The Beauty in Lying to Yourself

It’s like the world has been rubbing our noses in it. Broken government. Police brutality. A global pandemic. Climate change. Awash in harrowing realities, the author, a novelist, discovers the sustaining power of everyday fictions.

- By Joshua Ferris

HOW DID WE GET HERE?

I HUGGED MY FATHER GOODBYE FOR THE last time in a hospital room in March 2014. He was a seven-year survivor of pancreatic cancer. No one thought he’d make it much longer. He was laboring to breathe, and I was due on a book tour. It was, he said to me, now or never, kid.

Pride insisted he climbs from the bed on his own. He had to negotiate around half a dozen tubes. But then he opened his arms to me and I fell into them as I had been doing for forty years. He whispered that he loved me and we wept and shook in each other’s embrace, the profound love and the profoundest loss expressed in one gesture.

Over our grief, neither of us could hear the cosmic laughter.

For it is never two sad jerks in a hospital room who decide the when and where of the last goodbye. He hung on for four more months, by which time the book tour was over and I was back at his bedside in the fresh hell of enlightenment: Final embraces do not get scheduled. Death toyed with him until he could no longer stand, or open his eyes, or speak. Our final goodbye was a one-sided affair, uttered into the void.

That I had any control over death was the first illusion to crumble. The second fell the instant he died.

I believed there must be some compensation for watching a man die. Part of me even wondered if a cartoon angel might lift out of his still-warm body. Okay, not that, but . . . something. The loaded book falls from the shelf. The providential bird that lands on the sill. There was nothing. He had his run. He breathed his last. The dumb oxygen tank beeped and respired until, ten minutes later, someone thought to turn it off. The peace and quiet were outrageous.