Friends: A Love Story by Angela Bassett Page A

room. I remember he was very lethargic—I don’t know if it was from the meds or the aneurysm. One eye was half-shut. We talked a little bit, and I spent the night somewhere down the hall in the hospital. Then I had to return to campus the next day. Before I left I said, “Dad, I’m getting ready to go. Give me a kiss.”
    â€œNo, not today,” he answered. “Some other time.”
    â€œYou’re really not going to give me a kiss?”
    â€œNah,” he said—not mean, but real cool-like.
    â€œYou seriously aren’t going to give me a kiss?”
    â€œMaybe tomorrow….”
    I was a little hurt. It wasn’t like we were super-duper close, and especially given our history, I didn’t have to ask him. He died two days later.
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    Daddy’s funeral was held in a funeral home in New York. I remember going into a very small chapel, walking forward through the pews and seeing my father laying there looking all stiff and puffed up with formaldehyde or whatever they use, his hands propped up on each other on his chest—not in a position I’d ever seen him in before. I guess there’s no way to make the dead look natural. As I looked at his body, a part of me was detached—“Wow! Look at you.” That part of me wasn’tsad and found it all very interesting. I remember wandering into the rooms with other dead people in them and getting spooked. I was thinking, “ Whoo! Let me get out of here and back to the room where my dad is.”
    Another part of me sensed mortality. Finality. That part of me felt sad. I remember thinking, I didn’t have years with you or the relationship I wanted or dreamed of with you, I had the relationship that I had. I knew you, spent some time around you, had some interaction with you, and my mother never spoke ill of you, but I longed for more. Yet all my disappointments aside, I was grateful for him. Despite all I did not get from him, I got life from him. All that’s particular and singular and unique about me—half of it came from him, from his genes. And the family I did get from him—D’nette, Grandmom Brownie, Aunt Golden, my uncle Jerry, my sister Jean and her sister Lynn—all of that was because of him. Now he was gone.
    While I was sitting there, my aunt Helen, Uncle Jerry’s wife, tapped me on the shoulder from her seat in the pew behind me.
    â€œAngela, this is your sister Lisa.”
    I turned around and looked into the eyes of this sweet-faced sixteen-year-old girl. I remember reaching my hand out, shaking her hand. “Hello, Lisa. You’re so pretty!”
    When I turned back around, I looked at my father in the casket, eyes closed. “Well, aren’t you something else? This is some extra drama. Whoa! I have another sister I didn’t know about, and she’s sixteen and I’m twenty-one!”
    My sister Jean was sitting next to me. She was just learning about Lisa at age thirty-three. She was visibly upset and shaken. “Oh, my God, this is so terrible! How does this happen that people die and you’re meeting siblings at funerals. This is just over the top! This is not supposed to happen! This is so inappropriate!”
    Lisa may have been a secret to us, but somebody knew about her; she didn’t get from North Carolina to New York on her own.
    During the funeral they played my father’s favorite song,“Danny Boy,” an Irish song I imagine he loved because his name was Daniel Benjamin Bassett. That has to be one of the saddest dirges that has ever been written. It is so sad. So beautiful. I cried. It really took me there. Life and death were hitting me in the face at once. My father and I had both been trying to create a father-daughter relationship. But if you don’t have the tools and you don’t have the time, you just don’t make it. We didn’t make it. Now there was no chance of reclaiming our relationship. I