The Day I Let My Father Die
He Didn’t Give Much in Life, but His Death Set Me Free
We stood in a circle, the kind of awkward circle that kids at recess can’t get quite right. My stepmother chomped at her gum. My stepsister was stoic in ivory. My aunt wrung her hands like they were overused dishcloths. I pulled at a curl in my hair to avoid eye contact, my pudgy legs numb from standing. No one broke formation, at least until the beeping stopped. I then looked up. My stepmother stopped chomping and glared at me. My perfectly coiffed stepsister hunched and ran. My aunt screeched out a sob and let go of the rags long enough to reach for my shoulders to shake me.
It was done. I had let my father die.
I was born in New York in 1974 when polyester was praised, cars were full of muscle, and Elvis Presley was a god. My mother was obsessed with the era, in fact, in her mind, she never really left it. She’d wear her emerald green pantsuit and tinted oversized brown glasses and smelled of Barclay 100 cigarettes and drugstore perfume. Mom was full of life and even her mental illness thrived in memories of this Americana — like the milkman smashing into her red Camaro — yet she’d go cold when I’d ask about my father. She wanted happy stories, not heartache. No memories of the man neither of us saw since I was three. I wasn’t allowed them.
The day my father died, some decades later and thousands of miles away, I called to tell her. Weepy and stammering, begging for validation for my decision and expressing fear that this was my future due to his and mine shared congenital illness that I only learned the day he died. Her response: “Oh, that’s too bad, sweetie. Jon and I are having chili for dinner.” My grip on my phone tightened. My voice hardened. “Chili sounds good, Mom.” The phone went dead.
She wasn’t always this cold. She could be cruel, but not always cold, and there was happiness. When I was small, we would go on short road trips near our new home in Southern California. San Diego for crunchy yet mealy waffles, Solvang for sticky aebelskiver and blue ceramic windmills, and San Simeon for zebras and kitsch at the estate of a publishing magnate. She tried to make up for what we lacked in family and funds in adventure. She couldn’t make up for her madness.
My father lived his life without adventure and without me. I had created stories about him over those 30 years. A traveling salesman who pushed electric toothbrushes. A financier who shook his fist in a boardroom like George Banks. A fireman who saved cats from trees and line cooks from burning kitchens. A mob boss who dressed and spoke like Vito Corleone. A terrible father.
Returning to New York to see him would be the first time I’d been back since I was a toddler. I didn’t know it would be a goodbye. “If you are indeed Salvatore Leggio’s daughter,” yesterday’s email from a then-stranger said, “you need to come now.”
My entire flight from San Francisco to La Guardia I thought about what I would learn when I landed. I thought up questions to ask, experiences to share, and rage-filled speeches to hurl. The flight itself was surreal and stressful; the latter not because I was seeing my father for the first time since youth, but because of my mother’s unwavering consistency in being cruel. Her voice was always louder in my head than my voice was. “You selfish bitch, do not go out there,” she seethed through the phone. ‘He never loved you.” And that was likely true, but it was my last chance to know his real story.
When I arrived, a family friend picked me up from the airport. Barely discernible with her Queens accent, I learned he was a blue-collar transit worker with a partner, two stepdaughters, a stepson, and a white Maltese named Samantha. They kept a beautiful split-level home in a very Italian neighborhood on Long Island. “I think this is what the 80s in Europe were like,” I later wrote to my friend. Boxy sedans were driven by small women with big white hair that poofed over their steering wheels; delis with meats and cheeses I could not pronounce; nail salons that only offered gaudy acrylics; and garish churches always advertising feasts. I never knew my Sicilian family and how they lived and worked, and my father’s reality was much different than any story I told myself.
We stopped at his home. I was to sleep in his room; the room where he was found unconscious. I couldn’t wait to soak it in but also couldn’t wait to go and deal with that later. So we went. The hospital waiting room was filled with unknown faces that strangely looked like mine. A petite woman with auburn hair and an inappropriately cheery smile grabbed my sweaty hand and said, “I’m your stepmother, Maria, your father’s in there.” He was in a coma by the time I arrived, surrounded by machinery that breathed like Darth Vader and nurses whispering intently in their bright pink scrubs. “Talk to him,” Maria said. “Your father wants to hear your voice.” I let the waves of, “He could’ve heard my voice for the last 30 years” wash over me and slide off.
I sucked my teeth and took a step closer and gazed intently, stroking his cheek. The traveling salesman, the financier, the fireman, the mafia boss, the terrible father, all disappeared. There were no more stories, just a man with thinning black hair, my nose and lips, and a big belly creating a sled slope with blankets, being kept alive by tubes.
“I love you, Dad.” Words I’d never before said. Words I never thought I’d say. Words I never thought I could feel. Having seen too many movies I hoped for miracle blinks or finger movements or muffled answers; I needed them and wasn’t ready to accept never getting them. There was only stillness soundtracked by beeps, boops, and bops and my loud silence. I didn’t ask questions, I didn’t share experiences, I didn’t hurl rage. I sat in a tiny plastic chair and held his hairy hand. The man I only imagined was suddenly flesh.
Two days later we let him go; well, I let him go. Since he and Maria didn’t legally marry, the approving signature and decision to take him off support came from me, his only child and only living blood relative. Maria hated this. Somewhere in absentia, I believed at the time he hated it too. Despite his omitting me from his life even legally, he couldn’t disavow me as his daughter in this scenario. Even with a lifetime of never learning his strength, at the time of his death, I had to summon it to let him go. I had none of my own. I had none from my mother. When he passed, when the noises stopped, when everyone else ran out, half of them called me a murderer despite the doctors declaring him brain dead. I stayed in the room with him, still holding his hairy now quickly icing hand, half crying and half screaming like a confused shelter animal. But I was also finally okay. He was only 58 and I was 33 and I finally had the strength to start living.
The past no longer mattered. There were no more stories to tell myself–those were replaced by facts–but there were new adventures ahead. Adventures without him. Adventures without mom. He was no hero; in fact, one might say a coward. I learned strength from his death that I couldn’t learn any other way. A way no one should learn to grow up, but after years of being trapped in my mom’s mental Americana, it broke me free. I learned who he was. Who I was. He didn’t bring me much in my life, but in his death, he gave me that.
