Covenant of Salt

Walking through security, I’d try to turn back without you seeing my tears. You’d stay until the moment you could no longer see me, or so I assumed, and my heart would crack as wide as our growing distance once I got there. Despite these efforts, it was easy to convince myself you didn’t care that I was leaving, or that I lived 3,000 miles away. Of course you did, O would later confirm. “He was so upset when you told him you were moving!”

“Why didn’t he ever show that to me?”

It always hurt to leave, especially you. But I thought it my cross to bear alone. I hate being a martyr because I hate what martyr's represent, and yet time and time again throughout my life I have been caught in its trappings. For so long, it was the only way I thought one experienced the world. It's how I used to read everything, my life's work is to finally someday stop entirely.

I thought it unimportant if I left because you left first. I was just following your lead. Leaving is what we did. But that story was incorrect. You didn’t leave. You were pushed away by the same person from whom I moved 3,000 miles away. The same person who told me you left.

Would we ever be able to understand each other? Maybe we did. I could never be sure.

I will look for you today as I approach baggage claim, even though I know you can’t possibly be there. Maybe I’ll get to see old versions of you greeting old versions of me. Maybe I’ll simply have to confront the horror of your absence in yet another context.

When I step outside of my own mind I’m struck by a world that’s holding on so tight to its compulsions so as to ignore its decay. I have my own compulsions, my own illusions. I imagine some amount of them necessary to stay alive. But mine and the masses differ enough that I can’t tell which one of us is the alien.

Most days my grief is the only worthwhile thing to feel. It’s real, though I don’t know how I know. Maybe because it’s love.

Without words I feel most understood.

Or perhaps without words I have less confirmation of being misunderstood.

Either way, words can feel like life or death.

But my relationship with death is surely changing.

The worst person to have died was you. With respect to others living and dead, I could handle a great deal of life’s cycling through. Some painstaking losses. But this one will never be redeemable insofar as I have the audacity to judge the cosmos. And for that reason alone, I must find a way to make it so; to make possible what surely isn’t.

While I wrote your obituary, it was always clear to me that I didn’t want to deliver your eulogy. The obituary was information which alone feels incomplete, however useful. A eulogy would never feel satisfactory. Nor would some fairytale from the Bible about all roads paved by Christ to a moralized buffet table afterlife. Of course Rilke, my father of psychology, would have the worthwhile words to speak at my actual father’s funeral. And yet it still feels not enough.

For as much as I self-analyze, my solutions are often to stop being the way I am. This includes redirecting my sentimentality long enough for something more interesting to get through. The faith I have in myself is hardly in a waxing state when it feels I have something important to lose. I can’t handle more loss at the moment. Truly. Seriously. Please.

But I feel so behind on growth, the weight of “catching up” (to whom? to what?) paralyses me. I often imagine anyone in my presence wishes they were with someone else. That's something that began around the time you left.

Somehow, maybe in just one single second I will never fully recall, an automatic software update installed in my nervous system and it contained a bug that rewired everything with the constant panic of being fundamentally unlovable, and certainly not worth sticking around for.

The more time passes, the more I might be realizing that your actions were blamed for my neuroses but it was actually mom's vortex of delusions that made me feel as unwanted as she felt. Maybe more. Maybe I bore the brunt on her behalf.

You did leave her. But I don't think you meant to leave us. She was just such a child in need of a parent and found me to be the most suitable, despite grandma still being alive and well. In order for me to parent my own mother and sacrifice my individuation to do so, I surrendered to her version of reality. Of course I didn't know I was doing that at the time. My empathy over-rode my critical thinking; my own anxiety erupted in the wake of her instability so I did what I needed to do to feel as though I could, at least occasionally, rely on her. I was young. I was lost. I was perfect prey.

This made my mind a minefield of chaos and unprocessed, unrelenting grief. My attention became scattered, my imagination stalled, I grew in size but shrunk in the amount of space I took up. I channeled anxiety into humor until fewer and fewer things made me laugh. When I wasn't anxious, I was depressed.

The passing nature of breathing art scares the parts of me that require physical reminders of the things that never return. Perhaps I rely not enough on my own brain, or not enough trust the effects of alchemy. Too often I forget and repeat, feel stuck or disoriented.

Then again, doing therapy is like making art. For a usually-defended audience of one, who is also a part of the production.

Despite feeling hardly a sense of belonging, I’ve learned that the only way to ease the panic of being left behind is to please those I hope will stay. As it relates to the buggy software, something of that died with you, though when the fear reaches high enough decibels, it’s most familiar with self-betrayal. Another lucky inheritance from my mother.

Imagining mass, estranged family, the closings and openings I will embody, the unexpected things people might say about you. I fear that someone will ask me what it was like to watch you die. And I fear that no one will.

Flashbacks of you at your mother’s funeral seep in. You tried so much to be open to it all, despite the obvious possession of an ache only known to you. As my cousin presented you with his newborn daughter, I saw you earnestly try to get a hit of the coochie-coos, I even snapped a photo of it, but what I really saw was how deep your grief ran; how much you would give up this precious moment with new life to be with your mom again, and how much it hurt to feel that way.

Who brings shrimp on a plane? My seatmate. I believe a plane to be one of few environments in which the smell of shrimp might bring me disgust. Though I’m also reminded of your lessons on extracting the most tail meat with the least mess. When will this flight end?

…….

“Vanessa,” your other daughter says sternly in the hotel room after I practiced my funeral reading and offered her first dibs on family photos that she declined. “I don’t have a lot of feelings about this.”

That explains the frantic Lysol-wiping that occurred on every surface of the room when we first arrived here an hour ago. “He’s said some shitty things to me in the past, you know?” she adds, as though that would be a reason one would have no feelings at all about one’s dead dad.

“I know. He could be a real asshole sometimes."

You could. You jumped to conclusions about our intentions because you didn't trust mom, and I get it, but we needed more of the benefit of the doubt. Because instead, in your frustration and resentment, you made threats and spoke to us as though we were out to get you. We were manipulated children.

"But what I’ve learned these last few years is that most times dad was a shit to us, it was because we were representing and defending mom’s narcissistic delusions without knowing it and he was frustrated. He couldn’t understand how she had brainwashed us so much that we saw him as the bad guy.”

“Maybe. And he was also just an asshole" she reinforces. "And it’s fine because we got to a good place, eventually.”

“A good place and still no feelings about this?”

“No,” she sighs as though it’s a wonder.

Now that I think about it, she did always take after some of your sharper edges. While I adopted your snark, wanderlust, and penchant for dissociating, she adopted the defenses you used when you needed to be cold and distant. Because you, too, “[weren’t] an emotional guy.” But why the need to be cold if you’re not affected emotionally? And why am I asking questions I know the answers to?

What did it take for you to mellow? Two strokes, a move to Florida, and some nice black neighbors that upended your entire idea of racism.

Practicing my reading revealed its pitfalls. Some words I predicted would make my voice drop out, others surprised me. If words can feel like life or death, what are words about death?

“No one’s going to exploit your feelings the way mom did,” is what I ought to say to her. Something I realize as I lie awake with a fast-beating heart, negotiating in my mind about how vulnerable I'm willing to be in front of our entire family tomorrow.

Anyway, I'll be in your old neighborhood tomorrow. Will you be there?

It tracks.

My nervous system is fried. It can’t tolerate being in a different world than everyone around me. As a misfit, I’m used to feeling like I’m on another planet but this is something else. I have no inoculation against this.

Every other day, I cry from my gut. It’s primal. Its hideous. It’s an expulsion of tears and ache that doesn’t seem to have an ending. Much as I expect my tube to run out of toothpaste, I keep being squeezed from the middle and it keeps pouring out.

Did the cigarette help? My head got buzzy and I had a ton of energy. For a moment I wondered if this could replace adderall and help my adhd but then realized this is exactly why people become addicted to these sticks of poison. It’s why you continued to smoke after all the strokes and heart problems. No judgment. We all have vices.

The nicotine soothed me. Calm poufed through my veins the way clouds poufed through your irises as you died.

Afterward, my hands smelled like you; my clothes and my hair still carry a scent I associated with you my entire life. Others, too, but you for the longest. And most intentional.

As I write this, an anti-tobacco PSA airs during a Lakers time out. Ironic. As ironic as the priest doing your mass in a few weeks having just recovered from heart surgery. I’m happy for him, but I’m angry he gets a life after heart surgery and you don’t.

I don’t know how to be in the world anymore. People keep on living their lives, lost in their details. Of course. Their dads didn’t die. But my sense of the world, my memories, my very cells, the things I believe in — they’re all undergoing a transformation that physically hurts; makes it hard to breathe, hard to imagine a future, hard to reconcile the past. The world writ large is disorienting enough. To feel further isolated, I just don’t know.

It feels so selfish, and yet the looming presence a parent has over a person’s entire sense of self is impossible to negotiate with. Your loss has created continents within me, land masses broken apart into smaller parts, now separated by something that also never existed before I saw you take your last breath.

We finally have word about your memorial mass. It’ll take place on a weekend when B can’t travel to New Jersey with me. This hurts. I prayed to you to help make it all work out, to help me from the plane you might now exist in. Having my magical thinking confirmed as simply that threw me more than I expected. Are you not here? I can’t find you anywhere. Or maybe you don’t have supernatural powers — do you have to earn those? Or maybe you’re still as ambivalent as you ever were in human form. I feel angry at you for making me attend your funeral alone, even though it’s not your fault.

When your mother died, I was 3,000 miles away. My mother and sister would attend her funeral which took some pressure off of me to pull off last minute travel. Your mother and I didn’t have much of a relationship, so if I went, it would have been for you.

When I realized my proxies were indulging more in their fantasies of familial victimhood than sympathy, I booked a last minute flight. I knew losing your mother was more painful than you’d be able to express and they didn’t seem to be showing up in good faith.

It all happened so fast, I didn’t tell you I was coming. My recollection of that day is that I walked up to the mass, sea of extended family in front of the church, and I saw you through them. Someone next to you exclaimed in surprise that I was there, and I saw you snap your head around to search for me. When you found me, you floated through the crowd toward me with a confused expression, as though you weren’t sure I was real. Before you could reach me, you broke down in tears. We hugged. I was so grateful I could give you that moment; to be shown up for, to be relieved, to be implicitly understood.

The day I attend your mass, you won’t be there for me to fall apart in the arms of. Neither will my partner. But I will need it just as much, perhaps more, than you did. You, who made it to your 60s before your parents began to die. What am I going to do? I’m not ready for this. How am I going to survive it? Maybe the cigarettes.

Where are you? Can you throw me a bone or something?

Who knows, maybe it was me who had it wrong. 

We had a nice conversation, I felt grateful to get to talk to you again that way. It hurt to hide the truth from you; to not share how and why that time together was so important and meaningful. But if this place was someplace you could still be alive, I didn’t want to take that from either of us. 

I woke up crying, remembering that even though it’s my birthday, I won’t actually get to talk to you today. I considered dream me to be the lucky one, it was devastating to wake up. 

Before I fell asleep, B and I were watching a World War II documentary. Lately, more and more, historical crises read as a fortune for our collective future. The world is bleak and most days I have a hard time mustering up enough faith to trust the direction I’m headed in, or even that there’s a direction at all. 

A new wave of grief hit me then: that you’re not here to protect me from whatever horrors the future holds. 

Not that you would have protected me, really. From what would you have been able to save me? Perhaps you’re actually in a better position now to help me with the burden of being a person in current times. But it’s about the archetype. The father. The patriarch. The protector, the provider, the pragmatist. It's gone. Existentially, that makes me feel untethered. 

It also reminds me that you were a Trump supporter, against my best hope for you. I’m still haunted by a conversation we had after a Trump/Clinton debate in 2016 where I wondered aloud why “grab them by the pussy” wasn’t enough for you to pause your endorsement. With daughters, how could a man who sees women as objects he’s entitled to assault at his whim be the man you wanted to bestow near limitless power upon? It made me confront all over again the misogyny I experienced in you when I was younger; a misogyny I hoped would wane, not wax over the years. 

I know that wasn’t your heart. Not really. I think you were generally misguided in some of your political ideologies. Something about baby boomers, growing up during the civil rights movement with depression-era parents, or perhaps something more specifically about your stroke and how much more vulnerable to propaganda that left your mind. 

You were prey for people with insane ideologies, easy to indoctrinate. I gave you grace for that.

I expanded that grace when you made it clear this time around that you didn’t support Trump and his tech-bro oligarchy.

Still, I wanted you to have to suffer through another Trump presidency with the rest of us, considering you helped make it happen the first time. I wanted you to see how wrong you were. I wanted the part of you that cares about people to get louder than the part of you that worships the false god of U.S. domination.

I wanted to go through this with you.

I'd have even settled for just another birthday with you. In lieu of listening over and over again to the voicemail you left me on last year's birthday just to hear your voice again, I wish we could talk. And not just in a dream.

Do birthday wishes cover such asks? If so, consider this mine.

You know where to find me.

I recently ran into an acquaintance who asked a series of "catching up" questions. When I told him you passed, he offered his condolences and shared that he lost his mother last year, so he could relate to how wild and unpredictable grief can be. But then he asked me something that struck a chord: were you guys close?

My initial response was silence. I looked around a bit, searching for the answer. "It's complicated," I said "as it can often be with parents."

He understood.

And yet it bothered me. It bothered me that he asked that question, as though grief is ever proportionate to the level of closeness the living achieved with the dead. Sometimes a lack of closeness makes death harder to cope with because the opportunity for anything different to emerge in the future dies, too. Then again, the more a person is in your life, the more your life needs to reorganize around their absence.

What does closeness mean, exactly, anyway? Did we see each other every day? No. For most of my life, we lived in different states. Did we regularly have lengthy conversations on the phone? Neither one of us are good at talking on the phone, or having much to say in general, so our phone calls could be brief. But we made efforts with each other. We reached out for connection in one way or another. And when we were in the same room, we met inside the silences no one else could stand and lived a whole life there together.

It seems trite and a bit convenient to say that this was the year I wanted us to get closer, but it was. In December, I committed to myself that I'd visit you often throughout the year and try to turn the lights on in the dark corners of our relationship. In February, you died. That's a grief that is privately mine, that no one will ever be able to understand the amorphous shape of.

But how would our relationship be defined? I've grieved you in all different ways since childhood, I've had immense conflict with you, I've radically allowed you to be who you are, and you me, and I've been able to express my gratitude and love for you as you have done in return.

...

During the initial weeks following your death, I was vehemently convinced you were a saint. Reckoning with our complicated past, I decided you were the purest and most innocent among us. It was a relief to be there, even though humans are more complicated than being all good or all bad. You were made a monster for so much of my life, a few weeks of full-blown idealization restored a bit of balance.

Sometimes, when I learn a lesson I'm apt to forget, I'll write down some notes in an email and schedule it to send when I suspect I'll need it most. Today I received an email from a past version of me.

Last year I was upset that B didn't give me the birthday I wanted. Somehow I expected him to read my mind and when he couldn't, I withdrew. And then got angry. And then withdrew again.

One of my favorite things about B's and my relationship is that we're really open about the ways our fucked up attachments with our parents show up in the unmet needs we scream at each other about. His avoidance reminds me of you while my anxiety reminds him of his dad. It's fun.

In the email I received from my last year's self, I softly offered the reminder that my unmet needs are not for B to guess, or even to fulfill regularly. And the part of me who thinks otherwise is actually a part of me that has unfinished business with you.

There are several versions of you and me that have played out throughout my life.

When I was 7, you and mom had a fight so big that you stormed out of the house without saying a word to your daughters. You never slept there again.

Mom's initial story was that you worked too much and she was tired of you putting your family last. She said you were moving out and that we would get to see you over the weekend.

Within a few weeks, we found a groove where you'd pick up L and me on Sundays, and we would spend the day together on various adventures.

One of those early Sundays, as we sat stuck in the kind of Lincoln Tunnel traffic where 100 lanes of cars try to merge into 2, you lowered the radio and said "I want you to know that I'm dating someone. And we've been together since before your mother and I split up." I remember the traffic vividly because I remember wanting to run away but feeling trapped in an endless sea of cars.

You asked if we had any questions. I couldn't begin to know what to ask.

You were very matter-of-fact about it. Your tone struck me as though we had done something wrong. I spent many retrospective years wishing you could have given us more that day, when you still had the chance, because those few minutes laid the foundation for everything messy that followed.

Almost immediately, you began putting pressure on us to meet your new girlfriend. You never acknowledged how confusing and uncomfortable it would be to see you with another woman when we were still feeling whiplash from your separation from our mother. We were children whose family suddenly broke apart and you seemed more interested in rebuilding elsewhere than mending the cracks of the home you never returned to but we had to.

Emotionally, at least. I know you were always mending cracks financially and, well, literally with your construction skills.

You were curt and relentless about us meeting her, bringing it up every time we spoke to the point that I became anxious whenever you were around, even though I wanted you around more than I wanted anything.

I would think to myself:

Doesn't my dad hear me say "no"?

Why isn't my dad respecting that I'm saying "no"?

What does "no" mean if my own father won't back off?

If he wants this so badly, why isn't he doing more to help me understand that it's safe rather than getting mad at me for not giving him what he wants?

How can all of this somehow be my fault?

It didn't feel safe. Not because it wasn't, but because I was under the age of 10 and living with a woman who, to this day, hasn't come to terms with how you scorned her.

She called you a cheater, a selfish asshole who doesn't care about anyone but yourself. She said you made her feel like she was trash all throughout your marriage so why not end it that way, too.

She was furious when she didn't have control and made you seem slimy and untrustworthy for doing things behind her back that she asked you to do with her, like the "conversation" we had outside the Lincoln Tunnel.

And then the fiasco began. I shudder now at the thought of the many different versions of this I've heard as an adult from varying involved parties. We would receive an invitation to a family event followed by a phone call from you saying "I'm bringing her so if you want to come too, you'll have to deal with it."

In hindsight I understand you wanting to bring your new partner to your family's celebrations, especially since your brother had just died and your family was vulnerable and in need of connection. But you were effectively shutting us out of it. They're our family, too. And the more you made calls with threatening tones of voice, the more you made it seem like it would never actually be our choice; the more you made it feel unsafe.

You were battling mom through me. You were cruel to me because you saw me as an extension of her agenda. It wasn't fair, probably to anyone but least of all the fucking children.

Your fucking children.

And it was never going to get you what you wanted.

Not until I was old enough to bring myself to therapy and try to learn how to have a relationship with you around the sharp edges you weren't willing to dull. Back then, anytime I would start to come around, your aggression about it would fling me right back over to mom's side of things. For all of our sakes, I wish you knew how much you were working against your own ends.

So many of these layers became clearer to me as I got older because I worked to become more conscious. You used to say we were brainwashed by mom and it used to infuriate me because I had my own reasons for feeling scared that you didn't care to comprehend. Do you know the complex I developed around my own self-worth because of that? If my father doesn't care about what I want or need, why should anyone? If my father can't be kind to me unless I give him what he wants, why should anyone? If my father doesn't choose me, why should anyone?

That hurts so much. So deeply. So forever. No matter how many therapy sessions I have.

And yet I know now that I was very much brainwashed by her. Her side of the story was the only one I ever really heard and she was the farthest thing from objective. She always said she wanted us to have a good relationship with you but all of her actions said otherwise.

Mom never told us that by the time you two had that argument and you stormed out of the house, you were already moved out and living with your sister.

Mom never told us that your marriage was already ending, only that you did the unthinkable and ruined our otherwise perfectly fine family.

Mom never told us about the strongly-worded letters she would send you chastising your parenting skills and threatening a loss of access to us if you didn't do things her way.

Mom never admitted her own mistakes or fears, she only tore you apart for your indiscretions and your desires to be happy.

I'm sorry she did that to you, to us.

I know now that you were just a guy trying to live a good life. You wanted a partner that worked with you, not against you. You wanted a family free from the narcissistic pollution she suffocated us in. You tried to free us but when we didn't go with you, you blamed us for being under the exact spell you were once under. You should have known. You had to do something drastic to break yourself free of it and you were a full-grown man. What did you possibly expect from us?

So many of these dynamics stay with me and show up in my relationship with B. When I expect that he'll read my mind or answer my every need, it's really you that I'm looking for; a father who should know more about what his kid needs than the kid herself and provide it, no questions asked.

You did that where you could. I know. You did your best. I believe that. And the little girl that still rattles around in me needed more from you. You were everything to me. It hurt so deeply that it seemed so easy for you to leave me behind.

And now you've left again. This time, you left all of us behind.

The good new is that I don't need anything from you now. I did a month ago. During the weeks you were unconscious in the ICU, I tried dreaming and praying and singing in your direction. I wondered what kind of energetic waves a sedated person might be swimming in and I tried to meet you there to say hi, to say I love you, to say keep healing because I need you. This year was supposed to be the year I visited you so much you'd get sick of me, the year I was finally ready to ask you hard questions, share with you everything I was holding for us and learning what you'd held, too.

Instead we are here.

Well, I'm not sure where you are. But then, I never really did.

It's all forgiven on my end. I may still have anger toward you but it's proportionate to the love I have for you.

I don't hold anything against you. I just wish we could have talked about this so I could know if you held anything against me. If you were, I reckon you're not anymore.

I did some recon and figured out where those specific citrus slices came from. Walmart. One of your favorite places. I don't think we ever went to Walmart together, but we did have many rendezvous at the Kmart on Staten Island, right after having lunch at Applebee's. You loved that we could browse clothes, candy, bike helmets, and engine oil all in one place for cheap.

Walmart isn't a place I frequent. In fact, there isn't a single one in town. But I couldn't stop obsessing over the damn citrus slices; how they were your last snack and how eating the ones you left behind in the days after you died helped me feel closer to you.

So I drove 30 minutes to the closest Walmart. I walked around a bit, imagining how you'd wander and explore. But despite my best efforts, I couldn't locate any citrus slices.

So I drove another 10 minutes to a different Walmart where I did the same. Still no luck. I laughed at how intensely I was searching for them, especially once I considered the likelihood that you just randomly grabbed them on your way to check out one day. An impulse buy for you that I'm now on the hunt for. Eventually I realized I could search online to see if any nearby stores had them in stock. One did.

So I drove another 20 minutes to a third Walmart. I found them. On the bottom shelf, barely visible, hidden behind Red Vines and bubble gum. Holding the tub in my hand felt satisfying. Some consolation for missing you.

On the way home from my citrus slice road trip, I played a song that reminded me of you. Then the algorithm, a bit too astute for anyone's good, started the song I played by your bedside while you died.

The citrus slices aren't great. The flavor is good but the texture is strange and they're way too sweet. I don't know how you managed to get through them with the dental work you had recently. But they remind me of you. I imagine I'll be eating them for the rest of my life. Now that I know which Walmart to go to.

I hope you can enjoy all the citrus your heart desires now, if there's any use for that sort of thing without a body.

We haven't been in the same state on my birthday in a long time but what you probably don't know is waiting to hear from you on the day has always my favorite part. Years ago, after each of your strokes, there were birthdays you forgot. And even though it was understandable, it still broke my heart. I'm reminded of those years now because once again, and now on every birthday for the rest of my life, I have to remember that you can't call, even if you want to.

What do birthdays mean when we talk about the dead? Yours was a few days after you died and I was in town to celebrate with you. Instead the week was filled with arranging your cremation, sorting through your things, and trying to honor your day without you. We went to your favorite beach and I wept. We went to the last restaurant you and I ate together, and again, I wept, though secretly in the bathroom. And then I got on a plane to fly home with a root beer I drank in your honor, wherein, you guessed it, I wept once again.

Finding things about you to celebrate was easy, even though being present throughout the day was excruciating. But I'm having a hard time finding my birthday worthwhile enough to celebrate when grief is all but the sum total of my current emotional state.

As for a birthday wish... perhaps a time machine? The power to bring people back from the dead? An internal sense of peace that feels forever elusive now?

Am I being too dramatic? How do you think I should spend the day? Maybe you can find a way to write down your answer in a card.

Oh, if only our parents were born at the same moment we were, how much conflict and bitterness we would be spared. But parents and children can only go after each other—not with each other. And so an abyss lies between us, which, now and then, nothing but a little love can span.

The abyss that once lay between us suddenly felt like an abyss for me to hold all on my own. Without you on the other side, the love that spanned it all these years snapped back at me with nowhere to go. Love with nowhere to go is my favorite definition of grief because it captures something of its agony.

To the living around me, the abyss may explain where I keep disappearing off to. In it is where I mourn, learn, expand and collapse, wander aimlessly, get haunted by shadows, kick and scream, seek meaning in your loss, and confront my own mortality. The abyss not only spanned the width between us but ran a limitless depth. Now I'm left with the depth.

This past week, mornings have begun to vary. Sometimes I wake up and everything feels normal for about 30 seconds before I remember I'm in the upside down. Other times I wake up immediately negotiating to stay in bed longer so I can miss you without distraction. A few days, I still woke up crying.

No matter how the day starts, the abyss remains and travels with me. Sometimes I can live around it, sometimes I get a bit lost in it. But it's what I need. In the last 10 months, I have had to mourn my aunt, my uncle, my dog, and my dad. If grief is a humidity, I'm in Florida in August.

Stoic and quiet, I never really knew how you grieved. I saw how painful it was to lose your mother, and it was only after your own dad died that you started saying "I love you" to me. You must have been reckoning with something there. But what? What did you feel after losing your parents? Is it anything like what I'm describing? I'd hoped to ask your living self those questions but if the abyss has taught me anything so far, it's that answers to unasked questions may still be discoverable if you're patient and curious enough.

Meet me in there sometime?

"How would people get out of their locked coffins and 6 feet of dirt?" My imagination kept getting stuck on that in particular.

"We're talking about people coming back to life, I'm pretty sure relatively small logistics like that would be accounted for," he snapped back. He seemed irritated, not because I was questioning him but because it's an annoying place to be, thinking something is ridiculous and yet fearing it all the same; wanting so badly to do the right thing for the person you love but feeling so out of your depth about how to do that, you're willing to surrender to something fantastical or superstitious.

I could understand why it gave him apprehension to cremate his mother, not knowing that only weeks after that conversation I'd be meeting with a funeral director having a similar conversation about my father.

After the mortician interview, I watched a short documentary about an Indonesian tribe, the Torajans, whose tradition is to keep the bodies of their dead loved ones around Weekend At Bernie's-style.

I don't mean that disrespectfully. The love they show for their family and their ancestry is beautiful, and the more I watched and learned, the more I understood the traditions. They honor the descent into grief by going slowly, caring for the body as it decays, intentionally planning a meaningful funeral, and even after burial, ritually exhuming the body for ongoing care.

When families in the documentary would gather for the latter, Ma'Nene, or a second funeral, their grief and sorrow during exhumation were gutturally palpable. But once the body was available to see and touch, even though they had to confront more signs of decomposition than the last time, the family seemed so much more at peace. Their love had somewhere to go, the absence of which is exactly why grief can hurt so much. They would kiss their loved one on the forehead or brush their hair, and they'd even clean and redress the body for a refreshed burial. While I may not be interested in doing all that with your corpse, I could understand feeling calmed by some physical reminder of you, like seeing again the hands that used to hold mine when I was young.

My perspective, while moveable, has mostly been that the body is no longer the site of the person, if anything of the person remains at all. Yet it fascinates me to see a dead body as something worth preserving all the while explicitly confronting and accepting its decay. Still, it was a trip getting past my initial Western reactions to family portraits that center a visible corpse being propped up by the living.

When I was watching these videos and expanding my capacity for ideas of your dead body, I didn't know that you had already been cremated. I was still trying to reconcile thoughts of your body in all sorts of states of decay. But it turns out, your body had already been, as the cremation authorization form put it, "mechanically pulverized into an unrecognizable consistency." Words I both morbidly chuckle at and feel a quaking sickness about.

It's not that the Torajans changed my mind about agreeing to your cremation, nor my own, for that matter. But like my cousin, I found myself in an existential panic where I thought "what if Jesus comes back and my dad doesn't have a body to reclaim?!"

I guess if your soul ends up damned for all eternity, at least I'll join you there someday.

In any case, you being cremated feels like another "finality" in the whole thing. Not because I'm still actively trying to negotiate your death - you're dead and usually, for the most part, I know that. But because the death of a person so large in your life leaves a lot of things undone and those things are constantly being remembered unexpectedly. I think about conversations we never finished, questions I had that will never get answers, phone calls you will never receive. I think about how you will never be at my wedding or help me move into my own home. I know I took a while to get to those things but I thought there would still be time.

I confront a new finality of you every day. Today? That your physical body no longer exists. Your cells and your DNA, your fingernails and few remaining hair follicles, your eyes and your nose and the heart that made a mess of things in the first place, however previously unalive, are now no longer. It's weird to me. I wonder how you'd feel about that.

Maybe there's still a way to tell me.

I still haven't heard any updates about your cremation and talk about your celebration of life has ceased as much as the initial outpouring of condolences. As I look around me in my still apartment which looks the same as the last time I saw you, I can't help but wonder if any of that was real. Did I just slip into a hallucination where my dad died? Did I dissociate so much that an alternate reality ate the entirety of my February? If I called you right now would you be pissed that (I think) I wrote your obituary when you are still very much alive? I sent it to a lot of people, you would be really, really mad.

Do I want you back so badly that I'd prefer to have psychotically created the whole ordeal? Bobby says I probably couldn't have invented half the morbid and specific things I've told him about your death, so that helps, I guess.

How do you know what's real?

Last night, after learning that we're midway through March, I realized I have no concept of time. What a whirlwind February was. Uncle B died on the 4th, the day you were originally scheduled to have your heart surgery. The hospital rescheduled your procedure for February 7th, the day we held B's wake. Getting updates on your surgery while I stared at his dead body at the front of the room was an unpleasant crossover event, to say the least. Intrusive thoughts kept placing your face over his in the casket, fearing the worst, forcing me to hope for the best.

Your recovery was slow. The next day we buried my uncle but you stayed sedated in the ICU with a heart bleed the doctors couldn't get under control. Over the next several weeks, you showed signs of slight improvement while other issues began to arise. We thought you'd be okay. We thought it would all work out. We thought slow improvement was better than none and that we could just wait it out and see you on the other side.

I began planning my trip to come see you; for the family reunion happening at the end of February which we were going to together. I began to realize that you might need more recovery time, but I knew you'd want to go to the reunion anyway and that we'd just have to figure out a way to make that happen safely. I was excited to see you, to help you, to hang out with you again.

And then you got an infection. They were able to manage it, but your kidneys needed help. We began having new conversations about your recovery, the potential for ongoing dialysis. Whatever. We'd figure it out. As long as you had a sense of agency and a potential to recover, we'd take one step at a time.

Then you got another infection. It spread through you like a fire, but rot. Your immune system was in shock. Your new heart valve became sick. And then, your brain.

By the time I walked into your hospital room, I could see you were already dying. For all the hospital-bed versions of you etched into my mind, none were like this. There was a chance you might be in pain, and we just wanted you to feel peace. So they replaced most of the machines operating your body with pain medication. We got to say goodbye. Then they removed the rest and we sat by you for 45 minutes, rubbing your arms, telling you we loved you, and inviting you to let go. We even played your favorite song and sadly sang along together as a reminder of the good times; our cross-country road trip, the parties you hosted on the lake for your family, the life you built and the people who love you.

I feel so far away from that day now, even though it was just two weeks away and an experience that merged with my soul.

Last night I couldn't believe 5 weeks had passed since I last felt grounded and part of the living world. "What a whirlwind," I thought. "I should call dad and see how he's been doing with all this."

All this? You mean, him dying? Yeah. He's not going to answer the phone. On account of him dying, you know.

There are parts of me that still don't know. Maybe some that refuse to accept it. Maybe some parts so unready for the world without you that forgetting or pretending makes more sense.

For the parts of me that do know, especially those young ones, I called a meeting. This is where I may lose you. This is woo-woo therapy shit that I'm sure sounds absurd to you. But I want you to know.

I meditated inward, calling forward the 3-year-old, the 5-year-old, and the 7-year-old. I told them I was here for them, as my present adult self, and that I could take care of them, even though I was grieving too. I told them I wasn't sure how this was all supposed to work, what we may encounter, but that I'd be there to figure it out with them, for them.

"He's not entirely gone, you know?" I asked them. They didn't understand. When grandpa died, I was 5, and death was explained to me by someone very repressed about death. It was more confusing than it needed to be, and it made death even scarier for a while. Not that anyone has clear answers about death, but what I learned at 5 set me back, I think. So I tried to repair.

"When our bodies stop working, we die. But there's a part of us, I believe, that keeps on living. Call it our mind, our consciousness, our spirit, our soul, but something invisible and immeasurable but remarkably special stays alive. It moves beyond the body; it floats, it expands, it's limitless. It's like smoke, or wind, or god. You can't interact with it through most of our human senses, but you can perceive it some magical way. I don't know how it all works but I know that we feel it from time to time. We will have funny moments throughout our life where we will wonder if dad's around. We will see things unexpectedly that will make us think he had something to do with it. We will be going about our normal day and think we heard his voice from the other room, and it won't be him in the same form you remember, but it may be his smoke creating new ways to stay connected.

And if that doesn't sit right with you, maybe consider that he's not really gone because his legacy lives on in us. His personality, his hopes and dreams, his lessons, his sense of humor, his genes, the way his fingers danced when he'd cross his hands on the table, how he loved taking long drives and getting lost on purpose -- this body we're in now, he's in, too. He helped to build who we became. He gave us skills and goals and ways of seeing the world that will never go away. He gave us love that will always be ours, even if he's not here in the same form.

Some people associate their lost loved ones with an animal. For instance, when they see a hummingbird, they feel affirmed that their loved one is there in spirit or reminded of their loved one in their heart."

"How do we know what animal is dad," my 3-year-old asked.

"I'm not sure. There are probably lots of ways. One way may even be that we decide. We decide what creature will represent dad and whenever we see it, we'll think of him. What should we choose?"

"A butterfly!" my 3-year-old exclaimed.

"I don't know, dad wasn't a butterfly kind of guy" my 7-year-old chimed in. "What about a dragonfly?"

"I don't know what that is" said my 3-year-old.

"They're very cool, and I like that idea, but they're not around all that often," my adult self offered. "But let's think about this. What's like a butterfly but more like dad?"

"A moth!" said my 5-year-old.

"A moth," I repeated, smiling. "Yes. Like a butterfly but less fancy. Still beautiful but more subtle. Still engaged but more mysterious. Still busy but knows how to find a dark corner to rest in. That sounds like dad. And if we ever want to invite him home, all we have to do is turn on the light."

So you're a moth now, dad. If you can't show us any other way, be a moth and we'll know you're here.

Please.

Now I find myself negotiating with godknowswho, yearning for, at the very least, the day you died. If I can't go back in time to your full aliveness, can I at least earn back the day you died? Ever since that day, you've only been dead. At least that day your heart still had a beat.

And I could see you then. Not quite yourself anymore but still somehow very you. Even through the disturbing death rattle, I could still hear you. Even though your eyes were lost, I could see your sunlight get usurped by the clouds. Counting every one of your teeth as both a means of distracting myself and also peering helplessly into the sacred and horrific vortex through which your life exited your body.

You were dying, but you were still alive.

Yearning for you isn't a new development in our relationship. In some ways, I may have been training for this my whole life. I've coveted more time with you for decades. Your divorce from mom was a mess, and it was both of your faults and neither of your faults.

The propaganda against you was strong. And you knew you had a losing case because you had the major transgression. It was enough to paint everything you did as a crime against humanity. It took me too long to understand that. I'm sorry for that. I often wished you could have helped us see how much Kool-Aid was being served, but I know better to thank you for not putting us in the middle, which is all that would have done.

Still, the Sundays we were promised together after the divorce were the days I felt the most complete. Being with you was magical. Daily life compared to a Sunday spent with you could never come close to being fulfilling, and it only fueled my fantasies for a world in which you were there every day. Six days a week for the 10 years that followed, I was in so much pain missing you.

Not that you were very present when you did live with us. I remember you working late, or, as I later came to learn, seeking comfort from strangers or escaping to your sister’s most nights. You and mom were often frustrated with each other and I developed a sense of humor with the unconscious goal of breaking the endless tension between you.

When you were at home, you mostly parked in front of the TV. On Sundays I would sit on the floor next to you on the couch watching football. I told you stories about my week during commercials and otherwise learned the rules of the game, what got your attention, and how to speak a language you might understand. Your favorite team became mine so that we could have a tether between us.

Since you died, more people than I would have expected have reminded me of a conversation you and I had almost 20 years ago in which I shared with you I was going to therapy. There was more stigma and less fluency around therapy then, so it felt like I was coming out. It was scary to share. And I think it was scary for you to hear. I'm learning now how many people you approached curiously, worriedly, wondering why I was in therapy. I guess I didn't know how to convincingly share that part with you then.

It's one of the regrets I try not to have around losing you -- that I didn't let you see so many parts of me because I assumed I could so easily let you down, or convince you I wasn't worth coming back for. I wanted you to be proud of me, to understand me. So much of who I am would alienate you, and I never wanted to be anywhere you weren't. I still don’t. But you're gone now and I have no idea where you are. Which also means that maybe you're everywhere all the time? I can't pretend to know what I believe about this, especially now, when I most need a shred of faith. But I have to believe in something because the thought of you being gone gone is too much.

So yeah. I went to therapy because I was depressed and anxious growing up in an environment that was uncertain and steered by adult egos, where I felt abandoned by you and exploited by mom. My sense of self-worth formed around those things and I needed to zoom out, observe as an adult what I couldn't at 7, and try to rewire instincts whose only sense was that I was worthless if not a betrayed woman's plaything.

It's a good thing, ultimately. It helped me see you beyond the villain you were painted to be and instead as an imperfect human being. You had a strong adversary. She was betrayed. She was furious. She was anxious. She could only see herself as a victim, and us in turn. And in her un-self-aware attempts to do the right thing, she put a mountain between us. Therapy helped me begin the climb to reach you on the other side.

Now that you're gone, and we can't do more with that, I have to be grateful that we got as far as we did.

I love you.

I always did.

I always will.