storage unit but he had brought some small shelves with him across from the electric hospital bed in which he slept and worked these had been deployed along the wall and filled with books on russia drone strikes religious extremism and protest art above his head was a photograph of his father an officer in the royal navy who d died young of a heart attack next to father s bed was a swivel table built to slide over his bed to provide a surface for food his laptop occupied it and left only so much room as was filled by notepads and a mug stained with instant coffee grounds mum liked to joke that all my father had ever wanted was to stay in bed writing while food was brought to him and he d finally arranged it she joked too that when the nursing home had received him they had not thought he had the look of a long staying tenant but father had some secret vitality that was loathe to give up his endless work we talked about my classes i was planning at that time to focus on conflict reporting and perhaps tensions in the middle east this enthused father since it brought my interests within the sweep of his own he also seemed to like it because i told him i thought domestic politics in the us was becoming so central to the news cycle that i might find myself working outside the spotlight of current events and he was always proud when i found myself tacking against prevailing winds he told me that when i was growing up in california he could always imagine my day to day life even after the divorce because he usually lived nearby by and when i d gone to college i attended a school at which he d once taught so his imaginings could roam up to oregon with me he couldn t say the same of new york and he asked me to write him a descriptive email once a week to help him out i said no i didn t think i d be able to keep that up which made him laugh when my father laughed there was usually no sound he just smiled with his few teeth four in the front on the lower gum and his shoulders hopped and jumped in a pantomime of chuckling i told him i was going to record a video every day and instead of a weekly email i would try to send him a montage of a year in new york i said this with some self reproach because i was not sure if he would live a year we had a long goodbye i went away and passed a glorious year in school i found myself not following conflict reporting i am a coward and fear death pretty patently which rather limits the career options of a conflict reporter and i also found myself increasingly fascinated by the topic of the american right i had found a field that felt as unifying to my own interests as religious extremism had been to my father s career i recorded a video most days but did not set aside time to edit it into a whole instead i sent father irregular emails and every so often we had a video call via facebook messenger in our exchanges he welcomed my new focus as a kind of secant to his intellectual sphere so for that first year and some change we bonded primarily by exchanging articles that showed a convergence between our interests being a continent away and trying to navigate my first experiences of continuous independence i sought to balance my need to focus on daily life in new york and making the most of the new ways in which my father and i had found ourselves connecting this did not usually translate into lengthy messages but i tried to make my responses consistent and prompt promptness was especially important and occasionally without a better reason to say anything the shadow of fear would fall over me and i d send him an email or a twitter message just to say i loved him and hoped he knew in case we went too long without speaking to do so again eventually i tried something new with father he had been producing book reviews and short blog post essays for many years his focus had been islamic fundamentalism and the wars in the middle east which had dominated current affairs for close to 20 years my focus domestic politics and the american right was increasingly central to current affairs now and an area that while interesting to him was not his primary concern i was going to write essays and book reviews dealing with that topic and he could edit them if the finished product was good enough he could post them as a domestic supplement to his writing on events abroad that would suit the political moment in the process we could speak often and i could keep him apprised of what i was learning in an area of mutual interest so from august 2019 on my father and i worked on a series of essays and reviews together he recommended works that had caught his attention or i broached a possible subject once a draft was complete i would leave it with my father he d disentangle its clauses and disinter the submerged or incomplete ideas then over messenger our pixelated faces blurry and halting he and i would discuss changes for hours my father and i often interested in different topics or different parts of the same subject and hard to steer away from our preferred tracks had not always been able to talk for very long or very constructively sometimes we spoke briefly along a mutual path sometimes we spoke at length but digressed ever further away from one another each reaching for the conversational tiller but usually it was at best one or the other between us and the conversations were at least for me frequently less about an organic back and forth that rarely appeared than about ensuring we had talked in any case but during the months when we worked on these essays we kept steadily and naturally in close intellectual cooperation for whole afternoons and at the end of day we had created something tangible together i returned to california briefly in december 2019 for a friend s wedding reception while i was home another friend took me to see my father father had had a portion of his foot removed so i helped him into his wheelchair i wheeled him out of the building past other tenants many were moaning or seemed lost their vulnerability made me uncomfortable especially as i rolled father along and wondered if he would eventually be as unreachable i did not think i would have the courage to visit him if his faculties eventually left him maybe that was why there seemed to be so few other visitors we drove my father to a himalayan restaurant he braced himself against my arm as he limped from the car to the door we had a good dinner and spoke happily when i took him home i said goodbye this took quite some time because i would give him a long hug and then i would delay leaving and talk awhile longer and then hold him again finally i hugged him the last time i bent down to his chair he stretched thin arms up around my neck and i held him a long time i kissed the crown of his head age had made the fine hair and skin very soft then i joked that he had to be on his guard to live long enough for me to see him again when i could next fly into california i flew back to new york and not too very long after the coronavirus brought most things to a halt my father because of his age and his reliance on dialysis was in a high risk category but the nursing home closed its doors to visitors and reported no internal cases from that point forward my brother and mum visited him by bringing his favorite foods to the glass door of the nursing home and waiving when he was wheeled to the front then his food would be taken inside by a staff member to ensure containment wasn t interrupted on august 11 2020 my father sent me an article about william bar and conservative jurisprudence via twitter i thanked him on august 12 2020 my father sent me a link to an article by email and i put off responding the next day i sent him a photo of a line from ezra pound that reminded me of something he d told me once he read it but didn t respond on august 28 2020 my father had an outpatient surgery that went smoothly and my mum told me to email him but i didn t i reminded myself a few times to do so but i did not ten days later on labor day i was having a beer with a friend outside of a bar in brooklyn mum called and said that father had had a heart attack in his nursing home and had been taken to the emergency room she said she d keep me informed i explained to my friend what had happened and said i wasn t sure what to do but that this had happened before and it wasn t certain what it would mean so we finished our drink and walked back to his apartment at 6 45pm mum texted me saying still awaiting word i think no news is good news in these circumstances at 6 58pm my phone started to ring it was mum it occurred to me briefly that she had said she would text me updates i answered finished something i was saying to my friend and said hello hey emlyn so i ve just talked to the doctor and something s come up your father was flatlined for twenty minutes they ve managed to get his heart going but his brain isn t coming back she said calmly and they ve asked me whether we want to continue having him on a ventilator brain dead in a coma or if we should let him go her voice broke and i think we should let him go i remembered that father had liked to say that his body had just been there to carry his library card and his books it struck me a little cruel that in the end it was only his brain that couldn t be revived i just thought you d want to know okay i said and my voice shook will you call me back afterwards she said she would i asked her to put the phone near him when there was a chance even though i knew he wouldn t hear me and to send me a photo of him since i couldn t be there my mum put her cellphone near father s ear for a while i said what i could and for all the years i d spent thinking about this moment it was not much and it was difficult i was glad i d tried beforehand and with more success i think because despite the sentimental need to say something the time had passed people say that the dead are gone but i believe over is more appropriate the aspect of people we love their character and personality is like a tremendous event occurring briefly and though his heart was still working the tender spectacle of my father was over some time before my father who d flirted coyly with religion all his life had waylaid a catholic priest present at the nursing home to perform last rites and asked him to visit regularly to talk about theology mum arranged for this priest to come to the hospital and perform last rites for father my stepfather held up his cell phone on speakerphone so that my younger brother newly settled in his dorm room in la could listen in and mum held the phone up on speaker phone so i could hear as well the priest recited the lord s prayer the whole family with the exception of father and i recited it with him when the ventilator was removed i heard a gasping sucking noise mum assured me this was the ventilator and not father after that it was uncertain how long his shallow breathing would sustain his body mum sent two photos of father it was hard to look at them like when i visited him a few years earlier and he had smiled into the camera and said this is what i was like before he was in thin hospital clothes and his hair was in a disarray but he looked horribly abandoned now not in the sense of a person but of a place he looked empty and his face sagged mouth open in a way that reminded me of an old pumpkin sinking in on itself i had a few more calls with mum that night as i tried to keep a distant vigil and my friend very kindly allowed me to use a guest room to take the calls at one point he put on some low nordic music with a chanting sound and walked me to a small shrine he had on his book case where he kept funeral cards from his grandparents and his grandfather s pipe he performed an impromptu service involving scented candles and smoking the pipe then allowing it to burn as if to allow someone invisibly with us to partake as well though he did not have a specific practice to offer me he gave me this improvised ritual as a kind of sacrament to my father in recognition of his life which was kind i began alerting people via text message i was a little uncomfortable with the idea of a large wave of consoling messages though the sentiment would not go unappreciated and i felt oddly hesitant to tell anyone lest it should somehow turn out that a mistake had been made and i would have to walk back the announcement later so i told a relatively small group of people to begin with people i spoke to so often or who were so close to father that leaving it unsaid would be bizarre otherwise i might have told no one the next day i asked for my four days bereavement leave and booked a flight home in the afternoon father s heart stopped after that when i informed people i wasn t sure if i should tell him he died monday as i believed or tuesday as the death certificate would likely state then i had dinner with some friends based in part on food my father had liked we talked over what had happened i got through most of it rather casually until i tried to explain how i had waved at father s car when i was a teenager i began to cry and could only say i wrote it down i wrote it down the next day i flew out as we approached california the landscape was obscured but unlike the trip through the darkened mountains to the north when father had his first heart attack this time it was not fog while i was away my home state had caught fire everything was hidden behind a pall of ash i stayed on a friend s couch the next morning the air quality was rated as unhealthy for the sensitive and because i did not consider myself sensitive i went outside to see the place i d grown up every time i return the buildings are much the same but seem a little smaller i walked a street where father and i had often visited a local indian restaurant and a goodwill during the time when i had volunteered for every thrift store run while i was away the goodwill had closed and the building stood empty i looked towards the sun which through the smoke looked like a blood moon the layer of ash was so thick that one could stare into the sun indefinitely without one s eyes watering i wondered how long that would hold true i travelled with mum to the crematorium where i signed some papers and looked through a catalogue we chose to do the simplest cremation and container and focus on where to spread the ashes i asked if i could see my father and was told it would cost approximately 200 so i declined i couldn t see him in the hospital either because of the virus and the high number of bod...