Affection delayed is not always affection denied.

He sounds old and his voice is tired. It’s been fifteen years since I’ve heard it, but it’s definitely him.

I am caught in that melodramatic made-for-television moment where I learn that my estranged father is dying of brain cancer and I have only - days? weeks? months? - to “set things right” between us.

I have to laugh. I’m a writer, and I never would have dreamed up such a trite, overdone scenario. But here I am, actually living it. It gets better: I get the news about his cancer the day I am fired from my newspaper job. Has God moved to Hollywood?

My brother, Todd, calls, distraught. I am either incredibly calm or in total shock because I feel nothing - no grief, no anger, no sense of sadness. Nothing. “No one gets out of this alive,” I reassure him. “We all die.”

How is that reassuring? I don’t know. “He was a monster,” Todd says, “But he’s our monster,” he adds, as though that makes a difference. Maybe monsters, especially childhood ones, aren’t so frightening when they’re dying of brain cancer.

The childhood years of being beaten, of bleeding, of anger and shame and all the typical and not-so-typical physical, emotional and mental abuse are distant memories now. Thanks to therapy - years of Prozac and screaming at empty chairs in my therapist’s office - I reached “closure” years ago. Or so I thought. Maybe I haven’t.

After our last conversation in 1991, when he told me he wished I were dead and I had never been the daughter he wanted me to be, I threatened to outlive the old bastard - excuse me, the old monster- just so I could piss on his grave. I’m surprised when my brother remembers.

“I’ll stand guard for you if you still want to do that,” he says sadly. I have to think about it, I reply.

Three days later I’m in the parking lot at McDonald’s on a cell phone. “Hey old man. It’s your daughter - Becky,” I say.
“Hey Beck, how are you? You sound - good, real good,” he says. He’s in his office, working with his accountant to get his business in order so he can sell it.
“Yeah,” I smile. “I’m good. Hey, I heard you had cancer.”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “Yeah, they diagnosed it last week.”
I know, I’m thinking. I heard from your sister, who called everyone and told us.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Stage four,” he says. Stage four is terminal.
“That sucks,” I say matter-of-factly.
He laughs. “Yeah, it does.” There is silence for a second.
“Well, you sure swung for the fences, didn’t you? If you’re going to have it you might as well have the worse possible kind,” I tell him.
“Yeah, I guess so.” He laughs again. We talk about what I’m doing now. I’m a freelance medical writer, and have been for about forty-eight hours.

He’s a children’s dentist. Upon hearing that I’m now doing medical research writing, he assumes I know all the medical jargon and lingo that makes up his world. He is looking for connections, for common ground. So am I. So he launches into the medical realm of the drugs he’s taking or going to take, as though he were prescribing them to a patient rather than taking them himself. He is honest about the outcome. “They’re end-stage drugs,” he says. We both pause.

That information out of the way, our conversation turns to photography, a passion we have both shared since he began taking photos in 1969, and that I took up shortly thereafter.

At seventy-three he is dying, but in the meantime he is learning Photoshop, as I am at forty-nine. There were moments now, I remember, when we did have some good times.

We talk cameras, digital and otherwise, megapixels and burst rates, Nikon versus Canon’s latest camera-the EOS-which really kicks butt, I assure him. He likes Nikon. I begin to grieve for the losses of the past fifteen years -advice not given, requests and fears unshared. I curse Hollywood through my tears. I saw the movies, I just never got the point. Now I do, I think.

Damn. He’s going to die before I win a Pulitzer. I won’t get a chance to show him how well I did, that I succeeded in spite of his proclamation that I’d only, ‘get married, get pregnant, and have babies.” He’ll never know I really am the daughter he wanted. The regrets pour in.

I doubt he remembers any of the things that have haunted me for forty-plus years. Once the chemo treatments start he may not remember much of anything, let alone the past.

The only “story” about my father will be what remains in my mind and in my brother’s. I tell him that I’ll be coming down to see him in a week or so. We’ll have lunch or dinner-if he’d like to - and we’ll talk some more. He’d like that, he says.

After fifteen years, can I convince him of that in the time it takes to sit down to one dinner? I don’t know if we’ll even have that dinner. The chemo may prove too much. Todd was right. After all these years he’s still our monster. But now that he’s dying, I say the magic words that will transform him.

“I love you Dad.”
For the first time I hear him blush.
“I love you too.”

And we hang up.

*********

“The Monster” above, is the essay I wrote for Tim Russert, and it appears as the first story in his chapter on forgiveness in his book, “Wisdom of Our Fathers: Lessons and Letters from Daughters and Sons”

This is the story that saved me, that I read in the summer of 2006 and reconnected with who I truly was, and am - a writer. I just reread it today and still cried. It is powerful because it is real. And real things never lose their power. This is part of what I spoke about at TED Global 2009. It’s very much a part of who I am today and who I am becoming. I hope you have a powerful story to tell and will tell it. Powerful stories change our lives.