All fathers are fictional.
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
In the end, my father took up such little space. This is what I can't seem to get over. He'd never been large, but he'd always had a thick, bear-like solidity. My father was the sort of man who could block a doorway. It seemed an overly cruel joke to take away what little was left of his now tiny body. He wasn't asking much by then. In fact, he wasn't asking anything at all. Just a McDonald's milkshake once a day, and my father didn't even ask for that, I just knew he liked it. He'd fumble for the cup with both his hands and fall back asleep with the striped straw in his mouth.
I've had my share of father figures, including a great writer of fatherhood, Andre Dubus. When Andre died in 1999, I cried my eyes raw, and I remember standing in line at the wake and reaching his oldest son, Andre III, who pulled me close and whispered, "We just have to walk through the hole he made." I've clung to those words for a long time. But my old, gone friend might have been have been the first to say: Ah, well there are father figures and then there are fathers. Fathers, Andre might have said, are a whole hell of a lot more trouble. He knew from his own experience. But now that I'm a bewildered father myself, I'd like to call him up in Haverhill right now and say, "Wait, wait, so what is a father?" I imagine Andre sighing into his beard and laughing and leaning back in his wheelchair, and thinking about this, drawing on the faith that sustained him in the worst of times.
"Let me get back to you on this one."
Jenny Chang / BuzzFeed
My own dad was a LaSalle Street lawyer for almost 50 years. When he retired I'm not sure he even knew who he was anymore. After so many years of hustling — my father said the only way to accomplish anything in this world is to hustle and when you're done hustling, start hustling — his whole being seemed to instantaneously retreat. He began watching a ton of television. At first I was relieved. I thought he might at last turn into a normal American, which wouldn't have been such a bad thing. But TV became a kind of religion. He'd watch cable news endlessly, as if the frantic agitation in those voices brought him a little closer to the way things used to be at the office.
In my fiction, characters roughly based on my father haven't had it easy. I've exposed family laundry that with the perfect mortality of hindsight (when you can't change what you've done) I now regret. I will say this though: My father never gave me any grief about my work because he was a good and generous reader who understood the difference between nonfiction that tries to tell the truth and fiction that uses the truth to find something else. For me fiction is like holding up a mirror to life and then smashing it on the floor. Then I pick up a random piece and stare it at for days. Out of this: stories. I do the best I can with the limited gifts I've got. My father understood this too and, deep down, I think he knew that he — in his disguise as a fictional character — was one of those limited gifts.
Posts
Writing My Father's Death