“You still alive?”

My father’s greetings are always a matter of life and death, especially when I haven’t called in a while. His tough guy way of saying he misses me. I laugh and pace the kitchen as we try to talk, shaking my head at his steadfast predictability.

“Yeah, I’m still here.” I instinctively match his aloofness, setting aside my need for his affection and the desire to play my role differently. “How’s it going up there? Are you guys really ok?” My words feel repetitive of years of trying, like a ricochet of sounds in a dark tunnel, uncertain of the beginning and wary of the end. Searching for light that never reveals the truth. Our conversations have always been this way, but the reverberations seem louder this past year.

“We’re fine,” he insists, dismissing my weakly veiled concerns. A few years back my father and his wife bought some property in the BC Interior with the plan of building a house on it. Though everyone thought the move was foolish, it had proved a positive one for both his cancer and their marriage. My dad had never seemed happier. But the ongoing crises since the start of the pandemic had set us all on edge. We worried not only about his chronic health condition, but also the low rates of vaccination in the region. This was on top of a summer heat wave, forest fires, and the more recent floods that ravaged the highways connecting us. The potential for compounding risks if disaster sent them fleeing was difficult to set aside.

“I am still wondering if you guys have thought about getting out of there for a while. Maybe you could come to Vancouver?” I say the words tentatively, anticipating resistance.

“What are you always so worried about? From up here on the mountain, water flows downhill.” I struggle to improvise a comeback to this straightforward logic. This summer when I had asked about the forest fires, he had insisted that the smoke was only affecting the nearby Village of Lytton, a town ancestral to peoples of the Nlaka’pamux Nation in “British Columbia”. Within a day of our conversation, this town was engulfed in flames under a heat dome that shattered average temperatures locally and nationally, displacing tens of thousands. Now, I can’t shake my sense of another looming emergency, though I have no way of knowing that in a few weeks my dad will be medivacked to Vancouver for cancer treatment. Ever the responsible one, I press on.

“At the very least, you should still consider getting a bag ready with your important documents – so if you have to get out of there, you can move quickly.” I hear him suck down his breath and imagine him frowning, the creases on his forehead rippling thickly as he speaks to me in blunt strokes.

“Natasha, maybe you should just organize my life for me.” He sounds out each syllable in my name through nearly clenched teeth, the way he did when I argued or questioned him growing up. To my regret, our relationship has always been a struggle of wills, perceived judgments, and mutual misunderstanding. The eldest of three, my parents relied on me to take on family responsibilities, and my father in particular expected that I look after myself. Prematurely independent, I scrutinized my father’s decisions, which in turn fueled his defensiveness and disregard for my efforts to be seen and heard – responses I naturally reciprocated. What our relationship has taught me is how difficult it is to know ourselves when our closest relationships fail to reflect back our own sense of who we are. Or, the flipside: how difficult it is to relate to anyone, but especially a parent, who may not fully understand themselves.

Facing futility once again, I try to smooth things over by changing the subject.

“Never mind, it was only a suggestion. How are the roads? How’s the property? Maybe we can come for a visit again in the spring, like we did last year.”

In August of 2020, as public health restrictions began to ease, my two sisters and I embarked on a four-hour road trip to visit my dad and finally see this property that was now the centre of his life. When we arrived it was late afternoon, and the sun had migrated eastward. As the engine ceased and the wheels halted on the crackling gravel, the silence fell around us. The quiet left me with an overwhelming sense that I’d been there before. Unmasked, my father approached the vehicle just as I grabbed my camera and pulled on the door handle. He was limping again on one side and trying to hide it, exaggerating his bowlegged gait. Otherwise, he looked remarkably well, the picture of health for a man his age. Lean and muscular, he wore a bright yellow t-shirt over his faded work jeans and steel-toed boots. A dark grey beret capped off his small stature, and in him I saw my Italian grandfather, an elfin man who in life had been deceptively quiet though always observing. Swaggering toward us in the late afternoon sunlight, my dad’s eyes squinted proudly, reminding me of my nonno even more. I wanted to ask him about vaccination, but knew better. He was happy we had come, and was eager to show us around his humble, and largely outdoor, abode. Instead, I hung my camera around my neck and fell in step with my sisters as he gave us the grand tour.

Together we walked toward the back of the property where the vegetation was dry from the hot sun, and the land opened to a view of the roads and valley across the horizon. A few feet from the cliff, I snapped a photo of a plastic patio chair weighed down by three varieties of large, brightly coloured gourds. A set of tough-skinned squash that attested to our shared lineage, a history of working the land to ensure the survival of one’s family. My nonno had been an avid gardener, a skill he learned in Italy working the land his grandfather had purchased after working in Philadelphia for nearly a decade. Impressed by this fact, my father impressed it upon me that if it hadn’t been for the hard work of my great-great grandfather, our family would have continued to be ‘landless labourers’. Culturally speaking, property was something to be parceled, not shared, so at sixteen my grandfather left Italy to find work in a Belgian coal mine, leaving the family land to his two brothers – his only sister having married and emigrated to Venezuela. Years later, after moving his family from Italy to Belgium, and then Belgium to Canada, my nonno would frequently phone them to find out how the family vineyards were faring. He eventually forfeited his share of the Italian property to one brother – but not before my father had a chance to visit there in the 1980s, rekindling a love and connection to his birthplace that had laid dormant, but was integral to his very being. I know this because the shadows of those rolling hills and orchards were ever present throughout my childhood. Indeed, they were present still, imposed even, on the land that as settlers we were now walking. Land that is animated by shared language and stories that sound through the echoes of these cultural shadows, even though we can’t hear them.

The property was home to an array of life and activity that included everything but the house he had yet to build – the one whose foundation and framing had been constructed symbolically, if not actually, over a lifetime. In place of the house was an illegally parked trailer, a small red tractor, and an eclectic smattering of outdoor furniture, gardening supplies, and building tools. One of those tools was my great-grandfather’s large metal wine press, a cylinder of bright green wooden slats wrapped snugly with red-painted metal. Like something out of Santa’s workshop, the bright colours of the Italian flag seemed out of place against the rugged landscape of muted brown hues. The only real structure was a small cantina my dad was still finishing, an above ground pantry in the shape of a tiny house with a gable roof and brick facing. A temporary stand-in, or so it seemed, for the home he still planned to build.

The inside of the cantina was more like a small kitchen, equipped with a sink, stove, and shelves brimming with canned and dried goods. With my camera, I captured several still life images against the backdrop of half-done walls stuffed with pink fibreglass. On one shelf, a can of olive oil parked between a flat of Campbell’s soup and a bag of dried chickpeas. On another, an Italian moka pot stationed by a large can of Tim Horton’s coffee and some oranges. The look of it reminded me of being a teenager, when my dad would semi-annually bulk shop at Costco to feed us all. We ate a lot of pork chops in those years, but we never did starve, and only once did I come home and find the heat had been cut due to unpaid bills. This man may not have acquired the wealth expected of his generation, but he possessed a kind of fortitude that only develops through making do with one’s circumstances, a characteristic I appreciate and emulate in my own life. Nevertheless, the precarity of his existence has always made it difficult for me to fully trust him – not to mention the world, or perhaps even myself. In trying to have a relationship with him regardless of my mistrust, I have come to understand he is also vastly more complicated than his simple lifestyle suggested, though for years this was all I could really see.

Growing up, I was keenly aware of how my dad was different, and visibly so. Unlike my friends’ clean-shaven fathers, my dad wore a stereotypically-Italian moustache – a thick whack of bushy, brown facial hair that made him look strikingly like Tom Selleck. He would play this up for us kids, cocking an eyebrow as the American actor did in the hit TV show Magnum PI. His year-long tan revealed the outdoor, manual nature of his work, setting him apart even further. Rather than a suit and tie, my father wore grubby jeans and hard hats and drove flatbed Fords and dirty pick-up trucks. I recall one such yellow pick-up that didn’t have proper seats for my sisters and I. He would lay a piece of plywood across the pull-down seats in the back so we could either sleep or bounce around unbelted while the Eagles or other classic rock blared from the cassette player. Always a bit unorthodox, my father was decidedly not the typical Canadian father I wanted and idealised. Yet, neither was he the stereotype conveyed by his macho persona.

My friends were often surprised to learn my father neither played ‘Italian football’ nor watched it. While their fathers were watching hockey and drinking beer Canadian style, mine was perpetually in motion—building, fixing, painting, constructing – or when he wasn’t working, playing his guitar. Talented in the arts, my father was especially fond of music and dancing – so much so that he taught his entire graduating class, including the teachers, how to waltz. Team sports, however—like organized religion—were just not his thing. Once, when a high school football coach reamed him out for not attacking an opponent, he tossed his helmet and marched defiantly off the field, never to play a team sport again. The year I was to be confirmed he stopped taking my family to church just as suddenly, turning heel as we walked tardily across the church parking lot, grumbling something about the priest being a hypocrite as he marched us quickly back to the car. Needless to say, I was never confirmed and I didn’t step back in that church until my grandfather died. What confused me was that my father’s intolerance of injustice rarely translated into empathy for us kids, or more specifically, for me. Especially if I was upset with him, which I often was. Like the time I refused to speak to him because he had taken my five-dollar bill without asking. I was furious and he was amused by this. Rather than apologize he promised to pay me back with interest – a whole ten dollars’ worth!

Though wary of manipulators, my father, himself, was both rough around the edges and a smooth operator who could charm the gold rings off a fortune teller. Born into lingering post-war poverty in Southern Italy, he honed his survival skills hanging out on the streets of East Vancouver while my grandparents worked to pay off their family home. To supplement my grandfather’s cobbled together wages as a labourer in those early years, my grandmother worked first in a garment factory, then in a slaughterhouse, and later helping out as a dishwasher in Italian restaurants. Restaurants which, by my father’s recollections, were run by notoriously shady characters. Walking himself to the doctor at age six, by fourteen he could cook and knit socks and do odd jobs to make a buck.

School, however, did not come as easily to my father, beginning from his earliest experiences after immigrating to Canada. Though fluent in French upon arrival, he laments that the teachers scolded him for speaking it ‘incorrectly’ in his Belgian manner. This rejection was amplified by the stigma he was internalizing about ‘speaking dialect’ rather than ‘clean’ Italian within his Italian-speaking community. Though he excelled in a high school drafting class, my father never pursued his aspirations to study technical drawing or architecture at a college level. As the eldest son, he was expected to work in the same way that his sisters were expected, and indeed wanted, to get married. At the time, these were their pathways to ‘freedom’. But work and marriage were the opposite of freedom for my father. My mother’s pregnancy at the ripe young age of twenty meant a hasty Catholic marriage and little time for youthful aspirations. Rather than pursue an education, he immediately began working as a stone mason, a trade he had learned from his maternal grandfather and continues to this day.

Exiting the cantina, I joined my sisters to wander around the small building, just in time to see my father starting to lay brick on the incomplete outer wall, a small bucket of cement hanging from his right hand. I watched as he rhythmically placed each brick on the wet cement, methodically scraping away the excess muck with a pointing trowel and a flick of his wrist, his knowledge and expertise embodied through years of daily practice. The moment felt orchestrated, designed to show us what he can still do, though something about the way he moved struck me as odd. Later, I realised he had been relying on his left hand to lay the bricks, evidence of the stroke that almost cost him his life.

Despite recovering from two serious bouts of illness, including a massive heart attack that stopped his breath for ten minutes, our father remains determined to live out his life doing what he loves to do most. Work. However, it would be wholly inaccurate to call him a workaholic. For my dad, ‘work’ means making stuff with his own two hands, on his own timeline, and for his own reasons. Distrustful of authority, he couldn’t fathom that anyone but his family should reap the rewards of his blood-sweating labour, making it difficult for him to work for anyone but himself. Perhaps in resistance to external expectations, he did only what was required, saving the rest of himself for what mattered most – the work that would quietly express who he was in the world, without having to claim it outright. This notion of work does not fit neatly within the confines of a professional world that rewards perfection and productivity, and has brought him few recognitions or trappings of so-called success, like big houses and bank accounts. People saw my dad as a manual labourer, but he’s more like an artist (or writer), making new worlds out of old ones, creating a place for himself in the process. Watching him lay bricks, he seemed truly at home, despite the fact he slept in the trailer. The last home he owned was with my mother when I was eleven, the second of two houses that my maternal grandparents helped to finance after my two sisters were born.

My parents met in a pizza parlor in East Vancouver in 1975, and in a short time, they were married by the local Italian priest. A two-hundred-and-fifty-person shotgun wedding to save the extended family from the disgrace of a pregnancy of which I am the result. The ‘illegitimate one’ as my father likes to joke. When my second sister was born nineteen months later, my mom had to quit her office job at CN Rail, becoming completely reliant upon my father and support from my grandparents. To buy their first home, my mother’s parents loaned them funds for a down payment. As an independent contractor my father struggled to maintain consistent income, and therefore repay the debt, despite working all the time. No one (including him) seemed to acknowledge that he did so under enormous pressure, with little formal education, and all the while managing a neurological condition that had recurred since early childhood. A condition that began, according to whispered family lore, when he fell from a highchair and hit his head on a stone fireplace, an accident that left my grandmother in a state of perpetual guilt and shame. In the end, my parents’ marriage became a casualty of the financial help that had been intended to support them. No one ever considered whether the expectations were fair or realistic, or if they actually reflected the best interests of either of my parents.

I’m not sure at what point my father started to dream of building his own home, but prior to my parents’ separation, he became intensely preoccupied with making elaborate house plans. Mesmerized, my sisters and I would clamour around him as he ritualistically rolled out the drawings and explained to us the meaning of the mysterious lines and symbols. In retrospect, these were precious moments, as it was often frustrating and disillusioning to have a father that was so single-minded and solitary. Having to work triple-time to get his attention, I grew up both resenting his passion projects and aspiring to copy him in my own life, obsessively building houses with Lego the way he would, or begging him to play backgammon, his favorite table game, and teach me chords on the guitar. Resentful of married life, my father’s real commitment was perhaps to the home he wanted to build, a dream he would work tirelessly to realize. Though he struggled to make these house plans come to life, over the years he took other opportunities to create smaller versions of his dream, including elaborate birdhouses, an amazing treehouse for my cousins, and a life-sized playhouse for my sisters and I when we were kids. I can still recall this younger and more hopeful version of my father, whistling contentedly as he demonstrated for us kids how to build a granite wall on the playhouse. A playhouse that was perhaps my first real connection to my father’s world.

We called it The City House, my sisters and I and our two best friends, girls our age from an Irish-Canadian family who lived around the corner from our house in North Delta. My father built the playhouse with his broad hands and whatever leftover materials he could appropriate from his various job sites around the Lower Mainland. It was The City House to us because, as part of their friendly rivalry, our friends’ Irish-born father built a playhouse of his own under a large pine in their backyard. Theirs was a one room cottage out of plain, untreated wood that we kids affectionately called The Country House because of the pinecones that littered the yard and that we pretended were potatoes. In a way the houses were extensions of stereotypes that associated our fathers with immigrant labour or histories of poverty – the Italian construction worker and the Irish potato farmer – stereotypes whose darker versions our fathers would sometimes invoke in jest of each other, though said little of who they really were.

Adorned with brown beams, granite, and stucco facing, my father’s playhouse was the size of a small garage and modeled after a Tudor style cottage. Though small, it was a real house with drywall on the inside and granite retaining walls on the outside. What fascinated me even as a child was the attention to detail my father poured into its construction, right along with the concrete. The inside was fully equipped with a kitchenette, a loft for sleeping, and props including a miniature table, matching chairs, and a play telephone. Our playhouse was as authentic as it could possibly be, intentionally leaving little to the imagination. To make it appear as though the playhouse had its own garden, my father built it into the terraced landscaping of our backyard. To the left of the door were steps leading to a concrete patio with dark brown wooden lawn chairs that he had crafted himself out of leftover wood and an unused box of joist brace. As a finishing touch, he arranged a trail of flat stepping stones that led to the front door amid smaller white rocks, and asked my mother to sew curtains for the window. The day the playhouse was complete, my father remarked to my sisters and I with a familiar smirk, “Now your job is to weed it!” Though we got out of the weeding, his words clearly conveyed his understanding of children’s play – that it was practice for the adult world of hard work and personal sacrifice.

My father’s penchant for making something out of nothing was a trait he shared with his father and many immigrants of the time. If something in the house broke, my nonno would find some ordinary object to replace it. He once popped a tennis ball on top of a large spike poking out of a wrought iron gate when the metal picket snapped off. When the handle of my grandmother’s flour canister broke, he used a dial from an old stove to replace it, good as new. Their generation didn’t need to be taught how to reuse or repurpose. Creativity was second nature and necessary for survival. This was also how our backyard play-structures came together. Inspired by our playhouse, my mother’s Azorean father and brother transformed leftover welding materials into a swing-set and teeter-totter. These became our imaginary cars, and ‘playing family’, we would race each other ‘home’, swinging back and forth as high and as fast as we could. I can still feel the cool metal on our hands as we raced vigorously back and forth on those swings, intimately connected as we were to the material world that made up our play and became part of who we were becoming.

This real though imaginary world gave us scope to embody the histories, and play out the modern-day stresses, of the adults in our lives. Like the town and country mice in the Aesop fable we all knew by heart, we understood the playhouses in relation to each other. The inseparability of these two worlds – the city and the country – intertwined in our minds and imaginations presumptions about the urban and the rural, the rich and the poor, culture and nature. If the playhouses symbolized these modern binaries, our play expressed them as interpretations of our ‘ethnic’ backgrounds and our parents’ immigrant aspirations. As links to the past and bridges to the future, the playhouses also became part of our understandings of the adult world, and maybe even ourselves and our places in that world. Playing the parts of moms, dads, and kids, we recreated the kind of family we’d come to know as the only family. We couldn’t have known we were imitating the very life my father had grown to resent. Or, that unlike the country mouse in the Aesop story who chose the poor, simple life over one of riches and risk, my father’s life of simplicity and precarity was more likely the result of both his and society’s failure to imagine otherwise.

The events leading up to my parents’ divorce started when they sold our family home, including our beloved playhouse. These were years of bitter arguments between not only my parents, but family members who wanted the best for my mother and us kids, sometimes at any cost. The embroilment of family in my parents’ disagreements rendered them infinitely more complicated and difficult to resolve, resulting in many fractured relationships. Locked in intergenerational conflict, my parents and grandparents never considered how unrealistic expectations might have contributed to the eventual ‘breakdown’ of both my mother and my parents’ marriage. The result for me was a sense of both parental and cultural alienation, especially following my mother’s ‘mental illness’ that unfolded in the aftermath of myriad social, financial and familial pressures. In time my father gained custody of the three of us, albeit reluctantly. I spent the next two decades separated, emotionally if not physically, from my Portuguese background and the woman who had once raised me, her mothering rendered invisible and meaningless by stigma and disability. Struggling to rebuild his life financially and maintain his identity as a provider, my father spent those years growing further from his dream as he worked, sometimes paycheck to paycheck, on an income that didn’t keep pace with the cost of living.

Though I always understood that my father lived on the margins, I now see how those margins existed between the cracks of intersecting norms and expectations. That house we lived in, where he built the playhouse, was the last he would ever own. A house that fulfilled my immigrant grandparents’ expectations, but not my father’s own aspirations – aspirations that they likely didn’t understand. The house that my father envisioned was not just a building or a roof over our heads. It was a whole world, a place that promised to replicate the nostalgic imaginary of the village of his birth. As a teenager he had sketched a mural of this town with its rolling tree-speckled hills and the silhouette of a small village in the distance on one of the walls of my grandparents’ basement. I remember the mural because it had remained unfinished throughout my childhood, a symbol perhaps of a story yet to be written. Like the mural, the dream of the family home never completely materialized, but the reasons for this had more to do with difficult life circumstances and incongruent expectations. Maybe what my father wanted was not a house at all, not a place that belonged to him, but rather a place that felt like the home he longed for, a place where he felt he belonged. Maybe the dream of the family home never materialized because it was connected to a time and place in his imagination and forever beyond his grasp.

“What’s that?” my dad asks me, nodding toward the bag in my hand as I close the door and turn on the light. Approaching his hospital bed, I place a thermos of hot fluid on his table along with a bag containing several pastries.

“I thought it might be too late for coffee, so instead I brought you hot chocolate and some treats.” He nods quietly, but I can see the corners of his mouth turn up ever so slightly, letting me know I made a good call. I walk to the window to place my backpack on a chair. Outside the window, the dark Vancouver night is lit softly by sparkling Christmas lights on the buildings below. I remove the dinner tray the nurse had brought earlier, and then sanitize the rest of the table, placing the garbage in the trash can by the bed. Turning towards him, I catch a glimpse of the results of his recent bloodwork on the white board. “Looks like your counts are going up, that’s great,” I say to encourage him. Then I pull up a chair by the bed as I have been doing at each visit. Unlike our brief phone conversations that often revolved around current events or the weather, being sick and in hospital has made my dad surprisingly more open to my questions, and I wonder if he is grateful for the time to speak more candidly. I have also learned stuff about him I didn’t know - like how he had taken to reading more history recently, especially about African history, and about Indigenous peoples here in Canada.

“So where did we leave off? Oh yeah,” I say, trying to sound spontaneous, “you said that if you could change one thing about how we are all educated, you would make history mandatory, do you remember?” I laugh. “You also complained that kids today don’t know the value of work.” Clearly, I hit a chord because he dives straight back into our previous conversation.

“Natasha, when I was a kid, we had very few toys, and usually it was something you made yourself.” A familiar refrain, one I heard for much of my life. But this time a question comes to mind, something I had never thought to ask.

“What was your favorite toy? Did you even have one?” He takes a sip of hot chocolate, his face lit up by the memory I have stirred.

“GI Joe,” he says after a few pensive moments. “And my dad bought me a gun and holster once. He couldn’t afford a belt so he tied it with a shoelace,” he looks over at me, laughing as he tells me this, revealing the gaps where a few teeth are now missing. Then he falls quiet for a few moments, the memory of his toy perhaps sparking a deeper recollection of his youthful dreams and ambitions.

“I should have done what I wanted to do years ago.” He glances at me quicky then looks away, making me think he hadn’t necessarily planned to say that. I respond in kind.

“So why didn’t you?” He stares at me unsmilingly from his bed and then picks up a magazine from his side table, pretending to read the cover.

“I fell in love and that was the end of it,” he replies matter-of-factly, resting the magazine back on the table. I hide my surprise at his admission that he loved my mother and wait patiently for him to continue. “We had you, and then along came the other two.” He sounds tired now, both physically and emotionally, and I remind myself not to get him too worked up. As if reading my mind, he continues, his voice a little louder this time. In it I hear the accumulation of both regret and resistance to senseless realities. “Life shouldn’t be this difficult. In the old days, life would follow the pattern of the sun. You’re born, you live, you die. It’s the in-between that sucks, and the in-between is man-made.” He looks at me from the corner of his eye before staring at his reflection in the spent television that is suspended from the ceiling. The truth is, my father’s life consisted largely of chiselling granite and laying brick and stone for those wealthy enough to afford a dream that would remain forever beyond his own reach. He pulls the thin white hospital blanket over his chest and arms, hooking the worn flannel under his chin. “If I could do it over….” he says, stuttering slightly before repeating himself, “If I could do it again, I wish maybe I could have just been a father.” There is a kind of gravity in his words that takes me unawares, and I need a few seconds to register that having children was not among his deepest regrets. That it didn’t factor into his resentment at being forced into marriage.

Although the playhouse was likely my father’s way of teaching us the purpose of grueling hard work and the value of owning property – which we also were to him in some archaic way – maybe it was also the result of a tremendous and unacknowledged loss. The loss of his youth, his independence, and of his time to freely create the world of his imagination. Maybe it was also a way to repair that loss within the confines of his duties as a father. A way to nurture his inner world even while the outer world felt suffocating. It is also possible that all of these things or none of them add up to the so-called truth of the matter, and that even after a lifetime of accumulating questions and seeking answers, I still don’t have a full picture of who my father is. Though I will never really know, I take comfort in this version of the truth as it is something I can finally relate to.

“I can understand that,” I tell him. “I’m sure I wouldn’t be doing my PhD had I had more children.” I don’t bother to tell him about the profound sense of loss I had also experienced at the dawn of my own parenthood, as I watched my husband pursue his career aspirations while my own developing identity as an academic all but evaporated. And how the road back to myself, however much I enjoyed being a mother, often felt like an endless climb out of a pit of expectation dictated by everyone but me. My father never had sympathy for feminist lamentations so I leave these things unsaid. Instead, I mention my conversation with my uncle on the drive over. “He says when you get out of here, he’s going to help you get that builder certificate.” I don’t tell him about the emotion I could hear in my uncle’s voice, the concern he felt that we might really lose my father this time.

My dad shakes his head, almost disbelievingly, and then lets out a weary sigh. “God willing, when I get out of this hospital, I will build that house. It’ll be my last kick at the can.” I can see the determination in his face, and know it would be wrong to remind him of how complex his health situation is, or that he used most of his money to buy the property, leaving little for him to live on, let alone to build a house. It would be wrong not only because these words might cost him his dignity, but because within all formidable circumstances are the seeds of both risk and possibility. This is not to naïvely imagine that my father might finally have the house he certainly deserves after a lifetime of unrelenting work, but rather to believe that despite the potency of such circumstances there may be something more to be experienced, something greater than our individual selves or the context that neither of us can remotely control or foresee. For this reason, I choose hope over despair.

“You will get out of here. It’s just going to take some time.”

Though my fingers are crossed that he will finally abandon his impossible dream, my father has shown me through his resilience and determination to continue living, that the future, whether our own or that of another, is never what we think it will be. What matters now is not whose version of my father’s story is or becomes true, but rather how we are together in this moment, and how we respond to the realities that shape the unfolding of our uncertain futures. As I sit patiently with my father and contemplate the wonder of his life and the meaning of our deepening relationship, I have the feeling that this may be the only real path to the sense of home – our selves – we both so deeply desire.

In dedication to my dad, Carmine Damiano, May 11, 1954 – May 22, 2022.