Mother Jones
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The Faraway Nearby
By Rebecca Solnit
Viking
Some years ago, I visited my father at a nursing home in Council Bluffs, Iowa. Forty years earlier, after my parents divorced, he’d moved out there, remarried, got a good job selling insurance, played golf, developed diabetes, heart disease, and then Alzheimer’s. Bea, his second wife, warned me that he might not recognize me, his third son, and that he would tire quickly. We timed my visit around dinner, the high point of the day. I’d come to say goodbye.
I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen him since he left my mother, my brothers, and me, age three. But he was dying, and I needed to make this visit. We had about 45 minutes together, most of it taken up with my father’s monologue, stories inside of stories that made sense to him, about people I never knew and places I’d never seen. But as it got closer to the time for me to leave, there came a moment when he paused, took a closer look at me and said—so fast I almost missed it, as if it wasn’t really meant for me—”I love you.” I held his hand, and remembered all the times I’d wished he’d been there to say that. And then my father disappeared back into his stories. Three weeks later, he died.
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