I’m available for my grief. I mean, an advance party has slipped in but I sense stronger heartbeats of the stuff on the other side of my blurred edges. I mean, it’s my heart beating. Yet there’s a gauziness to this past week. Occasional pricks but mostly muffled. I’m a Gulliver emotionally. Not quite aware of the little stabs my inner lilliputians of grief are poking at.

The clock has been running backward. Every day (every moment of every day?), I’m reflecting in reverse. At this time last week: he was in his apartment. in his chair. in his life. in the ER. in the hospital room. in some pain. in a gone state. in another place. passed through (yet this last bit I won’t reflect until tonight at 11.16).

The business of losing someone is a determined distraction: the voices at the funeral home a lulling balm of “get some sleep” and “we’ll take care of everything.” Everything? I wondered. Well, just enough in terms of the vehicle he left behind. The phone calls to my mom, his friends: very very soggy those calls. The stoppages: newspapers, phone, the banking institution, all except the last wonderful in the language of condolence. The last (I’m looking at you Citibank) really so not wonderful that I lost it. Maybe that was cathartic? But the third time the customer service human said “We can’t find her account” I screamed “HE. MY FATHER. HE. SHOW SOME RESPECT.” That was an adrenaline pump for sure. A banshee of bereaved. And yet, the CBank human was seemingly unruffled. I was exhausted though. We never did take care of that bit of business. Saved for the future, probably through the mail. Dennis wondrous in his caretaking of me and the minutia of moving the physical furniture of my dad’s life.

It’s weird (not weird) how doing these things even when I know I could wait a minute are less like pressing on a bruise and more like an emotional tourniquet cutting off the circulation of the grief underneath. I say I’m available for the grief. And I say I will loosen that tourniquet. And I intend to. And now I’ve said it out loud. I’ve cracked the door of my heart open for it to come in.

And then this: The last time he was lucid (8:20PM, Thursday, July 20), he commented on the cat and the man with the dog standing outside the curtain of his emergency room. I looked, could not see them but yet I would not say that. Did he want me to close the curtain? I asked. No, they were fine. They looked friendly, he said. He pointed out the birds up in the lights. He was okay with them too. And that was all. The last things he said as a dad I recognized. The man in pain I saw the next day, the reactive DeanSpencer who was threaded with tubes&plumbedLines, that was the body of him. The soul, I think, had gone with the cat, the man, the dog, flown with the birds.

Below, some things that have settled in me.

Listened to Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

The Guest House Rumi

Emma Straub (her substack is one I read voraciously—along with her books. The ones she wrote after her dad died, I’ve been revisiting but this poem she shared by Tony Hoagland is brilliant and, as she says, “takes issue with the causes of death listed after one’s demise, and offers other avenues instead…” and I love it. Also an amazing one—an ode to poet Lucille Clifton—on all the things that didn’t kill her dad.)

In The Beautiful Rain

Hearing that old phrase “a good death,” which I still don’t exactly understand, I’ve decided I’ve already had so many, I don’t need another.
Though before I go I wish to offer some revisions to the existing vocabulary.
Let us decline the pretense of the hyper-factual: the myocardial infarction; the arterial embolism; the postoperative complication.
Let us forgo the euphemistic: the “passed away” and “shuffled off this mortal coil,” as worn out and passive as an old dildo.
Now, if poetry can help, it is time to say, “She fell from her trapeze at 2 AM in the midst of a triple backflip in front of her favorite witnesses.”
Let us say, “In broad daylight, Ms. Abigail Miller conducted her daring escape before life, that Crook, had completely picked her pocket.”
It is not too late for some hero to appear and volunteer in the name of setting an example:
Let us say, “He flew with abandon, and a joyous expression on his face, like a gust of wind or a man in a necktie from the last dinner party he would ever have to attend.”
To say, “He was the egg that elected to break for the greater cause of the omelet;
the good piece of wood that leapt into the fire.”
“Though grudging at first, he fell like the rain, with his eyes wide open, willing to change.”
Tony Hoagland