The Right Words to Bid Farewell
How I found them, even though they were left unspoken
The car speeds through the night, its front lights eating up the dark empty space. Two people are on board, the younger one driving and the older one asleep on the passenger’s seat.
They had been silent for a while, quietly enjoying each other’s company, then the tired man had fallen asleep, lulled by the gentle hum of the motor: he had done a good job in teaching his son how to drive smoothly and safely.
I once read that the strongest reason for grieving the loss of a loved person is the emotional luggage of all the unsaid things that should have been said: words of love, expressions of affection, and forgiveness for the inevitable disagreements that have been buried rather than solved.
As soon as I read it, I immediately understood that no matter how far in the future, this would have been the case when I would be mourning the loss of my father: he never was the most talkative guy, and he didn’t like to have too many words directed at him. No talking about emotions, no strong opinions, no disagreements. It’s not that he didn’t show affection for me: I always had a clear perception of his paternal love. He just didn’t express it with words.
As I became a teenager, I started to see that there was a certain style to his attitude. I learned to appreciate his elegant, ironic detachment and recognize some hints of that special kind of nonchalance called sprezzatura, about which I had read in some ancient manual of etiquette: the most elegant way to perform any activity is to make it look effortless.
This detachment turned out to be the starting point of slow decay. Whenever an activity started to exact an effort, he lost interest in it. Always an avid reader, he stopped reading books and newspapers when his declining eyesight made it necessary for him to wear glasses. Slowly but inevitably, other things followed. Books went first, then travel. Theatre. Cinema. Sports. Even food, with him becoming suspicious about any new experience and always going back to the same three or four favorite dishes.
This took away ground for our conversations, as the only things we had to share were the experiences we made together.
As long as I was living with my parents, we had frequent opportunities to engage in activities together, so our conversations always had a very easy starting point, dealing with the material details of the things we were doing together. Even in the last years, when I was studying in another town, I always came back home for the weekend and we had our time together. But, as soon as I left home for good, our conversations became more and more of a monologue: I was telling him stuff, he was listening with patience. No common ground, therefore, no remarks and no signs of interest.
Now, twenty years later, I’m in a different country and the pandemic has made it difficult for us to meet. Things collapsed quickly: no family reunions for one year, just telephone calls. In the rare occurrences when he picked up the phone, we briefly greeted each other, and any attempt to tell him something he interrupted, handing the phone over to my mother.
“I hand it over to mum”
became
“I hand it over to… to… our… her”
and, after a while, it was just
“She is here, bye.”
When she was not home, he felt obliged to keep the call going for at least one minute, but we only ever exchanged quick updates about the weather, with him failing to remember the simplest and most fundamental things such as his granddaughters’ names. Or even my name.
One day, I knew it, he will not recognize me at all.
I started to hope to be able to see him at least one more time before everything became too dark.
I started to think that, with only a few more steps forward in his path to obscurity, my father would be practically dead. To a certain extent, he was already.
At last, a couple of weeks ago, I made it there. As usual, we were immersed in a lively conversation with my mother, and my father was sitting in a corner, slightly bored. After a few minutes, he stood up and walked towards the living room, probably to turn on the TV.
That’s when it happened, I am sure of it. My mother snapped at him:
“What are you doing? They’re here, after one year, and you ignore them and go to sleep in front of the TV?”
He froze there. He came back, sat in the same place, and started to follow the conversation, even trying to utter some occasional remark. He was stumbling over generic words, trying to find the right ones that did not come to his mind.
I will never be able to get an explanation from him, but it was a life-changing decision. For the first time, I saw him fight.
When we left, he turned to me, smiling, and asked me:
“Do you remember…”
I did not say anything, leaving him time to find the words.
“Do you remember that time… many times…”
“…when I picked you up there…”
It didn’t take me long to imagine what he was referring to, so I could help him with one or two clues.
“…near the station, right?”
His smile broadened.
Every now and then, he used to pick me up at 1 AM at my girlfriend’s (my wife, now) house. It was a 50km drive and, when he was on a late evening shift on his work near there, he made a deviation from his path to home from work and I drove for the rest of the time. We had the usual shallow chats, silently enjoying being together. It went on for a couple of months when I was around 22, and it was one of the last special things that we did together.
I was so surprised. Hit by sadness, as it is such a typical effect of dementia to remember old stuff and forget about what happened yesterday. But, most of all, I was deeply moved by this pearl that he extracted from the depths of his troubled memory.
I replied by telling him that it had been so nice of him, tired after a workday as he surely was, but also that it had taught me to be generous to my daughters and to do similar things for them as well.
It was something we did together, the last special thing in our life in the same house: something in common right at the time when my life away from home (away from him) was beginning. A bit of adventure, that late-night driving and our meeting in a shady part of town.
Since that day, our telephone conversations have become longer. He asks questions, always struggling for words, but he tries hard to remember things from one day to the next one.
In hindsight, twenty years later, our nightly trips were the bridge between my childhood at home and my adult life, and his way of being present in my new, future life. Every now and then, he asks me again if I remember those trips, and I imagine the smile I know he has on his face as he asks the question. Does he know that I do remember, and does he know that he’s asked me the same question so many times? It doesn’t really matter: this is the thing he keeps remembering about the two of us. The bond that survives his lapsing memory. It will fade away, but it’s still there and it gives me joy. It’s very little and fragile, but it’s precious.
There will be one last time we meet, still both knowing who we are and where we stand for each other. Whatever the trivial circumstances of that last encounter, our goodbye will be on these terms. Something we shared, and that bound us together on a level that was higher and more important than the stages of our lives.
The car flies through the dark empty space. Two people are on board. They both know, and they need no word to say that.
Nothingness, Deaths’ bigger brother, is all around them and will soon swallow the thin beams of light in front of the car, and the car, and the two of them. But they are not afraid.
They own this moment together, and it is everything that’s worth having.
