The Friday afternoon felt heavy, words unspoken hung in the air like unsent messages. Days had blurred into a week since I last heard from Julia, a silence so profound it was unsettling. She was to watch our dog and son, a familiar arrangement for my out-of-town trips, yet her usual confirmations were absent. It was unlike Julia, who, in summers past, had painted vivid pictures of our New Jersey home through photos and videos, a testament to a happy dog and a thriving garden. She’d become a fixture in our son’s routine, school pick-ups and dinners filled with transcribed conversations, a kaleidoscope of history, physics, memes, and global chatter, all punctuated with thoughtful emojis.
Our cockapoo, once brave, now bore the invisible scars of a puppyhood attack, mirroring the lion from Oz, courage lost. Our younger son, reserved by nature, found an unlikely confidante in Julia, a bond deepened by the recent loss of his older brother. She had connected with both boy and dog in a way no other adult had managed.
My calls to Julia echoed into voicemail, a digital void. A quick online search yielded a stark, two-sentence obituary. Death, a frequent visitor in recent times, having claimed my son, mother-in-law, and father in quick succession. Strangely, Vincent’s passing, nor those of my mother-in-law and father, had unlocked tears. But Julia’s obituary cracked the dam. Uncontrollable sobs poured out, a deluge witnessed by a friend on the phone, who gently suggested these tears were for more than just Julia. Another friend, in a late-night message, welcomed me to the “delayed crying club,” assuring me these accumulated tears held a profound depth.
My father, a lifelong heart patient, remained active until his final weeks. The day before the surgery that would claim him, he spoke of preparedness. An urge arose to confess Vincent’s loss, a secret I’d carried. I had flown to Beijing, my childhood home, as his health declined.
My mother-in-law, also in China, passed soon after Vincent. The news was withheld, a fragile shield around her. The thought of sparing her that pain offered a sliver of solace. But my silence with my parents was more complex. The day after Vincent’s death, a text from Edmund White offered refuge in New York, “Come to the city. I’ll hold you and we’ll grieve together.” An email from a friend’s mother mirrored the sentiment, “I wish I could be with you tonight so I could put my arms around you and try to soothe your pain.” My own mother was not one for embraces. My father, a man of few outward emotions.
In the weeks following Vincent’s death, the thought of confiding in my stoic father flickered. But to burden him with such news, even with a plea for silence, felt cruel. When my mother eventually learned of Vincent’s suicide, her message was sharp, “All children should love their parents. I just don’t understand how a child could do that to his parents.”
My tears for Julia did not equate to deep intimacy. Yet, fragments of her remained: a confessed comfort with animals over people; a summer request for ten novels from my shelf, devoured with Hurston and Drury emerging as favorites; glimpses of a Pennsylvania childhood shadowed by addiction and abuse; her presence at university lectures; Spanish fluency and burgeoning German skills, evening classes finally possible as her sons matured.
Depression was a shadow she sometimes spoke of. One text longed for the solace of our sofa and dog. A month before her death, she inquired about a minor character in my first novel, a political activist’s son, executed in youth. “What do you think he’s like now?” she mused. “Will he know more about her?”
I confessed the character had faded from my thoughts post-novel. Julia suggested a sequel, a notion I silently dismissed. My actions, or inactions, found resonance in Marianne Moore’s poem “Silence,” read at Vincent’s memorial:
My father used to say,“Superior people never make long visits,have to be shown Longfellow’s graveor the glass flowers at Harvard.Self-reliant like the cat—that takes its prey to privacy,the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth—they sometimes enjoy solitude,and can be robbed of speechby speech which has delighted them.The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;not in silence, but restraint.”Nor was he insincere in saying, “Make my house your inn.”Inns are not residences.
“Make my house your inn”—a phrase applicable to my characters. Fleeting visitors, some lingering for years, but inns nonetheless, not homes.
Accompanying my father to the operating room, the opportunity to share Vincent’s secret resurfaced. A whispered confession, easily lost before anesthesia’s embrace. Awakening, if it came, might erase the memory, though a premonition of finality lingered. His frame was frail, barely ninety pounds.
Nine hours later, I trailed the gurney to the ICU, where an immediate second surgery awaited. The ICU doors opened to a bustling waiting area, elevators humming. No seating. The university hospital, my alma mater, was renowned, yet even in Beijing, comfort wasn’t always prioritized for family. “Wait for a moment out there,” a nurse or doctor would say, a moment stretching into hours. Three and a half hours I stood outside the ICU.
The logic of folding chairs, stools, chaise longues, sold alongside crutches, wheelchairs, and adult diapers near the hospital, became starkly clear. Picnics of endurance unfolded in corners. But even at midnight, a folding chair felt beyond reach. “Is there cardboard you can find to sit on?” my sister suggested from afar. She too had flown to Beijing, but her stay was brief, ending before the surgery.
I remained standing, rigid with pride, a thin veil over fear. Sitting felt like surrender, a potential inability to rise again. A single tear threatened to unleash an ocean, Alice adrift in sorrow.
Before six, tears were readily available. Then, a mirror from my father. “How sad you look when you cry, but others won’t understand your sadness,” he’d said. “If you keep smiling, people will think you’re a happy person. You yourself will feel better.”
A year after Vincent’s passing, a school friend, now a university freshman, visited my office. High school when he was in middle school, they’d shared a language class.
“Back then, I thought, This kid is so smart, so fun, so imaginative—this kid is going to change the world,” she said. Eighteen at most, her phrasing, “this kid,” shifted the conversation. I steered towards college life, her responses poised, sweet. Later, a memory surfaced: Vincent recounting a high schooler in Mandarin class.
“What’s she like?” I’d asked.
“Mommy-like,” he’d replied.
I’d questioned the appropriateness of the description.
“But she has a round face just like you,” he’d insisted. “And she smiles all the time like you do.”
At seven, darkness was a terror, amplifying whispers into monsters, shadows into graveyards. “In a Newtonian world,” my father explained, introducing me to its principles, “any sound comes from a vibration, and a scientific mind does not invent stories but identifies the source.”
At nine, he taught me the cleaver, its edge angled for safety and efficiency. “This way, you can cut anything with your eyes closed,” he’d declared. Practice followed, cucumber slices paper-thin, chopped with eyes averted.
Just as my father armed me with logic against childhood fears and kitchen skills for life, the unspoken language of care is often the most profound. Think of a daddy tending to a baby, a silent understanding passing between them. It’s in the gentle touch while changing a diaper, a task often mundane, yet imbued with love and necessity. The tool belt of fatherhood isn’t filled with wrenches and hammers, but with patience, resilience, and an unwavering presence. These are the tools a father uses to build a safe and nurturing world for his child. And within the quiet moments of baby care, there exists a poem of devotion, a silent verse written in actions, not words.
This unspoken poem echoes the silent grief and unspoken love within families. Just as I stood in the ICU, finding strength in rigidity, fathers find strength in the quiet demands of baby care. They learn to decipher the unspoken cries, the subtle shifts in mood, becoming fluent in the language of their child’s needs. The daddy diaper tool belt poem isn’t a literal checklist, but a metaphor for the multifaceted, often silent, dedication of fatherhood. It’s about being present, being equipped, and expressing love through actions, much like the silent strength my father embodied, and the quiet care Julia offered in her own unique way.
