Happy birthday, happy deathday

Seven years of complicated grief

Seven years ago, on a gloomy Monday, I was trying to take a call that kept insisting itself upon me while I was inconveniently inside a cinder-block CVS. The reception was blurry, static-filled, and I couldn’t make the contact true. Someone from New Jersey was trying to tell me something but I couldn’t tell what it was, and I remember most a sense of profound annoyance and then immediately forgetting about it.

A couple hours later, as I stood in my friends’ house catching up and preparing to have dinner together, I finally got the message. The call came through again, clear as day this time. I remember the physical sense of having been punched in the chest, and collapsing into a chair.

My deeply sensitive friend saw immediately that something major had happened and came to my side. “My father died,” I said, and they pulled my head into their hip as I surprised myself with immediate and bitter tears.

I would have thought my emotions would come more gradually, that the shock would be numbing, that my lifelong conflicted relationship with him wouldn’t translate into these kind of hot tears, choking and panicked like a child’s who’s gotten lost in a mall. But that was what my body did in that moment, and beneath the flailing I was somehow grateful for it. Grateful for my friend and their family, for the kind new-to-me person staying with them who was sympathetic, for the warm curry and the hugs. But also for the weeping itself, for the relief my body knew how to immediately seek, for a release from the numbness that had overtaken me until the moment a stranger on a crackling phone line told me my dad was dead.

My grandparents’ grave, where we scattered some of my Dad’s ashes

That numbness, the numbness that returns for me in one form or another every fall, when the clocks change and the light changes and the leaves go from red and gold to brown and grey underfoot, when Halloween is over and there’s nothing in front of us but Election Day and then Thanksgiving, that most harrowing of holidays — had a particularly flat flavor that year. I’d spent the previous weekend in New Jersey, attending a (really quite good) games convention and driving down to visit my father, who lived in Red Bank in a group home behind a convenience store.

He wasn’t doing great, and his case workers had been calling me about his recent hospital visits, from dehydration and fainting. You don’t know this if you haven’t met me, but I’m a six-foot-tall woman, and I come by it honestly: my dad was six-foot-eight at his tallest. A guy that size needs to stay hydrated and fed, or his blood pressure will go all out of whack. His mother died when I was only two, of the opposite problem: high blood pressure and stroke. My father couldn’t keep his blood pressure high enough to support his weight.

When he came out to his porch to meet me — he didn’t want me to see the inside of his place, or meet his roommate, who I think was maybe combative, probably a drug user or recovering — he was frighteningly thin, grey and haggard in the face. His affect was low, his movement slow. He had a hard time making eye contact with me. I was reminded of nothing quite so much as the time, nearly twenty years before, when I’d been called to visit him on the locked ward at Jersey Shore Medical Center. He’d tried to hurt himself and got checked in for a while. It wasn’t the first time.

This time, in 2016, I told him, “There are people who care about you, who think that maybe you don’t want to be alive anymore.” “That’s not true,” he managed to say to me, but not while looking me in the eye. I brought him a little food and some Ensure, and told him he had to eat. He promised.

I think he was trying to turn himself into air.

That Tuesday the 8th, Donald goddamn Trump, the man we Jerseyites with part of our fortunes linked to Atlantic City had hated for decades, was elected to be President of the United States. Two days later it was my birthday, and I managed to have an okay birthday weekend in spite of it. Monday was when the phone that had been ringing all afternoon finally told me what had happened. I didn’t know how to feel, but my body did.

Even though my dad was a complicated figure for me, it’s still true, as my therapist said to me tonight, that he was really the best attachment figure I had growing up. When he was there, he was really there: full of love and attention and energy and humor. He loved me, and showed me that in the ways he knew how. But he so often couldn’t be there, whether physically or emotionally. He was too erratic, too sick. And over the years my mother and her side of the family tried to make me forget or even hate him for it.

I couldn’t, though, and I didn’t.

This weekend, I watched a favorite movie and got to have my partner see it for the first time — one of my great delights in life. In it, there’s a wide shot during the groom’s speech at a wedding, after a guest, one of the ensemble of characters you care about, has collapsed. His friends who are standing nearby surround him and find a doctor, but it’s no use. The collapsed man’s partner is standing leaning in a doorframe, unaware, singing “for they are jolly good fellows” with the crowd, smiling and clapping along. The main character approaches him, hesitating, as though he would preserve the last few moments of happiness this man will experience before learning that the love of his life is dead. We see only the approach, the care, the sorrow, the tap on the shoulder and the start of the whisper. The camera mercifully turns away, and we don’t see the partner’s response until the funeral.

Yet the moment devastated me, and I felt, yet again, the tug of gratitude for that quiet room, my friend’s chair and arms and doofy, loving dog, the grace of finding out not in a cinder block CVS but in the home of a beloved. To have the camera turn away from my initial shock and loss.

Seven years, I remember noting when I met my current partner about seven years after my husband left, is a good amount of time, the amount of time they say it takes for your cells to turn over, and for your body to be, in essence, an entirely new body from what it was seven years before. It may be just a folktale but it still has a comforting ring, the feeling that once seven years have passed, the you you were is no longer there, and perhaps no longer needs to feel the pain that version of you lived. Perhaps this new version of you can wake on a cold, numb November morning and know that it’s over, that things are different now, that he is still gone but you are not. That you are here, that you are fresh, shining, new.