I remember his final moments. I wanted to be there when it happened, I wanted to see it end.
I remember his swollen hands, his body shattered by the cancer, reeking of piss and shit. I remember his face, frozen in an inhuman grimace, mutilated by his descent into the void. His once steady voice, now little more than an agonized murmur. A powerful man laid low.
The cancer is hereditary. I will likely have it too. It is a curiously liberating thing, to know of one’s own end. I will not waste away slowly. My death will come swiftly, preceded by a flurry of many deaths, just like his. It will be a fight until the very end. Fitting.
The lab
My father was a hard man with a soft smile. Taciturn and possessing a determination that surpassed stubbornness, the interior of his mind was a vast, unknowable space. The people who met him would often read him in wildly different ways, a subtle sign of how carefully his inner life was hidden from view. In the months leading up to his death, I confronted something that I had long feared: I never really knew him.
This isn’t to say that he was an inattentive or neglectful father. Far from it. He sacrificed greatly for my future, worked tirelessly to support our family. We spent a lot of time together. Much of his vision and imagination informed how I see the world. I enjoy an awe of creation that he lent to me. I look around me as I write this and I see the wondrous vacuum within matter, crackling with ferocious energies in the vast spaces between atoms, each as distant from another as the planets in our solar system. I look at the night sky and I see eternity revealed, light from stellar nurseries as old as our universe. The mathematics necessary to comprehend the magnitude of these things feels familiar to me, a well worn tool resting easily in my hands. I owe this to him.
I remember trips to his lab together as a boy. We would wake up early, get coffee and some rolls from a local deli, drive out to the Brookhaven campus through mist-shrouded pines. He was a prodigious coffee drinker, all the physicists were. They were competitive about it, as they were all things. I put a lot of milk and sugar in my coffee. I hadn’t developed a taste for it yet but I wanted to be just like him. He showed me how to dip my roll in the bittersweet drink, softening its edge. He could drink his coffee, eat his roll and drive stick shift at the same time, mug in hand, elbow wedged into the steering wheel, bread lodged between his palm and the gearshift.
The lab was a wondrous place. Built on a converted military base, perfumed with ozone and whiffs of stale sweat, the endless linoleum corridors demarcated by elegant mid-century fonts. It was a place where the limits of reality were constantly tested. One experiment might compress matter to an unimaginable density; another might create a vacuum so perfect that the intrusion of a handful of molecules would be considered a failure. Buried within mile-wide particle accelerators were rare alloys cooled within a few degrees of absolute zero, turning them into superconductors that could efficiently channel the entire electrical output of a nuclear reactor into electromagnets so powerful that they would compress a stream of gold atoms into a plasma hotter than the sun until, only a few infinitesimal fractions of a second later, they would collide at very nearly the speed of light.
The whole place pulsated with this kind of energy. Answers must be sought, the mysteries of nature must be revealed. Progress at any cost, a brighter tomorrow just beyond the hill, if only you have the nerve to reach for it. There was an urgency to it all. Radioactivity was everywhere, treated with indifference like sawdust in a mill. There was a room where the physicists had to wear badges that would turn colors after a certain level of exposure, a warning to leave. The physicists would leave their badges by the door, hoping to steal a few more minutes in front of their samples. My father was no exception.
As a boy, it was impossible not to be impressed by such things.
What follows
It was in those moments that I felt closest to him. His curiosity, his energy, his defiance in the face of the impossible, all these things made sense to me. Unfortunately, those moments were few and far between. I expected to follow in his footsteps. I wanted it, to advance humanity’s knowledge, to be part of that exceptional priesthood. It was terribly disappointing when I rounded the corner of calculus and discovered that higher mathematics - the essential language of physics - was out of my reach. I hit a wall past which every lesson felt like a herculean effort. I could still pursue the sciences, but I would likely have been a mediocrity. At best a professional explainer of sorts, perhaps the type who wears silly neckties and goes on talk shows to say things like “we’re all made of star stuff.”
My memory retroactively fit this into some broader explanation of his perpetual disappointment in me. He would have terrible fights with my mother that left him smoldering in a depressive rage. Their arguments had an edge that no child could understand but certain adults would know well. He told me it was my fault, that my mother was worried about me, that I had to do better, that that is why she was always so angry. Nevermind the schools that I won entry to, the command of language, history and technology that I achieved. Those things were consolation prizes in a race where second place was worse than dead last.
It all made a certain kind of sense. I wasn’t scholarly enough, I was too pleasure seeking. Maybe my fondness for contact sports made me blunt, vulgar and a little stupid. Too many blows to the head, perhaps. Could be I was too drawn to drugs and sex and luxury. Maybe I was too emotional, too funny, too much like my mother. By comparison he was perfectly rational, living in an almost platonic detachment from the visceral realm. Easy to understand why he wouldn’t have much in common with me.
Links added to a chain. Injuries passed down through the generations.
And now
In the months leading up to his death I began to wonder if any of that was really true. My doubts had gathered momentum as I spent more time with him in the lead up to the end. I exceeded him in many ways; I was more intuitive, better at reading people. He couldn’t keep secrets from me anymore.
He had been writing. Touching, brilliant stuff. I looked forward to each of his posts. They revealed a sensitive, thoughtful man. A man I never knew. While it was a pleasure to know that, to learn of his childhood in Heliopolis or his opinions and thoughts, it gave lie to the theory that we were too alien to be close. He wrote himself an obituary of sorts, he titled it “Leaving Low Earth Orbit.” It was a sensitive, thoughtful bit of writing. Brilliantly economical in how it communicated the depth of his passion. I wept when I read it.
First, because of what it revealed about his bravery in the face of death. Then, because I realized that I never knew this man. Whoever wrote this was not some cold creature of logic. He was someone passionate, red blooded, vigorous. Someone romantic, impractical in his desire to change the world, grandiose in the belief that he was uniquely qualified to do so. Someone not so different than me. I never knew the man who wrote that. My father never revealed himself to me. This must have been a decision he made, to keep secrets, to hide behind a facade. I believe that he was proud of me, but maybe he wasn’t proud of himself. He didn’t have to hide, I would have understood.
I have never truly mourned him. He died a few weeks before the pandemic lockdowns began. I was too busy doing whatever I could to support my family, to reassure my wife and my friends, to buttress a world crumbling around me. Easier sometimes to worry about other people’s problems than your own.
He is dead now. I will never get to ask him why. But at the very least, I can ask myself the questions that I never got to ask him. I can peer into my own mind. Certain kinds of work show you who you are. I can see if I like who is looking back at me. It is good work, work that will never end. Hard work, more often than not, but with each passing day it becomes a little bit easier to forgive him.