The Strength of Fighting

January 2009

Memory.

We are driving back home. Outside, the sky is moody and strangely expansive, mixing the natural light blues with clouds. It is afternoon, but I feel tired. I feel tired as though I haven't slept for years. It is only afternoon, but I feel tired as though my tiredness is trying to mask other feelings that I sense in the perifery of my conscious thoughts. It's only me and my mother in the car.

The news of my father's condition hit me on a sunny roof of a cold Milanese Thursday. 22nd of January 2009, just after lunch. My father has not been well for a while, so somehow I should be ready, but I am not, and when my mother tells me that things are 'complex' and I hear in a far away corner of my mind the tears she has just cried and she is trying to hide from me, I suddenly realise on a rooftop of Milan that things are not as I had hoped they were.

When I walk into my father's hospital room, the room feels too big for him and he feels too small for the room. He has lost 12kg since last time I saw him -when was it?- eighteen days ago. He looks at me, and I see surprise, but not at my visit- he knew I was coming- surprise at the way seeing me makes him feel.

He has got small tubes coming out of his nose, and the tubes are attached to a bottle full of bubbles. I push the need to cry away, and we hug, and I let him cry. My father has never been as human to me as in this very moment, and we are both genuinly happy to see each other. We talk about nothing and we exchange empty promises that things will be alright. My role is to bring some strength to my family, and I play it well: I am confident, I make fun of morbid things, I look like I know all this is futile and we are about to find out that it was not even necessary in the first place.

On the way back home it is only me and my mother in the car. We keep saying that things will be fine. We drive under a blue sky and clouds made of iron. I look at my mother and for a second I marvel: somehow she looks younger today, as though the strength of fighting, that determination that only comes when we want to save somebody we love, has given her some of her youth back.

I look at her and she looks younger, and I think that perhaps she will do it. She will save my father and the whole family. Perhaps we will be alright.

I say goodbye to my father at around 11 in the morning, on the 27th of January 2009. He cannot push away tears when we say goodbye. His last words are : when I feel better we will have roast fish. I smile and tell him to be strong, and that things will be ok. He looks like he believes me.

The reality is quite different, and when I jump on a plane to go back to London I discover myself wondering whether I will even see my dad again. One day later my mother calls me and tells me that the cancer has been diagnosed, and the way it is it cannot be operated. We let the news float in mid air, and we look at it, like we would look at a painting we do not fully understand.

I look at it, and I try to understand, but I cannot.

Just like I could not fully understand the moment when I had looked at my mother in the car and I had thought that the strength of fighting had made her younger.