To Tell You The Truth

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks or so I am publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week, we are publishing “To Tell You The Truth” by Nicole Morris. Nicole is a working-class poet who writes essays and adores compound words, birthday cake, and rainy days. Her writing has been featured in North American and Irish journals such as the Indiana Review, Blood Orange Review, the Stinging Fly, Banshee, and elsewhere. Nicole is a Tin House and Roots Wounds Words alum and was shortlisted for the 2024 Disquiet International and Indiana Review nonfiction prizes. Originally from Los Angeles, she lives in Western Ireland, where she is putting the final touches on a debut memoir in essays about girlhood, inherited anguish, and forgetting as a function of memory.

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There are particulars in a father dying that require attention to detail that I can’t carry. Like, what do you do with all the stuff? Everything he possesses means nothing to anyone except himself. Piles of books on Buddhism and gardening. DVDs and CDs of monks chanting or sisters humming or Motown moaning. Obsolete. And clothes worn to shreds. Bed linens, one set, wrecked with the stink of lying still, soaked through from the chemo night sweats and failing kidneys. Tiger Balm and Nag Champa permeating every pore on the walls, ceiling, curtains to mask the odor of entropy. An ancient desktop computer that stopped working in the mid-2000s. I’m gonna get that fixed one of these days, he says whenever I ask if he got my email. Junk mail and grease-soaked takeout containers. A mountain of empty things: Chinese takeout boxes, Ensure meal replacement bottles, distilled water gallon jugs. And the porn. There is definitely porn hidden throughout his studio, poor bastard. Even up till the end. Hoarding hard copies of printed smut has been a hobby he has nurtured for decades. Hustlers and god knows what else. No, thank you. And the body. What about that? The body no longer his body, but a body. In the third person.

I asked him recently. What do you want us to do with you once you’re gone? His reply? I don't give fuck. I’ll be dead.

//

Lately, I have been spending the darkest hours of the night inside the algorithm of the heal-your-inner-child, trauma-informed soul-repair, and past-life regression corners of the TikTok universe. I feel reassured of my choice to skip his funeral and opt out of the posthumous tidying up of a life. This particular cancer was generous. It issued him, me, us, a “Save the Date” to prepare and rehearse a response to the inevitable. We have time to set the death table, so to speak. Time to marinate in the news. Time to cook ourselves through, to the bone, the way he always preferred his steak and hamburgers when he had teeth and an appetite.

//

To hear him tell it, it’s imminent, but he’s been dying for about 15 years. Prostate. Terminal. Now metastatic. Still, he hangs on and brags about it every opportunity he gets, about how he’s close to being on the other side of the veil, which is his way of talking about the afterlife. He is sure there is something after life.

Could be any day now, he sighs on the line with me when we talk, which is infrequent.

Telephone fiber optics between us. Or, more currently, satellite pulses. Sounds bounce out of our mouths, into the ether, up through the skies, to outer space, to receivers floating in between stars, then toss them back down to our ears. This is the bare minimum I can make myself do: sit on the phone with him until his number stops being his and gets recirculated in the ether as a new user on some other mobile network. I listen to the news and updates on his life as he waits for the cancer to finish it. I live six thousand miles away from my father, in the wilds of western Ireland. He’s made a home in Monterey, California, a few blocks from Cannery Row. Once Steinbeck’s hobo paradise, it is now a candy-striped strip mall with no evidence of Mack and the boys. I am on another continent. Not far away enough.

Uh-huh, my response to this announcement.

Ho hum, he says to that. I change the subject.

What’s the weather like in Monterey these days, Dad?

The fuck I know. I’m not going outside anymore. Can’t drive, and the Ubers are racist.

Won’t pick me up once they see my name. It’s not a whiteboy name, you know.

Yeah, well. That sucks, Dad.

//

Every time I let my guard down and start treating my dad like the old man he is, the old man dying from cancer, he goes and fucks it up by confessing some horrific hidden truth about my early years that I either intentionally repressed or was too young to remember. The last time we spoke was on Christmas. I felt guilty about him being alone again. So I called, and we had a good and normal 10 minutes before he said,

You know you used to be a smearer; do you remember that?

A what?

A smearer. He says it slowly, phonemically.

Silence.

Yeah, you were. I was worried about you for a little while there cuz that ain’t good. Usually is a sign of developmental delays or autism. But yeah, one day I came home from work, and I had this really nice hair brush, expensive, boar’s bristle; you knew I loved it. And you took that brush, and you wiped your shit all over it. When I found it, I beat you. You were covered in bruises. I didn’t realize how fragile you were. And it scared me.

I was five years old when he found out he had to be careful because he could hurt me. But you never did it again. He began laughing at that. Then coughing.

//

Insert a cartoon sketch of him in a ten-gallon cowboy hat, blue jeans dusted brown, tucked-in flannel shirt, boots with spurs, hands on his hips, rocking back on heels, spitting tobacco out of his mouth in an arch onto the dusty floor outside on the wide open range in the American southwest while saying, Yessiree Bob, she never tried to pull a fast one over me like that again, and then squint into the distance at an inky black edge of horizon marking the end of this scene. Full stop.

//

It is a good daughter’s duty to walk her father into a death when you can see it coming. But I am not a good daughter, and he isn’t even my real father. This was a secret until my 16th birthday, when I needed a copy of my birth certificate as proof of residence for my California driver’s license. The names didn't match. Who’s name was that next to “Father”? I can still feel the red flush of hot shame that flooded my face at this reveal. But there was relief too. I was not his. And so I could be better.

He had a white coffee cup that read, “Karma is as Karma Does,” which I judged as wildly ironic coming from him. He has offered a few limp apologies in the last year or so, but they are always bookended with reproach and qualifiers. It wasn’t as bad as you and your brother make it out to be, and A lot of kids had it worse than you are two gems that he repeats often. Because he won’t be among the living sooner than later, I swallow this injustice—his revisions of the past. What do you call the experience of tiptoeing in your socks for 18 years and holding your breath and smiling through bleeding gums and swallowing all those quietly thick thumping sounds of flesh hitting flesh or staying awake all night long before your birthday hit double digits praying to baby Jesus that they would come home. Please, please, please God, make them come home. A primal pulse of need for parents to return after being gone too long, way past bedtime, juxtaposed with the threat of being hurt when they arrived. This is terror to a certain degree. There are worse shades, but this kind is mine.

//

God does hear our prayers. She does. It took 40 years, but all those Dear Diary entries where I scrawled in the curly q cursive of the 80s, hearts dotting i’s and loopy-loops finishing off y’s and g’s: I wish he was dead. I wish he was dead. I wish he was dead. Took forever, but God finally replied: I gotchu girl.

//

I am a Jedi master at disassociating. For the most part, it has served me well. Or at least kept me intact. Layers of duct tape across the fraying expanse of my interior world. Mummified. But alive.

//

I’ve watched someone die of cancer before. Nancy. My ex-husband's mother. It took two years, through my first pregnancy and into my son’s 11th month. She had been in remission. Breast. Aggressive treatment gave her a couple of bonus years of living like someone who is alive. But it came back with brass knuckles in time. Teeth, broken glass, and big-boned fists. This round, she was gonna lose. We were planning our wedding, trying to hurry up and get hitched while she was strong enough to be there. But the cancer tore through her like a brush fire, and it didn't help that she was in denial the whole time.

She hid her tumor from everyone until it was as big as a navel orange on the left underside of her neck. Absurdly elegant silk scarves and pashminas throughout blazing Los Angeles summers to hide it. Dramatic flair mirroring her smile. The flash of white teeth under her gorgeous mouth and sunshine in her eyes. Dazzling. She was talented at making you feel seen. Her standard greeting when anyone said, It’s good to see you, was, Honey, it's good to be seen! Nancy’s love for life was an exercise in redemption. It obscured our vision, and we were unaware that she was dying from the outside in. At some point, we couldn't not see it anymore. It butted its way into the rooms of our hearts and turned all the lights on. Pulled up a seat and sat with legs wide open in a miniskirt and no panties. Brazen. Way past the point of reversing, but that didn’t stop my then-husband and his big brother from participating in the theater of “We Can Beat This.” Intravenous vitamin C infusions and healing waters in Mexico, shamans, juice fasts, alternative-integrated-holistic-naturopathic-snake-oil-miracle-cures until eventually, the money ran out.

Radiation was the last recourse, and even then, as she was burned alive from the inside out and made bald and eating baby food, everyone carried on like there might be hope. I recall being furious with my then-fiance. How can you keep this up? I’d whisper-scream while breastfeeding our son. And he, not yet 30 years old or maybe already 100 years old, his eyelids wet bags of clay and face pulled back tightly into a little boy worried about his sick mama, said,

What else can we do? We can’t give up hope.

Nancy died in a hospital in Pasadena built in 1894 that looked like a posh hotel with its Spanish-tiled rooftop. She held out long enough to see my son take his first steps towards her deathbed, arms at his side for balance and a spitty smile with only a couple teeth in his mouth, absolutely out of his mind proud to show his Grandma what a big boy he was. Look at him go! She was high as a kite on morphine, but recognized her Grandman and returned his grin with tears dripping into the oxygen mask and down her gown. She floated out of the room shortly after that, away from the beep-beep-stop of her heart monitor.

If she looked back at her earthly body, if she lingered for a moment before being gone, she would have seen her two grown babies squeezing her empty hands with their warm-blooded ones wailing her name until she grew cold: Mommy.

//

My father’s death will be different. No kicking and screaming through that door between this here and that over there. No hand-holding through the beep-beep-stop. No keeping hope alive. Terminal is the name of this song, and he has arrived at the acceptance phase. His Buddhist practice became less wobbly and more consistent once he got sober, and now he says he’s ready for what comes next, unafraid of it. And it is accelerating, his disease. It’s eating him up. He’s losing weight, having mini strokes, spitting his teeth out like sunflower seeds.

A few months back, he shouted into the phone at me. I got me a prescription to drink the Kool-Aid! This was his way of telling me his application for medically-assisted suicide was approved by the state of California.

//

I’ve told him I cannot be the daughter who sits beside her father’s bed as he journeys to the death plain. I did not apologize for this. But I did offer him something because I don’t want any postmortem ghost goo on my hands. He says he will visit me after he passes to let me know he is on the other side, to tell me it’s okay over there. I leveraged this belief of his to justify my reasons for not flying halfway across the world to receive his body, which is such an absurd verb to describe the closure of a life. I won’t receive his body, as if to say I am unavailable to take a call. Please leave a message or try me again some other time. The guilt I feel about this is an anvil that is tethered to my heart, its rope rising past my throat and dangling around my neck. It strangles me. I suppose if I tug at it lightly, to locate the source, the guilt comes from fear of appearing ungrateful for all he did for me. The girl who wasn’t his daughter, but kind of was, by way of proxy, or marriage to my mother. Do I owe him something?

For the soap and hot water I washed my body with. For the electricity and the food. For the back-to-school clothes and the Christmas gifts, even when rent was past due. For the expectation of academic excellence, even if it was enforced by reward or heavy punishment. For the books. All the books built my escape room and likely saved my life. For the man he became to my sons. For the period of time they knew him as Grandpa, as Big Daddy, and the love he put on them, the way he made them feel seen. For his loyalty, misguided and warped, and weird, but always loyal. For the fact that, at nearly 50, I have the scars to mark all the ways I, too, have failed at loving people better. I have been the bad guy in the story, the villain who left buckshot and rubble in the wake of my departure. So for the shared shame of it, of being both the hurt and hurted, I should offer him my peace. Right?

Or maybe it’s none of that. What if I’m just tired and have nothing left to feed this fire? I want to lie down and close both eyes, trusting the black of the night to hold me and keep me safe.

Releasing my father to death without a grudge is a selfish choice. I want to sleep through the night.

//

I called him to see if he was still alive. It took three tries for him to pick up, but that’s not unusual. He doesn’t recognize the +353 area code and assumes it is either assassins or scammers trying to trick him into some circus of a crime. I’m already irritated when we eventually connect but mask it with questions.

An interview.

Q: How is your pain?

Q: Are you able to eat?

Q: Did you set up the home nurse?

Q: Is your insurance covering the chemo?

A: I feel like shit, but the pain hasn’t even started yet. This isn’t pain. Once it’s here, I won't be able to talk anymore.

A: I DoorDashed some catfish last night. I got some horchata in the fridge. I’ll have that in a bit. But I’m not hungry.

A: They kicked me off the program for the home health nurse. They said I missed too many calls from them, so I have to reapply.

A: They’re trying to stop the chemo. That pill is one thousand dollars a month, and they don’t want to cover it for a dead man. I called the other day to talk to someone, and they tried to sugarcoat it and tell me all kinds of BS. You know what I told her, that insurance lady?

Don’t spit in my face and call it rain.

//

A month has passed and I promised to give him a ring three weeks ago. Here we are again, another round of, is he or ain’t he? I had every intention of calling last week, on Sunday. But then there was a new recipe to try that led to a podcast about hidden treasure in New Mexico or Wyoming. Then, the mess of the meal preparation needed cleaning, and a bottle of Bordeaux needed drinking. The wiping down of countertops, loading the dishwasher just right so nothing remains on the plates, all remnants of soy, vinegar, honey, and brown rice. Then, the fire to tend to. Then I may as well have a shower, shave my legs and pits, deep condition my hair, cedar oil on my damp body until clean at last, and in pajamas—the ones I wear when there is no audience. Oversized men's bottoms paired with a shapeless cotton top. Tuck the pants into socks so they stay still in sleep. And by then, it was too late to call. It is Saturday again somehow, and I am steady enough to do this. I pick up my mobile and tap his name to dial.

Your call cannot be completed as dialed. Please check the number and try again.

I try five times. I double-check the number and cross-reference it with the last time we spoke. Say the numbers aloud as I tap them, as if the error is between my brain syncing up with the muscles in my hand. Plus, one, eight, three, one, three… I switched mobile networks recently. That’s probably the issue. Let me make sure I have the settings updated and the credit to call the States. None of this works. The number is dead, and I cannot name the emotion crackling through my skeleton, but my knees buckle in response, and my heart is a raging lunatic who can’t be talked off the edge of the skyscraper it’s dangling from.

I lay down on the floor of the sitting room of this 150-year-old cottage in this village in Ireland, where no one knows my emergency contact person is my ex-husband or that I am allergic to honey bees. I smile and cry silently at my aloneness. I hear nothing except the bleat of a single sheep from the field below and the flat song of my tinnitus competing with the drumming of my heart behind my breasts. Through the skylight, I see that outside, it is blacker than black and moonless. I am too tired to search for my father through the phone, but I let my eyes loose into the open outer space of the night holding up the sky; there are satellites hovering, ready to catch my signal.

The stars are my ancestors blinking in Morse code: You are ok, and I say out loud,

Hey Dad, I’m okay. I’ll try you tomorrow.

I close my eyes.