God of My Father

There is an intimacy no one prepares you for: the bodily fluids and secretions of a slowly dying man, the scents of fermentation and fear on the skin, the ache in your body from lifting his body: from the bed to his wheelchair, from his wheelchair to his recliner, his full weight heavy against your body. He wails. He shakes. He keens so often, and you didn’t know people keened outside of poetry. You want to write honestly about the death portal but what is the line between vulnerability and exploitation?

Inside, you are keening, too. You used to exercise. You used to cook nourishing and beautiful meals that took hours to prepare and eat them in a light-filled apartment you took a decade to decorate. You used to brush your hair consistently, your teeth. You used to meditate, sing to yourself daily, and dance alone in the living room. You were once a writer, you broke the unspoken class restrictions and published a book while working as an iron painter. Those days are gone. You wake up in the middle of the night in your childhood home to remember all the ways you are failing but know you have to get back to sleep because you’re lifting a dying body, feeding a dying body, keeping a dying body safe. He is your father.

You tell yourself this is an act of decolonization but really, you’re here because the health care system has failed. This kind of stepping outside of capitalism isn’t so much an act of radical liberation as it is a way to keep your father alive. You try not to panic at how you will survive when his death portal opens, where you will live, how you’ll feed yourself, if any publisher will ever trust you again. You push back knowing no one will ever love you the way he does. In your braver moments you call this liberation, you wonder if it’s just survival. His diagnosis came a month before your book was published. He began dying as soon as you tasted the fruits of your success and had to step away from them. You both love and hate the good Mexican daughter you inhabit. He needs his diapers changed. He needs to be fed. You learned the machines keeping him alive. Your sisters have husbands, young children, they keep the family business going, support everyone. Your mother has her own work with him and too often you hold her as she sobs in the laundry room at midnight, 2am, 4am, another load of piss-soaked sheets spinning in the wash. Your family has moved into hypervigilance. Your father would never have chosen you to be his caregiver, you’ve always been called selfish for choosing art over everything else. But here art isn’t real and death is.

You embody the kind of community care queer theory sanctifies. You are outside of capitalism, you’re engaging in direct care, with disability, your body a tool and gift against a broken medical system and yet, the patriarchy of your Mexican father is constant. You are middle aged, unmarried, the childless one. Your life is worth less because your body has not been given to a man, to children, to the lineage of labor you were the first to break free from in generations. Still, this is another kind of labor. Sacrifice is work. You harbor quiet resentment. Caregiving requires unsentimental tenderness and you have no idea who you will be when the death portal swallows your father’s life forever.

*

Death came slowly, cruelly. ALS kills by degrees, muscles waiting for signals that never arrive. His motor neurons stopped firing until his heart sputtered into silence. You were there until the end, when his jaw unhinged and his death mask, that primal yawn into eternity, seared itself into you. He died early one morning while you slept at his feet. You heard your mother crying, begging papa bear, papa bear, your hands are so cold, let me warm you. You jumped up and felt the cold; your own feet were ice. You needed socks for this, you knew this with stunning clarity, you wouldn’t have time to put them on later. You ran out of the living room where you slept as a family: father, mother, eldest daughter. You went to your room, grabbed a pair of socks, slid them on and ran back out. You touched his face. It was cool, tight, his skin soft and oily. You turned on the light. His jaw was unhinged, mouth gaped open. He was dead. Oh Mama, you said in the most painful voice you’ve ever spoken, he’s gone.

Days earlier you’d prayed to your father’s god, humbled and pissed you were that desperate. God of tyranny, god of punishment, you called to him. The god you were thirty-three years free of, sadistic Jehovah. In your head you spoke in a strange old-testament-meets-latina-baddy dialect: Oh god of my father my father is dying. I know we have beef but I can come to you strong, respectful and say what I need to say. When he greets you, let him speak of us, his wife, his daughters and grandchildren and tell him you’ve been watching over us, even if it isn’t true. I love how human he is, his imperfection. His singing has been my favorite prayer and my first invitation to entering something sacred: creation. I’ve cared for him with my human body and my artist’s pen, I’ve cared for him with medicine grown of this earth and fed him fruits grown in his garden. I feel him shifting between worlds. I hear his breathing move towards an eternal end. His body no longer hungers for what can nourish him. He is emptying. It is so human of him, this exhaustion. When he comes to you, tell him I came to you, that I prayed to you for the first time in 33 years but only because he was dying. I want nothing to do with you. Hold him tenderly for me.

The first hour after death was holy. Your sisters came and ritual rose into all of your bodies at once, encircling him, touching him. You each took time alone with his corpse, you marveled that his belly was still warm. At dawn you made calls and your village came, babies to elders. Food. Weeping. Laughter. His body at the center of it all, draped. You placed the sheet just under his nose because no matter how hard you’d tried, you couldn’t get his mouth to close. The day was an endless fever-dream. Swollen with absence, your body ached.

That night before bed you stood in front of your bathroom mirror. You wanted to do something animal, you’d never felt more animal in your life. You stared at your face, puffy and ravaged with exhaustion. You unhinged your jaw, half closed your eyes and arched your neck painfully backwards, attempting to make the death mask you saw on your father’s face that morning. Your teeth are crooked, crowded together and sharp. You have your father’s teeth, his beautiful shovel-shaped incisors. His were dry in death but still shone. You’d touched them for the last time earlier, they felt like ivory piano keys. Your teeth were wet, fuzzy from eating so much sugar in grief. You saw your own death.

Ritual begged and you answered. You went into the backyard where a fire was burning, embers really. Earlier you’d gathered with the women in a way that felt like an initiation, and you ate cakes while the fire burned, tequila buzzed and death-ugly until everyone went home. Alone, you lit sage and walked the house and garden, sobbing as quietly as you could, saying I love you papa. You went up to the garden your father tended for 46 years, California winter lush, and told the trees Our father is gone. A part of you relished the sharpness of the pain, it required presence that was also the absence of everything else and the everything else you were about to enter felt more terrifying than death. Your teeth were rotting in your mouth. Your joints stiff, your inconsequential fertility ending. You’d ignored your inbox and body and collapse felt close. The sage burned, the smoke blue and sharp in your nostrils. You left it in the embers and crawled into your first sleep as a fatherless daughter. You were at the breaking point, which is also an opening, which is also a portal.

*

Your old god haunts you, the first toxic relationship you ever knew and there isa riot of intestinal trauma worms coagulated inside; pull at one and they all bleed, try to remove the whole mass and you will collapse. The structure of pain is one that has formed you and feels like home. You hated Jehovah so much as a child that it has given you a lifelong sympathy for the devil, or for what the world calls darkness or evil. It has only been as an adult that you can see that the shame you embodied as your inevitable legacy is one of empire and not your inheritance. That God and his judgements are not yours to bear. Still, it feels impossible to untangle. Your father was a man of faith but first he was a man of the earth. His belt and prayers said one thing while his hands in the earth or on his guitar prayed something else entirely. You vacillate between shame and glory, between the god of empire and the ancestral ones who live in your blood, calling you back to them. 

From birth, the end of the world was promised to you. Every day was spent wondering if the end was nigh, if the skies would open and you, if you were good enough, small enough, obedient enough, would be whisked away to a garden-like paradise where the lion lay with the lamb and everyone who wasn’t a witness would be barred from entering. The worldly would die awful deaths. You prayed it wouldn’t come because even though you were trained against it, you loved the sinning, complicated world. You didn’t think Jehovah’s garden would have a library or bookstore and it would be full of self-righteous and deeply uncurious witnesses. There would be no death metal album covers to stare at with erotic fascination, no fantasy books to escape to. Eternity with believers sounded like hell to you. You knew the promised garden would never compare to the one your father grew out back. You knew sweetness and he was one who showed you.

The world didn’t end but your father’s death was awful, apocalyptic to your inner world. You retreat to his garden, the paradise you were promised exists just outside your back door. The mornings are thick with birdsong and the incense you bring to pray. You feel your father there, his love for the earth carried with him from his coastal jungle childhood in Mexico. Hummingbirds camouflage their bodies and chirp amid the tiny mangoes you’ll eat whole when they ripen, skin and all. Crows gossip from the banana trees. You yearn to love the way your father loved: a relationship with the earth, the seasons, the microbes under his nails, on his bare feet, connecting him with the great interwoven mysteries. He knew how to love through dry seasons and flood, how to cut away dangerous growth and insects, how to make the garden safe enough for children, a place birds would build their nests. His Jehovah could never love like that, could never fill so many mouths with sweetness and song. You lean into the earth, ask to be taught, forgive, become your own creator.