by Lila Zimmerman, AMFT

DEATH DADDY

“The unconscious has no time. They are only an illusion, time and space, and so in a certain part of our psyche time does not exist at all” (Carl Jung, 1976). 

My father was diagnosed with esophageal cancer just before Christmas. Time, I noticed, began to work differently at this point. By March he was undergoing an aggressive treatment of chemo and radiation therapies. I flew home to take him to his treatments and care for him. At the cancer center, you are asked to sit in the waiting room outside the doors marked with hazard symbols. It’s full of others, some of us waiting for our loved ones, others for their own treatments. We are all grappling with something we once hardly thought about. The waiting room is still decorated for Christmas, or in part. There is a tree in the center, mostly stripped naked spare one string of white lights and a singular ornament in the shape of a pick-up truck. I wonder if someone forgot to finish taking it down or perhaps putting it up in the first place. Perhaps, like mine, Christmas was interrupted this year. Maybe time stopped here too. The unconscious has no time, I thought. Perhaps cancer works the same way. A perpetual “not yet,” or, “you just missed it.”

I watch a woman using her walker as a pillow. I pick up my phone and begin scrolling. There is a war happening, my feed is full of it. Without meaning to, I watch an Air Force pilot light himself on fire. An act of protest. He douses himself in gasoline and stoically persists each time his lighter won’t light, doesn’t catch. When it does, he is engulfed in flames and he screams repeatedly, “Free Palestine! Free Palestine!” until he can’t anymore. I’m watching from the waiting room, tears running down my face in the company of these strangers who are all likely thinking in one way or another about what it means to be dying or to be living, or to be doing both at the same time. I think of my father sitting behind the doors, hooked up to tubes of life-saving poison, looking out over the Blue Ridge Mountains where I grew up. The Christmas tree is at half-mast.

When he is done, he finds me in the waiting room. We take the elevator down in silence. In the car on the way home, he pulls out a cigarette, lighting it without effort. He inhales deeply and I roll down his window to let the smoke out. I consider the act of sending aid with one hand and bombs with the other. I think of the death drive and Eros. I think of how powerful a life can be.

I’m writing this in April, to be published in June. My father is still alive, and tens of thousands of people are not, and at my window, my Christmas cactus is blooming. “Oh good,” I say, “I thought I had missed you.”