I Wish I’d Known That

I feel so bad for you, my friend,

your sufferings unsettle

my faith in meaning, I meant to say.

–Andrew Hudgins, “Courtesy”

My grief requires loud music (Mumford and Sons, The Rolling Stones, Radiohead), the poetry of death (Andrew Hudgins, Sharon Olds, Donald Hall), and television. Lots of television. Jason and I have zipped through ten seasons of The Simpsons, which I mostly slept through, a few select episodes of Moral Orel (the end of Season 2 and all of Season 3), and are currently re-watching The Wire. My father’s surround sound speakers make West Baltimore’s gunshots ricochet off our walls, embed themselves between our ears. My mother used to discourage me against “zoning out” in front of the TV, procrastinating and atrophying on the couch. But the grieving mind is erratic, a jumbled mess of shorted impulses and misfired signals. It requires a shit ton of rebooting. I put the TV on and my brain becomes a screen saver, recycling familiar (and therefore comforting) images. It allows me the protracted rest I need to get through short, frenzied bursts of work and estate management.

We also re-watched Mad Men, but rather than harboring myself in that cocoon of distracted sleepiness, I was more awake for this one, taken again with the emotional gravity of the show, with the relationships that deepen and change over the course of the narrative. Don and Peggy. Pete and Lane. Even Bert Cooper and Mrs. Blankenship, whose Depression-era romance is paid homage as they comfortably solve a crossword puzzle together just before Mrs. Blankenship dies at her desk. “She was born in 1898 in a barn,” Cooper says as he tries to compose her obituary. “She died on the 37th floor of a skyscraper. She’s an astronaut.”

There’s also Joan and Roger, one of my favorite pairings on the show. In the beginning seasons, their longstanding affair comically inverts the power structure of Sterling Cooper, with office manager Joan calling the shots in her relationship with SC partner Roger, who follows her around like a smart-mouthed puppy. When the affair ends and they each marry other people, their romantic history gives way to a subtle, knowing kind of friendship. Joan does a post-heart attack Roger’s makeup before an important meeting, and Roger finds work for Joan after she temporarily leaves Sterling Cooper. In one touching Season 3 scene, Roger, seated beside his passed-out wife, calls Joan to discuss JFK’s assassination, looking for someone who can understand his complicated feelings.

But on this subsequent viewing, with my heart both swelled and hollowed by loss, it was another Joan and Roger moment that left me curled on the bed in the fetal position. Near the end of Season 4, after a brief rekindling of their romance sparked by a street mugging and the absence of Joan’s husband in the Army, Joan tells Roger it’s over between them for good. “I’m not a solution to your problems,” she says, “I’m another problem.”

Roger, heartbroken but dapper, dons a cockeyed fedora in preparation to leave. Then he looks back at Joan, and sadly, sweetly, as though looking at a faded Polaroid, says, “So that night we got mugged, that was the last time? I wish I’d known that.”

I wish I’d known that. Yesterday, word reached me that writer Emily Rapp’s son, Ronan, who has the invariably fatal Tay-Sach’s disease, is facing the end of his short life. I’ve been following Rapp’s chronicle of her own grief (as well as Ronan’s physical decline) for nearly two years. Her dynamic, philosophic, wrenching work has mesmerized me to the point of having alerts of new posts sent to my phone. But it was Rapp’s recent essay on Role/Reboot that I thought of when I heard the news. “What If This Thanksgiving Was Your Last?” describes the “jangly and nervous” feeling Rapp experienced during the 2012 holidays season, wondering if Ronan would live to see another Thanksgiving. My father had been dead exactly one week.

The essay opens with Rapp describing an assignment she gives her creative writing students. They are to write a Thanksgiving scene that captures the way holidays magnify a family’s operating system–the quirks and eccentricities, the hidden alliances, the variables of age or politics. Using occasion to explore character, Rapp teaches that “there’s a kind of electrifying buzz around family and other relationship constellations when the holiday season begins, and it’s not just about the cloying Rudolph music blaring from the supermarket speakers and ads that try to convince you that buying an organic turkey versus a Butterball will define your ethical platform as a human being.” In other words, holidays tend to strip us of our artifices and reveal our internal scaffolding. The weak spots. The reinforcements.

The assignment itself is a framing device for Rapp’s essay. She then plunges into a meditation on life lived on the cusp of loss. Of knowing her son will die and loving him with her whole heart anyway. Of learning, through others’ grief in the Tay-Sach’s community, how deep love ”has the power to hurt you in unfathomable ways, but if you are truly open to it, it will save you, even if it can’t save the people you love best in the world.” Of what it means to remember those who die in what she calls “retroactive hope.” The hope that remembering, however painful, unlocks the lives of those we love and lose, as well as new parts of our own lives, even new ways of living. Grief is instructive, and though it seems to be an absolute, a hammer we cannot deflect from our heads, grief gives us choices. We can rail against the pain and withhold ourselves from it, as well as the love that always precedes it, or we can lean into it, knowing that the hard, ringing fall of the metal is another incarnation of that love.

The essay then closes with Rapp’s revision of her original assignment:

I’d ask them instead to write a holiday dinner scene with all the people they loved best, but with the added knowledge that it will be the last time everyone sat around that table together and passed around crystal bowls full of cranberry sauce and relish dishes. Write the scene knowing that everything, always, can be fractured, broken, dissolved. Write it with the knowledge that someone around that table within the next year will drop dead, disappear, disavow. Write it knowing that the only conflict worth worrying about is this one: When faced with the choice between shutting down your emotion, at the fear of risking pain, or opening up to everything and trusting that you’ll survive it, which will you choose?

2012 was my last year with my father. Though I’ve never been one to shut down emotion as a defensive mechanism, though I can’t recall a time in my life when I’ve opted to feel nothing instead of feeling pain, I still ask myself: If I’d known my father would die in 2012, what might I have done with that knowledge?

I would have insisted on cleaning his apartment earlier, so he could have had visitors all year. So I could have come over and popped in the Mad Men DVDs I let him borrow, but which he never watched. I would have let him read my book before it was published, so he could have made the suggestions for revision he made when it was too late, when the book had already wounded him. So he could have answered the many questions I ask in those essays. And on a more visceral level, if I’d known he was dying right there on the phone with me, saying, “Please, just talk me through this, honey,” I would have instead hung up and called 911, and not waited until we’d consulted with my mother.

Though all year I told my father I loved him at the end of every conversation, and he said it back to me, and we meant it, all of our lives we meant it, I still tally what I overlooked. What I dismissed. What I failed to see. What I’ll recount in my writing through the lens of his impending death, all the scenes that contain it even as he lives and breathes and talks to me from the page.

There is no perfect love, just as there is no perfect death.

In other work, Rapp has said that looking at pictures of her pregnancy, before she knew Ronan was sick–sick even in the womb–is like looking at a different person. A person unaware of the grief in store for her. Back in October, about three weeks before I learned of my father’s cancer–the cancer that did not ultimately kill him, but that almost certainly led to the heart attack that did–I participated in a collaborative writing project with my friend and fellow nonfictionist, Marissa Landrigan. In a weeklong series of emails for the VIDA organization‘s blog, Her Kind, Marissa and I were assigned the theme of “letting go” and charged with the task of exploring that theme conversationally as it pertained to both our real lives and our writing. Having both just turned thirty, Marissa and I approached the conversation with the anxious anticipation of starting our new decade, something I think we defined as a narrative marker of allowance, a mandate to define our hard-won wisdom. With an opening prompt including lines from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” (“Lose something every day. Accept the fluster/ of lost door keys, the hour badly spent./ The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”) we set to the task of articulating the meaning of our mutual transition. You can read the full conversation here.

After my father died, I awaited this publication with more than a measure of dread. I was right to do so. When I described the experience of reading the insights of a self I no longer recognize, my friend B., who lost her father a few months before I lost mine, said, “Reading another person! Yes. That makes total sense to me. An innocent’s voice who doesn’t think they’re innocent.”

How badly I want to step in the middle of this conversation, grab my old self by the shoulders, and shake her. Girl, I’d say, channeling the Italian-American women of my childhood, You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know who you are yet. I know that B. is right when she advises me to be gentle to this girl, to remember that innocence is a vital part of how we become wise (an idea Marissa and I discuss at length, Marissa much more eloquently than me). But I’m reading the proclamations of a person who is about to lose her father, and there’s nothing I can do to warn her, to propel her beyond the innocence that now fills me with disappointment. Because the thing is, I don’t want to be that person again. I don’t want my innocence back.

In her landmark essay, “The Love of My Life,” author Cheryl Strayed offers this criticism of our culture’s response to grief: “We want it to be true that if someone we love dies, we simply have to pass through a series of phases, like an emotional obstacle course from which we will emerge happy and content, unharmed and unchanged.” How often people have recited those phases to me–denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance–as though they’re patiently (or sometimes impatiently) waiting for me to complete them, turn away from grief, return to them the person they remember. My mother jumps at the sound of my achy voice on the phone. “What’s wrong?” she says, maternal instinct kicking in before she remembers. One of my friends is aghast at the anger that sometimes creeps into my voice, the viciousness underlying my tone. Another friend suggests a combination of proactive positivity and gratitude for what I still have. The people who recite this litany of practiced, culturally-trained reactions are almost always inexperienced with the death of a parent, sibling, spouse, or child, which Strayed catalogs as the list of deaths the Jewish faith says makes you a mourner. I don’t begrudge my friends their responses, lost and frustrated as they are in their inability to soothe me. But I’ve found myself retreating, instead soothed by either the near-strangers who don’t know me as anyone other than a daughter who just lost her father, or people who have also lost what I have lost.

The other day, for instance. I told my stylist about my father’s death. She was standing behind me, wrist-deep in my new hair color, but I detected a slight shift in her balance, heard something faint escape her lips. “Have you lost a parent?” I asked. We both looked out the wall-length windows, watching the people on the street. I knew before she answered. It’s an unsettling intuition I’ve acquired, but I’m grateful for it. These are the things to which I now attach gratitude.

How could Roger have seen it coming, the end of his great love? When they slept together in the aftermath of gunpoint robbery, could he have seen the impetus behind Joan’s grasping touch? If he had known what it meant–that sometimes we reach for the familiar instead of what we need–would he have held her tighter, looked deeper into her eyes, latched on to the detail of her dress or the exact smell of her hair?

If I had known that my father was going to leave me, to what would I have made myself more present?

Yet former Amy seems to sense the experience her writing lacked, the forces that await to ruin and make us more human:

Recently, I noticed that much of the writing I did in my twenties brought characters right to the brink of loss in their lives…and then I left them there, sometimes hanging on the edge before an inevitable unraveling, and sometimes flashing forward to what the loss would come to allow. I never let my characters experience their losses all the way through. Instead, I cut the meatiest chunk right out. For me, the last line of Bishop’s poem— the speaker imploring herself to “Write it!” — speaks to the work of loss I’ve often avoided both professionally and personally, and the work I’m gearing up to do better.

Not avoided, I see now. Just never known.

Letter in the New Year

Tornadoes in Alabama on Christmas Day. Woke from another cancer dream (we were afraid, but had time, no heart attack dropping out of the sky). Called Mom. Tears at eight a.m., cursory Merry Christmases. Then nothing, no more calls to make. All day, rain played the tin roof like a soft snare drum. Like pine needles scattered over foil.

I still don’t know what to do with your ashes. They sit on my night table in the burgundy sack from Pucedo’s. They thud when I shake the box. I can’t hear if there are bits of bone inside. A writer I know swallowed a bit of her mother’s bone, but the crematorium sealed your box in such a way that I can’t open it without exploding you all over the room.

E. thinks I should move the ashes somewhere less centrally located. She thinks it’s morbid that I sleep beside them, wake up staring at them in the morning. Sometimes I look around for a new place. Beneath the coffee pot. Next to the cat litter in the sun room. At the bottom of the linen closet with our stolen hotel toiletries. On top of the coat nook beside the dog’s chewed-up Frisbee. In the basement, high on a shelf out of flood range with my student papers. I square my eyes with a space and visualize it, death’s interior decorator. I never move them.

R. says you talk to him from the portrait we hung in the bar. I don’t like what you’re telling him. Tell him a story instead. Tell him about the money you won in Saratoga Springs. Tell him about Disney World. Tell him the truth: you loved him and were worried.

D.’s mother died last week. Sweet Anne. D. and I used to imagine this–his parents, so much older, you, stomach growing rounder, empty cigarette packs shaving off the minutes of your life. Sometimes, when D. and I made up from fighting, we’d joke that we’d be stuck together when our parents were gone, marooned on a parentless island where we’d have to get along. He isn’t stuck with me, thank god. But he’s on the island now. I see it everywhere, how we lose so much more than we’re given.

New Year’s Eve at Mom’s. Jason played the Springsteen records, and we all drank two of the bottles of Oggi we found at your house (the third had turned sour). Mom said she missed knowing she could call you.

After she went to bed, I took a photograph from one of her albums. West Franklin Street. You and me on the brown argyle couch. I’m three, maybe four. You’re clasping me while I watch television, probably Rainbow Bright. You look like you just woke up–eyes soft, mouth a little slack. You’re looking at Mom, not the camera. Later, I described the photo and asked if you were depressed. Mom said you don’t have your moustache, so the picture was taken after the separation, when she used to let you come over while she went to the Grand Union. You might have been depressed.

Don’t fuck this up, you told me. You didn’t mean the marble staircase we had to negotiate when you walked me down the aisle to Jason two years ago. You meant, don’t ruin my marriage. Me, daughter of a man who fucked this up. Is it in our genes? I was insulted and I knew you could see in me what I see in me, how sometimes I throw goodness away, how I let some secrets out so I can keep others.

Every few nights, I drink too much wine. Two a.m., three a.m. I want my music loud. I want poetry. The texts speak for me, I hold them out like shields. Some days, I don’t speak to Jason at all–don’t hover, when he stands by the bed–but if he fails to internalize the profundity of the song or the precise truth of the poem. If he asks me what I want for dinner. If he meets my pain with calm. If he holds me and says nothing. If he’s in the room with me. If he’s out of the room too long.

E. says she’s never heard me so angry, which makes me a cliche. Death is full of cliches.

Here’s a secret I never told you: D. took my virginity in your house. We were fifteen, maybe sixteen. We were always older than we were. Mom was with that man, and I went to live with you. That whole year, D. and I reaching for what would let us come untethered, running away however we could. You were down the street at the bar, working late. It only hurt for a second. It was the most wonderful hurt, the safest pain. Everywhere, the smell of clean bedsheets, latex, menthol cigarettes, patchouli perfume, you. I pressed my palms backward against the headboard, stared at the ceiling. Stayed where I was.

Letter at One Month

There is gossip, of course. Someone has been arrested and gone to jail. Someone is leaving his wife. Someone hit a parked car outside the bar and drove into the north side hills, into the blackness up there. Someone wants a copy of your funeral portrait with the vodka-and-cranberry. Someone has been lying to me. Someone and I have terminated our professional relationship.

There is progress, too. Most days now, when I get out of class, I take a detour home. I drive down King Road, taking carefully the hairpin turns along the state park toward the big box storefront lights on Route 13. It’s dark early and no houses out that way. I park in the darkness and turn my headlights off. I listen to whatever music won’t let go of me, and I scream.

I consider this progress, anyway. You would say, “Don’t be morbid.” But I prefer the banshee howl to the strangled numbness of the first days. I would rather scream than try to scream.

I keep listening to this song by a band you never heard of, and even if I had played this song for you, I know you would have said, “That’s nice, hon. A little sad, though.” And it’s true, the song is sad, it’s about death. And I know you would have heard the cloying melody and dying heartbeat bass drum and missed the lines I keep replaying to hear: But there will come a time, you’ll see, with no more tears. And love will not break your heart…

Mom and I went to lunch the other day. Greek place. She ordered spinach pie. The restaurant was bright–fresh white walls, oceanic murals, dolphins leaping equivocally with waves in slate blue and creamy orange. We talked plainly about grief. She said she has to ask herself sometimes if you are really gone so soon, and if I could, I’d violate her privacy to call and tell you, “See? She isn’t sorry she met you.” She paid in cash, and I thought of every restaurant you ever took me to, the exact change and tip in folded bills on every Formica table, and I thought of you as we were leaving and the old Greek man behind the pastry display case said, “Thank you, thank you, sweetheart,” because I knew right away he was the father of a daughter.

S&S check in nearly every day. They defer their pain to hear mine all the way out, all the way to skittering silence over bread crumbs and dregs of wine on the table. B. has been good to me, too. Today, he reminded me about the staff Christmas bonuses.

K. decorated the bar. It looks better than any other year, she hung glittery stars from the ceiling and the little tree glows in the corner like a nightlight, like a campfire going out in early dawn. It’s just slightly bigger than the one we borrowed from your parents all those years ago and never returned. Remember how we forgot to unplug it after the new year, and the tiny colored lights kept winking on with the timer? Six ‘o clock every night. Year after year after year. And when we moved into the new house, we brought it and put it on those stairs that are walled-off at the top. The Christmas tree that never died on the stairs that went to nowhere.

Daughter Species

The couch won’t fit. Jason and the neighbor boys upstairs have upturned it, angled it side-to-side, tried brute force that scraped the wood of our narrow doorway. I place my fingers into the long, deep scratches that splay my hand into a wide paw. Sign of a snow leopard. “We’ll have to repair that,” I say.

My father has been dead two weeks. The couch wasn’t his. We bought it from a friend before returning to Ithaca, an impulsive purchase we made without measuring. We yoked it with bungee cords to the bed of Jason’s truck and hauled it back along with the velvet-covered box of my father’s ashes and his huge flat-screen television with surround sound speakers. We don’t have cable.

When I’m not vigilant, my mind wanders back to the wake. How I steeled myself against crying. How the tears that pricked my eyes would so quickly evaporate as the next person approached the front of the line. How I might have appeared callous or secretly angry with my father. I worry too much what people think of me, as he did. Forty-year veteran of the restaurant business, he taught me that every occasion requires a hostess, someone to place herself strategically and receive. I camouflaged myself among the grievers. I inhaled the cigar smoke and perfume, and quietly shook papery hands, and assured everyone it was better this way, he didn’t suffer long, it was a blessing, for the best, a relief.

An hour into the couch debacle, and the boys are reconfiguring their plan. Jason thinks maybe it can be pushed through the back porch window. Our landlord did something with two-by-fours to build a fortified windowsill, and now Jason is taking it apart, hacking and pulling at it with the back of a hammer. I stay in the bedroom and listen to the wood splinter. It sounds like bones being crushed in terrible jaws, the way my mother said my father’s bones would break if the cancer spread there. He died the night before his bone scan. He died of a heart attack that stopped the cancer in its silent, wretched tracks.

A merciful death is an insufficient blessing.

Three nights ago, I went to my father’s bar and got drunk on expensive tequila. I drank so much that I puked an entire seven dollar shot of it back into my glass, one smooth motion of rejected swallow. No, my throat said, this is not happening. Earlier, Jason had said he missed my father, and I said something harsh in return. I didn’t want him missing my father before I began to miss him. I wanted to roam solitary through my grief. I wanted my own territory.

After I vomited, Jason took me back to my mother’s house. He says I wailed the whole way and wouldn’t leave the CD we were playing in the car. To absorb the alcohol and help me sleep, he made me a leftover turkey sandwich with mayonnaise and lettuce, but some of the bites just plopped out of my mouth. I woke with the dogs digging into the sheets, scavenging for meaty bits.

My father is dead and the couch won’t fit. I want everyone out of our apartment and take Jason aside to say so. “Dump the couch,” I say. “Drag it to the curb.” I’m ready to give up. I’m desperate to give up. Anything will do–the couch we just paid sixty dollars for, three weeks’ worth of laundry, my fading hair color, what to do with my father’s ashes. Let them sit on the end table in their velvet-covered box. Leave the windows open all winter and let it snow inside. Give up on the snow. Curl up on the wood floor and let snow settle over my clothes, my hair, let it cover me, let me be buried.

Let a daughter species go extinct.

It is six in the evening, post-daylight savings. The rapid dusk ushers a hunt. “Stay here,” Jason says, pulling the bed covers over my bare legs. Then he goes into the foyer of our building, where the couch is wedged between the plaster walls. He opens his toolbox and selects a screwdriver. He will take the couch apart. Strip to the frame. Then he will put it back together.

More Than One True Thing

I’m delighted to have a craft essay published in the latest issue of Waccamaw. Nonfiction editor and all-around badass Joe Oestreich asked several past contributors to reflect on their previously published work in a special feature called “How the Sausage is Made.” It was trip going to back to my 2010 piece “All the Ways We Fool Ourselves,” an essay I wrote as part of my graduate school thesis. Check out the other craft articles for fabulous writerly advice and even a couple of recipes. The issue also features new work by dynamite folks like Michelle Herman and Elena Passarello.

And here’s my contribution: “More Than One True Thing.”

Letter to a Not-Yet You

Your dad and I are trying to create you, and again this month you didn’t come. You are like the monarch that won’t alight on the rock for a photograph. No, you are like the fox I was almost sure I saw streaking through the fog. No, you are like, you are like.

I thought I’d try a different approach. I thought an affirmation might coax you, as I sometimes long to hear my name spoken aloud. “Amy Lynne,” my mother would say, three even syllables, when I told lies. “Aim,” from my college roommate, downy comfort of nickname. Your father, fan of simplicity, says only “Amy,” southern mouth stretched with vowel.

I want to speak you into being.

We let go when we die, but what agency exists in becoming? Sometimes I am so much my mother that I feel her past inside me, making me. I feel her becoming my mother.

Would it help to know you are already with me? When I am tired, you tell me to rub the dog’s white tummy. You tell me, when I step outside to retrieve the mail, to also sniff the falling leaves. Worry makes you hide, you say from deep within me. I think of you when I do not speed in my car, when I do not buy that pair of boots, when I do not and do not, and withhold myself from myself so I have all I can have to give you.

I want to speak you into being, but do not know which name to say.

For months after your great-grandmother died, I began every conversation with the fact of her death, needing her goneness to be acknowledged. Let me tell you again how she is gone. Now it is your not-yetness. I need to say again and again that you are not here.

Your dad and I don’t leave the house much lately, too bound are we in body-less love, too often do we talk in a household tongue that includes you. Your not-yetness is a strange non-grief to which we don’t feel entitled, but what to do while we wait for you to be? Watch-television-sleep-in-sunlit-afternoons-eat-dark-chocolate-squares-ignore-the-phone-grief-hope.

We feed the grumpy cat and sweep the checkered kitchen floor. We rearrange the too-tight bookshelves and preen the clothes in the too-full closet. We busy our hands. When we speak, we do so slowly, trying to enunciate.

IthacaLit Kickstarter Campaign

One of the reasons I love living in Ithaca, New York–in addition to its physical beauty, politics, food, and high citizen education rate–is its supportive and vibrant artist community. Any night of the week in Ithaca, when you’re craving something cultural, you can pick from dozens of readings, theater performances, musical acts, and gallery shows. When you tell someone in Ithaca you’re a writer, or a painter, or a glass blower, or a musician, nobody balks, or looks at you askance, or asks what you really do, like, for a living. Nobody makes you feel like making art is a meaningless pursuit. Quite the opposite. It’s cool to be an artist here.

My writing is also a testament to what a supportive scene can do for an artist. In the two years since Jason and I moved here from Alabama, I’ve been writing–really writing. I started this blog. I began contributing at The Nervous Breakdown. I published Close Quarters. Nearly every day of the week, regardless of how busy or tired I am, I feel energized to write. No small amount of this energy is due to claiming a writing identity, something I do not hide in Ithaca, but rather loudly embrace.

And I’m not the only one who recognizes this place as a special outpost for writers. In their Literary Boroughs series, Ploughshares recently named Ithaca as one of their “little-known and well-known literary communities” that demonstrate “that while literary culture can exist online without regard to geographic location, it also continues to thrive locally.”

IthacaLit is part of this culture, and they need our help. In order to publish its first annual year-in-review print edition, this local literary journal has sprung a Kickstarter campaign. I hope my readers, local and distant, will consider making even a small contribution to their project.

It’s no secret that the humanities and arts are in peril. The complex forces at work in our society have ushered in a dark time of devaluing the study and representation of humanity. I find it a frightening prospect to imagine a world without the contributions of philosophers, anthropologists, literary and religious theorists, writers, visual artists, performing artists, musicians, and those who teach in these fields. Please look around your own communities for ways to bolster the burgeoning arts.

And thank you, always, to those who support what I and others do, to my readers here on Ten Square Miles, around town in Ithaca, and all over the world. You are blessings.