My father gave me his freckly skin and, like him, I had melanoma. He gave me asthma and protruding elbows that are identical to his own. He gave me reddish hair that’s kindly reluctant to go gray. He gave me an aversion to drinking by not having one himself.
He did not give me the seat next to him at a San Diego Chargers game. He had season tickets when I was a kid, but I only found out about it years later.
He gave me the ability to talk to anyone because I couldn’t stand the awkward silences that he provided.
He gave me really nice houses to grow up in, but we moved a lot for his work, and things never seemed to be going well, so he gave me financial anxiety, too.
He gave me the tools to withstand a sexist world. He would say: Hillary looks ugly in her pantsuits. And her voice! Women don’t belong on the golf course. This was my exposure therapy. He gave it generously.
He didn’t give me a response when I was little and watching a baseball game on TV with him. Why, I wanted to know, did the umpire call a strike when the batter didn’t swing his bat? He couldn’t be bothered to explain.
Some things I took from him — his Fox News, when I set up his cable. Copies of love letters he’d written to a woman who wasn’t my mom that I found when I was helping him move.
I gave him things, too. I gave him disappointment when I was born a girl. Then I gave him grandsons.
He’s proud of the work I do, especially the fact that I edit David Brooks.
I once gave him something really nice. He’d been forced to sell his signed baseball collection when he was having financial trouble. I wrote about it in The Times and the fact that he’d gotten all the signatures when he was 14 and a batboy for the Chicago White Sox. The White Sox front office contacted me, asking if my dad would throw out the first pitch at a game. I took him to Chicago, and at 85, he took to the mound.
I didn’t give him a hard time about missing the plate.
I think he thought that if he’d had boys, fatherhood would have been different. Instead, he had three daughters. But, of course, gender had nothing to do with anything. He could have tossed the baseball with any of us. His limitations were his own, as our limitations always are.
He’s 92 now. He’s lost a lot of things — my mom, all of his old friends and, since a stroke, the ability to read his beloved Wall Street Journal — but also some of his loneliness now that he’s in an assisted living place. Access to his beloved Scotch, too.
He overextended himself, and I sold my mom’s diamond ring to pay for things he needed. The last of it covered the cost of having her body cremated.
In the end he didn’t get whatever he was chasing — the money, the success. But he’s happier now than at any other time since I’ve known him. I found him the place he lives now, where he has friends. That’s the last thing I gave him and maybe the best thing.
He is nicer to be around; I’m sure no Fox News and no alcohol helps. When he says something about what a woman can’t do — literally, still — I joke about please joining me in the 21st century, and he laughs.
He told me recently that he thinks about me all the time. I don’t think he thought of me at all when I was a kid — I can’t remember ever chatting with him about my day. When I visit, he responds as if he’s been bestowed a great honor. He tells me that it’s incredible that I’m there. And I can tell he means it.
In that way, he’s given me something to marvel at. The fact that even after I’d given up on him long ago, he could change. That it could happen to a stubborn old man in the last years of his life.
He was recently in the E.R. because it seemed that he might be having another stroke. As I waited with him for the doctor, who was female, and the nurse, who was male (together they blew his mind), I read him a David Brooks column about baseball — his two loves. “I can feel the New York Mets chiseling out a piece of my soul every week,” David wrote. As I read the words, I knew, with not a small amount of pleasure, that they would hit home. My dad, who’s suffered through a lifetime of White Sox losses, laughed so hard that his body was bouncing.
He didn’t give me my own love of baseball, but I do appreciate his.
The time for all the giving and withholding feels over — and I couldn’t tell you the tally. There’s a feeling of loss, of course, that’s stronger now that I know that he had it in him. But it comes with warmth for him, and that is new and it feels good.
On a recent visit, we had coffee together in the dining room of the assisted living place. Refusing his eternal gift of awkward silence, I kept the conversation going. I don’t remember what we talked about, but I am sure he eventually asked questions about my husband, my boys and David Brooks.
At one point I reached across the table and gave him my hand. I’d never done anything like that before, and I’m not sure why I did it then. He took it.
Susannah Meadows is the author of “The Other Side of Impossible: Ordinary People Who Faced Daunting Medical Challenges and Refused to Give Up.”
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