Sick on a journey—
in my dream staggering
over withered fields.
THIS IS THE LAST haiku ever written by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho Matsuo. He dictated it from his deathbed in a rented room over a florist’s shop in the city of Osaka, in the autumn of 1694, too weak to use the writing brush himself. A few days later he was dead.
I stumbled across the poem for the first time soon after my father died, and it has fascinated me ever since. Just seventeen syllables in the original Japanese, it somehow manages to talk about the loneliness of individuality, the sorrow of ending, the yearning to travel onward—even if that journey can continue only in the imagination.
Does it seem as if I’m reading too much into a poem that is, after all, just a sentence long? It helps to know a bit about Basho himself.
Basho had spent the ten years before his death as a kind of wandering poet-priest, crisscrossing Japan on foot at a time when travel was dangerous—the roads little more than mud tracks through lonely countryside and wild mountains full of brigands. Dressed in the robes of a Buddhist monk, he had walked hundreds of miles with a pack on his back to visit Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, ruined castles, famous battlefields and places of unusual natural beauty, all of which became the subjects of his poetry. He did this to sharpen his sense of both the wonder and the brevity of all things, and to remind himself that life itself is nothing but a journey, a pilgrimage in which everything is always in flux. To experience the world in this way was a religious act for him, and the poetry he wrote a form of religious devotion.
He barely gave himself time to recover from his longest journey ever—a five-hundred-mile trip through rugged northern Japan—when he set out for Osaka in 1694. He probably knew it would kill him. Osaka was just forty miles from his home outside of Edo, and he was only fifty, but he was so physically broken from his years of wandering that he could walk only a few miles at a stretch and finally had to be carried. Once in Osaka, he came down with a fever, which he ignored until it worsened and he couldn’t get up. Shivering in his quilts, he dictated the poem I translated above: Tabi ni yande yume wa kareno o kakemeguru.
The first time I read the poem, something in me resisted. The word dream felt unusually abstract, especially for Basho, the most physical and specific of poets; it seemed to make the poem into a rather simplistic metaphor, in which life is a dream and the world a barren field. Sure, I get it, but so what? Tell me something I don’t already know.
Then something happened, a kind of imaginative grace. I remembered that this was not simply a poem, a made-up thing, but the actual words of a dying man. I pictured Basho lying in his quilts, too weak to sit up, gripped by a feverish hallucination in which, from a great height, he watched his dream-self doing what he could not do: stagger homeward.
Suddenly I had trouble holding back the sorrow he, too, must have felt, the sorrow he had, in fact, hidden inside the poem, a relic to outlive him. In the days that followed, I would be in the midst of my ordinary domestic life—making a peanut butter sandwich for my son, Jonah, or pushing my daughter, Maia, on the swing in the backyard—when out of nowhere I would think of the poem. Then my face would go numb, my eyes start to ache, and I would feel as if something were reaching up through my throat, trying to be born.
ONE DAY, OUT OF nowhere, my father began having trouble walking. Suddenly, getting to the newsstand on the corner to buy the paper became a major undertaking for him: one slow, wobbly step after another, separated by long pauses, as if he were trying to remember what came next. We were all baffled and frightened by the change—he more than anyone—and yet he refused to let anyone go for him. He wanted so desperately to keep to his usual routine.
“It’s my back,” he told me. “I’ve got to see a chiropractor.” He had invited me out to eat sushi, but was now making a scene in the restaurant, lying on the floor and doing stretches next to our table. The waiter hovered, looking alarmed.
“Maybe do that later?” I asked, offering him a hand so he could hoist himself up.
He ignored me, raising his arms over his head, grimacing. “A good realignment is all I need.”
My eyes narrowed. I had just lost my job: Prof. Park’s Korean Studies Publication Project had burned up its entire endowment in a Korean stock market crash. Why couldn’t we talk about that? Why was it always him? I remember riding the subway home afterward, full of self-pity. Back at home I called David, who was now a medical doctor doing a fellowship in spinal cord injuries at a hospital uptown. “Dad can barely walk,” I told him.
“I’ve seen,” he said.
“He says it’s his back.”
“He’s somatizing.” Medical jargon for channeling the emotions into bodily discomfort. Our father had been tending to one or another hard-to-pin-down ailment for years, trying to find a name for his confusion in life. The new name was I can’t walk.
“He’s driving me crazy,” I said.
A few days later, I got a call from my mother, who told me that my father had fallen in the street and been taken to the emergency room in an ambulance. She had spoken to him and he sounded all right, but I needed to go get him. “I’m leaving now,” I told her, full of guilt at having ever doubted him or the reality of his problem. I put on my shoes and ran to the elevator.
But as soon as I stepped outside, something shifted and I went into a kind of reverse panic. How was I supposed to rescue my father? What if I didn’t do it right? The hospital was on the other side of town, but instead of hailing a cab I started to walk, and though I was in a rush, I stopped at a fruit stand and bought an apple and ate it down to the core standing right there. A part of me understood that everything would change forever as soon as I reached the ER, and I didn’t want that to happen. I wanted everything to stay the same just a little while longer.
When I finally got to the emergency room, I found him on a bed in an alcove, dressed in one of those short backless robes that showed his legs, white and vulnerable. “Help me up,” he said. He seemed to think I could take him home without talking to anyone first, and I would have done exactly that, would have snuck him out the door still in his backless gown and into a cab, if the doctor hadn’t shown up just then with a clipboard in his hands.
“Mr. Siegel,” asked the doctor, addressing my father, “do you know who the president is?”
“What’s it matter?” asked my father, “they’re all thieves.”
“True, but which thief is it now?”
My father smiled wolfishly, as he used to in court when he had nothing to go on but sheer nerve. He mentioned how disillusioned with politics he’d become, and then brought up the unusually fine weather we’d been having. But when the doctor wouldn’t go away, he looked cornered. “Okay, I’ll go with Carter,” he said, deflated.
The answer was Clinton.
My father turned to me, looking sad and a little guilty, as if he’d let us both down. Now everything was going to change. “Are you afraid?” he asked me, offering his hand.
It seemed like an odd thing to say, as if I were the one in the backless gown, not him, but I took the hand, grateful. “What’s to be afraid of?” I asked, and then realized I was trembling.
Later, a neurologist would tell me that full-blown Alzheimer’s disease often announces its arrival in a single dramatic collapse: massive decompensation was the term he used. He added that the illness had probably been progressing for a long time, a decade or more. It sounded like an accusation, and I bristled: I knew my father, and there had never been anything wrong with him, nothing we could see. If there had been, I would have done something.
Yet when I stopped to think about it, I realized that all the evidence had been out in the open for us to recognize if only we had wanted to. Shouldn’t we have known something was wrong when he started sending profanity-laced letters to The New York Times? Or when he opened a package of lox spread in the supermarket, scooped some out with his finger, and then put the package back on the shelf? Or when he locked himself in the bathroom and couldn’t get out? How about when his driving became so scary that Sean started chauffeuring him around town? And then there was the afternoon he spent wearing swim goggles around the house . . . Perrin called him The Situationist, after the French art movement that staged street happenings designed to disrupt bourgeois social norms. We had been great at explaining everything away with a joke.
So had he. When I told him that he had to buy the lox spread now, he laughed. “At these prices, snacks should be included.”
It took me a while to put all that together. In the present moment, there was only the spectacle of my father in the hospital room to which he’d been moved. He lay in the bed as if drunk: incoherent, slurring his words, his eyes glassy and half closed. He didn’t seem to know where he was. The next day, he was wide awake and talkative, but he sounded like an Ashbery poem, a mysterious flow of language outspeeding its meaning. I stood beside his bed, nodding as he talked on and on, wondering how we had gotten here from a bad back. “Dad,” I interjected, “I’ve got to go home for a little while, but can I get you anything before I leave?”
He looked at me pleasantly. “Maybe just a blow job.”
I nodded again. “Okay, I’ll see you tomorrow.”
The psych resident on his case, standing off in the corner, started to guffaw. He was dressed in a white shirt that looked as if it hadn’t been changed in days, and he seemed half-mad with exhaustion.
In the days that followed, my father started getting out of bed and falling, so we hired an aide to stay with him and make sure he didn’t wander and hurt himself. Honestly, he was probably trying to escape; he had moved into a new stage in which he feared his surroundings. The look in his eyes was horrible to see, a mixture of terror and rage, a kidnap victim’s expression. He began screaming at the aide, pushed away a nurse who tried to take his blood pressure. “Don’t you fucking put a hand on me!” he wailed, and both the fear and the violence in his voice reduced me to a child with no idea of what to do. When nobody from the family was present, the hospital put him in restraints, cuffing his hands to the bedframe. We objected to that, so they knocked him out with an antipsychotic drug instead; he slept for two days straight without opening his eyes; we couldn’t even shake him awake. When we objected to that, they moved him to the psychiatric wing, where people wandered in their pajamas, weeping, and attendants who looked like NFL linebackers handed out little paper cups of pills.
One of those evenings, I was at home, getting ready to go back. I hated going but couldn’t stay away: the hospital had come to seem like a dangerous place to leave my father alone. Jonah, who was two, asked me why I was leaving again; he wanted me to spend time with him. “I’ve got to go take care of Grandpa. He’s sick.”
“How sick?”
“Very sick.”
He seemed to think about this. “You lift him up, Daddy. You lift him up, up, up.” He raised his arms higher and higher into the air, stretching his frame. The idea was clear: I was to put my father on my shoulders, like I did for my son.
We switched hospitals and neurologists, fought with everybody, pushed for more and more tests, got used to being glared at by the staff whenever we walked in the door. The days went by, and our father seemed to come back to himself, though it was a weird new version of himself, with halting speech and that strange, shuffling walk, as if making his way across ice.
I remember taking him in his wheelchair to a cognitive therapy class in the building, led by two women who used a blackboard to guide the patients through three or four very simple crossword puzzles. One by one, the members of the class struggled to fill in the blanks: a three-letter word for motor vehicle, beginning with C; a two-letter word that means the opposite of down. After the last puzzle, one of the women asked if there were any questions. My father raised his hand in response. “I have a question,” he said, sounding as if he were cross-examining a witness. “And I would like a straight answer.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I have been trying to find out what happened to me. What is happening to me.” I could see him trying to put on his old face, the one he used in the courtroom with judges and juries. “But wherever I seek an answer, I come up against a wall.”
“That must be frustrating for you,” said the woman.
“It is. It is very frustrating, and I’m growing tired of it. I deserve an answer.”
“What do you think has happened to you?”
A crack in his suave expression. He looked frightened. “I don’t want to say.”
“You don’t want to say?”
His enormous brown eyes seemed to melt. “Yes, I don’t want to say, because if I did, I’m afraid it would force me down a path I don’t want to take.” He began to cry, his chest heaving up and down, his bare forearms, thin and white, gripping the arms of his wheelchair. I shifted from foot to foot, not knowing what to do. We had, in fact, already settled on a diagnosis of Alzheimer’s during a meeting in the neurologist’s office a couple of days before. My father had sat listening, a vacant expression on his face.
We brought him home from the hospital, wheeling him into an apartment he didn’t seem to remember. The disease moved quickly after that, quicker than it was supposed to. I’d read that Alzheimer’s takes decades to play out, but within a couple of weeks, he’d lost the ability to walk. Moments later, he’d forgotten he’d lost it, clambering out of his wheelchair and collapsing to the floor. David, Sean, and I lifted him up and back into the wheelchair. “Dad, you have to stay in your wheelchair, okay? You can’t get out,” I told him.
“Okay, sure.” He nodded earnestly.
“You understand? Don’t try to get up.”
“I’m not deaf.”
I went off to the kitchen and came back to find him spread-eagle on the floor again. It was a kind of Abbott and Costello routine, played for horror instead of laughs. My mother finally seat-belted him in and he pulled at the belt, unable to figure out how to unlatch it, screeching profanities at us: You mother fucking, cock sucking, shit eating . . . The worst part of it wasn’t the tirade, but how oddly impersonal it sounded, as if he were screaming at strangers. For the first time, I worried that he didn’t know who I was.
Had he forgotten me? The question was too painful to ask, but I was aware that he didn’t ever use my name, or ask anything about me, or register the distress I was feeling when I picked him up off the floor and put him back in his wheelchair. Maybe it was because his own distress was so much greater, or maybe it was because the guy who had taken my hand in the ER had been switched out for another identical but neurally damaged version of that person. I knew this, but nevertheless the thought that he had forgotten me felt like a threat aimed at the center of my own identity. It was a knife pointed at my chest, and he seemed to be the one holding that knife in his hand. I blamed him.
Nowadays, I never think about the year that followed. Not about the golden period, just a couple of weeks long, in which he would sit with the Daily News spread on the table in front of him, slowly deciphering a story about baseball. Not the day when the words in the paper finally became gibberish to him and he couldn’t read anymore. Not the last time I saw him, near the end, when he was propped up in a bed in his home office, staring at the wall as if unaware of his surroundings. He did not seem to register my presence. He had given up eating, had long ago stopped talking, and his hands were curled in toward his chest, an effect of the brain damage. I never think of that moment, of how, though completely still, he looked like he was driving somewhere very fast.
LATELY, WHEN I RECALL Basho’s poem, I tend not to think about it so much as simply live inside of it, watching the scene from a great height, as if I were a bird. I see bare trees and empty fields, without a trace of human presence, except for a single lone figure, staggering over the furrows. The figure drifts to the right and then the left, falls to its knees, and then gets up again. It is the wandering poet-priest Basho, so feverish he can barely walk and yet determined to keep going, to get home, even if that can happen only in the imaginative space of his poem, beyond the confines of his body and the limits of time.
And then I dip down for a closer look and see that the figure is not Basho but my father, and that the dream, the wish for the safety of home, is my own.