Does This Make Me Look

Back in the SPIN days, I traveled a lot. For a long time that was great, the rush of an assignment, a new city or country I’d never been to, the nerves of making sure I got what I needed to turn out a story anyone might care about. SPIN, unlike Rolling Stone, let their writers accept junkets (i.e., the trips to interview bands who either had new albums, were new bands, or just needed a goose of publicity, were paid for by the record company). A lot of these travel opportunities, er, I mean important music coverage moments were bandied about in our weekly story meetings. Cinderella (the band. Remember them? lots of hair) were playing on a paddleboat going down the Mississippi, did we want to cover that? (No.) R.E.M. would benon a tour of small clubs, anyone up for that? (YES, please. Then arm wrestling would commence around who would get to go. Although honestly, there were only two writers on staff completely right for that assignment and so one or the other…sometimes both…would be rewarded.) Deee-Lite down under? (Well, sure, although I was never right for those stories since I was more indie rock than groovy. Side note: just watched a live “Groove Is in the Heart” video. Amazing and why wasn’t I more groovy?)

Anyhow, one particular plane ride was moving me toward the U.K. where a publicist had come up with an idea for how I could come over and hang out with her while also doing a story on one of her label’s up-and-coming bands. As happens when work has become your life, the people inside the industry had become my pals and this particular person was someone who I’d had a good time traveling with. She was married to the drummer of a very successful indie band that was playing a stadium in London and so was going to be there anyway. Combining business with pleasure: I would see her, go to the indie band stadium show, then out to a big house in the country where the new band was recording and get an interview, spend a day in London with said band. Go home, write story. Rinse & repeat.

The airline tickets were delivered to my office (because, my friends, there were no internets to speak of back in 1991) along with a three-song sampling of the band: “Alive,” “Wash,” “I’ve Got a Feeling.” Sure, yes, the band was Pearl Jam (they still are Pearl Jam). I listened to the tape over and over on the flight, read the bio, came up with questions, and felt generally prepared. Until I got off the plane, walked into the terminal (Heathrow or Gatwick, can’t remember), and couldn’t find anyone there to tell me where I was going. Normally in these moments, either my friend the publicist would be there or a person holding a sign with my name on it would be standing at the ready to take me where I was going. I was bleary from the flight, caffeine deprived, and suddenly panicked. (Again, this was a time with no devices available.)

Here’s where it gets murky, I can’t altogether remember the details around what happened next. I knew where I was staying, so ostensibly I managed a cab to the hotel but then I had to wait until my phone rang for further instructions. Every time I left the room, to get food, to get coffee, to get air, I would miss the call that told me next steps. Finally I just had to sit in the room until the call came. Looking back now, this strikes me as such a mission impossible as to be absurd. Waiting by a phone. That was a thing people did. Waited for instructions. Waited for boys to call. Waited for friends to call with the plan. Waited to get good news or bad news or any kind of news. Eventually this particular call did come and the the next day I climbed into another car and was driven out to a big rambling British pile in the countryside where the band had been staying for some amount of weeks mixing their debut album, Ten.

There was a certain sort of suspension that happened in being a part of this world. A kind of letting go or being OK with getting lost that I probably wasn’t all that good at, yet still&all, I thrilled to it when the pieces fell into place. A kind of adrenaline that, once I was sitting in the big rambling house with this newbie band who may or may not someday make it big, cuz nobody knew back then, moved me almost to euphoria. That I do remember. How I’d been found, I’d been delivered to the right location, I would get the story. A weird passive/active momentum that pretty much dominated my music-writing career.

And I did it in a kind of vacuum. I rarely told my dad or my mom that I was on the road. Thinking about that now is wild, as if caution really were the wind and I was carried on it trusting all would be well. I would tell my dad the stories when I got home and he, to my memory, never seemed annoyed or startled that I hadn’t told him about the travel ahead of time. There was an independence that I think was channeled from him to me. Or maybe more a sense of being an independent operator. I would be fine, even when I felt lost.

Having spent so much time in the last few months looking at the photos my dad kept of his life, I see so many moments that he lived that I had no idea about. A panoply of places and people featuring him holding a drink, holding a cigarette, and in one, holding dollar bills as if he’s an extra in Casino. Naturally I want to ask him questions about these moments but since I can’t, I make things up. They all have happy endings to do with love and friendship and good times. The stories we didn’t tell each other filling out our lives but not with mystery per se, rather with smiles to know he trusted me enough to have them and me warm in the belief that he was much beloved in his adventures too.

In late 2013, when I was a full-time Woman’s Day employee stepping into the office as one did on a daily basis there would be times that the letters people sent to the magazine looking for various dates on when articles ran or other such things landed on my desk. One day I opened an envelope with a blue recipe card inside, fragile with age and printed in that lovely neat&tiny script of a certain generation. It told of how to make Dutch Coffee Cake circa 1940-something and naturally a good bit of lard was called for according to the ingredients list. (We had a backpage that updated, or rather modernized, recipes from the way-back time, so I think that was why it arrived.)

I became instantly besotted with the writer of the included letter. Something about the language she used describing how this was her husband’s favorite cake after he came back from WWII as they were making a life for themselves as a newly married couple in Binghamton, NY. It was chatty, funny, matter-of-fact, with some little mysteries between the lines about her leaving high school to work in a defense plant during the war. Her name was Winnie Swingle and she currently lived in Lula, Georgia. I mean, that was poetry too. I wrote her back. She wrote me back telling me more. And so began an awesome exchange of letters, books, random trinkets, and, most importantly, thoughts on living, dying, and some everyday incidents in NYC and Lula.

She was a lady who liked to sketch and also had a few pooches (cuz she lived in Lula, Georgia, and had a lot of room for them to run around in a yard). Bit by bit, she introduced me to her brood through the pen&pencil drawings she made on napkins, scraps of paper, and other flat surfaces. I told her about my dad and his collages. Because he and she were the same age, their lived childhood experiences chimed, but as gender would have it, diverged in young adulthood. While they were both grown and formed during the Depression, my dad moved to California from Illinois for college and then a graphic design career, while Winnie stayed close to home in upstate New York and married a returning GI, made him many loaves of Dutch Coffee Cake, and had kids. Then in 1967, when she was 44, she enrolled in an art program at Binghamton University, SUNY, graduating in 1975. Somewhere along the way, her husband died and some time after that she moved to Lula, Georgia.

These details of her came little by little as I’d tell of the job, my college life, and past career. I’d pack up every book on dogs that landed on the giveaway table along with other tchotchkes (she enjoyed perfume), she sent me sketches and every updated year of Lula refrigerator magnet and calendar. I’ve still got it all tucked in a fireproof box sitting on top of the other fireproof box that holds all my dad’s mementos and important papers.

The magical thing about my relationship with Winnie was that we were intimate in a way you can be with someone you’ve never met. I think that’s a thing. One time she sent me a photo with “this is me” written on it in ballpoint pen. The snapshot was of a very messy room, like maybe where she stored ornaments, lawn elves, and all the bits of life that it’s sometimes hard to get rid of. And although I did spend a good long time looking up-close at the picture to see if I could find a human in there, there wasn’t one, so took it more as a message about who she was on the inside.

She would also send letters on all kinds of things, which honestly is one of my favorite things. She chalked it up to being a Depression-era holdover in that you use everything rather than buying something new. If only we’d stuck to that kind of no-waste living. We may not be having quite so many landfill-begets-climate crisis-begets-look outside wherever you live and see the destruction-moments. In early 2018, two things happened with Winnie. One: She let me know her hands were hurting so she wouldn’t be able to write as much as she had but she’d still find a way to send mementos of herself and her life. I had found a tape recorder I wasn’t using and so sent it to her with some blank tapes. Maybe she used it although I never received any spoken moments back. She also mentioned that she would be in Binghamton and that I should come up to see her. I never did do that. In some fundamental way I felt as if a spell might be broken between us. It was a strange sense that this woman who I didn’t know bupkis about physically, who only existed as her written self would become three-dimensional. In a way I can’t fully explain, I didn’t want to know her beyond the page. When I finally did see her, it was on the memorial notice her daughter sent me in 2018.

I think about this topic of spells or boundaries or stepping into somewhere that may burst the magic bubble now because the night my dad died, as Dennis and I sat by the bed, I’d been completely engaged in holding his hand, kissing his head, talking to him for the first many many hours, but during the last hour as his breathing slowed and I knew he was passing, I didn’t take his hand or even say a word to him. Some kind of sense that I didn’t want to distract him from the very real work he was doing…even if it seemed peaceful in some ways, it also appeared not totally without effort…and a part of me felt a bit in awe of it and shy of interrupting.

And sometimes I think we make things up. But yet. I can feel guilt over those moments: not taking his hand, not meeting Winnie. I can acknowledge that. Not get stuck in it but just look. I can also know how much Winnie’s letters mean to me, what I learned from her, and how happy I know she was with my deliveries as well.

And with my dad, there isn’t a need for any words around what every minute of every hour spent with him meant. He knew it. I knew it. Here we are with them.

I’ve had a sinus infection for a little while now. Of course I have.

I say that because certain tell-tale signs over the last many weeks have been duly ignored as I’ve done my damndest to work around the blockage in my right nostril and slight pressure between my eyebrows. And while the symptoms came and went, disappeared even to the point where I was proud to think, I licked this thing, well, no, my sinusial (is that a word. No, actually, but this is) system let me know otherwise and kicked in with a vengeance a couple of days ago. That’s when it became clear I’d need to have a pow-wow with my teleDoc. So I did that and am now on a course of antibiotics (gak).

Anyhoo, the point is, I often think I’m someone who pays attention to what is happening inside of me. Letting the feelings in and sitting with them. The operative word in that first sentence is think. I aspire to be that person for sure. I have my eye on it. I intend to step in and look around, then stay for a bit and take in the feelings without fleeing. But more often than not, I enter, think, yes, stay here, then follow a shiny object somewhere else. My meditation has definitely taken this turn. I’m not unaware of that. My tendency for avoidance and a leaning toward putting things off when it comes to emotional repair and recognition has come into sharp relief in the last month+.

I’d agreed to some extracurricular work projects that clanged into each other as one workday ended and the other project’s hours would begin. It served as a great—in the large-in-number sense rather than the oh-joy way—distraction. And I was exhausted, occasionally distraught, and generally made dismal by the overlap even as the projects themselves were filled with cool moments, even as my dad lay dying and my mind worked to keep it all together. Well, sure, I thought, I can grieve while also meeting these and various deadlines, which, by the way, I set for myself given the folx in charge were beyond kind in offering me as much time off as I needed. Time I was too scared to take…in an emotional rather than financial sense.

Coming out the other end of those many projects, there I was with large swathes of time in which to notice some things: a blocked right nostril, that was causing fuzziness of the head and no availability to really taste food (this last bit is interesting to note given my dad complained of a lack in the taste bud area for the last few years, which frustrated him to no end and I know exactly why.) And also that my heart, the feeling function part, had softened so that seeing a little girl with large, red-framed glasses banded to her tiny head as she jumped solo into the YMCA pool made me cry. The power of these things stopped me in my tracks while also taking me by surprise. The humbling of what it is to be human. At some point, my inner self got tired of waiting for me to pay attention and just decided to drop me to my proverbial knees.

I know it happens like that. The fact that you can run, or at least walk very quickly, out in front of life’s pesky, painful, and emotional experiences but yet find yourself, maybe while waiting at a proverbial light at a busy intersection or some such, caught up with, tapped on the shoulder, and told that you dropped something a few life-miles back and here, I carried it all this way to give you, is usually inevitable. That’s happened to me a few times in life, and more often than not I’ll jump the light and run across the street, dodge a few truth trucks while muttering, hold on, if you can just carry it for a little longer, then I’ll deal with it, let me just get through this busy bit. It’s not that I haven’t ached for the slow-down, the turning toward and into myself to become a wiser human. But, truth be, I’ve also been a little afraid of the experience.

Kind of like when I was in college and one of my roommates told me he could will himself into a certain state of consciousness where he’d be hovering above his body and could look down and see himself on the bed. For some reason, at the time, that seemed super cool and I wanted to be able to do that too. So yes, we were probably stoned when we talked about it. Yet still, I’d go to bed and really concentrate on making this out-of-body thing happen. But to be honest, I also remember being terrified of it happening. Because then what? What if I managed it and couldn’t get back in? Ended up being stranded out there. Apparently, there was some kind of golden thread connecting you/your soul/etc. to your physical self but I worried that puppy could snap at any time. I mean, a thread is thin. Mine might have been a bit worn down. And golden, would that make the thread stronger somehow? I never really felt I had all the information so in the end, while it might have been a great party conversation, I never did fully commit to achieving it.

Now, 40-odd years on, while I’m no closer to levitating out of my body, I am closer to stepping inside it. I understand more how the protective mechanisms I used when I was young kept me safe and that I don’t need to rely on them the same way anymore. Take the tools I’ve used to try and fix everything and everyone outside of me and begin to tinker around with the stuff inside. Boy, I can think of about a million other things to do instead: laundry and the cleaning of cat boxes come to mind. Yet to be actively available for some inner work means at least standing on the porch and finding the door. Staying put as I try to breathe into my right nostril while watching a very brave little girl learn to swim with glasses on.

I spotted my dad in the produce aisle. The first thing I saw were the arms with their paper-thin skin. A fragility I knew so well, that I’d learned how to bandage with non-stick gauze and wrap rather than apply anything sticky, which would pull ugly at that cutaneous covering. The landscape leading to the hands that had held scraps of collage paper, books, golf clubs, martinis, me. But this particular pair of arms were resting on a shopping cart. And I was there. Or rather another woman was there who said, not unkindly but maybe a little impatiently, “dad, I bought one of those last week” as she walked back to him. I watched them move slowly into the dairy section and I didn’t altogether know what to do with myself. That I turned to face a mountain of grapes just brought the flush and sting, ache and awareness of my missing him on more solidly. My dad loved grapes and even when he wasn’t eating much, he would eat those.

They catch you off guard, these moments. This is clearly no surprise given right now I imagine a large amount of you readers out there are nodding your head in recognition. But even given that, it’s still so individual. Imagining the amount of folx walking through waves and puddles of memories, navigating various sites, smells, sounds that are splashing up sensations around a person no longer on this planet makes me think we’ve all gotta be a lot kinder to strangers who may appear frozen in place causing pedestrian traffic jams as they swim through a memory moment.

It’s wild. I have to remind myself to stay in it, stand in the Barnes & Noble where we went before Christmas and I first realized bookstores were, for the first time in his life, overwhelming, confusing. Michael’s Art Supply, where we went after his birthday in January and it became clear he just wanted to be in the store even though he wasn’t really creating collages anymore and couldn’t think of anything he wanted to buy. These were turning points. The juncture of where were were headed. Now, as a solo adventurist, I step inside those places and try to just stand. (Try is the operative word here. For anyone at Michael’s last Tuesday afternoon, you might have wondered why the lady with the blue hair made it only as far as the second set of double doors, then turned and walked quickly out. Apologies to the lady trying to maneuver the shopping cart around me that I bumped into.)

I had lunch with a friend last week and he asked me whether my dad had visited me in a dream yet? The operative word there was yet. No, I answered. Not yet. And then, as if all that needed to happen was an invitation, that night there he was. He wanted Italian food so he, Dennis, and I went to a place with a bar and sat at a high, round table, my dad and I on one side, Dennis across. My dad then turned to me and told me to order a lemon drop. Then we were on a roof trying to watch a movie, which was down in a parking lot so we couldn’t see it and when he stepped beside me toward the edge, I put out my arm to make sure he wouldn’t fall over the side. The caretaker in me still in full effect. The next morning, I looked up Lemon Drop + cocktail and saw that it’s a type of martini. Well sure, of course it is. The man whose ritual for near-on seven decades was a nightly martini would suggest that, wouldn’t he? Although my dad was a traditionalist whose fanciest addition to the classic vodka, vermouth combo would have extended only to how many olives to add. So further pondering on the sweetness of his suggestion will come. Or I’ll just order one and toast him.

So each day has become an open invitation to memories with anticipated apologies to anyone I may trip over on my way in, out, or over the places where emotional quicksand may pull me under too quickly. Learning how to walk on the surface, dip my toe in, float rather than flee. Stay. Put. Hold. Please.

Over the last month, and even well before, I’ve felt the circle of hands around me from friends ready to catch me or hold me or be there for a proverbial lean. People I know well and have for years, people I’ve just met, those I don’t really know but feel their readiness and support. It’s amazing this sensation of feeling surrounded by that kind of willingness because, yes, this passage is a solitary one while also everyone goes through it whether eventually, whether already, whether currently, whether time. So I’m grateful for that.

These hands, the ones on the end of my arms, they’ve been very busy in my 62 years. One thing they’ve been doing, which has been brought to my attention pretty clearly in the last little while, is looking for things to fix, to steady, to make OK. One thing they’ve not done a lot of is playing. They do get all up inside writing, which I consider playing of sorts for sure but the actual let-go, make mud-pie, wave in the air on a rollercoaster, run down a hill kind of play, not so much.

The art of that. The moment when we cross a threshold where full-on playtime is put on the upper shelf of that overcrowded emotional closet because maybe someone said “aren’t you too old for that?” when you mention you and your imaginary friend, Wendy, are going out for some frolicking on the playground or “I need you to make dinner” as you inched toward the door on the way to the apartment-complex pool (please to ignore the box of Mr. Bubble under one arm that’s meant to be dumped into the jacuzzi, which would be the mischief-making that you and your friends did on the regular). But then one day the outside voice became the inner one, and there was too much else going on for any kind of let-loose playing. I’ve no doubt this is a totally universal moment for many/all folx. The variable may just be at what age.

At 12, I stopped playing, running, jumping, letting go and instead started watching, waiting, planning, making things just so. I packed away moments of geeky, free glee and trained a watchful eye on the adults in my world and their mental wellness. Became alert to what they needed. No one said I needed to do that outright. Probably no one even expected me too but yet it felt like my job in a way since I didn’t see anyone else around stepping into the role. When someone you love is sad, you want to make them happy no matter what. So playtime altered. Less frolic and more focus. That set a course.

Not to say I haven’t been wild in my life. I most certainly have, yet I can tell you for sure that even in don’t-think-twice moments—dancing on bars, staying up all night for the sunrise, saying yes to a spontaneous trip—I was still eyeing the exit to safety and hearing the voices saying “You’re the responsible one. Don’t go and lose yourself now.” Admittedly the just-do-its could often be filed under risky behavior and I now understand one (in a series) of reasons for that: Appropriate play, did I ever learn that? Maybe instead I went from lock-it-down to let-it-out bypassing pay-attention. By which I mean: Take my time, pay attention to what brings the joy of purely playing. Understand it doesn’t need to self-destruct once the envelope’s been opened. If you have kids of any sort in your life, no doubt you have a view into what that pure unadulterated exploration into play looks like. And maybe there’s a moment of Damn, I want to do that to. And maybe you do. Now, when I go to the Y and swim laps, I slow my roll heading to the jacuzzi (no Mr. Bubble tucked under my arm, alas) and watch the kids play in the outdoor pool. It’s pure joy and it’s inspiring. Finding the happy place, finding the joy. Knowing the caretaking of my dad these past years has also reminded me of our wondrous splashings during vacations in Pacific Ocean waves and Palm Springs pools.

We have these vertical blinds in our living room window, next to the front door. Three years ago on my birthday, during our first year out here, my dad and I were heading out to a thrift store. He would go look through the books and CDs and I’d end up in shirts and sundresses. As we were leaving, one of the blinds on the end caught the breeze of the open door and got caught as I was closing it. My dad made a wry comment that made me laugh. It was so him: quick, quiet, dry. Every time I walk out the front door now and the end blind blows into the door jamb, my dad is there with me. Quickly. Quietly.

I think of his left hand. It was always very busy, that hand. Fidgety. In the hospital, three weeks ago, I held that hand. First, because I wanted to; second, because his IV was in that arm and he continued to bend it such that the line would get interrupted. The nurse taught me how to restart the IV when that happened so that the alarm beep would stop and the drip could continue. But I held that hand happily, firmly, which was so gnarled with 97 years of living: golf club gripping, art tool holding, Agatha-his-cat petting, martini mixing, daughter tending hand. Now I was tending it and him. He fought me on it a little those three weeks ago but in a way that was more his body than his mind. But my grip was strong. Gentle but determined.

I have a very busy left hand too. During meditation, I’ll be sitting and noticing how my index and thumb fingers are rubbing against each other. I’ll scold them a little as if they’re separate entities from me. They don’t listen.

He was always amazed at how much stuff D and I fit into our back patio: A small pool, a table that sat three, a chaise longue, some small tables, and plants. Four weeks ago, I was replacing the dead plants with ones I had high hopes for. Some sturdier varieties that love triple-digits(!?!?). When he called to ask how to fix his TV, I stood out in back in the place I was putting even more stuff and thought A) He’s unplugged everything again, and B) He’ll think it’s so funny that we’re fitting even more stuff into this back patio. At that point, there was an idea to bring him over to ours for my birthday the next week. He didn’t get a chance to see the new plants but every time I step out there, I can hear him saying “I don’t know how you fit so much back here.” That makes me smile because he’s here.

Last week I went and picked up his ashes. The wildness of that I was not prepared for. Surprising how something you’ve planned, even thought about, for a long time, is so exactly different in the doing of it. I wasn’t so much sad as surprised and a little amazed that walking into this place that is two blocks from where I live and that I’ve passed literally hundreds of times and even thought to myself, hrm, someday I’ll probably be making use of that place, well now I was walking in for that very reason. But yet, I was handed a black carry bag with an 8-by-12-ish gray plastic box, which had a clear plastic bag filled with what used to be my dad inside. Really, actually, the vessel that carried my dad for 97 years. That busy left hand, the fingers placing collage material, the arms executing a golf swing, that dry wit and kindness and flares of all other emotions too tucked inside the whole carriage of it. How was it that I was walking the two blocks home with all that in the bag with the box and the clear plastic enclosure with ash inside of that? I put it on the shelf and stared at it. What was the point of it, I wondered. I had a ceramic decorative thing with a lid that he’d had sitting in his dining room that I planned to place the ashes/him in. I worried that in the transferring from the bag some of him would blow away. That I wouldn’t quite get the plastic bag situated so that it would be a clean switchover. But then I just went out in the back, sat on the blue chair from his porch that lives here now in our just-enough backyard, and did it. Our boy cat, Desi, watched, caught a few drifting ashes in his mug. Overall, it worked. I was maybe so intent on not messing it up that I might not have felt as much as I thought I would. But there it is: He’s living in the moments least expected: my left hand, our verticle blinds, the colorful backyard, in my heart, in my soul.

Lots of you have written to say you feel you’ve gotten to know my dad through the adventures I’ve written about here. That makes me soooo happy since he’s a man worth knowing. And for those who actually did know him, they can back me up on that. He will live on in my stories even if the tale itself is not about him.

Over the last year, my dad had taken to unplugging things: toasters, TVs, coffee maker, basically if it had a reachable plug, he’d pull it out. Actually, sometimes even if the plug wasn’t reachable he’d somehow manage to wriggle it out. The number of times I’d go over and find the cable box blinking, then look behind the TV and find a few cords hanging out without a purpose became (almost) comical. When asked about it, he’d shrug and say, “I don’t know. It was working last night.” At the beginning, I thought he was just being a rascal, but then when I began to realize he truly didn’t know, or rather didn’t remember, the inciting incident of the unplug I stopped asking. Instead, I took up my trusty black Sharpie and the roll of masking tape that I practically began wearing around his place like a bracelet (I wrote about the handiness of that product here).

I would then go around his space and place the tape (often multiple pieces) over the cords&plugs of the TV, the coffeemaker, the toaster, the phone. I’d slip in an I Love You or draw a heart but mostly I’d write Please Do Not Unplug or the more straightforward DO NOT UNPLUG, then apply it crisscross style over the thing, hoping to deter or possibly at least pause the disconnection. It never really did. The man was very determined. And it became something of a ritual to reboot the cable on the regular, reset the clock on the coffee maker, simply replug in the toaster (gotta love that simplicity of a toaster). I mean, I get it. When something is confusing in its functioning, there is that rule of thumb: Unplug it, count to ten, plug it back in.

There were so many functions my dad was becoming confused about. Over the last few months it would be a regular occurrence (almost as regular as the plug dismount) that he’d meet me at the door looking stricken and saying something like, “I’ve forgotten how to shave” or “I don’t know how to use the phone.” He was both aware of this part of his brain unplugging and alternately upset and annoyed by it. Then we’d discuss and come up with a plan. We would pretend he was at a fancy barbershop for a shave. We’d roll the office chair into the bathroom, I’d put a hot towel over his face, and give him a shave. Halfway through he’d say, “I can do this” and sometimes he would take the electric shaver and finish it. Sort of. When it came to the phone, I’d ask, “Who do you want to call?” and he’d say “nobody. I don’t like talking on the phone.” And on that point, I’d have to agree. I inherited that from him. So we’d leave the phone alone.

I listened to an amazing, moving, incredible (so effin’ great) interview with Laurie Anderson where she talked about how when someone you intimately love leaves the planet that the person you have been with them leaves too. I get that. The particular human I was with my dad is someone I am not anymore. I carry all the wondrous things we shared and what moments I inherited and observed, but I won’t ever be that person with anyone else. The historical ways in which I was formed by him and rolled around inside our relationship was our way with each other. I can use all the masking tape I want to try and cover up the connections because I’m afraid of them coming unplugged but I think the reality is that there’s an emotional extension cord extending for infinity between us.

The other day D&my Apple TV began to update. Often the update has gone into some interminable loop that requires a kind of crazy magical use of multiple remotes to bring the thing into line. Or, you can just unplug the beast, count to ten, then plug it back in and it’ll reset. So that’s what I did. I unplugged it. I counted. I replugged. It reset.

Love is like that too. Thanks, my Daddy.

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

I am currently in touch with what it means to sob. Big heaving messy tears&snot. My dad, my wonderful, kind dad who also had moments of spiked anger where he’d throw things in frustration because he didn’t know any other way. A man of his generation but also not. Born in 1926 and bred up through so many events: the Depression, WWII, Space Age, and divorce (an incredibly minimalistic list here). A move to SoCal for art school and then a career as a graphic artist. A man who loved jazz, martinis at 5 (or 3), a good sit on a porch or backyard or balcony. Someone who took up collaging in his eighties and submitted (and was accepted except for once) to the annual mixed-media Redlands Art Show every spring. Who adored reading (TC Boyle, Annie Proulx, David Sedaris were specific favorites) and watching Ken Burns documentaries on PBS (he liked The Crown too). An early-humor adaptor of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Who modeled so much of that love of art, reading, writing, listening, and humor to me. Who Dennis and I moved out to be near in January 2020 and spent the last three-plus years gloriously traversing Yucaipa and Redlands with dinners at his place, days on his patio, me&him off to Silver Sneakers on weekday mornings, getting through COVID as Dennis, he, and I formed our pandemic bubble. Spending holidays, weekdays, weekends sitting and talking, eating and drinking. How will I fill my time without him?

He left us all last night forty-five minutes before Saturday became Sunday. He was peaceful, had moved through some pain and fear and Dennis and I were with him. That this happened fairly quickly feels both a blessing and a mindfuck. Last Sunday we went out for my birthday and he was present and accounted for, Monday he fell and broke his shoulder, after a night in the ER and home on Tuesday, he fell again Wednesday night and was back in the ER Thursday. By Friday he was in a hospital bed and not recognizable in spirit as the man who brought all the joys listed above. We’d already years ago, and then regularly, had extensive discussions about end-of-life wishes, which were written down unchanged. That morning, I had the toughest conversation I’ve ever had with a doctor who I will appreciate until the end of time. She was blunt and clear: He would not reset to normal mental or physical functioning. She gave me options, we would watch him, give him treatment, etc. for another 24-hours then reassess. If he remained as he was, there were choices, of which I chose the first: A peaceful end right there in the room we had all to ourselves. On Saturday morning, that choice became a reality. Dennis was there. We listened to Ella and the Duke on our bippy-boxes (his term for our iPhones). We all supported each other in helping him find whatever light he was going toward. And he found it at 11:16 PM. The process amazing, terrifying, humbling. The body very stubborn. His peace broken only once when he opened his eyes, panicked, agitated, trying to get out of bed, his beautiful blue eyes not clear but cloudy with fear as he asked me to help him, which I told him we always would. And then we did. And then it happened and now I sit gutted, relieved, finding it hard to write through sobs, while also incredibly grateful for him. For us. For what we had.

He was and remains my inspiration. As one of his classmates in Silver Sneakers said, “He made it easy to love him.” No words ever rang truer. His humor, his whole being, even as he started to fade before our eyes, his will to make that martini, root for those Dodgers, put the shopping cart back in its place rather than leaving it in the middle of the parking lot (he hated when people did that). All of it added up to Dean, Dean-o, the Baron of Bryant Street. Beloved of many. Father of mine.

Currently sitting with him as he makes a journey away from us. Most important thing I’ve ever done. Dennis across from me. We honor him.