20 years is a long time. When I noticed the date earlier this week and did the mental math, I thought I must’ve made a mistake. But, no. 20 years today. Seems impossible. I mostly try to ignore these anniversaries but how do you ignore a number like that?
This week I’m reposting an essay that helped me work through a grief that’s shaped much of my life. It was the first thing I had published (originally here). I was very nervous to share it but it felt like something I had to write in order to write about anything else. It didn’t provide closure but it brought a certain relief. Like I finally stopped fingering an open wound and could let it heal.
Grief exercise
A few years after my dad dropped dead, he called into an NPR gardening show to talk about some kind of tomato nymph. I should’ve been shocked, hearing his voice crackle over my car radio like that, but I’d already been seeing him around town for years. I passed him in grocery store aisles, he passed me in his car. I saw him through the windows of restaurants and just out of reach in large crowds. So, if anything, I was disappointed to hear him. I hated that show. I thought he’d have better taste. And besides, he was supposed to be in hiding.
I’ve always been skilled at self-deception (read: delusion) and in my version of what happened the morning he collapsed on his run, he got back up. Maybe he never even hit the ground, just stumbled, and kept running without looking back. Or, when I was feeling more dramatic, I told myself he’d been leading a double life all along. He was a secret agent, a spy, and had finally been called in from the cold. I could picture a sleek black car waiting alongside his usual route, the Cancer Man from X-Files stepping out as he approached. His life with us, he was reminded, was just a cover to be dropped.
So when I heard him talking about tomato nymphs, I was sure it went against some protocol, but it was nice to hear his voice all the same. I sat there and wondered how often NPR callers might be spies, communicating in code right out in the open. Maybe he was hoping I would hear it. And after that, I listened more intently. When I caught dead air, I turned the volume up. I let the static overwhelm me, made myself a conduit for some secret message, some code from the void. I imagined patterns in the hiss, an impulse I couldn’t hear so much as feel. I did this with dead air and dial up and dial tones. I did it with dreams and water and silence. I’m here, I thought, I’m listening. No message ever came, but I kept waiting.
Late one night, I had a thought. Maybe he doesn’t miss us. Maybe he’d made a go at writing, turned those night classes into something, and adopted a pseudonym. Maybe he’d gone on a pilgrimage, spent a few years in an ashram, and found his teachers. Maybe he came back with long hair and mala beads around his neck; lived barefoot with his hippie girlfriend in a small house with a big garden. I could picture him doing headstands in his new bohemian kitchen, free from our teasing. I could see him putting on a record, hear him snapping (off-beat) and singing (off-key). I could see him calling into NPR when he noticed a problem with his tomato plants. Did he figure enough time had passed that we wouldn’t recognize his voice?
I could see him, without us, without anything more than the occasional 3 a.m. reminder that we were out there somewhere. But I bet he slept soundly most nights, though I wondered if he still snored loud enough to wake the dead.
***
My dad had house-rattling snores, so loud you could hear them from the basement. As a kid, when the sound of his snoring stopped, I would creep into my parents’ bedroom and make my way next to his sleeping body. I would listen and wait until I could tell that he was breathing. Sometimes my parents would startle awake and ask what was wrong. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t dead, I’d say, and they’d sigh and send me back to bed. Sometimes I did this multiple times a night. Sometimes I woke up on the floor at the foot of their bed.
Eventually my parents convinced me to stop sneaking into their room at night, but I was still attuned to his snores. His buzzsaw breathing was as soothing to me as the white noise machine I use now. But when I was struck with the late-night panic that my parents were lying dead a few rooms over, I learned to stop in the hallway. I pressed my ear against their door, straining to hear through the heavy silence of the house, listening for their breath or quiet murmurs, without being heard myself.
In my teenage years, my worry became less that they were dead and more that they were awake. They established a trial for us as teens: turn off a lamp on the dresser at the foot of their bed when we got home. This way they knew that we were on curfew, sober, and safe. The whole ordeal was obviously much easier if they fell asleep waiting for us to come home. I usually made it out unscathed.
The last time I saw my dad, however, the last time I spoke to him, I had just failed this trial. I misjudged the situation and the quality of his snores and he woke when I switched off the light. I’ve thought about this brief interaction many times, trying to reach back in time and tease out more details, but they never come. I remember him lying on his side looking at me, my mom asleep beside him. I remember that he clasped my hand and said, “Are you ok?” meaning, “Are you drunk?” (I was.) I don’t remember my response, or the last thing he said to me, or if I told him I loved him. I’ve tried and tried to play it back, but all I get is static.
***
Here’s what else I remember:
My older siblings were in town and we went out for a family dinner. At dinner, one of my friends lit a napkin on fire and one of my brother’s friends put it out with his bare hand. Afterwards, my friends and I partied in the park across the street from our houses. I failed the lamp trial and went to bed. I went to my job at a local bakery at 5 the next morning, leaving before anyone else was up (hangovers don’t touch the young). I got a strange call from my sister a few hours later on the bakery’s phone, asking if dad had dropped me off and taken my car.
I was on break, eating a warm strawberry yogurt I’d forgotten in my car, when I got another call. I don’t remember exactly what was said but I remember my boss standing awkwardly, not sure what to do with her hands when I went back inside and told her why I had to go home. I sat shotgun as one of my uncles drove me home in my ‘96 Saturn and a lei I’d gotten at a school dance swung from the rearview mirror.
I remember pulling up to the house, seeing another uncle on the front lawn, the one who looked like my dad. He’s right there, I thought. I remember my mom getting home, having identified his body, holding his wedding ring. I remember my brothers hugging and how that scared me. I remember calling my best friend’s house, getting her mom, asking politely to speak to my friend, my friend needing to be woken up before taking the phone, saying simply, My dad’s dead. I remember her running barefoot through the park to get to my front lawn.
I remember sitting on a short stone wall in our driveway, drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette, and the noise my mom made when she saw this. I remember my aunt and uncle showing up later, having driven across the country after being turned away at the airport, forgetting they had a gun in their carry-on. I remember the great quantities of food that materialized and that someone made me eat a plate of meatballs. I remember neighbors, and parents of my friends, and friends of my parents telling me how they’d lost their own fathers around my age. I understood I was now part of some secret society and thought lost felt like the right word and the wrong one at the same time.
I remember sleeping on the pullout couch in the basement with my sister and waking up from a dream that he’d come home, the first of many. I’m sorry, I won’t do that again, he’d said. I remember my sister whispering in the dark, but not what she said, and holding me tight as we cried. The house was very quiet that night.
I have only one brief memory from the day of the service, and that I’ll keep for myself. I’m told our backs were sore from the hugs we gave and that someone made us eat bananas in the church basement. Everything else is a blank. I don’t know when I started to make new memories.
***
I never saw his body. We never got an official cause of death. We were told it was painless and quick, though I don’t know how they can say that without knowing what it was that killed him. I suspect it’s just something they tell the families. He donated his body to the medical college and I don’t know what they did with it.
I know that a couple saw him on his run, saw him stagger and collapse, and they called for help. I don’t know if he was dead before he hit the ground or if he had time to register what was happening. I don’t know if he had any last words, any final message to relay while he still had one foot in this world. I don’t know if those onlookers had time to go to him as his heart sputtered to a stop and the electrical activity in his brain went quiet. I like to think they held his hand, spoke softly, and told him he wasn’t alone, that he would be missed.
***
That night, when I tried to extricate my hand from his and make my retreat, was the last time I saw him, the last time I touched him, the last time I spoke to him and him to me, and I only half remember it. I can’t feel the humor and warmth he emanated anymore. Even when I close my eyes and concentrate, I can’t bring his face to mind. I know that his eyes crinkled when he smiled and that he had a lop-sided, mischievous smirk, but I can’t conjure it unless I’m looking at a picture, or an uncle, or my nephews. I can’t remember his voice or his laugh, though I hear echoes of it from my brothers. I’ve wondered what it would be like to know him now and have adopted many of my sister’s stories as my own.
In my favorite picture of us, he’s lying on the couch and I’m asleep on top of him, maybe three years old. My ear is pressed to his chest. I imagine I could hear his heartbeat in that position and that sleeping like this is how I first learned to listen for those quiet, secret messages. I heard what his heart broadcast (what all our hearts broadcast) just by beating: I am here, I am here, I am here.
The last time we spoke, he had one foot in some other plane of existence, wherever our minds go when we’re unconscious. Did his body know then how little time it had left? Did he suspect it on some level? Was the barrier between life and death already thinning? Would I get another chance to reach through, reach beyond?
In any case, he was half awake and I hardly remember it. I see his mouth moving but all I hear is white noise. So forgive me if I like to imagine him out there, living still.
***
This phantom father was delusional, yes, but he was also useful. I don’t believe in God or the afterlife, and I don’t believe we’ll be reunited. I believe that when the impulses in our brains and hearts stop, so do we. I think this is a wonderful mystery and I don’t believe we’ll ever solve it.
But a man who led a double life, who’d had to abandon that life, was a man I might run into at the grocery store. This was a man who might give me answers, even if I didn’t like them. This was a man who might perform regular stakeouts to keep tabs on the life he left behind. I pictured him, watching us from somewhere just out of sight, and imagined our cat as it prowled the neighborhood, finding him and crawling onto his lap, unconcerned with the fact of his death. I imagined the things he’d put in his surveillance report. Intercepted mail today—youngest waitlisted at Madison. Or, The boys refinished the garage door; looks good. Or, I see they haven’t sold my car. Or, New tree in the front yard. Very nice. Or, Note: remember to look into tomato nymphs.
I imagined all the ways he was similar to and different from my dad. I got mad at him and yelled and told him how much pain we were in. I also told him about the new show I was watching, the new class I was taking, the new boy I was dating, the new job I was hating. And then we’d forget each other for a while. I’d get back to my life and he’d get back to being dead.
In the days and weeks and months between our chats, I thought a lot about how he might have influenced my life. I’ve thought of all the food and art I wish I could share with him. I’ve wondered how much of my personality comes from him, what we would have laughed about, what we would have fought about. I’ve wished I could talk to him about his spirituality and what he learned through meditation. I’ve wondered if he would like me, if he would even know me anymore. But I’ll never know.
I never imagined this other life of his could end. I didn’t kill him the first time and I certainly wasn’t planning on killing him again. But I don’t know where my phantom father is these days. I haven’t caught wind of him in a long time. As I type this, I tried to imagine him embroiled in some international mystery that would account for his prolonged absence. But it’s not working. I think that in the face of such a surreal—yet relentlessly real—few years, the fantasy just can’t hold.
What comfort was there in fantasizing about a loved one who was out there but unreachable? Untouchable? What comfort was there in imagining a loved one who deliberately stayed away? Maybe this coping mechanism has just run its course, done its job, and I’ve reached the point where I’m ready to let them both go. Maybe these last few years have shown me that it was never all that comforting to begin with; it was never anything but tragic. He belongs to the way things used to be. I really just have to miss him forever.
And yet.
I know I’ll go on turning up the volume when I catch dead air on the radio. I’ll let the static wash over me and briefly fill the void he left. I suppose it was always just me talking to myself. But maybe it’s just a matter of being tuned to the right frequency, listening hard enough, and reaching out. He could be out there, longing to hear a message, an echo of his own.
I’m listening, I miss you, I’m here…
This week’s song on repeat
(Find the whole playlist here.)
I don’t actually have this on repeat because it makes me sad, but I’m pretty sure my dad ordered this cd through Columbia House after seeing her on Austin City Limits, we listened to it a lot.
I'm leaving tomorrow but I don't wanna go.
I love you, my town, you'll always live in my soul.
so beautiful. dealing with some family stuff and this made me feel less alone.
Sending love and comfort.❤️🩹 this is a beautiful and heartbreaking rendering of the aftermath of life-altering loss.🙏🏻