Dream Time With Dad: Autoethnography as Ritual in the Time of COVID-19

One Hundred Ninety-Four Days

“Goodnight, Michael,” she says loudly. There is no response.

“Goodnight, Dad,” I say. I’ve rarely touched my father in our forty years together. I rest my hand on the felt blanket covering his legs.

“Dream well, dad,” I say, “dream well.” I want to kiss him on the forehead, but I don’t.

One Hundred Ninety-Three Days

On March 11, 2020, I find myself in quarantine for the first time. The term “quarantine” comes from a seventeenth-century Italian word quarantina meaning “forty days,” which originates from the root word quaranta, meaning forty. On the morning I start my quarantine, I obsessively watch the world news to see the spread of contagion across the globe. My quarantine will last longer than forty days.

The term quarantine was first officially used in the seventeenth century by Venetian proclamation to control the spread of the plague. However, the term was used informally as early as 1377. My city issues its first stay-at-home order on March 16, 2020. I am situated in a quarantine. I am the infection that is controlled.

The use of the word quarantine as a spatial location has another Italian root—Lazareto—the site which houses individuals infected with the plague. A lazareto is where individuals are “set aside for the performance of quarantine” (Harper, n.d.). Performing quarantine creates a stage of empty streets and a six-foot proxemic. Performing quarantine is to act as if everyone is infected. Performing quarantine creates a deleterious performance of purity and the potential to make impure. The etymology of lazareto is historically rooted in two stories from the bible. Both texts are about the death of a man named Lazarus, who is infected with the plague. In both stories, Lazarus is held at a distance and redeemed after death. Death enables rebirth.

Due to the religious etymology of the word quarantine, the number forty takes on a prescient meaning as well. Jesus wanders the wilderness for forty days. The Israelites wandered the desert for forty days. The Egyptian process of embalmment takes forty days, and the alchemical process of putrefaction takes forty days. The Buddha sat under the bodhi tree for forty days. In addition, forty days pass between Christ’s resurrection and ascension (Edinger, 1991). Seventeen centuries later, the etymology of quarantine is ordered into a formal policy, and the relationship between the word and forty days is writ into law.

I turn forty years of age in the summer of 2020, in the middle of my fourth consecutive quarantine, “everything the power of the world does is done in a circle” (Elk & Neihardt, 1932, p. 156).

One Hundred Sixty-Seven Days

My father is polytheistic, but mostly he follows the “old gods.” I use the term “old gods” in a Neil Gaiman (2021) sense of the word—the gods of those peoples and cultures who immigrated during the industrialization of North America or those gods who established their ancestorial grounds before manifest destiny. The “old gods” oppose the “new gods.” The “new gods” are framed by Roland Barthes’s (1972) Mythologies: the contemporary ideology of mass culture, which disseminates through modern-day media and is the dominant form of collective storytelling. The “old gods” will not be televised, while the “new gods” share a pulpit on the screen in my pocket.

My father prefers the narrative paradigm of the “old gods.” He isn’t religious; instead, he believes in the multiplicity of the spirit—its many forms and shapes, its dialectics and configurations, the myriad of myths and practices. My father believes that all religions are correct, but the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964) which creates a radical Otherness of our collective reality.

My father’s beliefs are complexly linked to his phenomenology of spirit, which, due to his illness with Multiple Sclerosis, provided several near-death experiences throughout his life. Previously, I believed my father’s view was an issue of appropriation (Collins, 2012). I still have many questions; however, in retrospect, there is far greater nuance in his perspective—one I could not know until the process of his death. I now believe my father’s perspective uncovers a depth that orients toward “the psychological level which understands religious imagery as the phenomenology of the objective psyche” (Edinger, 2015, p. xxi). He held each figure symbolically but acknowledged the importance and power of the many masks of God (Campbell, 1991).

While at my father’s house, I glance over the various texts on his bookshelf. There are books about Judaism, Paganism, Buddhism, Norse Mythology, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

“So, what exactly do you believe?” I ask.

My father sits in silence for a moment. I watch the words shape a pregnant pause on his lips.

“I don’t know,” he says.

There are stories my father cannot language. Communication is a Kierkegaardian conundrum, where the vehicle of language corrupts the authenticity of the thing communicated (Kierkegaard, 1843/2006). At that moment, it is as if a “voice came back to him from somewhere deep beneath the world, in a bass rumble: Believe everything” (Gaiman, 2021, p. 119), and we do.

Three Days

In my father’s last few days, we can’t get the television to work. It continually provides an error message which reads “absent signal.” One afternoon, while my dad is sleeping in the hospice bed, the television turns on. My brother tries to change the channel for my grandmother; however, the cable box won’t respond. On the television is my father’s favorite movie. The film is about a man who dies and resurrects as one of his ancestors. The moment feels ghostly, like a cat curling up at the end of a patient’s bed in a nursing home. My father’s gods appear in the absent signal.

Seventy-Nine Days

I stop by my father’s house. I debate if I should wear a mask due to COVID-19, but either of us have left our homes. He has a headache and isn’t feeling well. I tell him that he should call his doctor. I think back to the moment he is diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis years earlier. The historian in me “grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 263). The present is illuminated by our past.

To trace the past, to reconcile the present, I must acknowledge the stories passed down through my family’s psychic inheritance. Walter Benjamin’s approach to history allows a method to ritualize the past as it reappears in the present. My father’s gods manifest themselves through our lived stories—the psychic inheritance shared among grandfather, father, and son. Benjamin’s approach of materialist historiography views history as constructivist in nature. History does not work in a linear structure; instead, time is constellated as nodal points gathering an expression “when it can be recognized and is never seen again” (Benjamin, 1968, p. 255). Our psychic inheritance is found in the present as a dialogue with multiple past histories. Our obligation, to psychic inheritance, is to serve as archeologists of the soul. We must unearth the gods of our personal history as “the present becomes intelligible as it is aligned with a past moment with which it has a secret affinity” (Peters, 2001, p. 3). The tradition of Toltec wisdom provides a parallel construction of past, present, and future whereby “personally and collectively, what we are perceiving as life is not real. Our perception of life is really just a complex set of overlapping stories, held together by our concept of time” (M. Ruiz, 2018, p. xxii).

My grandfather (Zip/Howard) first meets my grandmother (Nan/Anna) while on leave from a military assignment. Zip invites Nan to the movies and refuses to pay for her ticket. But that night, a new story begins. Following my father’s polytheism, the story of my grandfather begins the Greek myth of the God Cronus. Cronus gave birth to a new pantheon; however, to secure his reign of power, he devoured his children.

Forty-Five Days

I stop by my father’s house. When I knock on the door, I hear a shout from the other side.

“Come in,” the voice says.

I open the red door to my father’s home, and I find him sitting cross-legged in the middle of the living room. He is trapped between the ataman and the kitchen wall. There are broken ceramic shards scattered across the wood slat floor. We stare at each other; time elongates.

“Get over here and help me up,” he says.

I lift his body and rest him awkwardly on the corner of the couch.

“I fell a second-time last night while walking to the bathroom,” he says. “I was holding a coffee cup, and I didn’t have the strength to crawl back to my phone.”

Shortly after that, I call Nan to notify her about my father’s situation, and she calls for an ambulance. That night, after a few hours in emergency, they moved my dad to an Intensive Care Unit. Due to COVID-19, the hospital has a one visitor policy per day. My Nan visits with him, but I am not allowed to see him. A few days later, we learn the doctors have diagnosed him with terminal brain cancer. Over the next week, we learn the cancer started from a mole on his torso and spread to his lungs, spine, and finally to his brain.

Sixty-Nine Years

Zip left for military duty two weeks after meeting Nan. Nan found out she was pregnant a few weeks after he left. Their actions, and Zip’s departure, spread like a virus throughout the community. My great-grandfather is a constable in the town, and yet, my great-grandmother refuses to take Nan to the grocery store because “people are talking.” My grandmother is placed in a lazareto to prevent the spread of moral decay. In January, Nan turns sixteen and a few months later, my father is born. My father’s birth is not just a cultural mishap; it is a harm against the community. My father’s birth is the recognition of a crime. A slight against the gods. An offense committed by my grandfather’s hubris, for which my grandmother must traverse Daedalus’s labyrinth while nursing the Minotaur.

The literature on father–son relationships frames the larger themes embedded in this specific autoethnographic ritual. The ritual acknowledges themes of resistance to psychic narratives and generational inheritance (Alexander et al., 2012); relational paradigms (Adams, 2006; Poulos, 2012); remedy or detoxification (Berry, 2012; Purnell & Clarke, 2019); the relationship after death (Bochner, 2008, 2012); hauntings (Clarke, 2017); reterritorialization (Gale, 2012); mourning (Hanauer, 2021); presence–absence (Jago, 2006; Poulos, 2014); disability, masculinity, and leakage (Collins, 2012; Lindemann, 2010); relational dissonance (Wyatt, 2012); posthumanist relationalities (Claiborne, 2017); and myth (Patti, 2012).

Zip does not want to return from England. My grandmother’s parents notify the military of Zip’s conduct for which he faces possible criminal charges. My grandfather decides to come home and marry my grandmother, thereby restoring honor to her parents and removing the blight of the town. Zip home again, home again, dic-ory doc, away again, away again, Zip from the flock.

The autoethnographic ritual for my father attempts to address a problem in Western culture, namely, what “death is to us: the ultimate but inescapable taboo” (Peters, 2001, p. 147). The ritual does not attempt to solve the impediments posed by the problems of distance after death. Rather, the ritual provides a re-orientation toward death. The pandemic has exponentially increased the loss of life across the globe, in part, due to the compounding effects on routine health care. Many individuals I know have lost a loved one over the past two years, while “we lack the cultural and religious practices that would protect us from being lonely psychological agents. Our perfunctory grief bespeaks a disturbance in that most crucial of all relationships, our relation to the dead” (Peters, 2001, p. 148). The orientation toward death offers a ritual which privileges my father by honoring his gods, his end-of-life experience, and his desire to become a work of art after death. The intention of the ritual is to transform the psychic inheritance and the symbolic representation of the father. Much like autoethnography, “the purpose of a ritual is to link a person to the larger rhythms of life” (Hollis, 1993, p. 103). The individual exists as a part of a dialectic in the collective. The larger rhythms of the collective are witnessed and experienced at the level of the individual. As such, I place my father’s story in the historically defined present understood by the more significant socio-cultural concerns of communication, health, and end-of-life processes during a global pandemic.

In addition to the ritualistic component, the autoethnography serves to develop research on the father–son relationship by extending the work on generational psychic inheritance. The relational paradigm reframes and rewrites the tension between father and son. My autoethnographic approach attempts to understand the unlived life of the parent through the generational impacts of psychic inheritance as framed by Bryant Keith Alexander et al. (2012), and James Hollis (2021). The method allows for a recognition of “the unlived life of parents,” to understand, “wherever they were stuck, becomes for all of us a compelling model, script, set of marching orders . . .” (Hollis, 2021, p. 147). As an autoethnographer, I trouble my specific orders, but I follow the script of my father’s life as I try to deviate from its path. Hollis further presses the problem of denying the parental life as a problem of relationality, rather than individuality, “in saying we will not be like our mothers or not live our father’s life, we are still being defined by that other, rather than from the natural source within us all” (Hollis, 2021, p. 192). The unlived life of my father is gifted to me at my birth and presses upon me in his passing. However, it is in conversation with generational psychic inheritances where “the inner rhythms of memories whose weight has been born in silence for many years, a story emerges” (Alexander et al., 2012, p. 122). In the absence manifested by my father’s death, a new life becomes possible or present. “Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle” (Elk & Neihardt, 1932, p. 156).

Four Days

Nan is standing on the front porch holding garden sheers in her hand. She asks if I could cut down the plants in her front yard.

“All of them?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says.

“Even the ones that are still alive?” I ask.

“Yes,” she says, “what does it matter? They are all going to die anyway.”

I take the sheers and grab a plastic trash bag which blows in the wind. I grip the sheers with both hands and placed the blade against the neck of the Elephant Ear. I pause, staring at it. The youthful green color reflects at me. There is so much loss. I hesitate a second longer, wanting to hold the moment. I breathe out and bring the clipper arms together. The Elephant Ear topples over the blade and falls to the ground. I continue the procedure with each plant in the yard. Pausing, breathing, forcing my hands together. The cold air pushes in during the night. The fall has arrived.

Seventeen Years

In-between various tours of military duty, my grandfather has three sons with Nan. However, Zip isn’t around much as my father grows up. As firstborn, my father inherits the responsibility left behind by the absent and abusive father: a psychic inheritance which rebels from my grandfather’s actions and protects my grandmother.

The problem that remains is that both parent and child often perform a sense of co-dependence. As James Hollis points out, “the co-dependent adult has learned to avoid his or her own being” (Hollis, 1993, p. 102). The psychic weight of generational inheritance affects how the child understands its relationship to the world. The parents’ “deepest role is archetypal—that is whatever the child experiences in the parent both serve as a model for the child and activates certain capacities within the child itself” (Hollis, 1993, p. 68). My grandfather teaches my father about masculinity, my father then both owns and disowns the parental behavior. In this way, my father passes his psychic inheritance on to me as, “the parent is often the child of incomplete parents and can only model and transmit his or her experience. Thus, the legacy of wounded partial souls is passed from generation to generation” (Hollis, 1993, p. 68). However, Tony E. Adams (2006) points to the value of possibility found in reconstructing the story. In doing so, one can connect story and theory, “in this manner theories and stories become intertwined, creating a mixture loaded with possibilities from which we can choose” (p. 716).

After Zip died in 2003, my family learns of several other children secretly fathered and abandoned by Zip, Deus abscondus. My father learns he has numerous stepbrothers and stepsisters across North America, Europe, and Asia. In such times, “wheresoever we find wounds, deficits in our history, there we are obliged to parent ourselves” (Hollis, 1993, p. 71).

My father parents himself by forming a codependent relationship with his mother. He parents himself to heal my grandfather’s wounds. As my grandfather held family at a distance and often wasn’t present, he never communicated affectionately. My father inherited his lack of affection, which then passes down to me. I become aware of this history as I count the number of moments I have touched another human being since quarantine began. One: I shook the hand of the hospital chaplain. Two: I hugged my brother when he arrived in town. Three: I hugged my mother at the hospital. Four: I picked up my father when he fell. Five: I touched my father’s leg in the hospice bed. Six: I hugged my Nan when the morticians arrived. Seven: . . .

Forty-Three Days

The day after I find out about my father’s diagnosis, my mother has excruciating pain in her abdomen. She hasn’t slept for a few nights, and I tell her to contact her doctor. I go to the hospital to see my dad, and when I arrive home, my mom can barely walk. I take her to a diagnostic appointment and by the time we arrive, her face is dripping with sweat. The diagnostic nurse brings out a wheelchair and rolls my mother into the lab area. I learned about my father’s diagnosis twelve hours earlier, and now I’m waiting to hear about my mother’s diagnosis. The television in the lobby displays a political debate over the increased spread of COVID-19. Shortly after, there is a text from my mother. There is a problem with her oxygen levels. The lab assistants call for an ambulance.

The ambulance takes my mother to the same hospital as my father. I pull into the parking lot, grab my mask, and rush through the emergency doors. In the entryway, there are three aides taking temperatures and asking questions about COVID exposure. At this moment, the emergency doors feel like a threshold into the underworld, and the workers are Cerberus, the multi-headed dog guarding the gate. I speak to one of the aids, and after several questions, he wraps a band around my wrist and I pass over the threshold to stand in line for the front desk.

The emergency waiting room is flooded with an assortment of emergencies. The emergencies are overwhelming and spill into additional rooms. Some emergencies sit on chairs, some emergencies lay on the floor, some on cots, some in bundles together on the ground, some emergencies wear masks, some emergencies do not.

There is an area to the left of the main entrance which contains six small rooms covered by green curtains. Every couple of minutes a person emerges from a makeshift medical area wearing an oxygen mask and dragging a green tank behind them.

I arrive at the desk and greet the next nurse.

“How can we help you?” she asks.

“I’m here to see my mom, they just brought her in,” I provide her name, and they scroll through the computer database.

“She isn’t here,” the nurse says.

“What do you mean she isn’t here?” I try to remain calm.

“She isn’t here; maybe she hasn’t been processed yet,” she says.

I wonder if I should stay in the room and wait. I look around at the assortment of emergencies. I worry about the possibility of infection. An older woman with a cane stands next to me. We move in opposite directions as she makes her way to the desk.

I am three times my size; my mere presence is taking up space. And yet, I’ve never felt so small. Even though I have an emergency, I am not an emergency, and there is no room in the emergency space.

My mom spends the evening in the hallway of the emergency room as they don’t have enough beds. The next day, she is admitted to the hospital for an emergency procedure. The day after the operation, she has sepsis, and the doctors find fluid in her lungs. She is moved to a room in the ICU. My brother goes to the hospital to see our mom. My Nan goes up to the hospital to visit my dad. My parents are divorced twenty-five years and live across the country from each other. On this day, they are both in the ICU ward with rooms next to each other. “Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle” (Elk & Neihardt, 1932, p. 156). My brother is less than ten steps away from his dying father, but due to COVID-19 protocol, he is not allowed to see him.

Twenty-Six Days

My mother is released from the hospital two days later, and my father is sent to rehabilitation. My father hates rehabilitation. It reminds him of six months he spent in rehab in the mid-nineties. After ten days of discomfort, he discharges himself and returns home.

When I arrive at his house to assist with his final radiation and first chemotherapy appointment, I see Nan’s car and a white shuttle bus. My father is sitting the backseat of the bus and he looks exhausted.

“He fell again,” Nan says.

We arrive at the radiation center, and the driver helps my father out of the van. My dad is using a cane but needs a wheelchair. We slowly walk into the hospital center and greet the nurse standing next to a table. Resting on the table is a temperature gun and a list of questions.

“We need you to put on your mask, sir,” the nurse says.

My father fumbles in his pocket for a mask and struggles to put it on his face. I assisted him by wrapping the elastic around his other ear. The nurse asks him several questions and takes his temperature.

“He’s running a fever,” she says.

Several people are standing behind us, and I am suddenly aware of the implications of this public statement.

“He’s running 101,” she says.

“He fell down back at the house; it’s cancer, not COVID,” I respond.

“Please move out of the line and to the adjacent room,” she says.

The adjacent room contains wheelchairs, and I grab one for my father. After a few moments, the nurse returns.

“It could be his hat,” she says. I take off his hat, and she retakes his temperature.

“Still 100,” she says.

“I’m here for my chemo appointment,” my dad struggles to say.

“He’s had three tests already, it’s not COVID. He fell this morning, and that’s why he’s running a fever,” I say. My words are not reassuring.

“Let me talk with his chemo doctor,” the nurse says as she leaves us. My father begins crying lightly in the chair.

“Everything will be ok, just take deep breathes, try to calm yourself,” I say, “We know you’re not sick, you’re just overheated, it will be ok.”

The nurse returns a few moments later and retakes his temperature, after which she breaks the news.

“The chemo doctor won’t see him,” she says. “They are rescheduling his appointment to December.”

“It’s September!” I say in between deep breathes. I feel my fingers ball into a fist, my nails cutting into the palm of my hand holding my rage.

“Will he still be able to finish radiation today?” I ask.

“Yes, the doctors said he could continue with radiation,” she responds.

I wheel my father past the entry checkpoint and into the nearby elevator. The doors close behind us as we descend to his final appointment.

My dad never returns to his house. He decides to spend a few days at Nan’s, but the next day my father stops eating; a few days later, he stops drinking. Shortly after that, he returns to the hospital.

Seventeen Days

James Hollis (1993) writes that there is potential to reclaim life in the ritual of death. A potential exists, in the ritual, for both the dying and those who shepherd the dying through the process. Hollis notes that the confrontation with death provides an understanding of our choices, depth, and the possible emergence of what Heidegger calls being-toward-death. In his work Being and Time, Heidegger (1927/1962) articulates the concept of Dasein, which means “being there” or “being in the world.” Heidegger’s idea of authenticity is to encounter the limited possibilities of Dasein. The concept of being-toward-death is an essential component for the authenticity of Dasein, for it is in death that time finds its meaning.

I approach my father’s hospital room and see him transfixed by the television screen. He has a tray of food next to him, and a piece of chicken dangles from a fork.

“Hey, Pops!” I say as he looks over at me. “When did you start eating again?!” I ask.

“The food here is so good,” he says.

“I have to take a picture for everyone; they won’t believe it.” I pull out my phone, and my father and I stage photographs for the family. The pictures feel like an accidental renaissance painting.

The first aspect of being-toward-death is that death is non-relational. The concept of non-relationality is about how the individual leaves all other relations through the act of death. In the moment of non-relationality, Heidegger (1927/1962) points out, “the dying of Others is not something which we experience in a genuine sense; at most, we are always just ‘there alongside’” (p. 282). I cannot experience my father’s death; however, I am still informed by the process. Simon Critchley (2009) writes that we can understand death through the relationality with others as, “the relation to death is not first and foremost my own fear for my own demise, but my sense of being undone by the experience of grief and mourning” (para. 8).

“How have you been?” I ask.

“I peed myself again, I can’t get anyone to change the blankets,” he says nonchalantly. He is half paying attention to me and half watching the soap opera on television. I talk with a passing nurse about changing his bedsheets and return to the room.

The second component of being-toward-death is that death is inevitable, and all beings must succumb to the finitude of time. Heidegger and his concept of anticipation note that one “does not passively await death, but mobilises mortality as the condition for free action in the world” (Critchley, 2009, para. 5). The recognition of the finitude of time provides an authentic relationship to being in the world.

“What did the doctor say is wrong?” I ask.

“The doctor diagnosed me with a failure to thrive,” he says, the slush of green beans moves around his words.

“What do you mean a failure to thrive? You’re fine, and you’re eating and everything. What more could they want?” I say. He looks at me confused, disappointed. We are both avoiding the real conversation.

The third aspect of being-toward-death is that it is indefinite, which is to say, we do not know the finitude of time we have left. “In this state-of-mind, Dasein finds itself face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 310). Even my father, who was provided a sense of time, found it disappearing, decreasing in days, a testament to the indefinite aspect of time.

“I made a list the other night,” I say, “it’s a list of all the things you’ve taught me. Do you want me to read it?” I ask.

“Yeah, I would like that,” he says.

I open the document on my phone and begin to read the list:

Create, begin, meander, discovery, see things for what they can be, there are no endings, grow, attend, millions of paths, vortexes, red rocks, snow, meditation, breathing, peace, acceptance, photography, color, light, music, Buddhism, stars, being, becoming, letting go . . .

We are suddenly interrupted by a nurse with bedsheets.

“I’ll finish it later,” I say awkwardly and slide my phone into my pocket.

The final component is a disclosure of death as a possibility, “not to be outstripped” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 294). Nothing has greater precedent for the individual, as it is the potential that negates all other potentialities. Death, then, is individual as the “possibility which is one’s ownmost” (Heidegger, 1927/1962, p. 294). When the individual accepts the possibility or the movement toward not-being, the individual can act authentically.

The hospital won’t allow my father to stay due to the lack of beds, the rehab center won’t admit him again with the failure to thrive diagnosis, and because he still has an appointment for chemo in four months, he can’t begin Hospice. The only choice is to take him back to Nan’s house and wait.

The value of Heidegger’s work is the achievement of an authentic life, which only occurs in recognition of death. As such,

freedom is not the absence of necessity, in the form of death. On the contrary, freedom consists in the affirmation of the necessity of one’s mortality. It is only in being-towards-death that one can become the person who one truly is. (Critchley, 2009, para. 6)

When my father returns to the house, like clockwork, he stops eating and drinking again. A few days later, we cancel his Chemo appointment and begin Hospice. The choice of being-toward-death allows him the freedom to choose where he spends the indefinite finitude of his life.

Six Days

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg passes away from pancreatic cancer. Many people I know are in mourning. An hour after her passing, my father starts morphine.

Three Days

I arrive at Nan’s house in the morning and decide to play music for my dad. The album is Thru Visions and Dreams by Virgie Ravenhawk (2007), a Native American artist who uses flutes, rattles, and drums. I sit with my father and read. After the music plays for a while, it sounds like the current track is skipping. I look down to see how much time is left and notice we are on the final track. As I read the title of the last song, I feel an experience of my father’s gods. The final flute notes dissipate into the air as the music comes to an end. The title of the last song is “Dream Time with Dad” (Ravenhawk, 2007, track 17).

Two Days

My dad has read thousands of books throughout his life. However, he can’t read the final books he ordered in rehab. There is one book that seems most prescient: The Wisdom of Shamans: What the Ancient Masters Can Teach Us about Love and Life by don Jose Ruiz (2019).

I read the books to myself while spending time with my father in Hospice. My father can’t speak anymore, he can’t sit up, he can’t read. He passes his hand slowly over his head, lightly touching his bald scalp.

After finishing the book, I decide to read The Wisdom of Shamans aloud to my father. The book follows the Toltec tradition of wisdom, and it seems appropriate as Ruiz’s book retells the stories that his father told to him using the oral tradition. The stories provide a journey across various thresholds, childhood to adulthood, anger to compassion, life to death.

I read to my father,

“We are a creation of all that has gone before us. Yet the mind clings to the illusion of separateness” (J. Ruiz, 2019, p. xxvi).

I read to my father,

“My time in this body is coming to an end . . . Tomorrow is a day of great transformation” (J. Ruiz, 2019, p. 2).

I read to my father,

“We have found peace between us, you and me. We have communicated heart to heart” (J. Ruiz, 2019, p. 29).

I read to my father,

“That is what transformation is all about” (J. Ruiz, 2019, p. 55).

I am at the final three chapters, but I cannot finish the book. I notice my father continues to slowly rub his head. I stand next to him hesitantly and lightly place the tips of my fingers against his scalp. I slowly begin to mimic the movement of his hand. I draw my fingers over his forehead and temples in slow repetitive motion. In this moment, I try to take in what it means to experience human touch as communication. I do this to avoid the end we are spiraling toward. I do this because I cannot read the final three stories aloud. The first story is about embracing the darkness, the second is about the moment of death, and the final story is about what lives on after we die.

Thirty-Three Years

I grew up in Fremont, California, during the 1980s. On one random Saturday, my dad tells me we are going on a special trip. We climb into a light blue Honda and my father drives for an hour to a large Buddhist bookstore in Berkeley. When we arrive, my dad says,

“I’m going to let you wander. After you find a book, come to the back of the store and I’ll meet you on the patio.”

I begin my journey into the labyrinth. The shelves tower over me like various gods in the sky. I don’t know what I’m searching for, but maybe there is something searching for me. After some time, my fingers reach out and tip the corner of a random text as it slides in into my palm. A holy book for a holy journey.

I work my way through the maze of books until I find a long hallway which extends to a door. The light from outside reflects against the glass and refracts down the hall. I push my way forward until I cross the threshold to the outside.

I am standing in a square. In the middle of the square is a large fountain. Water flows rhythmically across a multilayered descent and pools in the collective basin below. The water is then drawn into the center and circles back to the top where the journey began.

There are large plants in all four corners of the garden. My father sits at a metal table to the right. A stack of magazines and a book rest next to him on the table. I walk over and sit.

“Now what?” I ask.

“We just sit and read,” my father says.

I open the book as the light of the sun dances down into the square. The two of us reading about peace in this mandala under the Berkeley sky.

Thirty-three years later, I now live in the house my father left behind. There is an indoor patio toward the back of the house. I place a fountain on the patio, a ten-foot-tall plant near the center of the room. The walls of the patio are aligned with ferns, ivy, and a large Buddha statue. There are windows on three sides of the patio which open to the sun. I place my father’s urn, made of light blue marble, under the fountain, so that his spirit may exist like flowing water. My father’s house is almost two-thousand miles from where I grew up in California; However, the house is located off Fremont Street. The road that runs into the house is Berkeley. The house’s address is on Delaware. Del is an abbreviation often used before an artist’s name when an original piece of art is copied into another medium. I take Fremont to Berkeley and live on Del/aware. “Everything the power of the world does is done in a circle” (Elk & Neihardt, 1932, p. 156).

One Day

I awake to a beautiful dense Bay Area fog. When I visit with my father that morning, I read the final three stories of the book.