This following is the opening gambit of an essay I’ve written about my father, my son, and me. They both have suffered from a very difficult affliction, which I have witnessed. The essay is titled “Fathers, Sons & Seizures.”

***

I had told A. the story of my son Brennan, how it is that his unrelenting epilepsy and severe learning disabilities have always reminded me of my father Hank’s infirmities, who had himself died in the middle of an epileptic seizure in January 1971. Hank’s illness had sickened his mind as well in the last ten years of his life. His speech had been reduced to the simplest of expressions. He said the same things over and over, with occasional long pauses between utterances, and so was very similar to how Brennan is now.

Their epilepsies are not related genetically. My father’s seizures were caused by a slow-growing brain tumor, while my son’s have no demonstrable cause of any kind. Nonetheless, the symptoms of their epilepsies are, to me, almost alarmingly similar, as are the two men themselves. They look so much alike that my son appears to me as a kind of copy of my father, the way my father appeared as a young man in his twenties in old photos. And they are most alike in how they are afflicted. The leaden talk. The long monologues. The repetition. I am frustrated by my son in the same ways I was frustrated by my father. Angered by them similarly. Crazed by them similarly. And I recognize how important I am to my son, and how my father so insistently sought my approval by raining down so much approval on me. The fact that neither man really knows much about me, or could know much, occasionally deadens my feelings for myself and for what I feel I must do to understand the two of them properly.

When I speak with Brennan now, twenty-six years after the death of my father, I realize that he was born less than a year after my father died, and that when he is attempting to tell me a personal anecdote of some kind—his personal story—it is then that he sounds most like my father.

I tell A. all this and, silent in the gloom of the car, she looks out into the surrounding darkness.

“Well, it’s clear to me,” she says abruptly. “Your son is your father, that’s all, come back to tell you what you missed.”

“What did I miss?”

“The truth about yourself.”

Terence Clarke’s latest book is a story collection titled New York. Kirkus Reviews says of it, ““Tales like these feel like new takes on classic stories of New York by Salinger or Capote—fine company, all in all.”