The last time I stayed with my father in Miami over the holidays, I made the mistake of thinking he was lonely. I had a bad habit of trying to decode his emotional state from external markers, in this case his threadbare green bathmat. Part of a towel set my parents acquired when I was seven or so, it had been in a sad state for more than a decade, but on my most recent visit the previous winter, it was covered with holes, actually disintegrating. Each morning before work, my father stepped out of the shower and wiped his feet on it. Evidently he did not register its lack of absorbent effect, the feel of cold tile against skin.
My husband, Max, and I planned to stay with him for more than a week, into the new year, but to celebrate Christmas Day itself with Max’s family at his grandparents’ place a few miles away. As we started to finalize arrangements to open presents, have dinner, and in between take a walk to see the flock of wild peacocks his grandmother had mentioned in recent phone calls, the specter of the bathmat rose from my memories of the last visit. I couldn’t put it out of my mind.
My father had, to put it kindly, never been gifted at housekeeping, but I worried what it might mean that he was living this way, moving through his days with so little attention to the world around him. Was he depressed? Ill? Deteriorating? Although we weren’t always together at Christmas, under the circumstances I thought it might be cruel to spend the holiday with other people when I was in town.
My essay, “Cleaning Up on Christmas,” about the time I stayed with my father to keep him company on Christmas Day and ended up in his house alone, cleaning, is up at Medium.