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PAPA, YOU’RE STILL DEAD

November 27, 2011

Be strong, They say.  Be brave.  Be a rock.  Don’t cry.  Cry if you need to.  Everything’s going to be fine.  Don’t worry.  These things make you stronger.  It’s better this way.  He’s in a better place now.  I’m sorry.  But everything happens for a reason.  Miracles happen every day, They say.  We’re praying for him.  He’ll be fine, They say.  Now you have an angel looking down on you from heaven.  At least he lived a good life.  At least he didn’t suffer.  He knew how much you loved him.  He’ll always be with you.  You didn’t really lose him, They say.  He lives in you.  Don’t cry.  It will be okay.  Time heals all things, They say.  Just give it time.

–

The night my father died, I crawled into the four-poster, canopy bed that had been the pride of my childhood and which remains in my former bedroom in my parents’ house.  Laying there, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark plastic stars I had long-ago affixed to the metal “ribs” that hold up the canopy fabric, I dialed the dozen numbers attached to my partner Jill’s international cell phone.  She had left the country on a business trip two weeks prior with my blessing, back when my father was still with us, still with it.  Though he was in the hospital at the time, there was absolutely no indication that my dad’s condition was even close to terminal, so she went.  By the time everything changed, the only flight Air France had to offer would have returned her to the States just a few hours sooner than she was already scheduled to be.  And would have cost $1700.

So the night—or rather, the very early morning—after I watched my father die,  I called across the planet ten thousand miles away to share the news out loud, the first of many times that I would say, “He is dead.”  I did not cry on the phone; my head felt dark and hollow and out of tears.  The room seemed to be floating somewhere encapsulated, like the dreams I had as a child where my wondrous bed turned into a magical raft and transported me to fabulous places.  This time, the fabulous place was Istanbul, from whence Jill’s voice poured in with sunlight, market bazaar and spices sifting out through the end of the phone.  Blue Mosque, Turkish sky, half Europe and half Asia, all sunglasses and cotton, light against hot skin.  In my cinematic imaginings, the film of my life opened up into a split screen with me, blanket, and covers on one side and she, sunglasses, and worry on the other.

“There’s a pigeon,” she told me.  “A fat one.  He’s sitting on top of this fountain next to the mosque—there’s some kind of iron curlicue flourish and he’s barely balancing his weight on top of it.  His fat is bulging out on the sides.  He says the Ottomans put this fountain here just for him to sit on top of and be beautiful.”

Somehow this was the most comforting thing she could have possibly said.

“Of course they did,” I replied.

“Just think about him, sweetheart,” she said.  “And try to get some sleep.”

And then the movie screen joined up again, scrolling to one side, with the light disappearing, leaving behind my dark childhood bedroom and the phantom beeping of hospital machines that would sound in my head for weeks to come.

–

As with other life-altering experiences (one thinks of giving birth or falling in love), words often fail when attempting to describe or categorize grief.  The classical Greeks, for example, seem not to have had a word for grief other than the word they used for pain.  In the modern world, philosophers and behaviorists have attempted to prove by logic what most of us know by instinct: that grief is an emotional experience unto itself.  There is nothing like it. And while it may seem pointless to attempt to quantify something we all agree is impossible to describe, the way that scientists think about grief may actually prove useful to those of us experiencing it.  To dissect and examine that which plagues us can bring understanding, if not quite relief.  Better the devil that you know, and so forth.

Grief is, no doubt, an emotional experience.  In fact, it is almost its own emotional category, since grief encompasses so many other emotions within itself: sadness, anger, fear, confusion, etc.  There are two major categories of emotions, according to those who decide these things: cognitive and conative.  Conative feelings are those that arise from instinct.  Pleasurable physical sensations or a rush of sudden fear both bypass our cognitive mechanisms: we don’t need to think in order to experience them.  Cognitive emotions, then, are the ones dependent upon our capacity to think.  Jealousy can only arise if we first identify that someone else has something we want—as quickly as it may occur, this is still cognition.

Grief is an odd duck because it is both cognitive and conative.  That old maxim, “grief is not rational,” is a rather pithy summary of the conative aspects of grief.  While cognitive emotions are subject to rationality, conative emotions are unmoved by human attempts to rationalize. For example, when I realize that being angry with my boss (a cognitive emotion) is making me dread going to work every day and doing me more harm than my boss, that anger may lessen.  But no amount of physical evidence or rational assertions will keep me from feeling terror (conative) when I wake up in the middle of the night to a loud THUMP!  I have no cognitive access to that terror—it comes up whether it is warranted or not.  To be fair, cognitive emotions are also sometimes subject to irrationality, simply because we are human and often mistaken in our thinking.  A young woman may be filled with joy because she just knows that her lottery ticket will be the lucky one.  Is her joy irrational?  Most of us would say so.  But joy as an emotion is still cognitive, because it is dependent upon a belief, however mistaken that belief might be.

Though conative emotions could be labeled “irrational,” I think it’s more accurate to say that they fall outside of the realms of rationality or irrationality.  I know that my father is dead and will always be dead, but that doesn’t stop me from wishing it weren’t so.  Grief is in fact constituted by irrational desire, the desire that what one knows or believes to be true (i.e. that a certain individual has died) should not be.  So as long as I wish that my father were still alive, I am grieving.  And under that definition, I believe it is fair to assert that I will be grieving forever.

–

Two days after my father’s funeral, Jill was back in the States and in my parents’ house.  Turns out that I was tremendously glad she had not been present for the death & dying business; it was a comfort to be around someone who came, seemingly, from another world.

I told her the stories of the days that had passed, recounting the events in order to make them more real for myself.  I pulled her into the guest bedroom to make love, desperate to feel something, anything else.  I watched her face as a mirror to see how she would find me changed.  I wept, sobbing, into her shoulder, many times.

I suggested an outing to see an Annie Liebovitz exhibit at the local art museum. The collection featured portrait photographs of famous musicians, everyone from Iggy Pop to Eminem, and I had been meaning to see it all summer.  We drove and parked and bought tickets, as if she were in town for a tourist’s weekend, instead of being there to witness my grief and shelter me from it. Neither of us knew how things worked now.

The photographs we had come to see hung against carpet-covered walls on the first floor, underground.  The space was cold and quiet, save for a video documentary that ran continuously behind a half-wall in the back room. As we walked, Jill and I fell into our own individual paces, drawn to different portraits, occasionally beckoning the other to point out a detail, or answer a question.  I have always been a Springsteen girl; she has been in love with Dolly Parton since she was a little girl.

This is what I have always enjoyed about being in an art gallery: the private experience, the stillness and silence.  Guided tours do not appeal to me, even the recorded kind.  Talkative, hand-holding couples drive me nuts.  At least, that is how I had always been.  But that day, something new happened.  We were halfway through a fascinating exhibit in the cool, dim basement of the Brooks Museum of Art and my heart was racing.  My brain, too.  Jill and I stood side-by-side in front of Lucinda Williams, who was in jeans and cowboy boots on a dirt road.  As Jill turned to move onto the next photograph, I felt a panic in my stomach.  A plaintive, pathetic Don’t leave! formed in my throat.  Jill was standing just a half-a-dozen feet away, but I was terrified of being alone; alone there, alone on that patch of carpet, alone with no one to hang onto, alone with my brain and its obsessive echolalia: “Your father is dead, your father is dead, your father is dead.” I wanted talk, I wanted chatter.  I wanted Jill to hold my hand, walk me through this gallery, and not let go.

–

In the weeks following my father’s death, I was only halfway in reality about what had happened.  True, I had been in the room when he took his last breath; I saw his body at the funeral home when the casket was opened for the Hindu priest to perform last rites; I even pushed the button in the crematorium that sent his body, dressed in silk kurta pajamas with a silver envelope in his hand addressed to “Papa” in his hands, to be burned to ash in accordance with Indian tradition.

Still, it didn’t seem real.  This is common among mourners, a sense of shock, of disbelief.  A kind of cinematic unreality takes over, makes it difficult to process input or generate output.  “Should I get out of bed?” becomes a monumental decision.  Distinguishing between what’s important and what isn’t is no longer possible because nothing seems as important as the fact that someone has died.

The real trouble with grief as a category of emotion is this: there isn’t anything to do.  Normally, emotions, whether cognitive or conative, serve as motivators for human behavior.  They generate goals and intentions.  They give us something to do in response.  For instance, I feel excitement and pleasure when I spend time with Jill.  Therefore, I have arranged my life such that I spend more time with her than with anybody else.

In the case of grief, however, there are no appropriate actions, nothing that can bring about what the grieving wish for.  The desire one might go back in time, that the course of events might be reversed, that a father should come back from the dead—are impossible ones.  The normal functions of the emotion-desire-motive matrix are blocked.  You can’t play your usual tricks with grief.  Grief requires an entirely different game plan.

–

“I Wasn’t Ready To Say Goodbye; Letting Go With Love; Rainbows and Rain; When You Lose Someone You Love?  Um, I don’t think so.”  Following our museum visit, Jill had insisted on a trip to a big-box bookstore so that I could buy a grief book.  I was utterly, doggedly resistant to the idea—those kind of books weren’t for me. I had never purchased a self-help book in my life, and I did not intend to start now.  And my resistance was only confirmed and compounded as I reluctantly and half-heartedly browsed through the shelves.

Every book in the “bereavement” section had a generically cheesy picture of a lake or a sunset on the cover.  What were these people thinking?  My dad might have died, but I hadn’t lost my sense of aesthetics.  Plus, I was looking for more than thin platitudes or pop psychology, neither of which was going to comfort or empower me.  The truth is, the idea of a book—a field guide, a map—did actually sound kind of good to me.  I’m a book person, a writer, someone who believes in research and study, which is of course why the very wise and thoughtful Jill had insisted on me getting a book in the first place.  But rigid, clinical outlines of the stages of grief weren’t going to work and neither was the bad theology of “trust in God’s plan.”  Where was the grief book for people who didn’t like self-help books or go to church?  Everybody’s father dies, has been dying, has always died, since the beginning of time, and it seemed to me we still hadn’t figure out what to say about it.

–

Here are some things most of those sweet little books don’t tell you:

1)    Grief is a fickle, quicksilver mistress—wrapped around your heart one minute, gone the next.  She might return in a minute, or she may stay away for days.  But she has never truly left.  She will always return.

2)    Grief is completely unpredictable and inconsistent.  What triggered it one day will not bother you in the slightest the next.  What soothed and brought you comfort last night will offer no help the following morning.

3)    Your friends will want to help, but they will have no idea what to do for you.  And you won’t really be able to tell them.

4)    Ninety-nine percent of the people who say “I understand” or “I know how you feel” don’t.  The ones who do, know better than to say things like that.

5)    Grief brings gifts.  You’d never want to say it like that, because it sounds perverse, and there is no good math for equations that involve death, but it’s true.  Sharp doses of clarity, incredibly intense flashes of gratitude and perspective, a cleansing kind of anger, even ease.  Death of a loved one makes everything both more complicated and less complicated, all at once.

6)    Time doesn’t actually make it better.  Time just makes it different.

–

Grief’s effects are not just limited to the mind and the heart.  The body also does its level best to mark the drama of the occasion.  For many mourners whose minds are shrouded with shock, the physiological effects of bereavement are almost like bruises, marking what has passed.  Such indicators further demonstrate grief’s conative properties by showing how we are unable to control the physical effects of our emotional experiences; even on a day when we “feel fine,” our bodies indicate otherwise.

When you grieve, your brain interprets the loss as a stressor.  In a series of seamless reactions, like a chain of dominos, your body activates the endocrine system, which you undoubtedly remember from high school biology.  Should you need a refresher, the endocrine system is essentially your body’s regulatory mechanism and oversight committee, those guys sitting in mission control making sure that “All systems are go.”  And when there is a hitch in the mission, your endocrine system kicks in for damage control, sending hormones where they’re needed most.  In the case of extreme stress, the hypothalamus sends a messenger hormone to the pituitary gland which, in turn, produces a second hormone that travels through the bloodstream to the adrenal glands, which sit on top of the kidneys like elf hats.  At last, your properly-stimulated adrenal glands give up the goods: cortisol. Ahhhh, that’s better.

A quick burst of cortisol feels like a sugar rush, because that’s basically what it is.  Glucose gives you energy, heightens your memory functions, lowers your sensitivity to pain, and increases your appetite.  All things that prove quite helpful when encountering a stress event like death.  The only problem is that, in larger amounts, the short-term benefits of cortisol fail to outweigh the long-term damage it can cause.  In order to rev you up, your body has to increase your blood pressure and heart rate, which can wear heavily on cardiovascular health after a while.  Cortisol also breaks down bone mass and muscle tissue while scavenging for resources in the body.  Worst of all, it suppresses your immune system in order to save calories.  There you are, already under stress, now extra-susceptible to getting sick.  Sounds like a design flaw, right?  Well, it is an unfortunate give and take, but not an entirely unreasonable choice for your body to make.  After all, to suppress any other system—your vascular system, or nervous system, for instance—would certainly have an instant, disastrous effect.  By temporarily suppressing its immune system, your body is hedging its bet against the chance that you might get sick.  Stress is a demand, and it takes its toll.

I can recognize both the short-term and long-term effects of cortisol from my own experience.  One line from a journal entry that summer betrays what must have been the effects of my cortisol high: “When did I turn into a machine with no feelings?”  I remember being astounded by my seeming ability to push forward, through hospital business, family business, and funeral business without feeling exhausted or really, feeling anything at all.  For about a month I was superwoman, “the rock.”  Everyone was amazed, and I was grateful that I had been able to take care of things when my mother was not able; as someone who carries stress more heavily and consistently than I do, I think she hit her cortisol breaking point about two weeks before I did.

But eventually, my body caught up to the state of things and started to act funny: insomnia and hair loss, two things I’d never experienced before in my life, were the big ones. Dryness of the hair, skin, and vaginal area are common among females under intense stress.  So are depression, fatigue, fluctuation of weight, and irregular sleep patterns.  When it all started happening to me, I felt a little bit like I imagine menopausal women do, watching your body alter outside of your control.  Try as I might, my will had no effect over my grief.  If my hair was going to fall out, it was going to fall out.  All I could do was wait for it to stop.

Whole handfuls of hair were lost to the trash can each morning.  At first, I was completely disgusted by the logistics of hair loss, the dark strands like worms migrating, invading my bathroom, my closet, my bed.  But the hair eventually became familiar, a thing I could count on—I even found myself admiring the strange appeal of its chaotic swirl against the white tile of my shower wall, like a page from Paul Klee’s sketchbook.  Still, I was frustrated, not out of any particular concern for my hair, but rather because the whole business felt so absurdly cliché.

–

A feeling is said to be hypercognized when there are many different cross-cultural structures for responding to it, interpreting it, and expressing it.  Unlike, for instance, pain or fear, an emotional experience like grief is manifested in different ways across the world.  This suggests that our methods of grieving are taught and learned; perhaps we even teach the very feelings associated with grief.  If emotions have adaptive functions, then grief itself developed because it brought a certain value to the group, specifically groups of primates from which human beings evolved.  Commemorating a death and participating in the act of grieving have been shown to create bonding between individuals—think of the resurgence of American patriotism in the face of 9/11 or the way that a natural disaster can bring out the best in a small-town community.  In fact, no positive reaction or incentive has been shown to promote social cohesiveness the way a powerful bereavement response can.

Unfortunately, what I see in modern-day America is a very schizophrenic culture surrounding death.  In the “old school” cultures of the South or within immigrant/minority communities, there is a clear prescription for what to do when someone dies: you make a casserole, you take it over to the house, you sit with the bereaved, you answer the phone and do the things they aren’t up to doing yet.  You leave some sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, just in case.  You remember the one who was lost.

Yet if we turn to pop culture for cues, we learn instead that we should do everything we can to push against death.  Shelter children from the sick and the aged, buy disembodied grocery-store meat and grow squeamish at the mention that it once used to belong to a live being, embalm the dead in order to create a “lifelike” appearance—the perversity is overwhelming.  For death is fundamental to our very nature; it is a constant, a universal, it is the thing that makes life precious.  We are mindful of it in all the wrong ways.

I think of the cultural traditions of India, my homeland.  There, as prescribed by religion but also by the social matrix, rituals mark every step of a family’s journey in grief.  Loud, unbridled emotional responses are expected.  Communities immediately mobilize to bring food, keep vigil over the body, consult the priest, pay the necessary costs.  Yearly anniversaries of the death event are also marked by rituals.  Time limits are not placed on the mourning period for spouses, children, or parents.  Life is interrupted, and that interruption is acknowledged instead of suppressed.

Here, the business of death has become precisely that, a business.  And it isn’t a cheap one, either.  We made the arrangements for my father’s funeral and subsequent cremation at a family-owned funeral home in Memphis.  A nice enough place, it was our first choice because of its on-site cremation facilities—my mother didn’t want to worry about a procession of cars traveling from once place to another.  Sunday, less than twenty-four hours after my father had died, I sat in a room with my mother, her brother, and two of our family friends, discussing—no, bargaining—the cost of my father’s death.  It was the most disgusting display of commerce I think I have ever witnessed.

Luckily for my mother and I, we were accompanied by two tough, level-headed friends who had been through the funeral racket before.  They managed to plod through every last detail, arguing for the things they knew we wanted and driving down the cost wherever possible.  Along with the rest of our core community of Indian immigrants, they brought traditions and attitudes that were more welcome than ever in the weeks following my father’s death.  Mom and I were cared for and supported by a whole crew of people who loved us, and my father.  Without asking, they kept our refrigerator stocked with food, paid for my father’s funeral expenses, picked up my best friend from the airport, and wrote a very large check as a loan to my mother who was waiting for the paperwork to come through on my father’s life insurance.  I will never forget, the morning after my father died, waking up in my parents’ house to the sound of quiet voices downstairs.  Something about that house not being empty, about the witnessing which was being provided, took the edge off of my shock and exhaustion.

But right there along with the incredible gestures of thoughtfulness and generosity came the terribly misguided ones.  Hearing that my father is now an angel looking down on me from heaven is about the farthest thing from comforting that I can imagine hearing.  “You need to be strong,” I was told at least a dozen times.  Others were so visibly uncomfortable in the presence of my grief that they would inanely repeat “It’s going to be okay,” when it clearly was not.  Now I realize that comforting the bereaved is a no-win situation; you want so desperately to ease their suffering, but there is no way to do so.  There is, in short, really nothing good to say except “I love you,” and “I’m sorry.”  But would it be so hard to acknowledge that?  Would it be so difficult to acknowledge another person’s suffering instead of trying to smooth it away?  What concerns me about my experiences as a griever is how difficult it is for us in this culture to be with someone’s pain.  We tell our children, “Don’t cry,” even though sometimes that is precisely what they need to do.  Hurt must be expressed, or it only increases.

I’ve never felt anything like this in my entire life; nothing close.  Songs and movies and television shows prepared me (even if with a somewhat skewed perspective) for what it would feel like to fall in love, to feel sexual desire, to be annoyed with my parents, to live the college life, to have my heart broken.  But nowhere did anyone ever tell me that the death of my father would be the most devastating, earth-shattering, life-altering thing that would happen to me.

–

Three months after my father had died, I volunteered to participate in a study, the aim of which was to catalogue the coping mechanisms employed by individuals experiencing severe distress.  After an initial meeting with Ben, a psychology graduate student running the study, I was given a series of computerized surveys designed to measure my current level of distress and determine which, if any, coping mechanisms I had used up to that point.  Then, for twenty-one days following, I took an online survey each night, answering thirty-five questions before I went to bed.  Clicking on the appropriate bubble, I first told the computer the degree to which I had felt certain emotions that day, including “proud,” “excited,” “worthless,” and “sad.”  Then, I responded to the last fifteen questions, indicating what I had done in response to any negative feelings I had experienced that day.  Among those choices were “distracted myself from negative feelings,” “asked people in my life for assurance that I am worthwhile,” “tried to push negative feelings away.”

Always a fan of research and hard-working graduate students, I diligently completed my survey each night.  Following a two-day break, I took a short series of exit surveys and then met with Ben the next day to collect my (nominal) participation fee and learn more about the study.  With dark, thinning hair and a small silver earring, Ben was probably in his late twenties or early thirties.  He spoke English with a continental accent (his birth country is Turkey) and his handsomeness made me a bit self-conscious, knowing that he had access to data concerning my emotional state for the previous three weeks.  Soon, however, I found myself on common ground with him, energized to hear about the impetus behind his research.

“The hypothesis we’re operating on is basically this: individuals who attempt to distract themselves from or avoid the negative emotions in their life will ultimately experience a rebound effect.  That is, those negative feelings will get worse if pushed away.  What we’re looking for is a spike in the data, about a day or two after an individual has reported behavior like ignoring negative thoughts or trying to think about something else.  If our hypothesis is correct, a spike will show up in the self-reported emotions data, in the feelings like worthlessness and sorrow.”  He spoke with his hands, gesturing as if drawing graphs in the air.

“And has that been what you’ve found so far?  Are you allowed to tell me that?”

He smiled.  “Sure.  I mean, yes.  We—I—have a lot of data to plot, but so far it’s confirming what we hoped.”

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Thank you.  And thank you for remembering to do your survey every night.  Here we go.”  He handed me twenty-five dollars in cash.  I grabbed my bag and made my way towards the door.

“Ben, what made you chose this topic in the first place?”

“Well, I guess I hope that the conclusions we’ll reach here will help care-providers realize that it’s better for their patients and clients to fully express their emotions, even the negative ones.”

“I think that is so important—I just feel really strongly about it since my dad died—people keep offering me medication, trying to distract me, but…I feel like I should feel it.  I mean, my dad died.  It should be difficult, right?”

“You are brave,” he said.  “It is a good thing.”

“Thank you,” I said, blushing.  I halfway wanted to kiss him, but we were standing in the middle of a busy university hallway.  He shook my hand, and I left.

–

Eventually, I did come across I grief book I found palatable.  Healing Your Grieving Heart: 100 Practical Ideas bears a less than stellar title, but a very simple line drawing of an oak tree on the cover.  What drew me to it and kept me engaged in it were the simple suggestions and affirmations on every page.  Number 13: Cry, Number 52: Take a Risk, Number 81: Schedule Something That Gives You Pleasure Each Day.  When your brain feels like that of an early Alzheimer’s patient, easily confused and overwhelmed, simple directions and dictations are a blessing.  I felt like I was like the extreme sports version of what the Buddhists call “monkey mind”—instead of a monkey, swinging from thought to thought, I had a black hole in my brain.  Construction of a decision, a sentence, a rational thought, were doomed from the start.  “Should I make a cup of tea?” felt like a life-altering question to be asking, and one I found difficult to answer, despite being aware of how ridiculous the whole situation was.  Luckily, when I wasn’t feeling completely humiliated by my lack of ability to function in the world, I found it all pretty hilarious.

For example: I bought a shower curtain.  Following the suggestion of Number 43: Go Shopping, I decided that I would go on a little spree to liven up my living space.  My operating principle: buy whatever within my budget would make me happy, no matter how temporary the happiness or how frivolous the purchase.  Hence, the shower curtain, discovered on clearance, in a bright pink canvas, complete with two ridiculous pockets.  Pleased as punch, I spent twelve whole dollars on the thing before tromping back to my car, where I promptly realized that the shower in my apartment, where I have lived for over six months, has doors.  Sliding, glass doors.

Another distinct memory: the first day of classes, my second year of graduate school, almost exactly a month after my father’s death.  I was taking a poetry craft seminar, and at that first meeting we were all asked to go around the table and state our name, concentration, and something that interested us as writers.  I was the last one around.

In the ten or so minutes it took to make these introductions, I felt myself grow incredibly and unpredictably pissed off.  It was all I could do not to leap across the table and strangle some of the most pretentious students as they spoke.  “Well, I’m occupied with deconstructing the ontological premises of life and getting down beneath that to what’s real.  My work is informed primarily by the philosopher Foucault and obscure Polynesian tribal myth.”

I’m the first one to admit, had it been any other day, any other time, that I would have probably tried just as hard to impress everybody as they did.  But within the razor-edge context of grief, all I could think was, You poor, sad, ridiculous people.  When I wasn’t hating them all, I felt sorry for them, not even superior, just numb, and tired.  It matters not, you fools, and you have absolutely no idea.  The whole thing was laughable.

When my turn came around, I said the most honest and nonjudgmental thing I could muster: “My name is Nishta, I write non-fiction, and since my father just died I really have no idea what I’m interested in, I’m just proud of myself for taking a shower today.”

–

In the months that followed, I managed to get things a little bit more together.  I made my way to the Student Health Center and found myself a grief counselor who listened to me once a week with patient detachment and told me that everything I was experiencing was completely normal.  (When you feel like you may be losing your mind, this is a very reassuring thing to hear indeed.)  I filled my tiny graduate school apartment with pictures of my father, collaged in the days after he had died.  Every few weeks, I sat down to write him a letter on special stationary.  I created my own rituals, enlisting the support and participation of my friends. For Diwali, the Hindu New Year, I spent hours making all of my Dad’s favorite Indian foods (with plenty of consultative calls to my mother) and then invited hungry graduate students over to celebrate with me.  That Thanksgiving, a table full of people who, Jill being the exception, had never met my father, toasted to his memory.  My hair stopped falling out in clumps.  I got my libido back.  I no longer needed “Organic Nighty Night” tea to help me get to sleep.  My daily life no longer revolved around grieving, although grief was certainly present.  Then and now, over five years later, grief still shows up and brings me to my knees.  And there still isn’t anything I can do about it.

“You just find a place to put it,” was the most helpful thing anyone ever said to me about grief.  “It doesn’t go away, you don’t wake up one day, finished with your grieving.  You just make a space for it, and the fit becomes less and less uncomfortable.”  I wish that were the message being sold in bookstores, instead of soaring eagles and sunset.

My entire life has been thrown into sharp relief since my father’s death.  I think of The Iliad, of Achilles’ rage over the death of his beloved Patroclus, dragging the body of poor Hector in circles for days, though he knows it will never bring his cousin back.  And of Priam, an old man who set aside his pride and fear to sneak across enemy lines and beg for the body of his son.  Their motivator is a grief which I now understand.

Earlier today, at an airport terminal, I heard a young woman say “Daddy!” into her phone, and in my brain I heard a sound like an angry game show buzzer, those little red Xs that flash across the screen whenever a contestant answers incorrectly. Oh Papa, I’m on a plane to Houston and you’re still dead.