I imagine us sitting at our simple wooden table in our little kitchen with the window open to the view of Citta` della Pieve, or outside on the terrace, surrounded by the geraniums that my mother so lovingly planted, eating together. The good times were many, and some bad times too. It was life in its fullness with my father and my family.

Looking back today at pictures and images I have stored in my mind, I remember funny and fun things of my dad. He would stall our Renault 4  in the piazza waving at people — the Cetonesi looking at him like he was from Mars — and I would be so humiliated I would run for cover behind my friends … When I was a kid I was slightly and foolishly embarrassed that he did not speak Italian properly — how silly children are — while he worked to find his place in a new world.

My friends, conversely, and his, never minded, and they all put forth their best to understand my father, with affection and good humor. Everyone seemed to love him, and in fact, were always enriched by him.

And now he is gone, and I wish I could take his heart in my hand, or his hand, now, as an equal person, an adult, more or less of the same age, and thank him.

The truth is, I didn’t know how to be with him anymore. I had lost the habit of intimacy with my father.

When I saw Dad for Christmas, just a few weeks before he died, he was not feeling great. His cancer had begun to make itself felt, finally surging after a 15-month silent death sentence, and I didn’t know how to cope with it, the sickness that I knew would break his body down.

Anyway, one morning he was sitting at the head of the table where he usually sat, in the kitchen of his house in Oregon, looking out onto the woods and the city of Eugene, and after placing himself into his spot and me getting my coffee, he said, “Bird, would you sit with me for a while? I would like to tell you a story.”

His eyes searched mine and asked for something they never had, with a tenderness or vulnerability I had never known in him.

I sat facing him, full-haired and strong, though sallow in the face now, and he told me about his first time at the symphony with his parents — my grandparents — to hear Die Moldau of Smetana, and how that piece of music had forever changed his life. It was a beautiful story of his childhood that I had never known, and while he told it his eyes flashed and his smile blossomed. I listened to him with a smile on my face because the child in me related to the child in him, and simultaneously tears streaked my face because I understood that he was going to die and he understood it, too, most importantly, and that was part of why he was telling me all this. He wanted me to understand something about him that, in fact, I had not understood or even known.

In the following days after he told me that story I played the Smetana on my computer while sitting near him, while he wrote and kept his diary and grappled with his illness seeping in, and he looked at me and smiled. “Die Moldau,” he said, and he winked — to beauty, that is, and perhaps to childhood, too. Or maybe to understanding something about the child in him.

I replay in my mind the final stories of moments I had with my father, and the words ring strong and true, but the thing — one thing — that hurts me now is that I didn’t hold your hand, Dad. I looked at your hands, old and full of veins, and I didn’t know how to take them in mine anymore, as I once had without fear or barriers, the way we did on the streets in Cremona when you walked me to school. I had lost the ability to hold your hand somewhere along the years and the paths that took me away from you in my heart, the way life does with time and distance and adulthood.

I didn’t know how to touch you anymore but for the shortest of moments, though I caressed your face one day and rested the palm of my hand on your cheek, stubbly and gray, by then. I wanted my hand to stay there, and I wanted to feel your hair, and I wanted to put my hand over your hand and feel your heartbeat, but you would have been uncomfortable and I would not have wanted to be rejected by you.

I didn’t know how to manage the shallow struggle of your breath and the panic the sound created in me that caused me to run from the room in fear.

Then one day in the kitchen you said, Birdkins. would you give me a massage?

The request surprised me but pleased me more than anything could have. Dad sat on this stool in the kitchen and he was wearing a black sweatshirt, and I massaged his whole back and shoulders, broad and strong in spite of his illness. Dad moaned and groaned in relief and comfort, I think, releasing the sense of being old and untouched and also being in pain from cancer and sciatica and all sorts of things that happen to us when we are 85.

Dad closed his eyes and moaned and my step-mom laughed and said, ‘I want what he is having,’ and we all laughed, and I laughed and tears streaked my face because I knew that I was privileged to touch my father’s body one last time.

I knew inside of me that I would never see you again, yet I didn’t know how to be in your space anymore. I was skittish and shy and I did not extend of myself. I didn’t know how to look deeply in your eyes and to stay, to stay there in trust and openness. When I said goodbye I looked away, and I wonder now if you followed me with your eyes as I walked away, knowing it would be the last time you saw me.

Before you died I wrote you a letter which I never sent. I wanted you to be at peace, and me with you. If I had written you a letter just saying how wonderful you had been it would have been unfair to me, and if I had sent the one I wanted to send, it would have been unfair to you. So I sent nothing.

I wish I had understood how to strike the balance that was fair to me and to you and that honored us both in our love for each other.

Now, I cry not for the bad, but for the good that was not. For all that was not made of what existed. For all the happiness that was not lived, for the closeness that was not released, for the acknowledgments not made, the thanks not given, the tributes not paid, the compliments not proffered, the kindness not extended. The love withheld.

Mostly, I cry now for you being gone, exactly as you were.

The light has gone out. The candle is extinguished. And the darkness is silent.