Small, Comforting Lies

Kathryn DeZur

The author’s father

Word Count 1428

It’s Father’s Day. My father descends his apartment’s basement stairs to do laundry. He bangs his calf. He doesn’t remember doing it. Somehow, even though he is on blood thinners, a blood clot forms. Also, because he is on blood thinners, he bleeds internally within the leg, but the blood has nowhere to go. It’s trapped by the fasciae puts pressure on the nerves and the muscles. The pain is intense, radiating down to his foot, up to his thigh. He cannot walk. He cannot bear any weight. The ambulance comes, and paramedics carry him down the steep stairs of his apartment. After twelve hours, he undergoes an emergency fasciotomy, in which a surgeon cuts through the tough white membranes, lets out the blood, saves his leg.

My father is in the ICU for six weeks, waiting for the two twenty-inch gashes to close. They do not. Finally, the surgeon agrees to a skin graft. In the meantime, my father suffers from ICU psychosis. He accuses me of never coming to visit, though I come every day. He cannot remember where he is, cannot read the signs I post in his room telling him he is in Fox Hospital, room 241. One night, he calls 9-1-1 from his hospital bed, certain someone has kidnapped him and put him in a basement. At another point, he has a mini stroke, and while his intonations remain, he speaks word salad. Eventually, he gets back his words, but not a lot of his memory.

He is 84. I’ve known for a while he can’t keep living on his own. He forgets you can’t make a left on a red light. He forgets whether he took his medicines, which ones, and when. Six months ago, I convinced him to put a deposit on an assisted living apartment, but he reneged and got the money back. He hates moving that much. Now all of us, his daughter, his nurses, his hospital social worker—if not he himself—see that he can’t go back to that solitary one-bedroom apartment with the steep stairs.

I spend two months going through his things, choosing what to save, what to throw out, what to donate. I fill his building’s dumpster twice, start sneaking to other buildings’ dumpsters to spread out the load. I burn through two shredders. I shred confidential data analyses performed for the CIA during the Cold War. I shred cancelled checks dating back thirty years. I shred old bills, old bank statements, old receipts—even one from 1972, for a typewriter long gone. I shred duplicate photographs because he always orders two sets. I recycle all the junk mail that he has piled up in neat stacks around the perimeter of his bedroom until there is only a narrow pathway that surrounds his bed. I donate clothing he has not worn for more than a quarter of a century and throw out the undershirts full of holes. I also throw out the teeny, tiny swim speedo from the 1960s that I’m just glad I’ve never seen him wear. I trash piles of saved frozen food cartons, Tupperware with no lids, white plastic forks, and spoons that have turned gray from use.

My father has OCD. He also probably has a hoarding disorder, though that has not been diagnosed. There is a lot of clutter, there are a lot of things, everywhere.

Still, there are things that I know he will not want to part with, no matter what. Sentimental things. Sacred things.

I save the framed prints he bought at art and wine festivals in Northern California. I save the atomic clock that no longer works, a retirement gift after forty years in the defense industry. I save the five-year employee certificate from Apple Computer, signed by Steve Jobs, where my dad worked as a software tester in his seventies. I save the crisp army uniform jacket he wore during the U.S. occupation of Japan at the end of WWII. I tuck one copy of every photograph into boxes stored in a nightstand. He wears his favorite baseball cap, the one that celebrates his time as a U.S. Forest Service Smokejumper, nearly every day.

One thing I am unable to save: his bookshelves, one ten feet long, the other seven and a half feet. The pine shelves, stained a mellow golden-redwood, adjust to accommodate the height of whatever they hold. Slanted display shelves present picture books and magazines for inspection.

My father designed and crafted these shelves as a young man in Montana. The Montana years were his best years, he says, just after his time in the Army, filled with college and summers spent Smokejumping. His life was full of adventure and books and mathematics, far from the tiny mining town in northern Wisconsin where he grew up, far from his father’s censorious voice telling him to "put away the books, Bob, and get a job in a factory like your brother." Like a real man, my father heard, just as his father had intended. "My father was a good carpenter," my dad tells me. These bookshelves are proof—proof that he too can make something with his hands, something solid, something stable, something worthy. But also, they are filled with objects his father disdains, the books that prove my father’s mathematical brilliance that earned him a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, which he turned down in order to marry my mother. He regrets that decision. Despite being married twice, he never was the marrying kind.

I try to find someone willing to take the shelves. I do not have that kind of space. He will not have that kind of space. No one has that kind of space. So.

I take the shelves apart. I throw out the peg board backing. I save the wood.

***

My father’s memory has been disassembled by age, by dementia, the way his bookshelves have been taken apart. The contexts are now missing: he can’t always remember how to use the phone, where he lives, his granddaughter’s name. Sometimes, though, memories pop up with sturdiness, with heft, pine boards solid and undeniable.

In the doctor’s office: "When I was a boy, my father used to beat me."

At the nurse’s startled look: "Oh," he says, "no, I’m just kidding."

Of course, he is not.

***

Fu Shi, a sixth-century Chinese woodworker, crafted a special revolving bookshelf for the Tripitaka. He believed that if one touched a bookshelf holding these Buddhist scriptures with proper reverence and made the shelf turn one complete revolution, that person would become enlightened, just as if having read all the canons.

If my father could touch his bookshelves again, would his memory become whole?

Would mine?

***

I lie to my father. Small lies. Comfortable and comforting lies.

Several times in each nightly telephone call, he recites the time he finds on his watch, asks if that is right. Yes, I tell him. Yes, it is 7:08. Yes, it is 7:14. Yes, it is 7:23. His watch is usually a minute slow, sometimes two. I lie and tell him his watch is perfectly accurate because he cannot live his life if he doubts his watch, this thing that grounds him in time that is otherwise fluid, otherwise meaningless.

Every month, my father gives me a check. Every month I take it, thank him profusely, and shred it. I control his finances, and I know what he can afford, what he might need to afford in the future. But he needs to feel like he is contributing, like he has a purpose. The check is part of that—part of his generation’s expectations for a father—paper that represents resources, represents the love he feels, can feel, for us. "Did you cash the check?" he asks. "Yes," I tell him.

Sometimes, he asks about his bookshelves, his books. I lie then too. He knows he doesn’t have them. He knows that we do not have them. He wants to believe, needs to believe, that they still exist, that they and he are appreciated by some larger world. "Did I give my bookshelves to a library?" he asks.

"Yes," I say. "Yes."

But the stacks of gleaming golden-red pine planks, with dark knots and lines like topographical maps, rest against the walls of my garage. I promise myself I will make something of them someday. I cannot throw out my father’s youth. The wood will stay with me until I can create something that will contain our integrated lives, his and mine, within a single object, where they will fit together in a way that hasn’t quite worked out in life.

Kathryn is an essayist, poet, and professor. Her personal essays have appeared in The Nassau Review (winner of the Writer's Award for Prose) and Still Point Arts Quarterly. Her poetry chapbook, Blue Ghosts, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2019. Other poems have appeared in journals such as Feed Literary Magazine, Press Pause Press, The Fourth River, and Blueline among others. She teaches literature and writing at the State University of New York, Delhi.