North of Hope (5 page)

He chuckled—I remember that—and said, “Well, that’s no surprise. Congratulations, kiddo. What do you think?”

What did I think? It was a way to get back into the world. It validated me in a way the army no longer did. “I don’t know—I’m excited!”

“Well, just make sure that you take time to think about this. Don’t make a decision based on ego,” Dad said. I was surprised at his caution, and though I knew I should be grateful for it, I didn’t restrain my enthusiasm.

I talked to a friend who had made the transition from the army to business school. “This is the last decision I want to make for my dad,” I said. “Then I need to figure out what I want to do.” I was wrong; it took years to rid myself of the need to please my dad, a need knit into every part of my neural network.

I accepted Tuck’s offer of admission and went to business school. That fall I became ill. It was early in the year, and I didn’t know anyone well. I lived off campus, so without classmates nearby, I drove myself to the emergency room. Apparently the
hospital IT systems weren’t functioning, because Dad called the hospital from Alaska, only to be told that I wasn’t registered. Then he called the police, worried that I may have driven into the ditch on icy roads, and asked them to go by my apartment to make sure I wasn’t still there. One of the thoughts I could never shake the year after he died was that I no longer had anyone to check on me, no one making sure I was okay. Who would ever know what might happen to me, and who would care?

I lived for his attention. More than anything, I wanted my dad to be proud of me. That’s the thing about a strong father: I learned strength from him, but for much of my earlier life I had a hard time discerning the difference between pleasing him and living for myself. He would have been disappointed about that.

The past few years had not been easy between Dad and Kathy and me. Dad had visited me by himself every year previously, sleeping on the pullout couch in my living room, but after that visit to El Paso, he started bringing Kathy with him and staying in a hotel. Instead of starting our day with an early breakfast, as we had with just the two of us, they sauntered up after she had finished a long yoga practice. When I told him my business school graduation date, he responded carefully: “I’ll have to see what our schedule looks like. Kathy’s niece is graduating college.”

I told him the date of my first Ironman triathlon, which coincided in time and place with a river trip he and Kathy were planning to take in Idaho. “We’ll see how the schedule works out,” he said. I was hurt and responded with childish frustration, not calling him until he called me, even weeks later.

Visiting home that Christmas, a large photo of a friend’s child sat framed on the kitchen counter. There were no photos of us kids.

“I come home once a year, and there’s a picture of some random person on the counter?” I said, knowing it was probably Kathy who had set it there, demonstrating that her priorities mattered
too. I wasn’t interested in her priorities. “Don’t you think your own kids deserve that kind of attention?” I pushed and pushed.

I don’t remember all of that conversation, but I do remember it ending in the living room. “Every day of my life, I remember the days each of you were born!” Dad said, exasperated. “I remember you growing up. I remember everything!”

That’s all I had wanted to hear. A victory, bought at the cost of civility and trust, penalties that would be exacted on other visits. I wondered what had gone wrong.

I bought a book on reconnecting with fathers. I considered Kathy warily. They came to business school graduation, though Kathy didn’t speak to me during their visit, stomping in and out of my apartment with a pout on her pretty face. But they came. They were a few minutes late for our graduation march. Dad had never been late to anything of mine before. He wore a black turtleneck under his sport coat instead of his usual button-up shirt. Unwilling to acknowledge the vanities all of us have, not ready to acknowledge Dad as his own person, I thought he looked ridiculous. I wanted the Dad tailor-made for me.

When my grandmother moved from her home in Sun City, Arizona, to a retirement center nearby, I flew down to join Dad and my aunt Georgia and cousins who lived locally in helping her move. We put things in boxes and brought them to her apartment, helping her unpack, finding just the right place for her china cabinet, for the glass bells and birds she collected. Grandma, fiercely independent throughout her life, had been loath to leave her home, but her declining health required it. Dad and I stayed in twin beds in the guest room at her new facility. I seized the chance to talk to him one evening, as we sat opposite each other on faded bedspreads. The only light came from lamps on the bedside tables, which cast long shadows and left the corners of the room dark.

“You haven’t been visiting,” I said, intending to provoke. “I don’t get it. When you come with Kathy, you guys don’t show up
until the day is half gone. Why don’t you just let her finish her yoga on her own?”

He evaded my questions for a while, then snapped, “Don’t you think it’s hard being down here while you’re here helping? People will say what a big help you are, and Kathy’s going to be jealous. I will
not
let this marriage fail. You kids
will
see an example of a good marriage!”

I sat on the sagging mattress, staring at him, speechless for once, watching the electricity snap and pop in the frayed ends of a divorced family. So much said between his words: regret over a failed marriage he never saw coming; love for his wife; love for us kids; the value of family; his insecurities, tempered by his determination. We regarded each other with a mix of apprehension and wonder, each of us trying to comprehend the other’s changing status and the resulting implications of affection and remove, independence and need. I wanted to hug him and say I loved him, say I was sorry we had talks like these, that I just needed to know that I was still important. The most I might have said was “okay” before we turned out our lamps and went to sleep. Or rolled over to stare into the dark.

Thinking back on it now, I craved the gentleness Dad had assumed with age and his new marriage, in part because it hadn’t been as present when I was younger. Part of this gentleness came from the love he had for Kathy. I could see that, and appreciate it as a part of him, as something she gave to him in a way we kids could not. But my need for connection threatened Kathy because my relationship with her, very real in its own right, was made of different stuff. We both wanted my dad in different ways.

I didn’t notice the point at which our roles changed places and I was the one checking on him, asking what they were taking with them when they were gone, how they were going to be safe. As Dad and Kathy headed into the wild, I worried, in the way we start to worry when we can no longer deny the possibility of loss, even though we have not yet begun to understand its consequences.

It is still beautiful to feel your heart throbbing.
But often the shadow feels more real than the body.

—Tomas Tranströmer, “After Someone’s Death”

M
y first days back in Seattle after Dad and Kathy died had played out like a silent movie, familiar scenes and even people around me moving in two dimensions, black and white, muted, meaningless. I walked about as a void, a transparent body; no one could see me, no one could understand. I was living in negative. I lived just outside the tremulous border of life, on the fringe, the mirage of separation between worlds obscuring details and depth.

I fooled myself into believing that I could manage myself as a project. I did what must be done. We had a funeral. We buried them. We cleaned out and sold their house. If I planned well enough, my rational side could oversee my emotions. I went to a counselor and to a grief group. I returned to work and soon moved into management, where I dove into projects. I focused on rhythms: working, returning phone calls, seeing friends, going to church. I adopted two adolescent cats and named them Jack—after Father Jack, the priest in Healy who had buried Dad and Kathy, after the Jack River in Alaska, and after C. S. Lewis (Jack was Lewis’s nickname)—and Healy, after the place where Dad and Kathy were buried. If life was about doing the right things, surely
I could figure those things out. This was something universal. Everyone loses their parents at some point.

But warning signs flashed like artillery fire in the night, unpredictable, shaking the ground, until I sat cowering, waiting for the next round to hit. I didn’t feel my normal interest in the classical choral group I had sung with the previous year. I lacked motivation to reengage with much at all. In difficult times past, I had sat at my piano and let my fingers explore Chopin, Beethoven, searching for solace or companionship in music. Now I sat at the small dinner table in my apartment, moving food around on my plate in the smothering silence, glancing at the piano, mute against the far wall, feeling early autumn darkness bleed through the skylight above me and suffocate the light.

One night I pushed my plate away and stood. I walked to the piano and sat on the bench. I rested my hands on the cool, smooth keys. My hands would not move. I looked at them—quiet hands sitting on silent keys, as still as bones.

To anticipate the storms, I became a weatherman, reading the signs, looking for cues. If I couldn’t change the weather, couldn’t hold back the onslaught, maybe I could get out of the way. I wasn’t very good at it. Water spouts erupted without warning in the midst of calm. One day at the office, I bolted up, closed the blinds, slammed the door, and sat back in my chair, turning to face the wall, weeping. The dam was weak; I could only try to respond to leaks.

When after the funeral an acquaintance recommended anti-depressants, I was insulted. We were a family that didn’t ask for help. We were tough. I believed this until the day, a few months after coming back to Seattle, when I sprinted out of the office and down the stairs to my car, hoping I wouldn’t see anyone, my body convulsing before I could slam the car door behind me. I went to my therapy appointment that afternoon, dissolved in sobs for the first and only time during therapy, and asked for a
prescription. I didn’t go to therapy to cry; I went to therapy to work. The counselor seemed relieved by it all: the crying and the request. He wrote the prescription. I went home and looked at the pill in my palm. Round, white, like a baby aspirin. I didn’t want to cancel out my feelings. I didn’t want to stop feeling the pain that kept me closer to those I had lost. I wanted to hurt, but I also needed to work and live. Refusing to use an available tool didn’t make sense. I waited a day, then another. Finally I added the little white pills to my vitamins and tried to ignore that I was using them. Over time, I started to understand that not asking for help was another legacy I could break. I started to see the damage done in our family that might have been avoided if we hadn’t all been so proud. And that the way that damage had manifested was nothing to be proud of at all.

“Are you over it yet?” someone asked once.

“Have you moved on?” asked someone else.

I knew these were questions asked from a place of discomfort, by people who did not know, who didn’t know what to say. Still, the queries came at me like blades. There is no such thing as getting over it, I wanted to scream, I wanted to whisper. There is no such thing as moving on, at least not how you’ve understood it before. It’s like being tackled by something you hadn’t known existed, then lying breathless on the ground, getting up slowly, and starting to walk again, alongside this thing, along with this thing. It’s no wonder some stories describe the grim reaper as a person or thing hooded and unknown that shows up at our doors, takes up residence in our homes and lives and bodies, a thing dark and physical.

I had to learn to understand the world differently. I had to relearn the world, a world without my father, without my stepmother. Once I did this, I had to relearn myself without them too. It all looked flat, dimensionless, ugly. I did not know how to do this kind of learning. I did not want to learn this kind of life.

Dad said, coming back from his father’s funeral, that he had somehow known as he carried the casket that he was carrying not his father but only his shell. I kept envisioning Dad and Kathy alone in boxes deep in the cold dark earth, now just flesh and bone.

Each day, I came home from work and stretched out on the couch, flattened like roadkill. I stared into the air hanging silent and dead, seeing nothing, waiting to be crushed under the weight of its emptiness. I did not want to talk to anyone, and yet I wished with desperation for someone who would be in that room with me, in that space, just sitting and breathing and giving life to the air. I wished for air that held the possibility of a call from Anchorage, Dad’s voice on the phone, Kathy’s laugh. If I thought at all, I thought in sharp shards of understanding that there were others around my city, around my world, also roiling under the weight of this dark, fathomless pain, and that knowledge was too much to bear.

I put on sunglasses to walk to the grocery store on a cloudy day. Inside, I avoided eye contact. The checkout attendant smiled brightly and asked how I was, a gesture I usually appreciated. I wrestled the corners of my closed mouth upward, briefly, in disbelief at the unknowing of the world. I signed my credit card receipt, dropped my sunglasses back onto my face, and walked out, back onto the street, where I was invisible. I wondered how anyone could be so cruel. I envied cultures that have mourning traditions, wearing black or rending garments. Then people would know; they would understand. Why had our culture done away with all that? To spare the majority the discomfort that each of us must one day face? And by doing so robbing every one of us of the space to grieve and neutering society’s ability to mourn with the bereaved, our chance to appreciate life more for knowing death? I felt cheated. And it occurred to me that grief is something imposed, but that grieving is something that must be learned and,
like anything of consequence, would reveal its realities slowly, over a lifetime. I had to learn it, so that I could make it through the shadowed valley and someday come out the other side. In my learning, I wanted to stay invisible—or if I had to be visible, to be left to my mourning. Lord, have mercy.