I learned of David Bowie’s death as soon as I opened my eyes on Monday, January 11, 2016. At the time, I was leaving for work before dawn and returning after sunset. I was living in the dark, listening to Blackstar. It felt like a dream. On “Girl Loves Me”, a dream in and of itself, there’s a repeated line asking “Where the fuck did Monday go?” And all year I’ve wondered “Where the fuck did Monday go? Where the fuck did David Bowie go? Where the fuck am I going?”
The funny thing is, I had already been listening to a lot of David Bowie when he up and died. I had been listening to a lot of David Bowie because my parents were getting divorced, and his music has always provided an outlet and escape at times of stress and anxiety. It’s strange when your parents get divorced in your twenties. There’s almost something that seems childish about it. Too many television shows with plot points of custody battles and every-other-weekend with dad. When you’re in your mid-twenties, you’re supposed to have your shit together enough as to where it might not really matter, right? But, like so many millennials, I found myself back home in the suburbs after the internships didn’t turn into jobs and my bank account turned to zero. Although it’s not glamorous to come back, I was looking forward to the stability and familiarity of my parents and our house. And then they up and got divorced.
My mourning for David Bowie and my mourning for my parents’ marriage became mixed up in each other. It was often easier to grieve for David Bowie because I knew exactly what he meant to me, and my parents’ relationship has always been more complex. Although I knew my parents privately and David Bowie publicly, Bowie was very publicly intimate while my parents were very privately closed off. At no point in my life have I looked at my parents thought, “That is what love looks like,” the way one would looking at, say, David Bowie and Iman. I’ve hardly seen my parents exhibit friendship, and certainly never intimacy. I can never remember seeing them kiss. Perhaps a peck on the cheek after a particularly nice birthday present, but never anything past that. I can’t recall them ever holding hands, or siting with their arms around each other or even sitting very close at all. Certainly I have never heard them say, “I love you.” And yet, no matter how imperfect their marriage may have been, my parents were, of course, the foundation I built my life upon. How can it be any different?
The only story my mom ever told me about how she and my dad met went like this: “We were in a dance class. I asked him to dance and he said no. Then I asked him again and he said no. Then I asked him again and he said no. Then we got married.” They eloped in Lake Tahoe, and two years later, I was born. Twenty-five years later, they got divorced.
The best hypothesis I can formulate is that it was a compromise. A settlement. They were both in their late thirties when they were married. Time was running out. They both wanted a family, and most pressingly, they wanted to be parents. Perhaps it was just a matter of finding someone in the same position. A deal, with a clear and achievable goal. I’m sure there were glimmers of happiness, of possibility, but there was too much working against them. The compliments were never enough and the contrasts were too severe. My parents did not get divorced because they stopped loving each other, my parents were never in love to begin with.
After I used “Life on Mars?” in what is surely a deeply embarrassing short film at a summer camp, a wise counselor told me, “I’ve always thought that everyone finds David Bowie at the same time in their lives.” Like everyone else, I found David Bowie at a point when I was questioning everything: sexuality, the future, my environment - the suburbs - is this it? Is this all there is to aspire to? He seemed to provide a portal, simultaneously into the past, and into the future. Remember that scene in Velvet Goldmine where a bell-bottomed Christain Bale stands in front of his family’s television screen and points to Brian Slade’s performance and yells “That’s me!” That was me. So desperate to escape and start living and creating. David Bowie is (never was) a hero and a role model, but something beyond that, as well. He’s another building block in the foundation of my life, identity and aesthetics.
I found myself shocked, so shocked, by his death. Of course, it was shocking for the world, as his illness had been kept secret and his recent outpourings of music and theater seemed to suggest a career resurgence; but I felt his death in my core. Sometimes I would be pumping gas or sitting at work and just think, “He’s gone.” Then I would remember my parents were gone as well, in a different way, but a way that felt equally final.
I was the last one to leave the house, my childhood home. My mom had already left for a new start in Oregon, and my dad was directing the movers at his new place, so it was up to me to sit in the empty house on the cul-de-sac and wait with two dogs and two cats for the call to deliver them. My RAV4 the ark, and me, a bewildered Noah. I walked into every room and saw shadows of the past: where we gathered to hear my dad read the first Harry Potter books aloud; the empty space where the kitchen table sat, where we ate dinner together every single night I lived at home; my bedroom, where I hung David Bowie posters on the walls and listened to Ziggy Stardust over and over. I used to want to leave this house so badly, but now I felt it was leaving me. Of course, with the new carpet and the empty walls, it wasn’t really our house anymore after all. And without us, it wasn’t really a home.
A year after that Monday, my parents are now Mom and Dad: separate entities as opposed to a unit. David Bowie remains in the same place he always has, in sound and stars. I’ve found new relationships and deeper bonds with Mom and Dad, now that they exist without the weight of the other. I’ve adjusted to the the foundational shifts, but from time to time, I still find myself thinking, Where the fuck did Monday go?
2087
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