F

I went over and looked through the little glass peephole in the door, which gave
a wide-angle view of the back stoop and pathway to the garage, just to confirm
that his van was gone.

But the van was there, and so, too, was my dad. He was dressed in a cap and
his winter jacket and had his back to me. He’d made it only partway down the
stairs before needing to sit down. I could see the exhaustion in the angle of his
body, in the sideways droop of his head and the half-collapsed heaviness with
which he was resting against the wooden railing. He wasn’t in a crisis so much as
he looked just too weary to carry on. It seemed clear he was trying to summon
enough strength to turn around and come back inside.

I was seeing him, I realized, in a moment of pure defeat.
How lonely it must have been to live twenty-some years with such a disease,
to persist without complaint as your body is slowly and inexorably consumed.
Seeing my dad on the stoop, I ached in a way I never had. My instinct was to
rush outside and help him back into the warm house, but I fought it, knowing it
would be just another blow to his dignity. I took a breath and turned away from
the door.

I’d see him when he came back in, I thought. I’d help take off his work
boots, get him some water, and usher him to his chair, with the silent
acknowledgment between us that now without question he would need to accept
some help.

Upstairs in my apartment again, I sat listening for the sound of the back
door. I waited for five minutes and then five minutes more, before finally I went
downstairs and back to the peephole to make sure he’d made it to his feet. But
the stoop was empty now. Somehow my father, in defiance of everything that
was swollen and off-kilter in his body, had willed himself down those stairs and
across the icy walkway and into his van, which was now probably almost halfway
to the filtration plant. He was not giving in.

or months now, Barack and I had danced around the idea of marriage. We’d
been together a year and a half and remained, it seemed, unshakably in love. He
was in his final semester at Harvard and caught up in his Law Review work but
would soon head back my way to take the Illinois bar and look for a job. The
plan was that he’d move back to Euclid Avenue, this time in a way that felt more