Woolly

In summers, in the latter half of the 1980s, my father’s swim trunks were the exact same color as his skin. He didn’t often come to the pool with us because he worked nights and spent his days trying to sleep. But on days when he did join us he’d wear a pale beige bathing suit, which, from a distance, made people glance twice and ask if that man was naked. This might have been okay if he sat in the shade and read the paper like the other fathers. Instead, he was determined to teach himself how to swim. He’d grown up in a rural Irish village on the North Atlantic, where he often rowed a curragh to see his grandparents. To my knowledge, the Irish approach to protecting one’s herd of children in that era was not to teach them how to swim because confidence might lead to chance-taking, but to make them afraid of the water instead.

But he was in America now and there were group swimming lessons every Saturday morning. Kids barely out of diapers hurled themselves into the water and paddled back to the ladder to go again. There were no adult lessons, but even if there were, I’m sure he would have been too shy to sign up. Instead, he ran what I thought of as his “experiments.” Broad and muscular from a lifetime of physical labor, he’d walk slowly into the deep end until the water reached his shoulders, and then sort of hop in slow motion, as if trying get a measure of his own buoyancy. Holding on to the rope and kicking was another favorite move, even though no one was supposed to hang on the ropes. But the worst was when he took a big breath, put his face in the water, and tried to float. He’d stay perfectly still, while his hair drifted around his head. He could hold his breath for a very long time.

“Oh no,” Annette, my sister, would say when we spotted him from the dock, or as we walked back from the snack bar with our frozen Charleston Chews. Catherine, my other sister, was still in the kiddie section, blessedly unaware.

And then it would happen. A lifeguard would blow a whistle and pandemonium would ensue. Attractive, athletic high schoolers, whose names I knew and had various crushes on, would come running from all directions to save him. When the first one reached him, he’d lift his face from the water, surprised. Please don’t do that again, they’d scold him when they accepted that he was fine. He was embarrassed to have scared them and to have all those eyes on him. But then there’d be a different shift of high schoolers, and the whole thing would happen again a few weeks later.

The last time he was fully lucid for a long stretch of time, he and I were alone in his hospital room in Ridgewood, New Jersey. It was late April, 2022. He was seventy-seven, still a strong-looking man despite the ravages of twenty-plus years of Parkinson’s Disease. I was forty-four, dressed in the mask, plastic face shield, and gown the hospital required. He was in a private room in the newly reopened Covid wing, lying in bed and hooked up to oxygen and other monitors. Since he was a fall risk, there were cameras trained on him from two directions, and he had a belt across his lap that sounded an alarm if he tried to stand up. Already, I could tell he was interested in that belt, how to get it off without the alarms sounding. On the white board it said his name was “Woolly.” With his strong Connemara accent the name Willie does sound like “Woolly.” And, of course, he’d never correct anyone.

He’d been admitted for Covid, his oxygen saturation level only 80 when we arrived at the ER. In addition to Parkinson’s, he had pulmonary silicosis from over thirty years of working in New York City’s water tunnels (a sandhog), so we always knew if he ever got Covid he’d be particularly vulnerable. Also, thanks to Parkinson’s, he had difficulty swallowing. I’d snuck in for him a cup of coffee that I promised my mother I’d thicken with the powder he was supposed to have in all his beverages, but he hated the thickener, and I hadn’t yet decided if I really would. I could tell he didn’t know who I was when I first walked in, so I sat on the edge of his bed and took off the shield first, then the mask, so he could see my face. I was vaccinated, boosted, had already had Covid, plus I live next store to my parents and saw them almost every day.

“Do you know me?” I asked.

“Mary,” he said, not at all bothered to be quizzed. His mother’s name. His grandmother’s name. And mine, his eldest daughter. I watched him notice the paper cup of coffee in my hand, so I handed it over, unaltered. In exchange, it was understood that he’d do his utmost best not to aspirate on my watch.

Once, on a trip to Connemara, we hiked out to the small island in Ros Muc where my grandfather was born. My father and his ten siblings were born on the mainland, which I gather was a step up. Trekking to the island that day — which is only about a square mile — were my father, me, my sisters, and an assortment of cousins who were also visiting from New York. To get to the island we had to wait until the tide was out and then walk over on the exposed rocks. I’d made the same hike before, and it always worried me because the island was spooky, and if we lost track of time and the tide came back in, we’d be stuck there, potentially overnight (with ghosts). When we arrived at my grandfather’s home place, he pointed out a space in the fireplace for baking bread, the ladder to the sleeping loft. He’d shown us these things before, but this time, as we walked, I had a memory of a previous visit, a time when I was so small that he carried me over some of the rocks.

“You remember that?” he marveled. When I was six years old, we visited a woman who lived in one of the cottages that was now fallen in. He named the person — a relative of ours, somehow — and told me she was the last person to inhabit the island. I recalled an old woman whose eyes watered behind thick glasses when she greeted us. She stood at a half door and spoke to my father in Irish as she pulled me toward her massive breasts. Mo grá, mo grá, mo grá, she said. I only remember that much because that’s all I understood: my love, my love, my love.

We were in the middle of remembering this other visit to the island when suddenly he stopped walking and looked around in a panic. He rushed over to a place where there was a small drop off into the ocean and sure enough, Catherine and Seamus, our cousin, had jumped into the water to cool off. One quick dip, they figured, and then back to the history lesson. They were well into their teens, strong swimmers.

None of us had ever seen my even-keel father lose his temper but he did on that day. That’s why I remember it so well, I think. He was wild with worry, with making them understand how dangerous it was in that spot, how the strongest of men couldn’t fight that current, how we might have had plenty of schooling but we were not one bit wise yet.

Once in a while, when he was upset, we could hear his first language come through in his English. My sisters and I used to joke that it turned him into a poet. That day, he said things like: It’s the place where two waters meet. It makes a great churning.

“Okay, okay, sorry,” Catherine said.

His first night at the hospital, his meal had been two wet circles of puree, and apple juice thickened to nectar consistency. A slip of paper said the meal was beef and potatoes, and when I told him that, he laughed. He fed himself without help — messy, but mostly okay — and then pronounced it not that bad. The next morning’s meal — the day I snuck in a coffee for him — looked the very same in terms of shade and texture. It was labeled French toast, but he seemed less game than he’d been the night before. He finished the coffee with minimal coughing. We watched television for a long time. The light in his room grew dim. Lunch came and went. He ate whatever the pureed meal was and I stole his chocolate pudding.

Eventually, I told him I had to go, and he asked if he could come home with me. He asked why he had to work another overnight if it was obvious that they wouldn’t be pouring cement anytime soon. The trucks weren’t even there yet.

“You’re not in the tunnels, Dad. You’re in the hospital.”

On my way out, a nurse stopped me. She told me he’d set off his alarms almost continuously through the previous night, and if he did it again they’d have to sedate him. We were standing by the nurse’s station, and I could see on the small screen that he was already fiddling with that belt. He was studying it like he used to study the water of the town pool, considering his next experiment.

“Okay,” I said.

After three days in the hospital, they did some test to see how well he’d do without oxygen. All good. He’d be discharged in a few days, they said. But something had changed, and I seemed to be the only one who’d noticed. Their Covid rule was one visitor per patient, for the entire duration of that patient’s stay, so I was the only one seeing him. My mother was also quite sick with Covid; Annette works full time and has two very young children; Catherine had just moved to Boston and was almost eight months pregnant. We had a daily call to discuss how he was doing, and I’d report what the doctors said — good, much better — but something nagged me. He did less for himself as each day passed. On his fourth day in the hospital, he didn’t seem to know what to do with the food they brought him. Eventually he took the plastic spoon but inserted the handle into the puree. The nurse seemed to think nothing of it — oh, classic dementia — so I became fixated on making her understand that he’d never done that before. They no longer had the safety belt on him because after his second night there he hadn’t attempted to get out of bed. And it was getting increasingly difficult for him to swallow. They changed the consistency of his apple juice from nectar to honey.

The day he stuck the spoon handle in his food, I offered to feed him and he was happy to let me. From that meal forward, he never fed himself again. Just two days before he’d sipped his contraband coffee and did fine, but by day four he couldn’t even bring the plastic cup of thickened juice to his mouth, so he needed that spoon-fed too.

“Oh, that’s just his little way of trying to get home,” my mother said when I told her, but that, too, was a protective response. I saw the same worry I felt flicker in her.

One morning when I arrived, he reached for my wrist, pulled me close as if to confide a secret, and told me there were twin nurses, but one was nice and one was mean. I knew who he meant. There were two nurses who resembled each other. One was brimming with warmth, the other had an air of impatience. The nice one would hum as she fed him, as if she had all the time in the world. She told him it was her peaceful time, that he was her favorite.

“Woolly,” she’d say. “You are a true gentleman.”

Later, he said, “This hotel is disgusting but make sure you tip everyone. Even the mean twin. Get the money out of my wallet.”

I don’t know whether it’s a characteristic of Parkinson’s Disease or something specific to my father that he never quite believed he was as bad as he was. He was not supposed to go anywhere alone, but if my mother got on the phone upstairs in their house, and he was downstairs with a clear path to the garage, he’d go for it. Sometimes my mother or I would get a call from a neighbor to say he was walking by himself. Sometimes a neighbor driving by would pull over, hop out, take his arm, and walk home with him as if that was their intention all along. He never objected or seemed to mind.

To see him walking, especially without a walker, you’d hold your breath. His balance was so bad that every step seemed like the one that would send him to the pavement, where he wouldn’t be able to put his hands out in time. He’d already had several rounds of stitches to his chin, his cheek, his head. Even with the walker he would do this thing where he’d rear back and sort of swing the walker parallel to the ground, making the whole thing more treacherous for him and anyone who approached to help.

One time, just a few weeks before Covid hit, a woman walking her dog on a snowy afternoon pulled him out of a snowbank. Coming up our street she’d seen a human rump sticking out, head and shoulders tipped over into the four-foot ridge the town plow had made when it passed.

“Oh my God,” my mother said when the woman got him up to their door and knocked.

“He’s fine,” the woman said. “But what if I hadn’t come by? It’s nineteen degrees out.”

Or, more likely, she didn’t really say that. More likely my mother added that when she told me the story later, because she knew that’s what I was thinking. What if no one had come by? The woman knew what house he belonged in because he always waved to her from the garage when she passed.

On the day before my wedding, 2003, just two years into his PD diagnosis, he took out a small rowboat that was on the property of the house we’d rented for the week. He told no one, no doubt because someone would have objected. My husband and I wanted a very small wedding, so we rented a place by the water in a town we loved, and had gotten permission to put up a tent. While the rest of us were distracted with decorating the rented tables and chairs before the big day, he decided it was an ideal time to run one of his experiments.

He pushed the boat into the pond that abutted the lawn and set out for an adventure. There were two oars. The day was clear. At that time he was still driving, and it took everyone a while to notice he was missing. It took a while longer to realize his car was still there, so where could he be? Most of this was kept from me until after, but at some point one of my aunts noticed the rowboat that had been sitting in the tall sea grass all week was gone.

I was in town buying bug spray for our guests when he came staggering up the lawn. When he got close enough to the house for someone to notice him, he collapsed. My aunt ran to him and shouted for my mother. The word “pond” implies a small body of water, but at seven hundred acres this saltwater “pond” was almost the size of Central Park. He’d gotten close to the dead center when the rowboat started taking on water. He bailed at first, but eventually it started to sink. He figured he’d flip it somehow, use it as a floatation device. When he got out he found his feet brushed the bottom so he sort of walked it to shore, slowly, slowly, on tip toes. Once on shore, he dragged the rowboat over a mile before he reached our rental house. Both oars were gone.

“Why didn’t you leave the boat?” my mother shouted at him back then, more than twenty years ago, and still wonders when we remember it now. “Why would he drag the boat all that way?”

He was exhausted, not thinking straight, unused to his normally strong body being not entirely under his control.

“That wasn’t too wise,” he admitted.

Months later, when mention of this excursion no longer set off tempers, he said to me: “I swam a bit, I think.”

After five days at the hospital, he was moved to a rehab facility that was considered one of the best in New Jersey, and the plan was that he’d stay at least four weeks. He needed to get strength and mobility back, and we needed time to find an aide that would live in at my parents’ house. And at least in the rehab they’d have top-of-the-line equipment, we figured, professional expertise on how to best help him get back to where he’d been before.

His regular PCP had recommended the place, but he wasn’t even inside the building when I had a bad feeling. The ambulette transporting him from the hospital was over two hours late and no one could say why. I’d left the hospital when the transport team arrived, figuring they’d be behind me by maybe fifteen minutes. When he finally arrived, on a stretcher instead of a wheelchair as planned, he was pale, rattled. They eventually explained that they tried to transfer him by chair but he couldn’t even sit up. The sweatpants and fresh t-shirt I brought for him were still in a bag hanging off the back of his gurney, his gown twisted so that his pale shoulders were exposed. I got the feeling something had happened en route, but no one would say. All of this would be okay — things happen — except they seemed so annoyed about it. Annoyed at him about it. When he was finally settled into his room he was too exhausted to speak, so I waited for someone to greet us, to bring him food since he’d missed lunch. But there didn’t seem to be anyone working there. Finally, I went to find someone who might be able to get him even a cup of water, who could help him with the bathroom. I found an aide down the hall, eating pasta from a to-go container. I told her he’d just arrived and there’d been a long delay. He was weak and hungry, and I was sure he needed to empty his bladder.

“I’m on a break,” she said.

I’m not really a dramatic person, but for the rest of my days I’ll remember exactly how this woman was sitting, the sheen of oil on the noodles she was eating, the light coming in the window behind her, the way she turned away from me. But similar to scolding a babysitter who you leave in charge of your newborn baby, I had to be careful. Eventually, I’d have to leave, and if she hated me, maybe she’d take it out on him.

Even thinking about this, I’m overwhelmed with memories of other things. I want to list all of them, but he wouldn’t want me to. It’s enough to say that he was deeply private about his body, and when my sisters and I were living at home he wouldn’t even use the upstairs bathroom if our bras were hanging in there to dry. But for the twelve days he spent in that rehab facility, he let me, and eventually, my sister Annette, help him with all manner of personal care. I’d arrive some days to find him slid down in his bed, his sheets soaked, or so parched his lips had cracked and bled. I’d ask the staff if he’d been fed the meals that had been served in my absence, and they always said yes. PT? Yes. But then why did he appear thinner, and why couldn’t he do anything but lie there? At one point there were twelve pre-thickened cups of juice and water on his bedside table and I understood that no one was taking the time to get these liquids into him. When I pressed one nurse about it, she looked at me with so much anger and said: “It takes too long.” No one had brushed his teeth, or shaved him. I went down to the PT office to speak to the director and she corrected the information I’d been given up in his wing. They’d tried PT but he wasn’t up to it. Maybe he’d be up for it in a few days.

“He can’t wait another few days,” I insisted. “He needs to be pushed now. That’s the whole reason he’s here.”

So many of my friends and family are nurses, and they’re very good at what they do. My father would be the first to say that the system is overwhelmed. He would say the fault was at the top, where they were admitting far too many patients than they could responsibly handle. And in the end, it was the nurses in our circle that we relied on for help. The best of people. As my mother would say: saints.

When they loosened visitation rules, Annette came to see him and agreed something was very wrong. He stared at the ceiling too much. Once in a while he’d say something in Irish. But he never spoke Irish to us, only to his brothers.

My mother, hearing our reports, didn’t demand to be brought to him, as we expected she would, as we hoped she would because she was the boss and things would finally be set right. She had recovered from Covid, but she seemed afraid, claimed she still wasn’t feeling well. Looking back, it makes perfect sense. She was parsing signs from the information we were giving her and going to see him would mean that she could no longer pretend that what was happening wasn’t happening. Finally, on May 6, his seventy-eighth birthday, she decided it was time.

And when she did go, after the cutest visit you can imagine, she agreed that he had to come home immediately. But how? We had to meet with his doctor and sign papers to say we were going against his advice. We had to find a visiting nurse service, and so forth. All of this would take several days. No one in the administration was available over the weekend. Annette, my mom, and I went back to visit him again the next day, and he seemed so much better, tuned in and happy, probably because he knew he’d soon be leaving.

As the four of us were talking and strategizing, the director of patient activities came in to go over programming for the coming week. “I’m in charge of the fun!” She said as she posted a flyer that described dancing classes, among other things. She had one of those over-the-top personalities, her voice like a preschool teacher’s sing-song. “We’ll get you dancing Mr. Keane!” She said as she pranced back and forth in the narrow space between his bed and his meal tray. “You can dance from your bed! You can dance from any position!” She shimmied her shoulders and took a colorful scarf from around her neck, waved it in a figure eight around his head.

“What the fuck?” my sister said, staring at her.

My father was the first of us to start laughing.

On the day he was moved home, my friend who is a nurse insisted on greeting the ambulette. When she first offered, I demurred; it seemed like too huge a favor. We were still looking for full-time help, but we wanted him home more than anything, so the plan was for us to fill the gap until we found the right person.

When the day came she brought along a fellow nurse and when the ambulette pulled up they took over, got him inside to his hospital bed. While I stood by, they stripped him, inspected his body, washed him, taught us how to position the chuck pads so we could turn him and slide him up on his bed without injuring ourselves. They found a third-degree pressure sore on his backside and told me to call a wound specialist, that it needed debriding. “He didn’t get this on a fifteen-minute ambulance ride,” my friend said, furious on my behalf. It was shocking to see, and more shocking to think he’d never complained about it.

“Does this hurt, Mr. Keane?” my friend asked, gently pressing the edge of the wound.

“Yes,” he said, calm as could be.

He needed to be turned every ninety minutes around the clock until that wound healed. Friends who were nurses, physical therapists, or who had no experience at all texted and called with offers to do a shift. People dropped off food, at my mom’s house and mine. Pulled pork, chicken parm, lasagnas, cakes, cookies, gift cards in case we had too much. My sons were rapturous, and almost seemed to forget why they were eating like kings. We’d open the door in the mornings and there might be a Dunkin’ Box o’ Joe and a dozen donuts. “Pop Pops,” they said, when they raced across the yards and burst into his room, just like old times, full of news.

He seemed better. We made a huge batch of pureed soup but also fed him ice cream, pudding, apple sauce, any calorie was acceptable for now. My very pregnant sister came from Boston and my other sister took time off work and it was nice, in a way, just the five of us, without husbands or kids, coordinating our alarms for those ninety-minute intervals. His brothers came most days. His nieces and nephews. Friends he’d known from the tunnels, from the Bronx. Everywhere I went, someone stopped me to ask for him: “How’s Willie?”

And as always, he never complained. “Are you okay?” we asked constantly, and he always said he was fine. My mother handed him his therapy ball after breakfast each morning, and he squeezed until his hand grew too tired and then he’d switch to the other hand. Once, when we thought he was sleeping, we noticed him silently working through his old PT exercises. Arm up, down, touch nose, repeat. Even if it took several minutes to swallow one spoonful of food, he always opened his mouth for the next. But he did grow even quieter, if such a thing is possible. He studied our faces when we talked. One day, when he’d been home for probably two weeks, the physical therapist from the visiting nurse service said his prospects of standing, of bearing weight again, were very slim. She said it to me and my mother outside his bedroom door, but the doors were not solid wood. After, when she left, he seemed agitated.

“So fast,” he said finally. He was wide-eyed, shocked. “So fast,” he said again. I realized he must have overheard.

But what was so fast? The progression of his disease? How quickly he lost his strength? Or did he mean his whole life?

“He’s thinking,” my mother said one night, very late. “He’s deciding. I can tell.”

We took to counting the spoons of food and liquid he took in each day. Three spoonfuls of apple juice with breakfast, four with lunch. A feeding tube wasn’t an option because he had legal paperwork to say he never wanted one, and even if we got around that it wouldn’t have been so easy with his disability. Once in, we all knew it would stay in forever, and the procedure itself, a return to the hospital, would set him way back. And we’d have to fight to get him home again. We celebrated when he swallowed almost a whole cup of soup, and refused to let our thoughts spool out any further. How long can a man survive on one cup of soup per day?

One day, I walked into his room holding a mug of tea — I still can’t believe I did that, how absent-minded and cruel — and his eyes followed the mug as I crossed the room. I tried to shove it behind a framed photo. But he’d seen.

“Tea,” he whispered when I bent over him to fix his pillow.

So I went upstairs to turn the kettle back on. While the teabag was steeping my mother came in and we both glanced at the container of thickening powder.

“He asked for tea,” I said.

“I know.”

“What do you think?”

She chewed her lip and then she took the mug of tea, splashed in plenty of milk so it was cool, and brought it down to him. She was going to feed it to him, without thickener, spoon by spoon. I was all for it, as I was always for him taking risks, if they made him happy and did no harm to anyone else. But after one teaspoon he coughed so violently, and for so long that we got scared. His face turned an alarming color. He waved one of his arms as if grasping for air. I raised his bed. She pulled his body forward and clapped his back. Finally, he stopped coughing. He returned to a normal shade.

“Let’s not ever do that again,” I said.

We had so many people dropping by to visit with him in those weeks. Some of them recalled old stories, some just chatted away about mutual friends, updates on kids and marriages. He didn’t have the strength to hold up his part of the conversation, but no one was awkward about it, which amazed me. “Ah, howaya Willie,” they would say as they settled into the spare chair to shoot the shit for half an hour. One rough-looking old timer told us: “Your father never started a fight but by God he could end one.” My sisters and I discussed that for days. We loved to see he had so many friends — it meant we weren’t wrong to love him so much. But for each of these visits my mother felt she had to offer tea and something to eat, even if it was just a plate of cookies. We had plenty, but it meant going up and down the stairs, scrounging around for plates, clean teacups. It meant washing up after.

One day I decided why not have our entire, absurdly large family over to my house, next door, on one appointed day. That way we’d concentrate the visits to a few hours and then for at least a few days after, my mother would have unbroken peace. The forecast for that coming Sunday, June 5, was sunny and mild. We could have food and drinks over on my deck and patio, and one by one anyone who wanted could go over and visit with him for a few minutes.

The day arrived as beautiful as promised. Around forty people came. Most of my father’s- side cousins, and some from my mother’s side, too. Aunts and uncles, a few friends. The kids kicked a ball around, my cousins wheeled in coolers. My father was one of eleven siblings, so we mostly left it to the uncles to tell the stories, about Galway, about the differences in their memories, about what my father was like when he first came to New York, a greenhorn so shy he needed three or four tries to find the courage to order a sandwich in a busy Bronx deli near where he was staying.

In ones and twos, people went over for a private visit, as planned. I texted my sister to find out if I should make our mother a plate of food and bring it over.

And then, when everyone had had their time with him, and the day was winding down a little, my cousin’s wife tapped me on the shoulder. She’s a nurse for hospice and had been (not coincidentally) assigned to his case. I was washing dishes in my sink, looking out the window to everyone on my deck. There are times when none of us agree about anything. We are liberal, conservative, gay, straight, atheists, church-goers, casual drinkers, serious drinkers, tea-totallers. We are utility workers, artists, teachers, bartenders, bond traders, Trump voters and Bernie Bros. We have some who can tell a story and some who really, really, can’t; some with terrible tattoos, some who smoke a pack a day, some who run marathons and are strictly vegan. There have been late night, beer-fueled fist fights, arguments that have lasted years. There have been times when we’re all so stubborn that we think we don’t mean anything to each other. But in that moment, the common history in our blood, I loved every one of them.

“I think you should go over,” my cousin’s wife said.

“Yeah, I just need — ”

“I think you should go over now.”

I put down the plate I was rinsing and looked at her. I don’t remember crossing the yard. I only remember getting to his room and one of my sisters telling me to close the door.

He was going, going, and then he was gone. Modestly, gently, he didn’t draw any attention to himself. He simply went. Gone from us, but arrived somewhere else, maybe, I’m not sure.

“He’s gone,” someone outside the door said quietly, and we knew word would travel over to my house, that everyone would know, and that they’d quietly take their leave. After a while, there were no sounds, no voices. Those of us inside that room didn’t want to open the door just yet. My mother was still talking to him, praying. For a while longer, it was still the five of us. The sun set outside and it grew dark. Eventually it seemed like time to call the funeral home.

When the people from the funeral home arrived to collect him, they were patient and kind. They told us everything they were going to do before they did it. When they carried him out, through the garage where he loved to sit and watch the world, we followed. My mother turned on the light so no one would trip, and there, suddenly revealed to us, was everyone. Every person who’d been at my house plus neighbors who’d heard what happened, people who’d been walking their dogs along our street for years and knew him from the small wave he’d always give when they passed. Sitting quietly along the stone retaining wall that he built with his own hands, they’d waited almost two hours. Finally, when they realized he was being carried out, they stood. They took off their ball caps. Some murmured their farewells, said they’d be seeing him. Not one person moved until the doors of the van were closed and it drove slowly out of the driveway and down the road. As a group, we watched in silence until the taillights disappeared.

One time, in February or maybe March of 2000 — it was winter in any event — not long before he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I was just a few months out of college and working at a literary agency on Bleecker Street in Manhattan. The agency was replacing all the old office PCs with new ones and offered the bulky old ones to the assistants at a very low price. I wanted one for my apartment — I was sick of writing on my old college word processor — so I asked my father if he’d stop by on his way home from Roosevelt Island, where the water tunnel entrance was at that time, and help me move it from Bleecker to my apartment on East 84th. We both knew without needing to discuss that we’d follow this chore with lunch at the diner before he drove home.

I guess because it was a Saturday, he assumed there’d be no one in the office. He wasn’t shy around his family, but he was shy around Americans. He was shy around very educated Americans in particular. And he was certainly shy around book agents who represented authors that he’d watched interviewed on PBS. As I pressed the elevator button, I said casually that he might meet so-and-so, a person he enjoyed hearing stories about when I told them at home, but instead of being interested he looked panicked, and stepped away.

“You said the office was closed.”

“It is. But sometimes the agents come in on weekends, when it’s quiet.”

He looked at his hands. When he was still working, and even for a long time after he retired, his hands often appeared dirty even though they weren’t. It was machine oil, and no matter how much he scrubbed, it soaked into his calluses, around his nail beds.

“No one will be looking at your hands,” I said.

“It’s not my hands,” he said, and the truth was that I knew that. But if I were to address the real reason why, then I’d be acknowledging that I knew there were differences between him and them, that those differences had crossed my mind too. He’d gone to formal school for only two or three years, and was finished completely by age eleven. He’d done every manner of physical labor, both in Ireland and in New York, while the people I was now surrounded by, the sort of person I was becoming, read books for a living. Even saying that none of that mattered to me would make it worse.

“Dad. I already paid for the computer.”

He relented, kept his head down, got in and out of there as fast as he could.

We went to the diner, ate our BLTs, and never discussed it again.

What should I have said that day, I wonder? That being intelligent and being well- educated were two very different things? He knew that. He’d taught me that. What else should I have said? That there was no one I ever admired, or will ever admire, as much as I admired him.

Quite a few times, in my dreams, he’s come to tell me that he thought he would have found his mother by now, but he hasn’t. He left for America at nineteen, and she died shortly after. In my dream, he tells me he’s been looking and looking. I wake up choking with fury. I don’t even think I believe in heaven but if there is one I feel so angry that it’s not managed better. He’s shy, I want to tell the administration up there. He might not ask for help.

But my other recurring dream, the one I have more often, is happier. In it, he shows up at a family party. Sometimes he’s young, sometimes he’s seventy-eight, but either way he’s in perfect health. There’s a cake for someone — to celebrate a new baby or the purchase of a house. Sometimes these parties are in a backyard and sometimes they’re at one of my uncles’ bars, long closed. Everyone there knows each other, somehow, even though some of them would have never crossed paths in real life.

In these dreams I’m always the first to notice him and when I see him I shout that I knew it, I knew he couldn’t really be gone.

“Ah,” someone says. “There’s Willie now.”