This Is Us
Approach This World With Wonder: A Black Son Remembers His Father
I could tell you he was a bully, but that wouldn’t be the whole story
“Friends depart, and memory takes them to her caverns, pure and deep.”
— Thomas Haynes Bayly
1
The last time I visited my father, I said goodbye to him at the airport in the town where he lived. We hugged, he said I love you, and I walked toward the departure gates with my sister to go back to New York.
Halfway up the ramp in the small Southern airport, small by New York standards anyway, I turned back to look at him because I had a moment when I thought: What if this is the last time I see him? I figured I was just being dramatic; my father had been ill on and off over the last couple of years, but he was also built like a Sherman tank, seemingly indomitable, and why should he die now? He’d clearly survived all the childhood prayers and the voodoo stares I’d given him while I was growing up, hoping that a merciful God would one day strike him dead.
I expected to see him still standing there, waving to me, like a Dad in the movies. As we exchanged a loving gaze, someone would cue the voiceover: “And as I looked into my father’s eyes in that moment…
