For CDLR
Two months after my father dies, the country descends into standstill. Life becomes a frozen turmoil. A man on TV says there are three criteria for a global pandemic. He does not elaborate. People begin to stay inside, distance themselves, acclimate to this new, constrained bubble. Even our language mutates. Bubble, read: immediate social circle, enters the colloquial lexicon. Those early days seem so long ago, don’t they? Flatten the curve, the TV says. Hand sanitizer is sold out across town. People are frightened. My father is dead. He was sick for three years. You have to admit about the timing. Two months after my father dies and the world finally seems to have caught up with my grief.
***
I watch the news for updates, wondering what kind of update would make me stop watching. It is no great credit to my character, but the answer is this: I want fire and calamity and pain and destruction. I want embers to fall, spread, pollenate into a blue-flamed blaze. I want strangers to suffer as I am suffering. I want to kick metal walkers out from under senior citizens, pitch big-eyed babies off skyscraper roofs. You think I exaggerate? I want wounds, violence, slash-and-burn. The anger I feel is inspired. Like something secret and long sealed has awoken in me. I want people to write dissertations on the unfairness that’s toppled my life. My life. Me. That’s what I can’t wrap myself around. Don’t people know it’s me we’re talking about? I banish empathy and pass my sorrow onto others as if by conduction. Give me death and bloody rapture. Give me commensurate devastation. Make Revelation look like summer camp.
Or this. I am stuck in the deep end of a wave pool, engulfed by unspeakable sadness. A man on the TV says, If you need help, you’ll get it. There is no box to check on my census form to indicate the recent loss of my father. I email my congressman to get to the bottom of this. I really did do that.
***
My bereavement counselor says anger is normal. Productive, even. J. has the calming, sometimes dehumanizing voice of an early childhood educator, one of those lilted southern timbres I normally find musical but which presently makes me dream of bashing his head into concavity each time he extends me kindness. I want to tell him that this is not anger. No, no, no. This is rage. This is ancient and ancestral, its hieroglyphic, a black magic hex on all those who dare approach. He asks me about my father. I tell him and I cry, snort, sniffle. I speak in a chorus of throaty gulping noises and I try to stabilize myself. I transform my voice into a manly cry, reserved and staccato and cowboy-tough. But this too soon begins to fail. Okay, but don’t let these tears misinform you. Don’t lose sight of my rage. Because I’m a stampede, an avalanche of furious pain and I’m gaining speed. Can’t you see that? I’ll murder everyone you’ve ever loved. And yet. There I am, crying, shaking now and my knees wobble. He hands me a tissue. Thank you, I say. J. is a licensed bereavement counselor practicing out of a hospice center, so I am surprised at what he asks next. What do you think, he says, about mediums, about those who have a connection to worlds beyond this one? I tell him I’m a reluctant atheist. There are a lot of things in this world I don’t claim to understand, he says. We sit knee to knee in his small office and we are not wearing masks. It was that early into things. Through a window to my right, horses grazing in a hilly pasture, their tails ticking behind them like metronomes. This is our first appointment. I’d say it went pretty well.
***
J. is the third bereavement counselor I’ve seen in these two months. The first was provided by the hospice clinic where my father died. (When the overseeing physician first introduced herself to my father as a palliative care doctor, he responded by saying, Well, that must be pretty easy.) Her name, the first counselor, was A., and she wore long floral muumuus and she cried when we cried; her voice shook when ours shook. She had that expression particular to some New Age spiritualists of someone never far from proselytizing. When my brother said he felt like he should have been there more for our father, that he felt he’d succumbed to the stress and sorrow of the situation and let himself, his father, and his family down, and was now, understandably, bullet-holed with grief, I said no. Yelled it, really. I shouted him down like an opposing member of some legislative body. I told my brother that, while I knew this space was meant for the safe expression and validation of feelings, this feeling in particular would not be validated, owing to the fact of its overarching invalidity. You did as much as anyone, I said. If not more. A. laughed at this, as if she were just another one of the siblings. I told her my father was brave. He was so brave and he did a good job. He did the best he could. I’m glad he’s not suffering anymore, but he must have been so afraid. This is when A. started to cry. Three wild turkeys saunter across the front lawn. What I wanted to say but didn’t was this: find your own grief, because this is mine, and it’s the most precious thing I’ve ever held. When A. stood up to leave I said, Thank you so much. I can’t tell you how helpful this was.
***
I read The Friend by Sigrid Nunez and Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter and Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders and Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald and The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee and Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton and The First Cell by Azra Raza and Joan Didion provides at least a partial foothold in her description of grief as the opposite of meaning––in her words a relentless succession of moments during which we confront the experience of meaninglessness itself. There are indeed moments I’m skeptical of my father’s death, as if his end were a rumor overheard, its source questionable. These moments occur under the umbrella of my complete, unquestionable, almost primal understanding that his absence is permanent and irrevocable. How to square these states of being seems to be the pressing question. My mother is worried about me and I am worried about her.
***
A part of my heart is in the process of calving. I need newer, fewer words. I need heartsore, crestfallen, saturnine, tristful. Give me discipline specific phrases, medical jargon, medieval notions of perdition and damnation, dead words from dead languages to eulogize my dead father. Give me grandiosity, jarring synonyms. A woman on the TV says things are only going to get worse. Finally someone tells the truth. Watching movies helps. Reading helps. One thing would really help. And how splitting it feels, to want so purely and utterly one single thing that, no matter how deep the wish or diligent the plan to affect its occasion, cannot ever come to be.
***
King Berenger, the male lead in Eugene Ionesco’s absurdist play Exit the King, is meant to be seen as a comic everyman, a perfect repository for ridicule: the bloated sense of royal superiority, the fumbling lack of self-awareness, a bitter denial of his own death. A perfect collection point for many of the anxieties we do not care to admit of ourselves, a kind of two-way cathartic mirror. The play is the story of a crumbling kingdom and Berenger’s journey toward the ultimate end. The blocking of the stage through the progression of the play is best characterized by depletion. The narrative is dotted with famously belligerent lines, such as Queen Marguerite addressing the audience minutes into the first act, saying, The king will die at the end of the play. Or when she addresses the king directly: You will die in an hour and a half. Ionesco remarked on the play that it was his attempt at an apprenticeship in dying. There is part of me that cheers for King Berenger, as if he alone might conquer the unconquerable. How can the audience laugh at a man who asks what none of us have the stomach to ask, and that question of course is why are we born if it isn’t forever?
***
Schools shutter, events cancel, colleges move their classes online. The world empties. What you have to understand is that this is not a retrospective. I’m spot-welding the dam as the water breaks through. This is real time, live streamed, my sorrow synched to the internet of things. We’ve been misled. There is no grace in grief.
***
J. texts me two hours after our session. The message is thoughtful and considerate, but contains more emojis than I am comfortable with. There is also a link for a medium’s website. Our next appointment cannot come soon enough.
***
I discovered these sessions through the local weekly. Christened “Coffee and Conversation,” their aim is to connect those who are experiencing grief in all its myriad stages and manifestations. I have gone to Coffee and Conversation three times. Each time I have been the only attendee. This is good. There are always many apologies for this, explanations about how numbers are hit or miss. They never know how many people might show. I take it as another datum of evidence supporting the conclusion that I am unique in my suffering, the model of the universe centric to my burden. My brother asks me how much I’ve been drinking and I lie. A ton, I say.
***
A woman on TV says five million tests will be available by the end of the month. I would like to give people a test of my own. A cheek-swab that, dipped in some undiscovered reagent, would quantify their present sense of anguish into a single number. Highest number wins. I talk to my mother on the phone. She says if dad were alive, he would be in a panic. She says if dad were alive, this novel virus would certainly kill him. I don’t ask if she means this in a good or bad way. I don’t ask her anything at all.
***
One little remarked upon aspect of grief––at least as I’ve encountered it during my brief indoctrination period––is that it is intimidating, formidable. Its timelines for solace and healing are maddeningly far from the here and now. It has the flavor of a mission, a task of daunting size and scope that arrives precisely when brushing your teeth is a struggle of gargantuan order. Another issue, this very much remarked upon, stems from grief’s fundamental inexpressibility. There are elements to grief’s form, but the outlining itself is inchoate, a blurry haze. The feelings have boundaries but these boundaries are new, fuzzy, far-off. By now my thinking tends to reside here: if I cannot overcome this sorrow, goddamn if I won’t articulate it.
***
His oncologist comes to the funeral. The nurses, too. I do not know if it is common for healthcare professionals to do this. I decide it isn’t. When my father’s oncologist reaches my brother and me in the receiving line, dressed in a wildly baggy yet oddly expensive-looking suit, a mess of sobs and sadness, he is hurt personified. I say, You took such good care of him. And it’s the truth. He did. My brothers and I are pallbearers. The funeral home director tells us that, after the mass, we will guide the casket out of the church. On reaching the hearse we will lift the casket from the cart, align it on the runner-wheels, and slide our father in, amen, forever. When we lift the casket, we are surprised by the weight. There are only four of us. We nearly drop it. People notice, gasp.
***
I rage through an internal monologue directed at a woman in the grocery store, who stands precisely in the spot where my favorite crackers are shelved. She gives no indication of coming movement. In my mind I call this disgusting pig vile things. I curse her family line. But the monologue suddenly ends. This surprises me. She is still in my way. A new thread takes shape, beginning with a question. Isn’t it always like that, a simple what if? All of this is major development, this dash of empathy. Like an old friend returning home. Before long, though, the vitriol restarts and I hate this ugly cow of a human. Fling me back to the comfort of my wrath. Of course. But I am gladdened by the moment.
***
J. looks at me and says, What you just said is pretty interesting. This means he’s preparing to point out a paradox. J. tells me that, on the one hand, I’ve expressed a desire for things to return to normal, for no preferential treatment, for a unilateral halt to the eggshell-walking of those around me. On the other, he continues, you want the world to stop spinning, you want fanfare and sirens and mass displays of mourning. Yes, I say. Both. At the same time. All and all. Simultaneity. Finally somebody understands. Now make the arrangements.
***
J. tells me he’s so sorry. He wishes there were a more scenic route home.
***
I mean the stuff about the anger is a front, of course. It’s a mask, a veil, a cover and a silkscreen, a flue meant to direct the heat of my pain away from itself, a filter, a kind of emotional retaining wall, some giant uncrossable crease or unbreakable levee. A distraction. From this plummeting freefall of sadness. Anyone who says grief is more complicated than that––they’re liars. They’re lying to your face.
***
The man on the TV says he is not sure when life will go back to normal. When my father was sick, he told me that he wasn’t afraid of dying so much as he was afraid it might hurt. On his final morning, after a sleepless night of labored breathing, he turned to my mother and said, I think I’m dying. A few hours later he was still alive. He told her that he didn’t want to make a mess when he went. He didn’t want it to be ugly. I’m sorry for being melodramatic, he said. There is a possibility that these were his final words, but I have not confirmed it with my mother. When he began to fade, in and out, there came a moment when you knew he was gone. An instant of leaving, of departure, a thingness erased. In and out, fading into a stillframe of waves, to the ocean returning, endless in a perfect blue beyond.
***
Why bothering going on at all? This is often my way of thinking, today, these days, lately, still. Not disgust or apathy, closer to a heavy mist, a slow-drip of anhedonia. I tip the delivery driver 70%. Because it’s got to be harder for him than it is for me. Maybe. Maybe not. But maybe.
***
Say it like this instead. My father is dead. I loved him very much and I am going to miss him dearly. The sun is shining outside. I am scraped out, bottom to top. Sunshine. The question of course is how to go on. Sunshine, death. Tell me how it ends.
