My dad comes home in a box

Judith Hannah Weiss
Human Parts
Published in
6 min readFeb 4, 2025
Drawing by Judith Hannah Weiss
Drawing by Judith Hannah Weiss

Sidewalks sizzle in Manhattan. Molten, hissing, dangerous. And even more torrid in the tenements where I work for a childcare agency. It is 1966. People driven desperate — by nine days in the high 90s — hack into fire hydrants, preferring fierce torrents of water to brutal, broiling box-like homes.

I get home at 7 for my other job. The evening shift, as nurse to my dad. Cancer has racked, ravaged, reduced him to stretched skin on bone. He has turned a deeper yellow, somewhere between leather and wood and is twisting, contorted on sheets of white. He asks for water, then swallows two pills for pain.

He must have swallowed many more pills I didn’t see. Ten minutes later he tells me not to call 911 and says he does not want to go to a hospital or to have his stomach pumped. He tells me to “not tell anyone” for seven years so it will not be suicide, preserving life insurance for my aunt and mom. Then he mentions Kierkegaard and begins drifting off. I say, “I love you, Daddy.” He does not say he loves me. He never said he loved me. He said, “Thank you.” Those were his last words. Thank you and Kierkegaard.

I tell my mom about the pills right away, but she never comes to the bedroom. I imagine she continued to sit like a statue, immobile on a sofa, at the far end of our very small home, like my dad dying was a secret or was spoken in a language she didn’t know. I sat like a statue, too, at the side of my father’s bed. I held his hand for hours, not sure we ever held hands before.

A few weeks later, he came back in a box. I planted him in the horseshoe garden. My mom stood there, mute, absent, elsewhere (as she had been the night he died), while I dug a hole and covered the box. Within a year, she sold the house with the box and the horseshoe garden and the lilacs and roses she had tended with love.

My father was a doctor with two sets of patients: the ones who could pay and the ones who could not. He worked pro bono at Ellis Island for many years, trying to keep in the country immigrants not welcomed here. He became chief of medicine, too, at a New York City hospital, which was a big deal then if you were Jewish.

During the McCarthy era, he was pressured to rat out “socialist doctors,” which meant doctors advocating what later became Medicare. He declined, lost his designation as chief, developed a huge clot in his leg and was forced to quit when I was two because he could no longer walk.

The clot was like a time bomb which, if dislodged, could shoot to his heart or lungs or brain. This meant that tripping on my cat, Jesse, who might appear underfoot, could kill my dad. As could anything that caused him to fall.

My father could explain suns and moons and stars and planets and Mozart and gravity. He could, but he didn’t. He didn’t speak much, at least with me. Instead, he disappeared to the living room, where he listened to classical music, read enormous stacks of books, and mentored occasional medical students, while Jesse the cat stayed with me in my room.

I learned it was right/good to stay shut in my room, not moving much and not making noise. Alone in my room, I drew large, happy, Christian families like I saw on TV. I named each child and tucked their age under their feet. Their moms woke them with a kiss. Mine did not.

My mom had thousands of kids. I wasn’t one of them. She ran away from home each day to be with them. They were in the hospital, in chronic care pediatrics, burn units and AIDS clinics, where my mom refused to don mask and gloves “because kids need your touch.” Their moms were missing in action and my mom was missing from me.

When I was in college, I got a job wrapping packages. They looked great. I wanted to be like them. Then I worked for magazines. I cut and pasted words so they made sense and landed the right words in the right place at the right time. I wanted to be like them.

As a freelancer, I was called an “outside creative.” Pretty creative, very outside. I made things fresh, fun, lovely, lively, perky, cozy, sweet. Home the way you wanted it. Life the way you wanted it. The scent. The color. The texture. The ease. And most of all, the dad who gave hugs, which means he was not my dad.

A torrent of present, past and future shoot in and out of my skull. My father spoke to me, though rarely, as if we had never met. An awkward impersonal courtesy. I learned nothing about him from him — and very little from others. I saw my dad — who may have been a healer — as an old man on a sea. A crippled man who killed fish with his friend Paul, who drove him to the sea and back. My father, who could barely stand, stood at the sink long enough to gut them in our kitchen in stinking blood-stained clothes.

On bad-weather days, my dad, who was in his late fifties, picked me up at school. I hated it. All the other kids were picked up by their moms, who were in their 20s or early 30s. They had shiny hair and 2.8 kids and drove shiny new sedans. My dad drove an ancient Buick. It was a relic and so was he. I was ashamed that I was ashamed.

Dinners for the two of us were strained, the reverse of comfort food. Speed-eating. Brittle, busy, masticating. You could call it serving time. Hard to say who felt more trapped, or more released when we rose and went back to our separate “cells.” My father labored to heat things up, baking potatoes in a dark gray dented thing that may have survived World War I. It looked a bit like a helmet.

Eating by myself was better. Chunks of Velveeta and mayo on Wonder Bread with 12 essential vitamins, consumed standing in the kitchen. I mastered that meal in second grade. Later, I branched out. Swanson Roast Turkey with mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy and peas or Banquet Fried Chicken, also with mashed potatoes and peas, which I ate sitting down.

I grew up in a house of silent strangers. I was one of them. We lived with six million people in six rooms and with six million stories no one could tell. I was locked inside a cell. That cell is inside my cells and the cells of ancestors who perished in “camps” or just perished.

What did I want? I wanted to be the little girl that everyone wanted, the perfect little white Christian girl with blonde curls and blue eyes who grew up to have one hell of a tennis serve and was an equestrian marvel, and went to the right schools, married the right guy, and had the right kids who were always welcome anywhere.

I wanted Halo shampoo and Ba-Bo cleanser and Juicy Fruit gum and Hostess cupcakes and a father who could walk like Father Knows Best and a mom who looked and cooked like Donna Reed. Failing that, I wanted my dad to be a dad, any dad at all. Instead his face looked closed, like a cabinet.

Someone said the difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense. This isn’t fiction and doesn’t make sense. Does this sound real to you? My family was stashed in a shoebox. My mom had thousands of kids. My ancestors were turned into soap.

But back to my father. Nietzsche wrote, “He who has a “why” to live can bear with almost any “how”. When the pain become too great for my father, his “how” overcome the “why”. Viktor Frankel, wrote, “There are three ‘whys’ that stand out: Love. Work. And dignity in suffering. My dad couldn’t work. He had lost his dignity. And love? That I can’t ever know.

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Judith Hannah Weiss
Judith Hannah Weiss

Written by Judith Hannah Weiss

Nominated for Best American Essay and The Pushcart Prize. Former freelancer for New York, Martha Stewart, Vogue, Vanity Fair.

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