To which there wasn’t much to say. So, I’d just eat my lasagna, realizing that he probably was right. My junior year in college, my dad and I would have lunch together, usually once a week. Most times it was something quick, followed by a stroll, as time was always pressing. There was just never enough of it. During our walks, he’d surprise me with his candor, musing how he might reinvent his career. He was no longer an editor. He’d done television for a spell, but that was behind him, too. He’d talk about people who had once thought he was important, but now, no longer did so.

Then he’d joke about how that made him feel, and we’d laugh together, happy that our own camaraderie was invulnerable. What we had would never change. After all, he was my dad, and I was his number one girl. When Dad was settled in his room at the hospital, he tried to sit up and look at his watch, “Okay gang, let’s go.” It happened every twenty minutes or so, as though he were his own timepiece. He wore a very simple one with a black wristband and a white face.

“Okay, let’s go.”
 

In the hallway, outside his room, I said to his doctor, “I don’t know what to do.”

The response was kind but to the point. “Your father is your past, your family is your future. Get back to your family.” My father had already slipped into the morphine induced twilight which precedes the very end.

The doctor left, and I studied this man whom time and illness were swiftly preparing for his departure from earth. I bent over and whispered in his ear, “I love you, Dad.”

“Okay, he murmured. “Let’s go.”

I took the watch off his wrist and said my goodbyes. After all, the show must go on.

The cast knew where I had been and why. But life being what it is, no one said a word. Instead, I approached an awkward ninth grader whose character continued to elude him. It was the part of the ingénue’s father.
 

“Edward,” I put the watch on the boy’s wrist. “Wear this. This was my dad’s. He was obsessed with time. He was always looking at his watch. Why don’t you try that?”

The next morning, I received the call. It was all over. That night, The Boyfriend opened to a full house. Edward’s performance was flawless.
 

The loss of my father was so intense, that even now, decades later, it still packs a wallop. Sometimes, when I’m alone, I find myself wrestling with the ideas and conversations we had, passing magazines back and forth, chortling over pieces we found amusing, sometimes sitting silently, sometimes reading, sometimes not. After his death, I finished college, but continued not writing. Instead, I worked in film and television. Life went one way, and then it went another.

My marriage ended. I returned to the States, walking away from all things entertainment. I married an architect and worked some in design. Time passed. Then my brother made a movie about our father. It made me roar with laughter and dissolve into tears. Ideas and snippets of memory began tumbling forward. It was all I could do to keep up, taking notes.

The moments lingered, shaping themselves in such a way, that hopefully, transcribed with a bit of discernment, anyone might know them. My father’s prescience was a gift which came with the passage of time. For the writer in me, the material I am looking for might turn out to be my own.