Two weeks notice.

I was eight years old when I met my father.

He was not a bad father, not intentionally, not when we were speaking. This assessment may be cutting him a bit too much slack, a halo effect in reverse, but I can only assume that learning how to be a father for the first time at age 57 is not easy. Certainly not when your arthritis keeps you from playing basketball with your son with any agility. Certainly not when you're playing a video game for the first time with a child that is half a century younger than you.

To clarify, "when we were speaking" means from that day in 1992 to late 2002. We bonded mostly over court-ordered weekend visits, Dodgers, Kings, and Lakers games, buckets of balls at the Wilshire Country Club's driving range and cups of gazpacho in its clubhouse. These things I remember clearly. But for the life of me, I can't recall just what the fuck happened to start our silence, the one that would rob us both of seven years of one another's lives.

That's actually a lie. I remember quite clearly what it was, but not why it had to happen that way. The child of parents who are no longer together, I lived holidays twice. In this decisive case, it was Thanksgiving, and I was 19. I'd just been initiated in to my fraternity, just filmed my TV-MA episode of Dismissed, and to say I was cocky as shit would be a complimentary understatement. I spent the afternoon of Thanksgiving at the house of one of my mother's friends, got wasted before the meal began with that friend's son, and drank a few more glasses of wine at the table on top of that. Then I got behind the wheel of my car, maybe triple the legal limit, and drove drunk at 19 years old the 45 minutes up to Thousand Oaks on one of the biggest police checkpoint days of the year. I did this idiotic act so I could see my father on Thanksgiving. I got there at 7pm. He had already gone to sleep. And this was despite the fact that I'd phoned when I was leaving so they'd know I was on my way. That's when I stopped talking to him. The five minutes I saw of him early the next morning before I had to rush back to my Black Friday retail job in Orange County would be the last that I cared to see of him. But considering that Christmas came and went without so much as a phone call from him, the decision was evidently mutual. That was the part that I never understood. Never will. But now I no longer care to.

For six and a half years after that day, I couldn't think of any positive memory of my father. I didn't want to. It was easier to vilify him, to listen to "Styrofoam Plates" by Death Cab for Cutie, convinced that that song epitomized how I would feel when I found out he died. This morning is when that moment happened. And sitting in my hostel in Delhi, I just re-read the lyrics to that song and nearly threw up, literally sick that I had let such vitriol ferment within me for so long.

Those six and a half years of silence ended not today with his death, but in June, less than two months before I left for this trip. But the truce that ended it was asymmetrical, because it had come too late. When I walked in to the convalescent center that was now my father's home he had been wheelchair-ridden for over a year by a series of strokes. His extreme dementia (think severe Alzheimer's meets cerebral palsy) left him incapable of speech other than gurgles and moans, left his body folded in upon itself like melted plastic, left a once athletic and later a stout 260 pound frame withered down to about 140. His femurs and forearms were like Q-tips, and on my first visit his own sneeze prompted a look of absolute terror in his eyes. That was how deteriorated his mind was at times.

It took until my third visit to tell him that I forgave him. I refused to say it unless I meant it, until I was sure that I did so out of true understanding and not simple pity. But I did forgive him. Because he was no longer an abstract to me. No longer hubris personified..... he was just human all along. He fucked up, a lot, and put my mother through deep, deep shit, multiple times. It was out of selfishness, but more importantly it was out of weakness. And I saw that in some ways, he was frail long before the illnesses overcame him. But that's what human beings are. We are weak, we give in to temptation and our id, and put ourselves in situations where we'll act first and just get around to worrying about the consequences later. But if we expect forgiveness from others, we too have to be forgiving.

My entire life, it's been really difficult for me to accept that I was one of those worry-about-it-later consequences. That in a world where fidelity is universal and lovers do not lie to one another- that in this perfect world, I would never have been born. I still don't think that I have dealt with this properly, because I have a recurring recklessness borne of the inescapable feeling that since I shouldn't be here to begin with, I'm really just playing with house money. That's a big reason why I'm typing this from a hostel in Delhi and not from my old apartment in Los Angeles. And ironically why I'll be over here, missing his funeral, just as I missed the funeral of my grandmother (his mother) while I was in Australia. The compass needle and the damage done.

For years I always pictured myself absent from my father's funeral. But never once did I think that I'd want to be there and simply could not. I feel..... I can't describe how I really feel, awful is too weak of a word (maybe abhorred?)..... that I won't be there. But not because I needed to say goodbye. I was able to do that before I left, and to achieve the inner peace and closure that had eluded me for so many years. And the email my cousin sent me that announced my father's death came not as a surprise. Really it was two weeks overdue.

The last post I wrote, the letter to my friends, was in a very different tone than any of my other entries. This was because of the reasons that I expressed within it, and because it came at a time in my travels when the road felt interminable, when I saw myself standing on a bridge so long that I could not see either bank, neither its beginning nor its end. The bridge itself was the only thing that existed, and land on either side was merely an assumption and not a certainty. But the bigger reason that I wrote it, the one I didn't talk about, was that I had had several nightmares that morning. Ones extremely vivid, like negative exposures of the one in Berlin, and they affected me to a point that I was convinced that they weren't just dreams. For reasons of sanity I'm hesitant to say that I was seeing the future, but I awoke convinced I was seeing reality that just had not happened yet.

The last dream, the one that woke me up. I was in a car with someone that I used to feel was maybe my best friend in the world, but who now I haven't spoken to in months. We arrived at the care center to visit my father, and were sent to a theatre that served as a waiting room where an old film was playing. I left her there to find out what was taking so long, left to find where my father was. As I wandered corridors, a man in a Fedora came with me, his face covered in the shadow his hat cast, his footsteps silent though I didn't realize why. We wandered around and around, hallways in basements that never existed, corridors that led to identical corridors. I tried to go back to the theatre to find my friend but got just as lost, and I realized that I would never see that person again, that our bond was lost for good. I turned back to my initial task, an increasing desperation to see my father, and all this time the man glided along with me. I turned to him for help and saw the face of my father as he raised his head. I alone spoke.

"You're here. That means you're not with your body."

His face was placid, but vitally it was less than solid. His feet hovered above the ground.

"It's because you're already---"

I woke.

Miguel wrote me the email less than two weeks later. And while I wasn't looking for it constantly during that time, I knew without a doubt that my return flight to Los Angeles on December 14 would be too late.

"You should stay a full week [before coming back to Pennsylvania], that way you can see your father a few times," my mother wrote as we planned out the itinerary of my return. I realized oddly that that had never even crossed my mind. How can something be a priority when it's not even an option?

I won't get to say goodbye at his funeral. But I said before that wasn't the part that upset me. Because I had already said goodbye, more in fact.

On my next to last visit with my father, I was extremely choked up. Having already spoken my forgiveness, there was one thing I hadn't expressed yet. One more resurrected truth left to tell. Which is silly really, because anything you say to a person in a vegetative state is really for your own benefit, not theirs. We'd made eye contact a few times over the course of my series of visits, and one was prolonged enough that I thought he might have started to recognize me. This had been the highlight in the rekindling of relations with my father so far. The best I could bring myself to hope for. For my own benefit, for the final release of my burden, I knew I had one more thing to say. Holding his hand, I leaned over and kissed his sunken, overly smooth cheek, and then whispered slowly in his ear, enunciating each syllable.

"Dad. It's Joshua. It's your son. Joshua. I want you to know, Dad...... I love you. It's Joshua. Your son. I love you, Dad."

It was on the first time that I said it, not the second, that the limp hand I was holding seized firm, with a ghost strength that had not existed in years. It gripped mine for ten seconds, more, I didn't think to count. And as I moved away from his ear and sat back down, our eyes held contact again for a short while before he returned to staring in to the nothingness of the calm-colored wall.

Saying goodbye to my father before I left was possibly the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. Because I wasn't just saying it for my own sake anymore. I can't be at his funeral on Monday, which tears me up to think about. But I can always live with the knowledge that the peace of mind I feel, the absence of animosity... it's mutual. I didn't just get to say the goodbye that I wanted to say to my father. We were able to say goodbye to each other.


Kenneth William Woods
10.24.1934 - 11.11.2009


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(post-script) This is probably too much information for a lot of people, but writing this has been extremely cathartic. I will not be at my father's funeral to give his eulogy, so in this way at least I feel I'm paying tribute to him in another way. Admittedly it is not a glowing one, but an honest one (and yes, the dream happened, exactly as I wrote it). Another reason to write this is that a few people have given me the honor of telling me that my writing has helped them. In trying to be open about something so personal, I hope that maybe others who relate to a bit of my emotions or my experience in this entry can be helped a bit by it.