On My Father's Deathbed

I suspected my father's days were numbered. Not that he would care to discuss the matter. I sincerely believed he trusted that a last-minute solution could spare him from what the evidence made clear was inexorable.

I don't know which cancer actually took him. Because of the multiple and frequent transfusions, I believe it was blood-related. The truth is that he faded slowly, until a time came when he could no longer get up, and he remained prostrate in bed until the final breath of air relieved him from the burden of life — a life well lived.

I wasn't there beside him. I was in Copenhagen and learned the news from a Facebook post. That distance, that buffer zone — call it the Atlantic Ocean — preserved me. And I wanted to be preserved.

"Throughout the whole of life one must

continue to learn to live, and

— what will amaze you even more —

throughout life you must learn to die."

Seneca — Moral Letters (attr. various letters)

Despite my best efforts to discuss the inevitable with him, he resisted, and we never talked about it. A few months earlier I gave him a copy of Seneca's notes on How to Die, hoping it would trigger a conversation. It didn't. I asked him a few times whether he had written a will or left any instructions, just in case, and he responded with his usual stubbornness: When the time comes, I will. He didn't.

"He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery."

Seneca— Moral Letters, 26.10

In Still Alice — the 2014 film with Julianne Moore — a woman who knows she has Alzheimer's leaves herself notes and instructions, and then, because she has Alzheimer's, she can no longer recall that she wrote them. My father never got around to anything like that, in great measure because getting around to it would have meant conceding that he was dying, and he preferred to focus his attention on the latest news or an episode of Law & Order on the flat-screen television.

Talking about his imminent death was not an option.

I needed to talk to him about it. I wanted him to know that I had always been worried about him — or rather about losing him, which is almost the same thing. Although that could also be read as I was more worried about me than I was about him. From a very young age I was afraid life was going to take him away from me, just as it had taken his own father when he was ten. Come to think of it, it is possible that he introduced that fear into our relationship himself. But there were other reasons — the constant insecurity that came from the death and disappearances of friends and relatives caused by the civil unrest in Argentina. By then we were living in Miami. Well, he was living in Miami, I was not. And he did not want to talk about death, even less about his own.

I wish he had.

The last photo of my father

Before leaving for Copenhagen, I paid my father a last visit and took a photograph of my mother seated beside him. I held his hand. He clenched it as tightly as he could and smiled for me one last time before drifting back to sleep. They call that transition hospice. Americans don’t like to talk about death either. By then I was no longer grieving. I knew he was going to die, and I had been preparing myself for that day since I was ten years old.

Sontag argued that all photographs are certificates of presence — proof that something existed, that a moment was real. She understood too that photography is inseparable from death — that every photograph is already an elegy, a record of something in the process of being lost.

The camera at the deathbed takes that logic to its conclusion. To photograph someone dying, or someone watching over the dying, is to acknowledge that what you are seeing is already becoming the past. But there was something more personal than theory at work. I was watching my past, my present becoming something I could no longer reclaim anywhere but in that photograph. My mother beside him, anticipating the end. Perhaps her's as well. Who knows?

One could ask whether raising a camera at that threshold aestheticizes grief, turns pain into something consumable. Her face refuses that reading. She is not aware of being looked at. She is entirely elsewhere. Entirely with him (them?). The iPhone caught something it had no right to expect: the complete absence of performance.

"You will die not because you are ill,

but because you are alive."

Seneca — Moral Letters, 78.6

In 1944, a psychiatrist named Erich Lindemann coined the term anticipatory grief. He was studying the wives of soldiers who had so completely grieved their husbands' anticipated deaths that when the men came home alive, the marriages were over. The grief had run its full course. The women had already moved on — as I had by the time the news reached me at Kronberg Castle, in Helsingør where Shakespeare staged Hamlet. I could not have planned it, even if I had wanted to. And I didn't.

On my return I went to see my mother, whose death I have been grieving ever since, and whom I believe I may stop grieving the day I learn she has actually passed. Hopefuly not through Facebook, but who knows, my family has ceased to communicate in civilized terms since Trump came to power and my brother embraced his cuase.

Among the books in my father's study I found a copy of Seneca's notes on How to Die. Despite never wanting to discuss the book with me, he had clearly been reading it — and making notes in the margins, as he did with every book that passed through his hands. I miss him. But I stopped grieving the day he died.

Perhaps Meursault, the main character in Camus's The Stranger, had a different explanation for sounding so detached after the death of his mother. But this is mine.

I never saw my father again after that visit. There was no funeral, no memorial. I understand he was cremated, and that his ashes remained for a time in the trunk of my brother’s car before he disposed of them in his own terms and in his own time. I have thought about that often. My brother needed to hold on to those ashes perhaps as I needed to hold on to the last photograph of my mother and father together — and perhaps that is why I raised the camera in the first place. Because I knew, without allowing myself to know it fully, that this was my last chance to perform a rite. The photograph was the funeral I was not going to have. The image was the only ceremony available to me, and I took it.