What Do You Want to Talk About?

Mom and Dad had what she called a “50’s marriage” with Dad working every day and with Mom staying at home to tend to the details of daily living, child raising, and housekeeping. When my sister and I were little, my mother told my father that by working constantly, he  was missing out on our childhood. They made a plan for my sister and I  to spend  an hour every weekend with Dad, one-on-one. 

When my turn with would Dad come, I would crawl onto his desk and asked him, “What do you want to talk about?”

He inevitably turned the question back to me and asked, “I don’t know. What would you like to talk about?”

Each week, my father and I shared an awkward pause after his query. Time stood still. My anxiety swelled as my young mind could not provide my father with an  immediate answer to his question. Eventually, without fail, we would wend our way back from the edge of the nothing-to-talk-about-abyss  and fill our appointed hour with stories, lessons, pondering, and laughter. 

Every single time we talked the whole time. 

These days, visiting my father feels similar to the  early conferences we shared. On the days I have time to sit a while, I park myself on the couch next to the chair in which he spends most of his day. He sighs. I fiddle with my phone. He comments on the weather. I agree with him. He tells me something he has previously mentioned.  I respond as though I am hearing his news for the first time. 

And then, silence.

Awkward silence. 

I pretend I am a Quaker and wait for inspiration. I long to be someone more practiced at, and comfortable with, the art of sharing silence. Don’t get me wrong, I have thousands of hours sharing silence with others  in meditation halls and yoga shalas. Give me a yoga pose and my breath, a meditation cushion and a formally-designated session for silence, and I am just fine.  And sure, one might  think some of said training and experience would have  rubbed  off on me socially by now. But yeah, not so much. Silent moments on his couch are eternal. I feel as squirmy inside  at fifty-four years old as I remember feeling at six. 

More often than not, the space between us opens. He remarks about how much he misses my mother. I  ask him questions such as What do you miss most? How do you imagine things would be if she was here? and  What is one of your favorite memories of Mom? I tell him about how funny she was and how she had a finely-tuned her BS detector.

We discuss the accomplishments in which he takes pride. He is proud of his marriage, of me and Anne, of the many people he mentored over the years, of his work as a project manager in the pharmaceutical industry, and more. He tells me he feels good about all he has done in his life.

We talk frequently about death. I ask him what he thinks is going to happen when he dies. His answers vary from “I have no idea” to “I am certain it will be a grand adventure” to the disclosure that he is “Mostly ready, but not quite.”

These precious moments arise in the midst of awkward silences and are scattered between the repeating comments that reveal his cognitive impairment and signal his movement away from the Dad I once knew. These moments  cannot be forced or coerced, but they can be invited by curiosity, nourished through patience, and appreciated in the tenderness of love. 

Many of you have asked me how it’s going with Dad. It is definitely going. And I am going with it as lovingly as I can. (And if Dad were reading this entry, he would hate those naked “its” and would exhort me to employ some “power verbs” instead.)

So yeah. Like that.

More soon.