Where My Father Lies

My father lies in a grave without his name. Or rather, my father’s ashes rest in the family plot where, for most of his life, he said he wanted to be. I've pointed this out many times: my relationship with my father wasn’t good. It wasn’t the kind I would have wanted with him, and surely not the kind he would have wished to have with his son. I've done what I could—I’ve tried to make my relationship with my daughters different. I think I’ve succeeded halfway. I wish it were better.

I have many childhood memories. Many things stayed etched in my mind and haven’t faded. Most of them, to be honest, are bad. My daughters say they can’t even remember what happened a couple of years ago. At least they don’t speak of bad memories from their childhood the way I do. It hurts me deeply to have left them for a few years when I had to go work in another city during the pandemic.

My father showed up once at my elementary school during recess. It was one of the few times he was ever at my school. Another time was at night—we had been sold tickets for a movie that would be shown at the school. I asked for money to buy the tickets and go with my mother and father, but in the end the movie wasn’t shown; something happened with the film and we got our money back. Another time, when I was in high school, I forgot a notebook with homework in his car. I got to school and, before going to class, I was smoking a cigarette, when suddenly my father showed up behind me. I threw the cigarette away and tried to cover up what I was doing; I guess he pretended not to have seen me.

Back in that elementary school occasion, my dad had fainted the previous weekend during a race. The doctors who treated him recommended more thorough tests. The result was an apparent heart failure. My father's strange decision was to come to my school and tell me that he might only have a few years left to live. A strange thing to say to a 7- or 8-year-old boy. Ever since, I grew up with the fear that my father could die at any moment. I prepared myself mentally for the idea that my father would die soon and that I would be left in charge of the house, taking care of my mother. But things didn’t turn out that way. One day my mother confessed to me that she had cancer and only had a few months to live. The diagnosis was so accurate that six months later, it was just my father and me.

Many relatives died in the following years. Practically all of my mother’s siblings passed away. Then my father's parents also died, a few years later. Talking about death became common between my father and me, but it was uncommon for us to talk about his death. I'm sure my father never truly considered it. Not in a definitive way. I'm convinced that, at some point, my father believed he would live for many more years. We never talked about those crucial details one should address when facing their own mortality—wills, farewells, final wishes. We grew apart for a while because we thought very differently. In the end, I was left with only a vague idea of what he wanted for his departure from this world.

I keep a photo of the office I was working in on the day I got the news of my father’s death. It was around 9 or 10 in the morning when I got the message. In truth, my father hadn’t died at that moment; he had been found in his room, already lifeless, probably two days after he had actually passed away. When we were looking after him, my wife had saved his life once when she saw him fall. When my father decided to be cared for by some relatives, he died—and it took them two days to even notice. His body was already in bad condition. A funeral with an open casket was not an option. I decided to have his body cremated. It hadn’t been his explicit wish, but he had mentioned it once.

What he had said was that he wanted to be placed in a niche next to my grandparents. I found it an odd decision, considering there was a spot in the family grave where we had buried my mother. His wish to be next to them couldn’t be fulfilled. My father never told my uncles, who owned the niche, and they had planned to use it for themselves when they died, so there was no space for him. After the cremation, we held a small and somewhat uncomfortable ceremony with my relatives. I was alone with my father’s family, who had cared for him poorly in his final days. In the end, they wanted to decide where to place my father’s ashes, but I refused. They had already made too many bad decisions. After the mass, we took the ashes to my mother’s grave. My father rests there, with the only partner he ever had in life. The gravestone bears my mother’s name and the date of her death. I still need to have my father’s name and the date he left this world engraved. Although we know the day we found him lifeless, we don’t know for sure when he actually died.