My dad and I were once invincible dominoes partners, I was his frente, and he was my compiche, my wingman. When the domino table materialized at that time of the night at our family parties, he scanned the room looking for me until we locked eyes. I am not competitive, but I was driven to win, if only to see the fire in his eyes. The thrill of the domino smack on the table, as my soft-spoken papi yelled “Capicuá!” — he just knew he killed it.
We are not close in the way some families are. We don’t tell each other secrets. When he was still physically able, my dad did not show his affection by way of hugs or saying “I love you.” Ours is a tacit, unspoken understanding that we’ve got each other’s backs.
When I was younger, he’d show his care and complicity by bringing me toasted peanuts or fixing my toys. Later, he’d slip out at the crack of dawn to clean my filthy car and fill up the tank before every trip back to Boston. My favorite moments were Papi and me in the kitchen, eating roasted batata with warm café con leche, talking politics and history before the rest of the household stirred. The mornings were always ours.
But when I was a teenager growing up in New Jersey, his unspoken love made me feel even more lonely in a family that always felt a little foreign to me. I come from a loud Pentecostal Dominican family that is quick to dispense advice and gossip, often while shouting over one another, but that rarely says things like “I love you” or “I am gay.” The important stuff goes unsaid.
I longed for the kind of dialogue I read in novels or saw in films, in which people shared their deepest fears and secrets and came out on the other side of the conversation feeling complete and warm. I envied my family’s faith, especially my dad’s unwavering belief that all that happens in the world — whether good or bad — was predetermined, part of God’s plan.
I did not believe in God the way he did. I felt abandoned, estranged, missing out on the complicity that gave him solace. I did not put my trust in an invisible man in the sky, but I did crave putting that trust in the people around me. I wanted them, not God, to be my plan. I longed to move away, to become independent and spread my wings away from my parents’ watchful eyes.
Our family was part of a wave of Dominicans who migrated to the Northeast in the 1980s and ’90s. By then, instead of murdering and imprisoning people, Joaquin Balaguer’s regime was killing Dominicans via hunger and unemployment. He spent an estimated $250 million to build a massive lighthouse dedicated to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s so-called discovery of the Americas.
My parents, who were in their 40s at the time, were laid off from their jobs when he cut public spending to build his beloved lighthouse. Considered too old to be employable and unable to see a future for themselves or us, they decided to leave.
My siblings had married and moved out by the time I joined the family in Trenton. Suddenly, I went from being the fourth child in a loud, bustling family, to being a sort of only child of middle age non-English speaking immigrant. While my dad went from being the patriarch, a deacon in his church and one of the most respected and known citizens of his town, to a man who depended on his kid to write checks, make phone calls to utility companies and translate paperwork. More than anything, he longed to return.
When it was time for me to go to college, the first in my family, Papi didn’t understand why I had to leave. In the Dominican Republic it is common to live at home while studying. He was angry — the preferred emotion Dominican men show to hide fear. We argued a lot those days. He wanted me near, I later understood, where he could protect me from the world.
After I graduated, my parents and I became a strange unit. Even though I was living on my own, my plans were often assumed to include them. Wedding invitations would come addressed to the three of us. I became accustomed to considering my parents, to seeing them as an extension of myself even if I did not live near them.
My father’s love spilled over to those I loved: kid, partner, friends, students. And when I got knocked up shortly after finishing my graduate studies, I was embarrassed to have to come back home again, this time with another life inside me. My childhood bedroom awaited me with warm blankets and gifts. My son was born in their bed, in their home, within the warmth of the security blanket they had knitted for me over the years.
Later, when I got divorced, my parents, together, helped raise him, reminding me — and this time, yes, now with words in addition to actions — that I was not alone. And when I was fired from a job at Harvard, my dad reminded me that in their home there would always be enough arroz con habichuela to go around. “Aquí siempre tienes una casa,” (“You will always have a home here”), he said. His words gave me the courage to fight back.
Over the past decade, our goodbyes became more prolonged as my mom grew grayer and as my dad’s embrace grew weaker and more trembly.
Two major surgeries, a debilitating illness and diabetes complications have weakened his muscles and memory but not his spirit. But when he suffered a massive stroke this year, doctors told us nothing more could be done. He can no longer speak. He is too weak to walk or eat. But he won’t go gentle in his sleep either. On most days I accompany him and hold his hand and read his Bible. I can feel his slow departure changing my DNA.
When I visited him last week, his eyes were open, and his face looked peaceful. The absence of pain in the dying is a beautiful gift for the living. I held his hand and stroked his bald head. I complained about the snow and the traffic. I told him about my classes, how I am teaching gringos about Gregorio Luperón, one of the leaders in the Dominican restoration war, at Princeton, where I am a professor of Black Latino studies. I could feel his pride.
I closed my eyes and told him I would be OK. I know he worries, I am, after all, his baby. “You are such a good father, such a good grandpa,” I told him. I opened my eyes and saw he was tearing up. And I could hear his voice so clear now, telling me it is all going to be OK; he won’t be far, just to the other side of the curtain.
I cried too, with gratitude for our tacit, complicit dialogue. That we could sit together, in silence, just a bit longer.
Lorgia García Peña, a professor at Princeton University, is the author, most recently, of “Translating Blackness: Migrations of Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective.”
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads.