Originally published in Los Angeles Times Magazine

THE VALET AT THE PITTSBURGH AIRPORT rental car office brings around our white Lincoln Continental and Vince Donnelly raises his eyebrow slyly and says to me, “If I’m going to go, I’m going to go in style.”

A bit of subversive humor from my dad that I well appreciate. It helps alleviate the shock of how he looks. Prior to this trip, I hadn’t seen my dad since I spent Christmas in Vail, Colo., where he and my mother had moved several years ago. What a difference five months can make.

During the holidays, Vince didn’t look so bad for a guy who recently had had a third of his pancreas cut out. I even dared to hope he was on the mend. Then, a couple of days after Christmas, he asked if I wanted to drive his new Cadillac STS down to the Eagle diner where we’d find the best milkshakes in the county. The weather was warm for the Colorado high country, the sky a saturated blue. It was not a day for bad news, and my dad tried to deliver it as gently as possible.

“The horses are out of the barn, Joe,” Vince said as we gained speed and lost altitude cruising down the valley. “I don’t think they’re going back in. I can feel it. It’s running wild.”

My dad went on to explain that the cancer he’d been diagnosed with the previous summer had metastasized despite the drastic operation. His CA19-9 markers (cancer activity in the blood) were climbing the charts. He rattled off the meager survival statistics, the chemo protocols and the grim prognosis. I stared out the diner’s windows and told him he was going to be fine. There had to be some exception to these rules, and I was sure my dad would be that. After all, he’d lived his life being the exception. Growing up in a household weighed down by poverty, alcoholism and old-world Catholicism, he still managed to get out, get educated and become a successful business owner. He had survived colon cancer twice in his early 50s, and several years ago he’d brushed off prostate cancer as if it were the flu. I’d been conditioned to expect him to walk out of life’s burning buildings.

As he spoke, my mind wandered back to Los Angeles, where my own trajectory away from the past had run out of turf. Vince had visited me there recently and appreciated all of the things that we residents take for granted–the light, the architecture, the action, the intelligence. We talked about spending more time together in L.A. I thought better times had arrived for my dad and me. We had both survived near-death encounters with booze and the things that drive men crazy. He was lucky to walk away from a drunken head-on collision with a truck. I was lucky to have called a friend instead of pulling the trigger of the gun in my mouth. We’d both gotten sober since and had even become optimistic.

Now this: the two of us in the rain at Pittsburgh International Airport, loading three bags into the white Lincoln–one for my clothes, one for my dad’s, and one for the syringes, saline solutions, antiseptics, enzymes, anxiety reducers and chemo pills that have become my dad’s constant traveling companions. Pittsburgh, the town where I more or less grew up and where my dad’s working life finally paid off, is the first stop on our trip–a journey that will retrace our steps to Syracuse, N.Y., where my family started.

As I navigate the rain and slippery roads toward the city, I wonder what the hell we’re doing. The figure in the passenger seat is a hollowed-out version of my dad that is alien to me. His jokes help remind me that it’s still him and that he is still alive. The white Lincoln radiates against the black skies and brown buildings of the city. I’m glad my dad chose white. It’s heavenly.

***

JUST A YEAR BEFORE, my dad could bench press 200 pounds, leg press 500 and swim, hike and ski laps around athletes half his age. At 68, Vince Donnelly was in the middle of an astonishing physical renaissance when the cancer in his pancreas erupted.

His strength had helped him survive an operation at Johns Hopkins to remove a large chunk of his pancreas. Soon after, though, tests showed cancer in nearby lymph nodes. Opinions varied on whether my dad was treatable. The operating surgeon suggested that he just go home and live his life as best as possible, not concern himself with things such as CA19-9 markers, CAT scans, chemotherapy and all of the other ways people try to corner and kill the beast. It was the doctor’s way of saying that fighting probably was a waste of energy. But fighting is in my dad’s blood. I didn’t expect him to stop now just because cancer was in there too.

The following spring, my dad’s hopes for survival took a severe blow. PET scans ordered by my father’s oncologist in Vail showed cancer spreading throughout his upper spine and sternum. The images also indicated increased metastasis in his liver and near his kidney. The Vail oncologist told him he could reasonably expect to live four more months.

That’s when my dad called and suggested this road trip through his past. The impulse surprised me. Although the Irish are given to singing weepy pub songs about heroic near-misses and might-have-beens, my dad was never the sentimental type. Vince justified the trip by saying he had business in Pittsburgh and wanted to “check out a few things relating to family history” in Syracuse. His voice told me there was something more to it, but I wasn’t sure what. Maybe he needed to go back to own what he did, to see how far he’d come before he died. Maybe he needed to know he’d done enough, because even in these sober, looser, happier years of late, my dad still at times felt as if he should have earned more, done more, been more. That notion seemed preposterous to me, and my secret fear always had been that I could never live up to his legacy, that the deep ruts of his giant footsteps would swallow me.

I agreed to drive him. Truthfully, though, I was nervous. I was 38, sober and alive but still dogged by self-doubt and not sure what I was doing with my life. Was I ready for this type of reckoning? God forgive me for thinking it, but my dad, facing death, could at least go back to where we came from as a conquering hero. What was I?

I told my dad we should call the trip “The Farewell Tour.” He laughed and suggested we print T-shirts with a hot rod hearse on the front and the names and dates of the tour stops on the back.

***

A VALET HAILS my dad like a close relative when we pull up to his beloved Duquesne Club, where he stays when he’s in Pittsburgh for business. These places are the pinnacle of the social and business hierarchy of last-century towns such as Pittsburgh. In the past I’d looked down my nose at Duquesne Club anachronisms, such as having to wear a coat and tie to dinner and the old, gold-framed artwork depicting fox hunts, steel mills, coal barges and other bygone local customs. To me, the club was the kind of place where the Addams Family would be happy to room and board.

This time, however, I can’t help but draw parallels between the club and my father. The club is irrelevant and fading. My father is fading and becoming irrelevant. Nature knows when you’re dying and the world politely moves on long before you’re gone from it. Watching this happen to my dad hurts. The club no longer amuses me. It makes me uncomfortable.

Soon after arriving, Vince slips a previously undisclosed mission into the agenda of meetings with lawyers, accountants and insurance people (death actually requires more precise planning than life). My dad is fond of an upbeat oncologist at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. If the four horsemen of the apocalypse appeared on the horizon, Michael Wong would say they were dressed nicely. Vince is attracted to Dr. Wong’s positive outlook and wants him to provide a second opinion of the Vail oncologist’s disheartening interpretation of the PET scans. I know a second opinion is ultimately meaningless, but I go along with the plan until I, too, get caught up in my father’s hope that the lesions are actually arthritic football injuries that had been pestering him for years.

Dr. Wong meets us and tells Vince things that fall gently on his ears, including that blood markers are often unreliable and PET scans are far from the industry-standard imaging technique. Wong says he will compare the CAT and PET scans and give us his assessment when we return from Syracuse.

The meeting buoys my dad. We’re back on the initiative! That evening, we go down to the club’s dim and mostly vacant dining room and order the heart-lover’s choice–pork loin and scalloped potatoes. Just to make sure things don’t get too healthy, my dad orders chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream for dessert. Twice.

“I’ve got to keep my weight up,” he says.

“Hey, this cancer [stuff’s] not all bad,” I offer.

“Not all of it.”

Despite the joke, it’s clear to me that Vince really is desperate to keep his weight up. I can see he is terrified and desperately scrapping to hold on to whatever life remains. I can’t stomach the fight anymore. He’s getting mauled. I don’t want to see the champ getting pummeled while everyone’s heart breaks–as when Ali fought Larry Holmes. I just want him to die gracefully. With his every forkful of cake and ice cream I want to scream, “It’s over! You’re dying right here in front of me! Stop chasing false hope! Stop nuking yourself with chemo! Give up!”

I don’t say a thing, because my dad wants to live and what can you say to that?

After his pancreas operation, I started hugging my dad–big, uncomfortable, loving hugs. This hugging thing was new for him. All of his life he could joke, he could pat a back, but he couldn’t put his affection into a messy embrace. I also began to stroke his hair, to hold his face, to kiss him five times in a row. To his surprise, he liked it. He started asking for it. This cancer had opened up a new world of physical affection between us that didn’t previously exist. I wondered what might have been different if we’d lived our lives like this.

Saying good night after dinner, Vince turns in his doorway and says, “Joe, come in here and wrap me up in your big, strong arms. I’ll never forget how you held me in the hospital like I was a little baby.” He cries and cries as I hold on and hold back my own tears. He’s just skin and bones.

***

IT’S HARD TO THINK OF ANYTHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN SYRACUSE. I was born there, but all I know of it are my dad’s memories–of pulling my grandfather out of bars when he’d gone missing for days, of fighting with his father when he tried to “get at” my grandmother during a bad drunk. One story still haunts–the time my grandfather lined up my dad and his younger siblings with a shotgun and drunkenly threatened to blow their heads off. Vince talked the gun out of his father’s hands.

Vince told these stories without bitterness. Things were just the way they were. At least through Vince’s stories my grandfather was a real figure to me, not always horrifying, sometimes even funny and warm. I knew my grandfather loved to fish and dance, was faster with a quip than you were, that he worked hard and had a terrible chip on his shoulder. I knew that my dad’s ultimately sobering head-on collision was an eerie and fortunate echo of an accident in which my intoxicated grandfather once killed someone.

I also knew that before he died my grandfather had sought and received forgiveness from my dad, because, despite everything, Vince always hung the moon for him. But I knew almost nothing about my grandmother.

What little information I had painted a vague picture of a bent-knee Catholic, praying for deliverance from poverty and regret, who lived on the edge of severe depression. The nature of that depression was shrouded in mystery. She kept my father at a chilly distance even though he was often thrown into the role of protecting her against her drunken husband. My dad could never quite explain this except to say, “She lived with a lot of disappointment.”

We drive north from Pittsburgh in a barrage of cold rain relieved by frequent stops for coffee, doughnuts and ice cream sandwiches. When we finally skate into downtown Syracuse, the afternoon sun appears briefly and barely. I ask my dad if he thinks it’s somehow symbolic.

“It’s probably happy to see me return to the scene of my many crimes,” Vince jokes.

We park across the street from the little house on Teal Avenue where Vince grew up. He stares at it and tells a story about the woman who lived upstairs and sewed him a winter coat from the remnants of his father’s overcoat. Vince laughs about how bad it looked. I suggest that he stand in front of the house for a photo. He does so without enthusiasm.

During the next couple of days we drive by my father’s old haunts, rarely braving the miserable weather to get out of the Lincoln. Vince provides a constant soundtrack about friends, family and history. We stop at the grim tenement where I was born. My dad seems embarrassed. I ask what the complex is called.

“The slums,” he says.

Syracuse unfolds as a black-and-gray ghost town. I’d be surprised if there’s a less attractive place in America. We cover the same ground again and again. It’s clear that Vince is searching for something, some place or meaning that is eluding us. I want to go home to Los Angeles, return to the sun. This place spooks me, and I know it’s because I can still feel it in me, like the chilling memory of a close call.

Eventually we turn onto a shoddy thoroughfare that lights a flame in Vince’s eyes. We park and walk. He’s found the route along which he used to escort his mother to work at Woolworth. The store is gone, but Vince sees what he’s been looking for. It’s a small shop in a tidy Victorian set back from the street. It sells tombstones and once had one for sale with a lamb etched on it.

“We’d walk by the monument place every day because she worked up here, and we’d see that little lamb. How many times she must have looked at that stone,” Vince says, his eyes going past the shop. “It probably cost fifty bucks. Fifty bucks to buy the stone with the lamb on it for the baby she thought she had killed.”

Standing in front of the strange shop, Vince explains the terrible nature of the baby’s death, which he had only recently learned from his sister. The baby was his older brother, “Baby Paul,” who died just months before Vince was born. Apparently his mother had given Paul a can of talcum powder to play with that she thought was empty. Somehow the baby got the top open and, his mother believed, some powder got in Paul’s lungs and killed him. She carried that secret guilt her whole life until she told Vince’s sister while on her deathbed.

“My mother, you know, she had that tragedy with her first child. I can’t imagine what it was like. She loses a child in March and she has a second one in August,” Vince says. “How she could transfer any immediate love and care to that second child was beyond me–that child being me.”

Only then do I realize what Vince has been looking for. It wasn’t the memories of his childhood, the ghost of his father or the sled he rode in the winter. He was really looking for the tiny footprints of the older brother he never knew–forever just “Baby Paul” to him, and forever more an explanation for his mother’s lost embrace.

***

ON THE DAY BEFORE WE LEAVE SYRACUSE, the sun shines. Vince and I go to brunch at one of those old-style inns that are landmarks of the aristocratic Village of Skaneateles on Skaneateles Lake, about 20 minutes from Syracuse. The drive takes us past the cemetery where his parents and ancestors are buried.

The inn delivers mediocre food onto white tablecloths with an air of old-world gentility. Vince says little at breakfast. Something’s brewing. Driving back, he suggests we stop and visit the cemetery, and I guess this has been the reason for his silence. The closer we get to the cemetery, the darker the skies grow, the stronger the wind howls. By the time we reach the gates, it is lightning and hailing. It’s as if the gods have been warning us away for days and now are indignant at our persistence. I agree with them. What does any of this matter anymore?

I ask my dad if he thinks it’s a coincidence that golf ball-size hail is bombarding us as we approach his family grave site. “I doubt it,” he says.

The family plot is on a little knoll. I can barely make it out through the rain-soaked windows. The stones are dark silhouettes lit by lightning, as if from a horror movie. My dad rolls down his window and looks out.

“I told you about my mother wanting the stone with the lamb on it, but she could never afford it. She felt bad about it. I don’t know when I did it–a number of years ago–I got a stone with a lamb on it that said ‘Paul’ and put it in the ground. A flat one with a lamb on it,” Vince says. “As soon as I pull away, we’ll probably be the last family to ever go look in on it.”

I realize he’s right; I will probably never return here. I won’t have to, though, because my dad has taken me all the way in. There is nothing left unsaid or undone between us. No ghosts to haunt my memories. I won’t come back, but I will carry all of this with me wherever I go, even back to bright Los Angeles. It’s part of who I am and who I always have been–my father’s son, and for that I am grateful.

Back in Pittsburgh the news is bad. After reviewing the scans, Dr. Wong confirms the dire forecast of my dad’s oncologist in Vail. “At least we know what we’re up against,” Vince says.

My dad died six months later, surpassing expectations by eight weeks, breaking everyone’s heart in the process. I keep a vial with some of his ashes at home. Now and then I look in the container and think about the mystery of life, and how something so complex can come down to something so simple.