Diary 
Thomas Laqueur
I remember only one occasion when I wished my father dead: in early December 1983. He was 73 and it was less than a year before he died of cancer, a little more than a year after he learned that there was no treatment for his particular neoplasm. I heard him furtively, or not so furtively, whingeing to someone on the phone, to a woman. (I had returned to the small West Virginia town where my parents lived and where he had long worked as a pathologist and was now chief of staff at a veterans’ hospital.) I didn’t think that he was speaking to someone with whom he was having an affair – he was past that – but I did know that she was in every way inappropriate, that he was being self-pitying with someone to whom he ought, in my view, not to have revealed himself. He was being abject: not in, or with, his body as Freud dreamed of his father, but emotionally.
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Thomas Laqueur is the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he writes about and teaches European cultural history.
Other articles by this contributor:
Lectures about Heaven · Forgiving Germany
The Old Country · the troublesome marriage of Poles and Jews
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