At the end, my father could not understand how the pandemic had changed the perception of risk. He was born in Brooklyn in 1928, the same year in which Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin and two researchers at Harvard invented the Iron Lung. He went to high school on Long Island, enlisted in the U.S. Army at an office in lower Manhattan, and earned two degrees from NYU—a master’s in science in 1956 and a doctor of dental surgery in 1968.
Though he occasionally lived elsewhere—Alaska, Germany—sometimes for years at a stretch, he always returned. Not necessarily to the city, but to the central and western regions of the Empire State. New York, in its more expansive definition, was where he felt safest.
And so he couldn’t understand why I—another child of Brooklyn—didn’t share that feeling, why I had no inclination to return to the state of my birth. Whenever we spoke on the phone, he would ask when I was coming home and I would explain the ever-changing rules of lockdown.
In Tangier, Morocco, where my wife and I have lived and worked for the past five years, we were initially barred from traveling outside of our immediate neighborhood. The government banned intercity buses and trains, and suspended all international flights and ferries.
During March and April, when New York was recording some of the world’s highest rates of infection and fatality, Morocco fared much better: less than 5,000 cases among a population of 33 million, with fewer than 200 deaths. So even if I had thought of New York as home, or if there had been any available plane tickets, I still would’ve felt little desire to leave the relative security of Tangier.
But as my father’s health worsened, those calculations changed. By August, when he entered a home hospice program, New York State had reduced its number of daily deaths to the single digits and its coronavirus-testing positivity rate to less than 1 percent. Meanwhile, the Moroccan populace was struggling to reconcile safety precautions with a gradual reopening of the economy. As a result, the number of new cases was setting repeated daily records, with a positivity rate rising above 7 percent—still significantly lower than hard-hit Texas or Florida but worrisome nonetheless.
On August 9, I obtained an extraordinary travel permit and boarded a special flight from Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, to JFK. The hours on the plane were like a daylong seminar on anxiety management and controlled breathing. After five months of seldom leaving our neighborhood more than once a week—for grocery shopping only—I was confined in close quarters with an estimated 200 others, many of whom wore their masks with the same carefree abandon that Marilyn Monroe accorded a party dress. My neighbor in row 33 left his mask mostly dangling from his chin, though he sometimes mitigated this exposure by completely covering his head with the airline-issue blanket, like a parrot in a cage.
Upon disembarking at JFK, I expected thermometers, questionnaires, and other public-health precautions. After all, Governor Cuomo had recently announced the launch of roadside checkpoints for travelers from states with “significant community spread.” Instead I waited in the immigration line just long enough to complete my entry forms on Mobile Passport, as usual, then collected my luggage and prepared to board the train for the rental-car lot—without a single inquiry regarding my current health or previous whereabouts. All the while I watched in dismay as people of many different nationalities greeted each other with hugs and kisses. I’ll admit that I wondered if I had read too much, deluding myself with unreasonable fears that nobody else shared. Then I changed my mask and went into the restroom to wash my hands. All the soap dispensers were empty.
On the five-hour drive to my father’s home in Seneca Falls (the original inspiration for the town of Bedford Falls, in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life), I continued to ponder the wisdom of family gatherings in this time of crisis. My father had been a heavy smoker since his teens; he didn’t manage to quit for good until his seventies, when a couple of dark spots showed up on an X-ray. During the past decade, he’d developed an alarming habit of contracting pneumonia every winter. At least one tumor was now growing in his lungs but, with any luck, cancer would not be what killed him. He would be one of the fortunate few in 2020—someone who died of old age. Unless, of course, one of his adult children unwittingly brought him the virus.
For the first week of my visit, I slept in a nearby motel, only speaking to my father while masked and at a six-foot remove, and insisting that all shared meals occur outdoors, on the back deck. My sister and younger brother observed similar precautions. (Our older brother, who works at a supermarket in San Antonio, decided not to come.)
Because my father’s legs were failing, the repeated journeys from his recliner to the deck required great effort. "Why are we eating outside again?" he would ask, swatting weakly at the wasps and flies that ignored every mandate of social distancing between themselves and our corn on the cob.
“Because,” I would reply, “I’m waiting for the results of a coronavirus test. If the test is negative, I can move out of the hotel and stay with you.” That “you” meaning him and his wife, Mary, who had recently celebrated their 34th wedding anniversary.
I knew from compulsive reading that the CDC was currently recommending a 14-day quarantine, and that the president of these United States was alternately pretending that the virus had gone away or touting quack cures. I also knew that the protocol for professional basketball players—generating many millions in television revenue from inside their Orlando bubble—involved 7 days of isolation, followed by a negative test, before readmission to the game. Considering this vast spectrum of advice—and weighing the needs of my dying father with the risks of viral transmission—I chose the sages of the NBA.
My test was administered at an urgent-care clinic in nearby Geneva. Three days later, I received my negative results, although the physician’s assistant magnanimously granted me written permission to “return to work” on the day of my visit, without knowing whether I was shedding viral particles or not. This gesture, as you can imagine, did not reduce my anxiety about the lack of a national coronavirus strategy. Or about my personal status as potential carrier. The last thing I would have wanted was to upset my father’s plans for dying outside a hospital.
Over the next two weeks, my father’s condition deteriorated according to a schedule that might seem familiar to a hospice nurse but felt precipitous to me. On Tuesday he was nibbling on roast duck and steamed dumplings while instructing me on the finer points of smoked salmon, by Friday he was unable to swallow solid food. And though weakened, his body retained a formidable reserve of strength that it used to fight off his every urge to get through the process of dying. One night he told my sister, “I don’t want to die anymore if it’s going to be so hard.”
In the meantime, the two major party conventions were unscrolling like a highlight reel of fever dreams. On the Democratic side, the speakers acknowledged the national nightmare and pledged to wake us from it. On the Republican side, they insisted that the unreality to come would be far worse than the existing unreality, unless we granted them four more years of the current regime of anger and pain.
The walls of my father and Mary’s house are festooned with framed photographs of the family: parents, children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, and cousins. There are so many pictures that it’s impossible to walk from the kitchen to the living room without registering the immense passage of time. In the oldest prints, those sepia tones were come by honestly, while the newest reveal the intervention of up-to-date digital filters.
One black-and-white snapshot shows the ship from which my father leaped in 1946, holding a rifle above his head, before clearing the beach in a Pacific archipelago. Others reveal myself and my siblings as infants, then toddlers, and then—miraculously—fifty-year-olds. And because angling was my father’s favorite pastime, there are lots of images of everyone smiling, with fish. These moments feel real not only because they actually happened but because their participants were together in the past and are together again in the present, grayed and wrinkled but evidently themselves.
I am sorry that our gathering had to occur during a pandemic, but have no regrets about the fact of its occurrence—despite my ongoing anxieties. After all, I am still looking forward to my return to Morocco: preceded by mandatory PCR and antibody tests (within 48 hours of departure!) and followed by two more weeks of quarantine. At the moment, I’m not sure which task will be harder to complete, but the smart money is on the testing. As I write, the average interval between test administration and results in New York is 3 to 5 days. Which means that my chances of boarding that flight to Casablanca are not great. But just as I couldn’t let my father die without trying to see him one more time, I have to try to get back to my wife and home.
Even though he too was eager to depart, my father did not leave Seneca Falls without a fight. There are no rules for dying, and just because your mind says it’s time to go doesn’t mean that your heart and lungs will follow its advice. In any case, I am grateful to have had the chance to be there at his bedside, unlike the hundreds of thousands this year who suffered as their loved ones perished alone, in isolation wards or worse.
My best hope for my father was the recognition of an eventful and productive 92 years followed by a peaceful death. My best dreams for the country are more complicated because I don’t believe our democracy has reached the end of its natural life. If only, I wished, examining the photos in the guest bedroom, we Americans could see ourselves together in the same frame. Past and present. With some flaws obvious in the moment and others to be revealed only in the fullness of time. But my analogy broke down there. We Americans are manifestly no longer a family, not even of the most fractious kind.
My father’s dying breaths rattled on for hours, then days. Despite obvious discomfort, he managed to hold his head mostly upright, as if allowing it to rest on the pillow were a signal of defeat. We all declared our love for him—trying to make him as comfortable as possible while simultaneously marveling at his body’s stubborn resistance to whatever it is that comes next. Once, long after I thought that the capacity for words had left him, he clearly said, “Help me."
In his professional life, my father built a decades-long career of helping others. Although his childhood dream had been to become a physician, he worked for years as a chemical engineer before graduating from dental school at the age of 40. Nearly all of his acquaintances called him Doc. In his small-town practice, many of the people he treated had no prospect of paying him for his services. They brought him eggs instead, or zucchini bread, or tomatoes in season. For some years he strove to develop mouth rinses that would counteract the unpleasant side-effects of chemotherapy. Later he volunteered in remote Alaskan villages; after he and Mary moved to the Finger Lakes region, his patients frequently included recovering meth addicts.
Just as the federal government would do well to follow New York’s example in battling the coronavirus, the rest of us could do worse than follow in my father’s footsteps. Governor Cuomo’s strategy hasn’t been perfect, of course, and neither was my father. In one of his final weeks of lucidity, he almost allowed the anger provoked by a past injustice—involving filial piety and the privileges of his elder brother, the first-born son—to overwhelm the memories of all the good things he had done since then. But, in the end, he didn’t let that happen. In the end, I like to think that he forgave and moved on.
Those old wounds, of course, had everything to do with family. If only, I wished again, our present afflictions could be like that too.
Peter W. Fong is the author of the award-winning novel, Principles of Navigation. In 2018, he led an international team of scientists on a thousand-mile expedition from the headwaters of Mongolia’s Delgermörön River to Russia’s Lake Baikal. His stories and photographs have appeared in American Fiction, Gray’s Sporting Journal, the New York Times, and many other publications.