Exodus
Six days before my father died, I took him home with me, out on furlough from Beth Israel Hospital, for the first night of Passover, his last seder. He zipped a short cotton jacket over the translucent tan and blue plaid shirt he had worn through three decades. It matched his cornflower eyes. A narrow belt held up his baggy brown pants, a little higher than his waist. I talked to him about bringing the Pesach dishes from his apartment, about my older son reciting the four kashes. He walked slowly, but deliberately; a thin, short, quiet man, surprisingly muscular for seventy-nine.
My father could never sit still. He was always tinkering. He’d carefully unfold his reading glasses, then rewire my stove. Or don his faded blue machinist’s work clothes and misshapen, paint-spattered shoes, and tear down the rotting shed. That afternoon, weakened by cancer and its drugs, he lay on my living room sofa, vocally venting his impulse to get up and do. His body looked as if someone were pressing his gas pedal and his brakes simultaneously. A few hours before sunset, his dry, raspy voice requested some toast. This was a day he had always kept chometz-free. I was thankful there was no bread in the house to contradict his lifelong religious practice. He and I had spoken in English all my life. That day he called out to me in Russian, the language he spoke only to my mother, and in Yiddish, the language he spoke only to his brother. I shuttled from stove to couch and back again, now with a peeled and quartered yabloko, now with a glesele te. As I boiled the gefilte fish, he dosed uneasily. As I stirred the matzo-ball batter, he rose uncertainly, then sank back down, heavily, into the cushions. He wore my holiday preparations like an ill-fitting suit.
I had envisioned a special seder for my father that night, one cleansed of the old tensions over when we could start and how I would participate; what should be read, how fast, and by whom. He would recite the kiddush with his oldest grandson, read from his ancient Maxwell House Haggadah. He would hide the Afikomen for my youngest to find and redeem. But time moved at two speeds in my house that day. In the kitchen, the clock hands swept fast circles like those in vintage black and white movies. In the living room, the afternoon lay inert, as if stuck inside the glass dome of the anniversary clock that my parents had brought with them from Germany forty-five years before. The man in the living room was my father refracted through a peculiar lens. The morphine which allowed him some relief also painted his senses with dogs dancing on rooftops and hospital roommates eating monkeys in the middle of the night. Why had I brought him here? Was this for my father, who would certainly want to be with his family for the first night of Pesach? Or was I being a sentimental choreographer? My vision of this last supper shattered like a glass under a groom’s heel. A fog descended low around the mountain that was my father. Within that sanctuary, his spirit was preparing for his own Passover, his own Exodus. Two hours before sunset, I gathered him up, and took him back to Beth Israel.
There he lay, tightly tucked with an orderly’s expertise, back under crisp white sheets, swaddled firmly by a thin white blanket pulled up just under his cropped white beard. Pale muslin drapes formed a partial wall, the muted windowed twilight another. A light bar glowed softly over his bed. The room was cooler than before. A low, constant whoosh of moving air insulated us from the evening sounds in the corridor outside. My father’s hair, turned pure white only recently, had been brushed smoothly to one side, his twin cowlicks gone flat. He was a white figure, in a white wrapper, in a white room, instantly asleep, his face relaxed for the first time that day. He slept peacefully, hair, sheet, light flowing together in one luminous entity. I was thankful for the simple clarity of that moment: he belonged there and nowhere else. Struggle, futility, and defeat slipped away from me. An hour later, I led our seder, without my father at the table. I heard his younger voice chant with me, “Lecha ulecha, lecha ki lecha, lecha af lecha…Ki lo nu-eh, ki lo yu-eh.” My voice faltered as I saw his face through the words in the Haggadah, bathed in the serenity of another world. White on white, white within white, white surrounding white.