Too much has to do with loss and sadness, but not who and what was lost. The fugue of anger and sadness with a brief respite in January before the fugue began another crescendo leaves you exhausted deep in your brain. You don’t want to feel this anymore but you fear that not feeling this anymore will betray him. He will really be gone; and gone has become such an achingly gigantic word.

When you were perhaps ten or eleven, the family went on vacation to Carlsbad Cavern. The map of the caves featured a “bottomless pit,” which fascinated you to no end. You couldn’t wait to see it. When you reach the Bottomless Pit, the big, dark, unfathomable endlessness of it — despite knowing that it did, in fact, have a bottom — paralyzed you. Something like that bottomless pit occupies your internal vision.

Everything you feel has become about you, turned you narcissistic. In that hole? That is where he is, where the memories lie. You don’t know what you will find if you go down into that hole. Like the Bottomless Pit, thee hole has limits, but to go down into it will take time. To get back out will take time. Whatever you find each time you go in will take time, and you have to go out and function in the world. Memory is combustive.

But, here the analogy breaks down, because if you don’t go down there, it might close up. Memories will disappear if you don’t cultivate them, retrace their outlines. So, you find yourself held in this unbearable tension between the self-involved fugue of anger and sadness and the fear of the Bottomless Pit.

One person suggests setting aside a time each day to mourn. Another tells you of observant Jews who go to the synagogue with a minion to say the Kaddish every day for a year after the loss of a parent. She suggested that you think of something similar.

Perhaps a memory each day? One, single memory to hold him. To see his goodness. To see my guilt. To work toward and through and build whatever this next thing of me will be.

So, here is Memory 1: Sitting in the spooky, cold café deep in Carlsbad Caverns, eagerly anticipating the next leg of the tour that will include that Bottomless Pit, Dad carefully allayed your anxieties by explaining that the pit did actually have a bottom. Researchers had gone down on ropes and discovered that the soft floor of the pit had muffled the sound of anything dropped.