The Road to Damascus

I went to Beirut in June of 2010 because my father was dying.

This sentence, palpably illogical – my father was not dying in Beirut – is nonetheless true.

When my father was in hospital in 2008, after nearly dying from a perforated ulcer, then from MRSA, the doctors said to him,categorically, ‘You drink, you die.’  We all heard them. We talked about it. And for almost two years, he did not drink, and he didn’t die.

And then, early in 2010, in remission from a cancer diagnosed a year before that, he started drinking again. I don’t know whether he died because he drank; or whether he drank because he was sure he was going to die; or because he was afraid to die and wanted to forget about it; or because he just wanted, by then, to die. It is strange to understand that all of these can be true at once. Suffice it to say: he drank; he died.