so many layers of pride that it was impossible for me to be angry. There was no dissuading him. My parents had raised us to handle our own business, which meant that I had to trust him to handle his, even if he could, at that point, barely put on his shoes. So I let him handle it. I stuffed down my worries, gave my dad a kiss, and took myself back upstairs to get ready for my own workday. I figured I’d call my mother later at her office, telling her we’d need to strategize about how to force the man to take some time off.
I heard the back door click shut. A few minutes later, I returned to the kitchen to find it empty. My father’s walker sat by the back door. On an impulse, I went over and looked through the little glass peephole in the door, which gave a wide-angle view of the back stoop and pathway to the garage, just to confirm that his van was gone.
But the van was there, and so, too, was my dad. He was dressed in a cap and his winter jacket and had his back to me. He’d made it only partway down the stairs before needing to sit down. I could see the exhaustion in the angle of his body, in the sideways droop of his head and the half-collapsed heaviness with which he was resting against the wooden railing. He wasn’t in a crisis so much as he looked just too weary to carry on. It seemed clear he was trying to summon enough strength to turn around and come back inside.
I was seeing him, I realized, in a moment of pure defeat.
How lonely it must have been to live twenty-some years with such a disease, to persist without complaint as your body is slowly and inexorably consumed. Seeing my dad on the stoop, I ached in a way I never had. My instinct was to rush outside and help him back into the warm house, but I fought it, knowing it would be just another blow to his dignity. I took a breath and turned away from the door.
I’d see him when he came back in, I thought. I’d help take off his work boots, get him some water, and usher him to his chair, with the silent acknowledgment between us that now without question he would need to accept some help.
Upstairs in my apartment again, I sat listening for the sound of the back door. I waited for five minutes and then five minutes more, before finally I went downstairs and back to the peephole to make sure he’d made it to his feet. But the stoop was empty now. Somehow my father, in defiance of everything that was swollen and off-kilter in his body, had willed himself down those stairs and across the icy walkway and into his van, which was now probably almost halfway to the filtration plant. He was not giving in.
* * *
For months now, Barack and I had danced around the idea of marriage. We’d been together a year and a half and remained, it seemed, unshakably in love. He was in his final semester at Harvard and caught up in his Law Review work but would soon head back my way to take the Illinois bar and look for a job. The plan was that he’d move back to Euclid Avenue, this time in a way that felt more permanent. For me, it was another reason why winter couldn’t end soon enough.
We’d talked in abstract ways about how each of us viewed marriage, and it worried me sometimes how different those views seemed to be. For me, getting married had been a given, something I’d grown up expecting to do someday—the same way having children had always been a given, dating back to the attention I’d heaped on my baby dolls as a girl. Barack wasn’t opposed to getting married, but he was in no particular rush. For him, our love meant everything already. It was foundation enough for a full and happy life together—with or without rings.
We were both, of course, products of how we’d been raised. Barack had experienced marriage as ephemeral: His mother had married twice, divorced twice, and in each instance managed to move on with her life, career, and young children intact. My parents, meanwhile, had locked in early and for life. For