Fathers and sons

I was happy when I opened the hospital door. I wanted to tell my father that, despite what most people thought (including me), the judge had determined a medical examination in order to decide if Henrique should go to Australia or remain in Brazil. His mother simple wish to do so wasn't enough. A psychologist would examine the case and give a final statement, in which the sentence would be based upon.

I stood by his side, held his right hand — the one by which antibiotics and serum were administered, but he didn’t open his eyes. He wasn’t lucid anymore, he wasn’t there anymore. I tried to tell him the good news, but my poor imagination can’t hold on to the idea that one should talk to unconscious people, people in coma, even with the dead, for they may hear something. Both my good news and happiness remained in my throat and I sat on the couch where I had spent part of the previous 2 months. The next day, he was moved to the ICU. Six days later, at 68, he died.

Actually, I wasn't surprised to see him like that on that January 25th, 2006. He was getting worse each day. It was the final step of a long decadence nurtured by an activist alcoholism, a chronic indifference to his own health and a profound lack of goals in life.

Worthless for him on that death temple, my joy as I arrived at the hospital had some gratitude and relief. When he had learned, nine months before, that Roberta wanted to take his only grandchild to live abroad, my father cried in a restaurant, in front of my sisters and a bottle of whiskey. He, who didn’t know how to show his feelings, specially in public, seemed to have noticed at that moment that his only link to the future had been broken and he asked: “So, I’ll never see Henrique again, right?”. He said that he would like to help. Thanks to some money he gave me, I could hire the lawyer I started this battle with.

Me too, I breathed relieved because the six previous days had been terrible. I learned about the special audience on the 25th — scheduled because of the so-called urgency of the trip — on the 19th. My lawyer found me on a child psychiatrist waiting room. I had an appointment there, because my mother had suggested me. She had liked a presentation she’d seen and thought we should tell him our story; we may hear something that would help us. When my mother got there and I told her the news, I saw in he eyes what I was thinking: “What the hell are we doing here if it's all over?”. During the conversation (horrible, worthless) we had with the doctor, she cried. It seemed it was really over.

It looked like two simultaneous endings. I was about to lose my son and my father. Helpless, I was hoping that, at least, it would happen in different days. When I earned the right to the medical examination, I thought — naively — that maybe my father would get better too. Or, at least, that knowing about Henrique being with us for more time would make him fell good. I opened the room door with this feeling. But it was too late — I already knew, but didn’t remember.

He had been in that hospital for several times during his life. Since 2003, his visits became more frequent. On December 1st, 2005, he was there for what he feared it would be his final visit. He had acute hepatic cirrhosis, diabetes and edema in various locations of his body. He hadn’t drink since August because he hadn’t the strength; his body rejected it.

Showing for the zillionth time his great resistance, he was sent home on the 23rd to spend Christmas and New Year's Eve. But things weren’t good. On January 7th, after a week trying to convince me his situation wasn’t serious, the woman who lived with him called me asking me to go see him. It was a horrible and new scene to me. Lying on the bed like a sick child, he didn’t have enough strength to almost anything, he barely spoke and still would want to go back to the hospital only the next Monday. He sure knew that, once there, he wouldn’t go home. I knew it too, but I couldn’t stay still.

My father was committed that day with hepatic encephalopathy (dementia caused by health deterioration). He was so bad my uncle cried at the hospital — something I’d never seen before. The weeks after that, whoever was with him in his bedroom had to help him with everything, even urinate. Those days I saw myself dealing with the animal world in us, called rational beings, and saying goodbye to my father in the middle of feces and blood.

I won’t forget that, on the 24th, he insisted on sitting on a chair to read the newspaper. He seemed to do that out of habit, because he really couldn't. The newspaper slipped from his hands several times and, when he tried to get a glass, he spilled the water on his pajamas. The he went back to his bed and only left it to go to the ICU.

I cried when he was moved and I cried a little on the 31st, during the funeral parlor, which didn't last long because of his wish and a heavy rain. That was pretty much it. I inherited my father’s taste for alcohol (with less ardor, though), his passion for the soccer team Flamengo, the dislike of cowardice and meanness and also his affective inability. I’m not good at crying.

During his cremation, I could notice some people looking at me and wondering: “isn’t this guy going to cry?”. I don’t blame myself for not giving them the tears they need to finish these rites in their heads. But I feel like I have neglected the mourning for my father because, while I was taking care and saying goodbye to him, I also had to deal with people trying to steal my son.

My father was not very good with children, and it was worse with Henrique, because of his autism. How could someone who kept their feelings on a vault deal with a child who barely spoke and needed affection in exchange for communication? I know that, in his way, he suffered, but he tried to compensate the distance with gifts, asking for him and placing his grandson’s pictures on the shelf.

I began to understand my parents better after Henrique was born and even more when it became clear he wouldn’t communicate easily. When I forced myself to listen to my son’s silence in order to understand him, I think I began to better understand my father’s silence.

I imagine that if they were both still around, we would have taken our strange trio to another level. After all, each one of us is (or was) part of the others, and there should be a magnet in our flesh to bring our silence together.

I thought about it a lot on August 13th, 2006. It was the first father’s day without my father. The first without my son. It was my maternal grandfather’s birthday, who loved the date because of its cabalistic aura.

I was named Luiz Fernando after my father, Fernando, and his father, Luiz. My grandfather died in 1952, when his first son was only 14. This screwed my father’s life forever, and he suffered for being an orphan everyday of his life. His ashes are in my grandfather’s tomb, a symbolic reunion. Now, my grandmother’s ashes are also there, she died on April 11th, 2007, at 95 years old. A strong woman, she began to fall apart after she lost her first-born.

My son was named Henrique after my maternal grandfather. He died when I was only 3, but his sweet patriarchal manners from Minas Gerais made an impression in the whole family. Some of my cousins have Henrique as their middle names. He was a poet, the founder of the famous modernist magazine “Verde” in his hometown Cataguases and left to some of his descendents, as his legacy, the love for words.

Henrique, my grandfather, died on September 16th, the same day my son was born 27 years later, in 2000. My uncle João Afonso, my grandfather’s oldest son and my godfather, noticed the coincidence. João Afonso died on July 5th, 2006.

Being so far from my son Henrique hurts not only for itself, but it also carries the pain of everything I wrote here.

So many losses.