December 6th, 2009

I wake up and I’m in a very dark room. A phone is ringing. I need to pick it up.
I know this room well, but I cannot work out where the phone is. I’m in that disorientation of sleep which makes it impossible to carry out simple tasks. I try to force myself to understand where things are, how to answer a phone, but I have to make several circuits of the room before I can do this simple task. Are voices easier or harder to hear in pitch darkness?
I’m in my parents’ house, in the sitting room. The phone is next to my father’s chair, beside the grandfather clock. I have been asleep on their sofa, an original G-plan number that I’ve regularly used as a bed for my entire life. It is embracing and comfortable as usual, but now I am off the sofa and standing in the dark, in my underpants, holding the phone.
I’m not sure how long the phone has been ringing. There are others asleep in the flat, my mother and my brother, somewhere in this ocean of inky blackness. It crosses my mind that because I took so long to answer the phone, they may also be awake. This bothers me slightly in the fraction of a second before I speak into the phone, not because I worry that they might have been woken, but because I want to keep this moment to myself. It is my job. I am selfish that way.
I am pleased it is me that gets to answer the phone. I am showing my maturity. I can manage this situation, I am the calm one, the eldest son. I have waited twenty-five years for this moment and I know what the call is about, even before the woman at the other end speaks. Even through my confusion as I stumble around the room I know why the phone is ringing. Somewhere, at the other end of this phone line, there are people who have been awake, who didn’t lie down sometime around midnight and fall into a deep slumber. Their job demands that they remain awake through the night. The people at the other end of the line are guarding my father, watching over him during the night. I imagine the building: most of the hospital is in darkness, people sleep fitfully. Throughout there are pockets of light in which nurses and porters sit quietly at their desks, monitoring alarms and filling out forms. It’s like an aeroplane during the night, I think. My sister is already flying over from Canada and our other brother is on his way from Sweden. I know about these long flights through the dark night, the small pockets of light, the mind left free to drift and churn. It can be a hard journey to make alone. Many years before, when my first child was small, I would break into unexpected sobs in the dark watches of the night, sleepless under my thin airline blanket.
I know exactly where this call is being made from. I had been in the hospital the previous day.
My brother had summoned me back from the coast, a strange urgency entering his voice when I dithered at home — please come now. I caught the bus from the seaside, giving myself two hours to think about things. When we get to the town I’m right at the front of the bus upstairs and I take a picture, looking down at the nondescript scene. Nothing I haven’t seen ten thousand times, this town doesn’t change, but I want a reminder of how it used to be.
This town is never going to be the same again, I think. I get off the bus and phone my brother at the hospital. Please come straight up, he says, pleading rather than polite.
I know this town very well and I cut through streets that still sometimes appear in my dreams. I cross the common grassland and get to the hospital which sits on a ridge overlooking the town. The Kent and Sussex, a strange name for a hospital. We always thought we were purely Kent, but it turned out we lived on the border with Sussex. For a few years as teenagers we drank at a pub called the Sussex where the county border had once run through the building, leaving only a tiny bar, the Kent bar, in Kent.
I know what I’m doing. I’m a man with a mission. In my bag I have a slim book, a Guide to Humanist Funerals. I’ve had it for years, since the day dad phoned me up and told me he’d been to a friend’s funeral and liked it. A Humanist funeral he said. Could you find out how they work. It was the sort of request you can’t turn down. I found the Humanists on the web and ordered a copy of their guide, tucking it away secretively, filled with pride at my selected role, the trusted one. I will know what to do when the time comes, I often thought over the years. And then the time came.
When I get there, my father is a mixture of agitation and semi-concious calm, propped up in bed and breathing with difficulty. His hands are blotchy, he has the skin of an old old man but still a large frame. I’ve visited him many times in hospital over the years, but this time it’s different. My mother tells me, matter of fact, that my sister won’t get here before he dies. She will be here tomorrow, but she won’t make it in time. It’s a way of telling me that she knows and accepts that these are the final hours. These things cannot be said in so many words. I look at her face, it hasn’t changed. Although she is French she has the classic English poise of somebody who has come through the war. Nothing can unsettle her, there is no revelation to be had at this moment.
I can’t ask what he’s dying of, but I assume she knows the details.
My dad groans and grumbles. At one point he opens his eyes and stares straight at me. ‘How long have you been here?’ he asks with his ususal thick skinned belligerence. I hold his hand.
My brother and I are released for a while, we go for a beer in a pub across the road from the hospital. We have one, then another. I’m sure we’d like to have more, to stay here for hours swapping stories and jokes, making each other laugh. But we can’t, we feel responsible. Our mother remains in the hospital. Dad’s dying over there, I want to announce to the bar. It occurs to me that they must get a lot of our kind in here. I know this town so well. This is a pub that I once ran into the front wall of, driving a car without a licence, knocking the window through the wall. We joke about it now, about the landlord who chased me down the road.
We got beer, dad got morphine. After that we left the hospital. I wanted to stay, but nobody encouraged me. I thought you sat vigil for the dying, but not here. My mother is calm and level, she wants us to go back to the house so we do. They’ve been married for fifty years, it’s her call, I won’t interfere. I’ve been waiting for this day for many of those years, since he almost died on the way to work. As he grew older it seemed harder and harder to imagine how he would ever manage to actually die, for although he was ill and getting worse, he remained a big man, solid in his opinions and hearty.
I realise now that I cannot remember my father before his first illness. My mother always claimed that after he was ill he became childlike, that he became easily upset over minor issues. I have no memory of him before that. To me this was his personality. Self-centered but generous. Fractious but sociable.
We drive back down to the house from the hospital. I’ve spent a lot of time in that hospital over the years. When I was a boy my best friend was knocked down by a car and I visited him here regularly as he made a slow recovery. You become familar with your locality, although I haven’t lived here for over twenty years, I know every yard of the roads.
I have no idea what we ate or what we did that last evening but at some point I was left alone in the front room to sleep.
Standing in the darkness after the call I stare at the clock until I can make the time out. It is three twenty. I know and don’t know what this means, but it is time for action and action is always good. I walk through to my mother’s room. I haven’t woken my mother in the night since, once, ill as a child I stumbled vomiting and spinning into her room for help. I reach down and place a hand on her shoulder. She seems very small and insignificant, alone in the bed. I shake her gently. Mum, I say softly. Mum. She starts and opens her eyes. It was the hospital who phoned. I tell her the news, which is non-specific. They say Dad has deteriorated, we should go up to see him now. I know what this means, but I’m not taking it in. I think I believe he will recover, that he’ll be home again soon, as before. Each winter for years he’s told me that this is it, that the season’s illness will be his last. I can’t believe it’s finally come.
I feel a niggling need for urgency, but I am not going to hurry anyone.
I wake my brother. He moves quickly and silently around the house. We are all hushed and calm in the dark house. We get dressed and leave the house, getting into the car. I drive. I marvel at how simple this is, how we move as a single body from place to place, wrapped against the winter cold. It’s Tunbridge Wells, a town with its own mythology, we’re all disgusted here. Dad has lived here for nearly fifty years, but has never become one of us. He has held himself aloof, retaining in part the exiled Lithuanian jew that he was born.
We are at the hospital in moments, driving straight in and parking right outside the entrance to a modern wing. You can park here at four in the morning, something that is nearly impossible during the daytime, even if a loved on is dying on the premises. The doors are not locked, we walk in, bunched, like a group of hit men on a job. We know where he is, down this corridor, around this corner, past the desk, there is a small room on the right with four beds. It’s a strange place, a sort of antechamber to hospital, or home, for people who could go either way. Or for people who aren’t expected to go either way. Earlier, as we had dithered around a death, a woman opposite slumbered sunken so deep and motionless that I wondered whether she had left this world. A family came and talked to her, proving, I imagine, that she still had life in her. They left unceremoniously and she still never moved except maybe to closer to the end. Opposite, a young man took a journey in the other direction, picked up in a jaunty mood by wife and daughter, he was back with the living before nightfall.
Now, in the depths of the night, we were returning to spend more time with him, maybe for his final hours. Deterioration, he word spoke of a final wordless descent into the abyss. But that night as we sweep imperiously past the desk, sure of our right and our destination, a nursing sister detaches herself swiftly from the desk and efficiently heads us off, as if fearing we will get past and discover the situation for ourselves.
‘He has passed.’
We weren’t expecting this although it was what we were expecting. The movie continues with a slight edit. Now we are not one bonded unit. We move around the final corner in fragments. Somebody hangs back, somebody has to go first. I am eager, as ever, to engage, to interrogate the situation. There is no pausing. There he is, propped up as when we left him and looking serene. We look at him for a bit. My memory is hazy, what did we do. I imagine we hugged in our winter coats, then we walked over to him. I remember kissing the top of his head. He was still warm. So it was true, he had only just died. They drew the curtains around us. I took some pictures. I had this idea that you sit with the dead, keeping watch through the night, but my mother wouldn’t let me do that. Come on home she said. She is eager to leave now. After a short while we retreat into the cold night.
When we get home that last morning my mother lies down on the sofa where I had been sleeping. We talk quietly and calmly, as if afraid to summon up any feelings. My brother lies down on dad’s big reclining chair. They go to sleep so I sit in the kitchen, trying to work out what will happen next. I wander around the house and take a lot of photographs, my dad’s chair, his place at the table, pictures of pictures.
At about five o’clock I write a short note on Facebook. ‘My lovely dad died this morning.’ Was that a correct thing to do? I thought about it for a while, but the word had to be passed out, it seemed quite natural. He would have appreciated it, I know.

Bloomsday

My dad wasn't one for sentimental Jewishery and he passed almost his entire life avoiding any contact with manifestaions of the culture he had so specifically left behind. It wasn't that he was in any way ashamed or embarassed by his roots, he wasn't. And, despite being born before the holocaust and being old enough to watch it transpire, he didn't seem to have any fear of exposing his jewishness. He did work for his entire career in a Fleet Street that wasn't particularly friendly to jews and where it was worth keeping your head down, but then most of his colleagues were also jewish, so it was hardly a secret. I think he was just uninterested in most facets of his culture, no doubt regarding them as prosaic and mundane. He would call on a regular basis for gefilte fish from my mother. She swore she had made it once for him and he'd not even bothered to eat it.
He took me to Blooms on the Whitechapel Road, I remember it well, a pilgrimage to the heart of jewish dining. It must have been sometime in the late eighties I would guess, I don't have any real memory of when or why, how we came to be in the east end at the same time. He would have been retired by then with no reason to travel to London, whereas I had moved to the city and was making my way through art college. Come, let's eat at Blooms, he would have said. It's a great Jewish institution. He would have liked the idea of it more than the reality. When I was younger and I visited him at his office, he would offer to take me for any lunch I wanted, but we invariably ended up at Mr Natural, a faux Californian burger joint under the now long dismantled Holborn Viaduct at the bottom of Fleet Street.
Blooms has been gone for fourteen years now. I remember when it closed down: I had a fancy for a while to somehow steal the huge neon sign that stood above the entrance canopy. Of course I didn't in much the same way that I didn't follow through on any of the grandiose plans that I no doubt outlined to my dad during our lunch that day. I can't remember any of it, just that it was a dull and lugubrious place and the waiters were slow ('the rudest in London', it was said). My dad talked about the food he remembered. He never really talked about his youth and he didn't explain how he came to leave all that behind.
Now the premises are a Burger King, non kosher I presume, and the last of jewish Brick Lane is rapidly being expunged. The jews left a long time ago but buildings and businesses take longer to remove.

Dad in London

Dad in London on Flickr

I've never been certain of when this picture was taken and as time passes it becomes less rather than more certain. I can't ask dad anymore and the stories that mum and others tell get more and more contradictory.

In one version it's the day mum and dad met. In another it's the day they went out on their first date. Either way the time difference between the two events (first meeting and first date) can't have been very great.

I remember being told that dad couldn't remember which Tube station they'd agreed to meet at for that first date so he ran from one to the other until he found mum. She was probably late, so the fact that she wasn't at one station wouldn't have ruled it out as being where they were meant to meet. Had dad figured that out about mum already? I think the stations had similar names or variations of the same name but I can't think where that would be now. Maybe it was the exits for different lines of the same name, like Paddington?

If it's true that the picture's from the time of their first meetings then it would be 1956 at the earliest as that's the year they got married on 1 October. That would mean dad was 25. What was I doing then?

How I was born

This is the story of how I came to be born. Of course, with my father in his pomp, it had to encompass drama, a foreign country and newspapers. My dad moved to France on a one
year contract to modernise a Parisian rag and during that stay I was
born. They booked a doctor and a clinic, but when the day came it
seems the doctor had gone off on holiday. The replacement was nowhere to
be found. A heatwave was in full swing. Finally a place is found and
the labour goes ahead. My father was a newspaper man, how could such a story not be in the press.


I was a miracle baby. They'd already adopted my sister after
being told no babies could ever be made, but it came to pass that
technology moved on and a fix was found. He told me this story many
times, proud to have created such a memorable event. I was the first
born, and wasn't even supposed to happen.
Dad is not there for the birth, this is Paris, 1961, but he turns up the next morning to visit mother and baby.
"Where is our baby?" he asked.
"I don't know," says my mother, plaintively. He rings the bell and a nurse appears.
"Nurse," he commands. "We would like to see our baby."
A few minutes later another nurse ("she couldn't have been more than fourteen, tiny") appears at the door holding a baby. She holds him up and the parents study it for a while. They smile. "Very nice, thank you," they say. She disappears again with the baby.
Years later I find this photo, the presentation of the lamb.

Portrait of my Father

Portrait of my Father: Jonathan Lethem | Granta 104: Fathers

The picture floats. Someone took it in the Seventies, but the white backdrop gives no clue. My dad owned that wide-lapel trench coat for fifteen or twenty years, typical thrifty child of the Depression. (He probably tried to give it to me at some point.) The beard’s trim narrows the time frame slightly, that rakish full-goatee. So often in later years he wouldn’t have bothered to shave his jaw to shape it. Put this in the early Seventies. Somehow it floated into my collection of paper trinkets, ferried off to college, then to California for a decade. The only copy. By the time I showed it to my father, last week, he hadn’t seen the photograph for thirty-odd years. He couldn’t be sure of the photographer, guessing at three friends with comically overlapping names – Bobby Ramirez, Bob Brooks, Geoff Brooks. (I remember all three of them, beloved rascals from my parents’ hippie posse.) He settled at last on Geoff Brooks. The picture was never framed, nor mounted in an album, just shifted from file cabinet to cardboard box to file cabinet all this time. A scrap of Scotch tape on the left corner reminds me I had it taped up over a desk in Berkeley. In a family that, after my mother’s death, scattered itself and its memorabilia to far corners of the planet, and reassembles now sporadically and sloppily, the picture’s a survivor. But I’ve lived with it for thirty years, gazed into its eyes as often, strange to say, as I have my father’s living eyes.

And it shows Richard Lethem as I dream him, my idol. His Midwestern kindness, prairie-gazer’s soul, but come to the city, donning the beatnik garb, become the painter and poet and political activist he made himself, a man of the city. When I first knew my parents they were, paradoxically, just the two most exciting adults on the scene, part of a pantheon of artists and activists and students staying up late around the dinner table and often crashing afterwards in the extra rooms of the house. My parents were both the two I had the best access to and the coolest to know, the hub of the wheel. I wasn’t interested in childhood, I wanted to hang out with these guys. The picture shows my dad meeting the eyes of a member of his gang, both of them feeling their oats, knowing they were the leading edge of the world. I wanted him to look at me that way. He often did.

My Dad's Stamp Collection

My dad had a stamp collection. I knew that from when I was little. I used to climb into the huge G-plan wardrobe in their bedroom and leaf through it. I collected stamps myself, but this was a glory in comparison, full of animals and countries that I'd never heard of, moon landings and huge beautiful stamps in their own mini sheets.
I have no idea what role this collection played in dad's life, if collection is even the right word for it. It consists of one album filled with colourful stamps in small sets, lots of animals and flora and fauna, but there are other subjects dotted throughout. It doesn't make much sense and to my adult eyes it looks a bit like an album that someone else has put together to appeal to a lazy collector. I'm probably wrong though. Dad's little brother, Reg, collected butterflies and arranged them in cases - this stamp album is similar.
Alongside this strange album was a big bundle of loose bits and pieces. This to me was always the glory of the collection. Unsorted and unmounted, it seemed to just be the accumulation of someone who could see the beauty and historic value of these stamps, but who never had any interest in doing anything with them. It's clear that as a journalist, dad had access to various sources of stamps and picked them up over the years. The moon landing is much represented: these were the stamps that I fell in love with as a child. But a lot of other stuff found it's way in over the years. The launch of a nuclear powered ship, there's a stamp for that. Independence for the Seychelles, issue a stamp. Postal strike? Fleet St cartoonists design stamps for colleagues who set up their own postal service. Marius collects them.
Then, years ago, he gave the collection to my baby son. A typical act of generosity from him, but also the action of someone who really has no interest whatsoever in the subject any more. Luckily, neither has my son, so I've appropriated the lot for the time being. If he ever takes up stamps, it's his. Until then I no longer have to climb into a cupboard to leaf through this.

Dreaming of Dad

On the last night of my recent family holiday, after a clear sunny day, a huge thunderstorm developed which deluged our tent with water. Throughout the night thunder and lightening crashed around us as I braced myself for emergency evacuation if and when the river we were camping by broke its banks.
During this night I had a long and complex dream that revolved around the wedding party of a couple whose best man I was almost thirty years ago.
It turned out that my father wasn't actually dead. My mother had noticed his arm moving, that was all it took, and he was back with us. Even in the dream I knew this was implausible (we cremated him, I remember doing it), but I went along with it because he was there, large as life, the same as ever. We went to this wedding party which took place partly at a fairground. Dad was not impressed. 'Why are we here?' he asked petulantly, exactly as he would have in life. He didn't really know the couple, so why would he be expected to attend? I looked at him. His trousers were slightly too short, he was dressed as he was in life. The dream went on for hours, or so it seemed.
When I woke up I had to pack the tent in driving rain. There was no time to consider the reason or point of this dream, but it has made me vaguely wish I could have him back for a day or so sometimes.

Last Email

Miss you all.  Wish I was with you. Dad.
Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 12:01 PM

Funny thing about email, you can look back at it. It doesn't go away. I introduced my dad the the internet right at the start. Even then he thought it was too much for him, but he was a user for fifteen years. After I put him on the internet I wrote a column for .net magazine titled 'Don't put your father on the net, Mrs Worthington'. As he got older his communications became more intermittent, but he kept on emailing friends and family till the end.
In an idle moment I looked back to see what was the last email he sent me. A strange experience, because I could so easily imagine that he was about to send me another one (and also because my brother had used his account a bit to email me, and I had to discount those).
So this was his last email, sent four months before he died, in response to an email from me on holiday. Sweet and to the point.

My dad and the tomato plant

One summer a few years ago me and my sister, Suzy, were at dad's. Suzy may have been staying with him at the time, I don't remember. We went to the garden centre to get him some plants for the garden. He wanted flowers so we bought him some flowers that old people like: frilly like an old ladies knickers. I also bought him a tomato plant. We got home and started putting them in the borders. I told him I'd got him a tomato plant as well. Emotionally that's when it kicked off. I don't remember it exactly but it went something like this:
"Why?"
"You get tomatoes off it."
"I don't want it."
"Why not?"
"I wanted flowers. I don't want that."
"You can eat the tomatoes off it."
"I don't want it. Does it have flowers?"
While technically I imagine anything that bears fruit has to have a flower of some description I decided to exaggerate the tomato flower's gorgeousness and told him it had lots of pretty yellow flowers.
It kind of petered out around there, both of us in bad moods. The tomato plant stayed, mostly because I'd put it in the ground and he wouldn't know how to dig it out. Like most of my trips to see my dad in the last few years I left his house sad and not sure if I wanted to go back to see him again. Later that summer my sister told me that the cleaner who used to come in to look after my dad ate the tomatoes for her lunch when she was there. I don't know if dad ever did.

Here's a picture of dad from one of my visits to him that I remember as being happy. Mostly I think because he liked (and I guess approved of) the new-old-somewhat broken Citroen Xantia that I'd bought and it was the first time he'd been in it. I'd had it when I visited him in hospital the year before but he hadn't got to see it. I remember driving up to see him in hospital on a sunny day with the car windows open playing the album A Tom Moulton Mix very loud (especially Eddie Kendricks's Keep on Truckin') and feeling somewhat serene and happy. I guess I was glad he was alive, getting better. Somehow going to see him in hospital felt like a way that we could get on. He liked the fuss the nurses would make of him in hospital. He could be very charming with strangers when he wanted to, asking where they were from, about their name, accent and family. It reminds me of another story that makes me very angry but that's for another time.