Schrödinger’s Father
How many pieces of proof does it take to convince you that somebody is the person they say they are? Two? Three?
“Hi, Dad,” I say, well, I say to my dad.
“Hi, Daniel,” the man seated behind the floor-to-ceiling window says back to me through a phone.
That is in fact, my name.
One.
I look at him and study his body. His skin is somehow more wrinkled and more like rubber. There are more signs of the bones lying underneath that hold the rest of him in place. His eyes look dazed.
He is very much an older version of the person I know as my dad, but he is close enough.
Two.
I show him a photo of my family. Our family. He names the people in it as his eyes search the pixels on my phone. He names me. My mom. My brother. Himself.
He names everybody correctly. He does not name the two young boys, but he does identify them correctly as my brother’s two sons. Still, I accept it.
Three.
He is my dad. Sort of.
Because he’s still looking at the photo when he says: “Why am I there?”
This statement sends a chill throughout my body, though it simply manifests itself in a raised eyebrow.
“Why are you in the picture?” I ask to clarify.
He nods.
I chuckle. “It’s because this picture is very old.”
His only reaction is to nod again, and I suddenly realize that he thinks this photo is of us today.
His statement is a mistake. It is one of the metaphorical cracks in the man in front of me that tells me that things are not quite right. He looks so much like the person I know as “Dad,” even if a bit older, wrinklier, quieter. But in some ways, he’s nothing like the man I remember at all, the man who was loud, boisterous, told terrible stories and jokes, but most of all was mentally sharp—often too sharp—and would never be confused about why he was in a photo.
So this man must not be my dad. And yet, he very obviously is.
And, being the key operator.
Those two things are mutually exclusive. Or they are supposed to be. A coin cannot be heads and tails. An object cannot be in motion and completely still. A person can’t be my father, and not be at the same time.
And yet under certain conditions, they are.
And.
Most days, I continue to talk to my dad through a window.
But today is special. I am allowed in an outdoor courtyard where I can actually sit next to him, where I can actually touch him.
I play him big band music from my phone and slowly I can see him smile and though it is subtle, I wonder if I see his head nodding along to the beat.
I show him a few photos. Many are the usual suspects. My mom. Our family.
But I decide to show him a few photos of New York from when I lived there.
“New York!” he says.
I show him a photo of Manhattan Chinatown. It’s his old apartment building specifically, which is miraculously still standing.
“Home!” he says.
I show him more photos, many are photos of old photos I found in various old albums and boxes, and they are old, very old, some of which are probably many decades old. I am not even sure if he is the person in the photo.
But he responds anyway.
“My mother,” he says softly.
I have no way to verify this. I have never met my grandmother. I don’t even know what she looks like and if this is her.
“Me,” he continues anyway, pointing to a little boy whose shoulder is underneath the hand of the woman he just called “mother,” a boy who must be four or five years old, dressed in white with black leather shoes, and if I look closely enough, he does vaguely resemble the man sitting in front of me.
“A long time ago…” he mumbles.
I suppose he is actually my dad, the continuation of the boy in the photo although the literal cells that made up the boy are not at all the same literal cells that make up the same man today.
It brings to mind again the question of what exactly makes somebody who they are. I’ve pondered this question many times before and I always come back to it because if you really consider the question, it wrecks many ideas of what we think it means to be somebody. Is it their cells? Is it their knowledge? Is it their personality?
If my dad has to prove he’s my dad through his cells then he would obviously fail. Many of his cells are missing and the ones that remain are not the ones of his childhood, let alone the ones of ten years ago.
But if he has to prove he’s my dad through his knowledge or personality, I’m not sure he would be able to either. Only bits and pieces of both remain, signs that somebody was once there, though they are long gone.
I wish I could ask him more about the photos, about his mother, about his life in New York. I have finally gotten to the age where I care about the story of his life, but here I am and I am too late. All I can get is a patchwork, the showing of some photos and seeing his various different reactions.
And it has to be good enough because it is what I get. The chance to sit in a courtyard underneath the morning sun, listening to some old big band music and choosing to be a son who still gets to spend some time with his father and learn whatever he can about him.
At the very least, I get that. It’s admittedly a weird space to be in, to look at my dad and see somebody strange and foreign and unfamiliar, but to also see somebody who embodies glimpses of a story I know that I am the continuation of.
I leave New York and return to the modern day and show him a photo of him and my mom sitting on a couch in their old home, one of the first photos I took when I moved home to take care of them now five years ago.
He smiles.
“Mom,” he says, although sometimes he does call her “my wife.”
I doubt he remembers that time. He just sees the two of them, together, like they used to be.
But of course, I remember.
There is a difference between acknowledging mistakes and having regrets.
When I first moved back to take care of my parents, I remember being surprised that the parent I struggled most with was actually my dad. He started saying things that made no sense. He started doing things that made no sense. He himself, starting making no sense. And I fought him on it because my dad is supposed to be a certain person and suddenly my prior experiences and interactions with my dad suddenly seemed to have been completely erased or rendered meaningless.
That was the hardest part of taking care of my dad. Because it didn’t seem like he was my dad at all or that I was even his son. All my actions seemed framed as a stranger bossing him around. Everything I gave him went unnoticed or forgotten. It hurt when he got upset at me, because it was the latest in a long line of unfair accusations against me—and made worse because it seemed like it was an isolated one-off incident to him.
I was clever though, and I thought that this was a problem that could be solved.
I held a funeral for my dad. A one-person funeral where I played the role of pastor and chaplain and attendee and family relative and son. I held it at a park with a pond, the very place where he took me as a child to throw bits of bread at ducks for them to eat. I thought it’d be fitting to also, in that place, say goodbye to the person I knew.
I have the journal entries to back this up, but I genuinely thought that this funeral, which now sounds like the machination of a seven-year-old, would pave the way for a better caregiving experience.
Because I needed to grieve the loss of the man I knew as my dad. Because I thought that if I didn’t think of the man in front of me as my dad, then I could take better care of him.
I now know that the first part I got right. The second, was a mistake.
Pretending like my dad had died led to a nightmare of mental gymnastics, twisting myself over and over to logically conclude that he wasn’t my dad. But of course he was. He looked like him. He had similar mannerisms. He forgot things he should know but he was still the frustrating combination grumpy and charming that he has always been.
He was the continuation of the story that makes him, him, even if the cells of eighty-year-old dad are gone and dead, we still have the cells of ninety-year-old dad which are alive and kicking.
Still, I brute-forced my logic onto him because if I didn’t see him as my dad then I wouldn’t be hurt so much by the words he doesn’t even know he says—but of course the truth always seeped in and it just fueled the anger that no father should ever say things like that to his son, let alone a son trying to play caregiver to a father.
Which naturally reinforced my desire to think of him as not my dad, because then it would all be better, right?
It was a vicious cycle, and it was a mistake.
I now know that it is better to see the parent I took care of as both my dad, and not my dad, at the same time.
But I don’t view what I did as a regret. It was a mistake, and it was how I learned that sometimes you must hold the tension that allows two things to coexist that should not be able to and that there is actually a name for this phenomenon and it is called ambiguous loss.
You can lose something, and not lose it at the same time. You can not be sure.
The parent I took care of was no longer my dad. But still, he was. Even if to this day, it does not often feel like it.
On occasion, my dad gets other visitors.
“Hi, John!” they all say.
“Hi,” my dad says back.
“Do you remember me?”
They are my relatives, my cousins, my mom’s friends. Their names don’t matter, because he does not remember them.
“You look familiar,” he sometimes says.
“I don’t remember,” he sometimes says.
“I’m not sure,” he sometimes says.
I wonder what it’s like, to see faces that look familiar to you though you don’t know why. You can’t recall their name, who they are, how you know them, and still they keep acting like you do in fact know them and it must be unsettling to have that feeling, made even worse that you feel it constantly, all the time.
It’s true though; my dad should know them. He’s known all of them for a long, long, long time. Some of them longer than I have been alive.
It’s hard for me to watch, because I know I am watching the person I know as my dad continue to slip away.
And I wonder if I am next in line.
On one of my visits, I go with my brother. A new pandemic variant has come to town, so we’re back to talking to our dad through the glass window.
The visits are largely the same, whether I am with my brother or not. This is in part because some of my rituals are taken straight from him.
“Hi, Dad,” my brother says.
“Hi,” my dad says back. Sometimes he includes my brother’s name. Sometimes not.
But this is actually true when it’s just me, too.
“Daniel’s here too,” my brother says.
My dad nods. If I am also on the call, sometimes I will also add: “Hi, Dad!”
Like I always do.
“Have you eaten dinner yet?” My brother asks.
“No, not yet.”
This is a mistake. It is six p.m. My dad, like most residents in this place, is kept on a relatively strict schedule, and he always eats around five or five-thirty. So he has definitely eaten.
Still, his answer is always the same. It is the standard-issue answer.
No, not yet. And always spoken the exact same way.
My brother mixes in a few more questions and statements that are specific to him. Have you had coffee? Are you watching TV? Be nice to everybody.
He shares some photos on his phone. Some of them are the same as the ones I share. Some of them are his own, probably of his family, and I choose to let them have their own moment—father and other son.
Sometimes when I come with my brother, we take turns talking to our dad, or sometimes we have a conference call with the three of us, although I think this can confuse our dad.
But today, I stand six feet away in the background, smiling and occasionally jumping around to be a source of visual entertainment.
I am also just observing, watching my brother and our dad have a moment, and suddenly it dawns on me that this is our dad, and that I have to use the possessive plural because my dad also belongs to somebody else because he is still a dad to somebody else.
My brother shows a photo of my mom—our mom—to our dad, and even though the phone is facing away from me, I can tell exactly which photo it is because of my dad’s reaction to it.
“Mom,” my dad states.
My brother mimics a steering wheel with his hands. “She’s driving.”
My dad chuckles.
I imagine the photo in my mind. My mom is standing in front of her Honda Odyssey, as she still is in my dad’s memories. And I can see my brother is using that memory in his favor.
“Tell her to be careful,” my dad says, a rare statement that does not follow most of his usual script.
“I will,” my brother says back.
I almost turn away. It is becoming too painful to simply observe and watch. It is one thing to come visit on my own. It is another to see my brother and my dad, both of them older, two people who I know are my family but somehow I just see two signs of my childhood that is now distant and fading if not gone forever.
I really wish that my dad’s memories were in fact, not memories. I wish they were true. I wish my mom was still driving, because then I could bring her here to see him. And one of the reasons why it is always hard to see my dad as my dad and not somebody else is because if my dad is my dad then my mom should also be with him. She should be here. They should go together.
But they are not.
I almost turn away. A part of me wants to run away and never come see my dad again. Because my mom is gone. The man I know as my dad is gone. And so there is no point in coming anymore. It would be easier, to never come visit again, to pretend that my dad is in fact, dead. Or so it seems.
Of course, I now know the truth is the opposite. To run away is fine, but to run and never come back, would be to repeat the caregiving mistake of before. I should allow myself to grieve my dad and my mom and my youth and everything else that I miss—even my caregiving identity.
And, I should allow myself to think of this man in front of me as my dad, our dad.
So I stand there and hold my position. Because I have learned that—as hard as it is, as mind bending and impossible to grasp as it is—in the long run, it is actually easier to do the hard work of staying, of being the force that holds two opposing ideas in tension, of allowing both to be true.
Schrödinger’s Cat is one of those thought experiments that seems fascinating in theory and utterly silly in practice. My non-quantum-mechanics-expert explanation of it goes like this:
Suppose there is a cat stuck in a closed box with a vial of poison in it. The vial is linked to an atom, and if the atom decays then the poison is secreted and the cat dies. But because an atom is an atom, the atom can also not decay. It can be both, a superposition of two states at the same time.
So is the cat dead or alive?
The thought experiment proposes that, like apparently many things in the subatomic world, you can’t know the answer until you actually measure it. The actual act of measuring or observing the object is what causes it to become one state or the other.
Basically, if the cat is dependent on the state of this subatomic particle whose state can’t be determined until you observe it, maybe the cat is in effect, also a subatomic particle. It’s both dead and alive, until you open the box and actually observe it. In which case it becomes one or the other.
It’s hard to imagine a thought experiment like this being useful. Even if it’s actually been “proven possible” with light photons, ions and sort-of-tuning-forks that simultaneously vibrate and don’t vibrate, at best this is a for-fun philosophical exercise to discuss the nature of being.
Which, however, is perfect for someone like me.
These days, I imagine my dad as the cat in this thought experiment. He, like the cat, can be both dead and alive, without either state being “chosen.”
Which also means I do not have to open the box that he’s in. I can choose to accept that both of his states are the reality.
He is my dad, and he is not.
There is at least one more serious mistake I made as a caregiver, although I am again grateful to have made it.
On the day my mom passed away, I told my dad the truth.
I walked through the garage, through the door to the laundry room and through the door to the living room where he lay there on the couch as he always did.
“Mom died,” I told him.
It destroyed him. Which of course, also destroyed me.
I can still see it today. The way he turned his face into the couch and away from me. The way he groaned. The way his voice—usually drained and lifeless—felt like it had emotion to it.
“I can’t believe it…” he muttered.
I remember leaving the house as soon as I could because I couldn’t take it.
And I remember when I came home and walked through the first door and then the second door he immediately asked me: “Daniel, is your mom still at the hospital?”
“Yes,” I remember saying.
I lied. Because I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth.
Because even if he had forgotten the truth of the fact, he clearly had not forgotten the truth of the feeling.* I saw it in his eyes. I heard it in his voice. I saw it in the way that his body was still positioned away from the outside world and instead into the couch.
The emotion lingered. And that must have been in fact, worse. To have the emotions of anger or sadness and guilt and loss and grief but to have no memory of why those emotions exist.
I know the feeling. I imagine we all do. To feel something but not know why we feel it. And then to spend hours, if not days or months or lifetimes, trying to understand why. I imagine it must be that much harder for him.
And so I learned from my mistake, as you’re supposed to. I now hide the fact from him, so that I can carry the feeling for him, so that he does not have to.
I often wonder: What’s the point of visiting my dad, if he won’t remember? What does it matter to him?
There is the obvious response that I will remember doing it, that visiting him is as much for me as it is for him. But I also sometimes wonder if we can’t always know the totality of the outcomes of what we do. Our actions are only a small fraction of why anything happens in the cosmic universe. And so we might as well choose to do the thing that we believe in, the thing we find value in.
Because even if my dad does not remember me visiting, what if he remembers something?
And so I continue to pay a visit to my dad. Because he is in fact, still my dad. I am still his son, the boy with a minuscule amount of knowledge about his father but legend says five loaves of bread and two fish can feed hundreds and so maybe a minuscule amount can miraculously become a wealth of knowledge too.
Like my brother, I use our father-son connection to my advantage, to my dad’s advantage. Even if he does not know it, I can be a reminder of the truth of the feeling that there is still good in the world, even if the truth of the fact seems to suggest that there is not.
I show my dad a photo of my mom. She is standing in front of her Honda Odyssey, as she is in his memories. And I use the lessons learned from my mistake in my favor.
“She’s driving,” I say, mimicking a steering wheel with my hands.
He nods. “Tell her to be careful.”
“I will,” I grin.
And then I take a gamble.
“She misses you,” I say, which was, and is still true. But then I lie. “She’ll come see you later today.”
He nods, and I wonder if I detect a smile.
I wonder if it’s a mistake to lie. My childhood upbringing says it is. But I do it anyway.
Because in a few minutes he will have forgotten what I said. And yet, I know that the emotion of that smile will linger on, and that that emotion is something only someone like me—his son—can give to him.
And maybe she will come visit him in his dreams. In which case, I’m not lying then, am I?
“Hi, Dad.”
“Hi, Daniel.”
When I visit, there is a part of my brain that tells me to treasure the way he says my name. It is unique to him. It is not a native American accent of any kind, not Californian like my own. It is part New Yorker because he spent so much of his life there, part New York-Manhattan-Chinatown specifically because that was his community, and also part like nothing else in the universe because he is his own person and he has always gone to great lengths to ensure that I know that.
Dahn-yee-yull.
I treasure it because there will come a day, probably soon, when I will never hear him say my name ever again.
I suppose he could not make it. He might not live long enough to reach that age of forgetfulness. It might be some sense of relief for him that way, actually. It might also be some relief for me. But my dad is my dad and so I’m guessing he’ll continue to be a stubborn fellow and so I might as well prepare for it anyway.
For the day when he will see my face, see it as familiar though he will not know why, and when I say “who am I?” he will mumble and go, “I’m not sure.”
It will hurt, but I already know what I will do. I will ask him if he’s eaten yet. I will show him photos of his family. And I will tell him that his son, Daniel, will come visit him later today.
I hope he will nod and smile, and that he will feel emotion sweep him off the chair he loves sitting in—an overwhelming sense of expectation that his son is coming to visit him. And I hope that that feeling will linger on, even if what he’s excited about he no longer knows.
He will not know that I am his son. He will not know that he is my father.
But I suppose that’s okay. Because he can not know. He can not be my dad.
And yet he always will be.
*this phrase comes from,“The Truth of fact, the truth of feeling”, a short story by Ted Chiang, one of my favorite sci-fi authors.