A new feeling begins in preparations for Normandy, a trip that coalesced ages ago. For practical purposes you can say the planning began when you accepted the invitation to speak about Frederick Douglass in Paris. Arrangements continued when your husband’s daughter’s wedding date, bounced around the calendar by the British Army for which her fiancé works, finally settled on a date two weekends before the conference. Why return to the U.S. to teach a single class before taking off for Europe again? Why not just stay? You feel exceedingly extravagant, not a tiny bit guilty, and very much relieved.

When you realized that you would have the time, you thought that perhaps you should visit the D-Day beaches. Your mother’s father had been on the third wave. Long ago, before he died, you had interviewed him about his experience. A mortar had blown up behind him, exploding a tree and wounding him badly enough to evacuate him to an English hospital but not badly enough to return him home. The shell left a notch, the size of a fist, in the flesh of his back for the rest of his life. Shrapnel left in his body meant that he could never pass through metal detectors without incident. The two of you had talked once of going to the beaches together. Even then, you knew that he was too disabled to make the trip. Still, it was pretty to think of.

When you returned from the ICU visit — what is it now? a month ago? — you searched for the interview, which is around here somewhere, you are certain you saw it. You want to know exactly where your grandfather came ashore because you can’t remember. Was it Omaha? Or Utah? You can’t remember if he was wounded on the first day or second. You can’t remember if it was St. Lo or some other “Saint” place.

How can you not remember? He gave you this story, an experience that he had not fully told anyone for a long time, if at all. Did he tell your father? Your mother, his daughter? His favorite grandson, your brother? He told you. How did you forget? Where did the interview go? You did see the interview, right? It was in a file marked “Paw-paw’s genealogy” in a file right here. Where did you put it?

Although you know that the interview exists in the D-Day Museum archives in New Orleans, you want to weep that you do not have it, that it was just right here and now it is gone and you don’t know where. Like so many things these days, you want to preform a ritual, say magic words, do a card trick, anything that will alter this thing that just can not be real.

Your dad had wanted to visit the beaches at Normandy. They were on his “bucket list,” the one he had been checking off in the past few years. You were going to send him pictures and videos when you went, bring him a souvenir, send him a postcard. You had hoped they would make him feel better and speed his recovery.

Paw-paw is gone. The interview copy is gone. Your dad is gone.

You keep on planning. Some people hope this trip will cheer you up. You don’t expect that. You don’t really want to be cheered up. You don’t expect to enjoy the trip in the conventional sense of the word, either. This trip has become something more like a pilgrimage, although that is not really the correct word. You go there for the memory of them, as if the memory were a blanket that you wrap about you. Doing this is, for lack of better word, spiritual.

You wake up surprised. You don’t remember going to sleep. You don’t really remember sleep. Your mind already writes the eulogy. The same words going over and over, hammering in your head have broken through to more words that can describe this moment.

All of the metaphors and images come from films, songs, books, poems. The opening scenes from The Big Chill. “A Hole in the World.” Marley dead as a coffin nail. “Words, words, words.” “It must be the coldest day of the year” (metaphorically speaking because this is Houston). “Stop all the clocks…for nothing now can ever come to any good.” You create a patchwork quilt of pop cultural scraps. You want this to be original, although you do know that you will follow the model of Four Weddings and a Funeral, that you will use Auden’s “Funeral Blues.” The rest must be original. The rest will be the last word, the public word, perhaps the only word that a room full of people will hear you say to him. The rest must be honest.

You write. You write. You write. The light grows. People awake. The eulogy has exhausted you and the deadline looms for the obituary. Two obituaries, one long, one short. The short obituary must act as advertisement for the long. The short must be done by noon. The short must not be expensive. All the short says is that he worked at these places, belonged to these organizations, that the funeral will be at this place and at this time, donations in lieu of flowers.

The long you see as a the Authorized Biography. This will be the last, most complete, public record of his life. So, you pepper your aunt and your mother with questions. “What years did he go to Catholic High?” “When did he start playing the trumpet?” “When did he start flying lessons?” “Were you all stationed anywhere else but Texas?” “What did he major in?” “When did you meet?” “How did you meet?” You begin to realize how very little you knew of your father. You know more details about the life of a long dead man than you do about the one who raised and loved you.

The last time that you visited, you had also gone to Dallas and seen, after a lifetime of living in Texas, Dealey Plaza. You had asked your parents about learning of JFK’s assassination. You now think of that story, that gem. You think of the number of gems like that, the stories that he told about life in a receding past, or about people who had only just died of the generation before and theirs of the generation before them. Where are those stories? On what part of your hard drive have you stored them? How can you get them back? Download them, print them out, play them back? How many more did he have? Him telling those stories, kicked back in his recliner, a dog on his lap. He was the Source.

You must distill this to his essence, to the things that he loved and the things that gave his live meaning to him. His parents’ meeting through music, their World War II experience, his formation in a large, extended family, his love of music and flight, his sense of responsibility and service.

You must get this down because, even now as you write this sentence here, you feel it all gliding off of the tips of your fingers and evaporating. You want to write his stories down with blades on your skin so that you will not forget. So that you will remember that you did forget. So you will remember that you did not even gather them in the first place.

The minister and his wife arrive in the afternoon. Your parents, while secularly Christian and essentially believers in a Higher Power, weren’t particularly religious in your life. “We grew up in the Church of Don’t Get Up Early on Sunday Mornings — or Saturday Mornings,” you always joke. The minister, however, had been an old friend of your dad’s since the 1980s, and the two had talked over much spiritual business. He’s an intellectual about these matters and your dad appreciated that, you see. They could discuss and explore ideas. He’s funny, too. You see how he and your dad were such good friends. You feel connection to your dad with him next to you on the sofa discussing this thing that must be done.

You plan the service. Sort through the songs, the verses, the readings. The religious element makes you uncomfortable, but then, your dad wanted that. Your mom later tells you that all of their friends and dad’s family will expect it and want it as part of the ritual. After the planning, while everyone chats, the minister tells stories about the early days of his friendship with your dad. Suddenly, you have a visceral realization that this is his loss, too. He needs the religious element. He will be offering a funeral service for a friend of nearly thirty years, and he probably knew your dad better than you did. You no longer feel him as just a friend of your dad’s but as a compatriot in this thing you must go through.

The minister and his wife depart. You, your mother, and your aunt eat on the ten cold pizzas that your cousin brought over the day before, a stand-in for the ubiquitous Southern casseroles. Your brother wants tacos. He goes for tacos. You, on the other hand, might puke up the pizza. Alcohol quietly flows. The eulogy has a beginning and an end, but the middle does not quite gel. You finish the long obituary.

“Do you want to hear?” you ask your mom, your aunt, and your brother. They glance at each other. Looking back now, you realize that they probably did not and were being polite. You begin, “At the beginning of his story….”

You wonder into which stage of grief Kubler-Ross would classify “Don’t Give a Fuck.” A friend suggests anger or depression.

You don’t care about anything, even the things you usually care about. You don’t care that you don’t care except that you must show up for work, you must prepare for class, you must grade assignments, you must keep appointments, you must write this paper. You must go through motions.

The first day back to work and not caring becomes anger. You keep thinking “I can’t do this I can’t do this I can’t do this,” but you know you can. You just don’t want to.

You resent work so much you cannot see straight. You do not want to blame any person because everyone has been so compassionate. You do not want to turn this on students because they had nothing to do with this and you surprise yourself with the genuine affection that you feel for them. Still, you resent some vague shape sitting in the space occupied by work because this responsibility called you back for those last two weeks that you wanted to stay with your dad. “I was not essential here,” you seethe. “A hundred people within a twenty mile radius could have stepped in.” All the way to school you shake with resentment. You tremble with hatred at yourself. Then, it cracks and sadness pours over you.

You walk through the day dazed. “How is your semester going?” asks a colleague who does not know. “How are you?” asks a favorite student who does not know. “How are you doing?” ask people who do know. You haven’t figured out the proper way to answer. “Well, my dad died. I have no idea how you are supposed to respond to that nor how I expect you to respond to that, and this is really unfair of me to just drop this on you so I’m sorry and pretend that I said nothing and anyway how are you?” Two days later, you can automatically say, “just fine and you?” The lie tastes like ashes in your mouth. You hate yourself for how easily it comes. At least you don’t have to take care of the other person’s feelings.

The act of teaching takes you into a different part of your head. The focus on the subject, the interaction with students, the performance, all give your body a break. You feel relief. You notice you feel relief. Your relief feels like betrayal.

You cannot find that same space outside of class, nor do you want to. The next teaching day you actually feel good in class, almost chipper. You feel numb for the rest of the day. People ask you how you are, express their condolences, and you feel as if they are asking about someone else, about something that did not happen. Everything takes place outside of a glass bubble. At the end of the day, the bubble breaks. The wailing takes a life of its own, separate from yours, a banshee ripping its way out of your guts.

There are two groups of people. Those who have been through this loss and those who dread it. You love both for their sympathy. Still, this is your grief to experience and you know exactly what you want and need. Going back to work right now will not help because work stalls the motion of your mourning and aggravates the anger. You want to wallow in this experience. You want to transform and learn from it. Teaching a class, writing a paper, routine: these things waste this well of emotion, divert this potential for contemplation and expression. They prevent profound transformation. They become the real denial, distancing yourself from this one last connection with your dad.

Don’t Give a Fuck contains the deep sadness and apathy of depression, but it is not Depression. You do care about creativity, thought, action, other people, and perhaps more so than usual; but you do not care about them in the usual ways. They do not express themselves as they did before. When you say “I give zero fucks about this,” what you really mean is that your usual daily life has little meaning to you right now; meaning lies elsewhere and your anger targets anything that keeps you from exploring that elsewhere and from going through this — oh, there must be a word for it and you just cannot find it. You want the space, not forever, just for now, for a few intensive months at first with decrescendo through the year.

You want to “take your broken heart and turn it into art.” About that, you really do GAF.

This is not the same numbness of the ICU days, of knowing potentialities and holding them all at bay.

Is this denial? You know what has happened but you don’t feel it. You don’t feel the sadness, you don’t feel the pain. You feel normal, except you also feel that something very large is missing. Your blind spot has grown beyond proportion. You feel pressed against a glass wall between you and the rest of your world, between you and the rest of your feelings.

You fear that you have distanced yourself as a bulwark against this loss for so long that you have actually been successful. You hate yourself for that. You worry that this is it, this numbness of near normalness ends your sadness. You will be able to look at old pictures now, at him holding his grandsons, at him playing his horn, at him with the dogs, and not feel anything. Not a week since the funeral and this is the limit of your grief? You are a monster.

You search in your hollow self for the pain. He left a message on your phone. You did not delete it. You listen. You aren’t numb anymore.  Your chest burns deep beneath the bone. Still, that his voice is there, on your phone, but he is not in his chair in Texas. You cannot call him back. You don’t feel that. That is a thought that pesters your skin, your cells, but cannot break through. This sadness, visceral, perplexes you. How is he not there? Why do you hurt as if he is not there? Your rational mind and your emotions know the same thing, but don’t sync.

You falter back to numb.

At one point in the day, you begin to wonder if they believe you are Jewish and are accommodating your sitting shiva, this is how long and how often you must wait.

To be fair, their wifi has slowed to a speed reminiscent of dial-up, and you all did only call them that morning, the day after the death, to arrange a funeral for that week. Still, you must consider work schedules and school schedule of the mourners. Death arrives inconveniently and, even in sympathy, our culture considers death rude.

The receptionist stalls by giving you a tour. A chapel, a room for catering, a room to sit. The chapel looks like a church. A reddish pink light illuminates a cross on the wall above a space reserved for a coffin. You persist in thinking of that space as an altar. The light makes you think of a bordello. The space for the catering reminds you of the later seasons of Six Feet Under.

The whole place reminds you of Six Feet Under, or rather the corporatization that Six Feet Under criticized. You chastise yourself for meanness. No one here tries to upsell you or exploit your loss to increase their profit. Still, you mention the reference to your aunt and brother. Your mother never watched the show. You and your aunt laugh about the pilot, Dave consoling the man who responds, “She’s shoveling shit in hell if there’s any justice in this world.”

A fade. You all sit at the four corners of the table in the waiting area, staring in the mid-distance. Another family shambles out of the sitting room, silent. You want to catch their eye, let them know that you know, but they move toward the door as if blown. The receptionist brings you to the sitting room in their place, offers you snacks from a basket on the table. You vaguely think that some version of yourself might have found solace in losing her appetite and thus some weight. You slap that version of yourself.  The funeral director arrives.

So many decisions to be made still, although your parents have made many of the worst of them for you. You note your father’s age on the paperwork. Three years ago, when he had that first, awful infection and everyone got so angry. The first stage of grief, of saying goodbye, did you know? Of course you did. That was the reason you were so angry. You recovered, did not send your angriest e-mail to him, but you still feel guilty. They did not know about the cancer then, but they knew about the mortality. So did you. You feel guilty for not facing it better, stronger. You hoped there would be more time. You ask yourself who you are fooling.

The worst decisions involve his body. He and your mother wanted to be cremated. As the funeral director explains the arrangement of the altar — the thing you call the altar — she mentions the placement of the urn. Your father did not choose an urn. He found the cheapest, most basic box in the catalog.

Later, you and your brother share a laugh about the box. “That’s so Dad,” your brother says. “None of this bullshit, just a box.” Your mother went up a notch and chose a pretty box. Neither wanted to be displayed nor to display the other on a mantle or shelf. They want their ashes mixed together and to be spread over LSU — or the ocean, your mother pipes in. Disagreement even in the afterlife. “That’s so them,” you think. You will do both when the time comes, even if the LSU part is illegal.

In discussing the box, the funeral director choses her words carefully, respectfully. You can tell which types of questions she has answered in the ways that she anticipates your family’s. Clearly, people worry that the crematorium has not been cleaned of others. Clearly, people worry that they do not receive the correct ashes. With every word, you watch your brother, your mother, your aunt, flinch. You feel your own self flinch.

You wonder if he is somewhere in the building. You wish you did not because you would want to see him, and you don’t really want to see him, and now your mind drifts down that road, and cremation feels so final.

A week later, as you write this, you can write this. You can put down the word, “cremation,” and not feel revulsion nor the sense of being slammed against a wall. You don’t hear the slam of a closed gate. It is over.

You haven’t seen the box, it wasn’t at the funeral, you haven’t asked about it because that seems too personal. Yet, it also seems pointless. Ashes are ashes. They aren’t even his body. They aren’t even his bones. He is gone.

The decisions go on, dragging through half-hour long pauses, forty-five minute long pauses. A video runs on a flatscreen in the background showing an ad for the home’s services and samples of the types of videos that they show during the visitation or reception. The music is exactly what you would expect of a funeral, maudlin yet upbeat. Sad, but not too sad. It says, “we are sad, but let’s celebrate.” That is the message of funerals in our culture. It does not have the same mix as at a jazz funeral, which separates the two feelings, but attempts to force the one over the other. “Dad would have died if we used this,” we say, at first realizing our slip, then embracing it.  Your brother finds the volume and turns it off. He also finds the thermostat and makes the room less of a freezer.

What stationary? What poem for the “keepsake” card made from the stationary? What deadline for the obituary? What cost for the obituary? What newspapers? What pictures? What flowers? Your aunt has definite opinions on that. She’s good. What minister? What catering option? “He would have liked, he liked, he would have hated” all figure into these decisions. On the one hand, a funeral is for the survivors. On the other, it commemorates the dead. You realize how much like a wedding a funeral can be, but how much less planning goes into it, really. People actively plan a wedding for a year, perhaps fantasize longer. Very few people want to think of their funeral.

Four hours later you leave with a list of things you must do. Songs for the service. Songs for the video. Pictures for the video. Short obituary. Long obituary. Eulogy. You have done so little this day, and yet you feel as if you have been beaten.  You can’t even think to want anything or not want anything.

You realize that rituals for death do exist. You hear Joan Didion’s words from A Year of Magical Thinking, “there are things that must be done.” That is the ritual. The things that must be done.  Each thing hurts because it reinvigorates the loss, revives its realness, and takes you further away from him. Each thing in service to the dead person, to his memory, to your grief, to your survival.

Today is over. This thing is done.

The cells in your body respond with their own insistence:

A sore throat.

An ache to hug him.

A wall between you and the next thing you must do.

Desperation for oblivious, dreamless sleep.

Desperation for dreams.

Desperation for ghosts, actual ghosts.

Your face melting.

Your blood gaining weight, liquid lead in your veins.

Agitation.

Exhaustion.

Numb.

Power. (What more can hurt you now?)

An urge so deep that you feel the childish certainty that, if you will it hard enough, it might happen, to return to last month and make a different decision.

To write, constantly write, every feeling, every maudlin thought until they have bled dry, until they have transformed into something new. To toss the words into the world like a thousand cranes for someone else to know that this happened, this grief, this candle, this beacon, this monument to a life.

Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. A solo, a duet, a trio, a symphony, a passacaglia.

Anger at him passed long ago. You remember the first dissipation, lying in an ER with a migraine. He had taken you and waited while they ran you through a CT scan and an IV. In the dim room, you looked over at him, browsing his iPhone. Just there, patiently waiting and entertaining himself, unconscious of your observation. You just had a vision of a film, burning through and melting away, like an old movie caught in the projector. You felt anger escape and evaporate.  Sometimes it flared, coming of a piece with the irrationality of fear, shoring up the denial, and working its way into bargaining.

You saw the condition of his body, the pain, the bags of medical supplies that would plague the rest of his life. The bags that had already plagued his life. Your mother remembers something lost in the shuffle of dialysis and intensive care. She remembers that the surgeon mentioned spots on the bones in the X-rays. Your insides spasm. You don’t blame him for giving up. You aren’t angry at him.

You are angry that you did not stay. You did not want to leave before, and you were not at all certain that you would see him at Thanksgiving, his one last wish that you could not even manage to grant until you fell into the fear. You are angry that your rational mind told you that you must go home, begin classes, pick up daily life, push this out of your mind to get through the day, and tell yourself every minute that everything was getting better. Lie through your teeth to everyone else to reassure them, reassure yourself, that all looked well.

You are angry that you did not listen to your guts, which told you to stay until he was out of the ICU. Stay until he was out of the hospital. Stay until he was home. You are angry that you did not write to HR and ask about Family and Medical Leave Act. You are angry that you let their reputation for incompetence be your excuse. You are angry that you were not there with him every day to show him that you love him, that you had not abandoned him.

You are angry that you were not able to hold his hand and work with him to the acceptance of the end. To be there with him and tell him that you will always always miss him. To apologize for your bad patches. To make up for the reason that he would feel abandoned. To apologize for not waking to his need decades sooner. To take care of him to his end like he took care of you at your beginning. To hold his hand and tell him that, if he wants to go, you understand, you will be there with him to the end.  You are so very angry that you did not do that.

You resent everything and everyone who encouraged that rational voice. You tell yourself that you would be here, in this same place right now, anyway. Nothing would have changed the outcome; but the outcome is not really the point, is it? You just want to wake up and be back, a month ago, and have the strength to remake that decision, to tell everyone else to fuck off.

You are furious that you felt you had so little time remaining and you still left.

You continue to resent everything that you have to do now to go back into normal life, the very same things that brought you back three weeks ago. You resent everyone who tells you that work will take your mind off of it, that getting things done will take your mind off of it, that moving forward will make it all hurt less.  They mean well, you know.  You’ve said the very same things for the very same reason, even to yourself. Like the lie of everything is getting better, these are all just wishes.

So, you restrain yourself from snapping back that they were so very wrong before, why should you believe them now, they should just confine themselves to “I’m sorry, my condolences” and not offer this advice. This was not their call, this is not their fault, they mean well. Some of them have been here.

For you, right now, anything that is not mourning him insults his memory. Anything that is not mourning him continues the mistakes that you made in his life all of your life because you lacked emotional fortitude.

Your anger is at yourself.

To LJF,

My dad is dead. The finality of the prose beats like a hammer on a nail. My dad. Is dead. This is the day that I dreaded for my entire life.

There is a howling, gaping chasm in the world today. The deflated clothes hanging in the laundry room where I dressed this morning. The advice on the new car that he won’t be there to give. The pictures that I will take for him at Normandy next month before I realize that he won’t be here to see them. That hammer blow will strike again and again.

Let it come. Let this hurricane roar, let it tear me to shreds. Let its size match his. This searing force testifies to his greatness, his goodness, his bigness. This pain honors him.

Because he was a big man. Physically large in ways that made us terrified, even angry, that this day would come sooner than it has. Yet, from haggis to boudin, he just couldn’t say “no” to a juicy sausage. Even now, in the refrigerator, a smoked jalapeno link awaits his fork. And his appetite for pasta and garlic made his own mother question his ethnicity, sure that the hospital had switched him with the Italian baby born the same night. He liked his food. But physical size, that’s just a metaphor. His bigness came in all forms. He had presence. He will be an absence.

And, god, that presence was funny. No one here should be surprised that his humor came in various shades of blue. He enjoyed fart jokes so much that I cannot judge them on their own merits. His laughter at the campfire scene in Blazing Saddles entered ranges heard only by dogs; and the Symphony Moose I’m sure haunts the Miller Outdoor Theater to this day, fumigating the station wagons of unsuspecting families. Yet, he had a touch of sophistication and wit. What other father would introduce his eleven-year old daughter to Chaucer via the extended Middle English fart joke, “The Miller’s Tale”?

Still, with all the bawdy shenanigans, you could watch the emotion roll through him as he listened to Elgar’s “Nimrod.” “Amazing Grace” played by the Black Watch reduced him to tears, and he wept at the mere description of hearing Vivaldi’s “Four Season” played live in San Vidal Cathedral in Venice. When Karl and I were small children — in the time before Keith — we curled up on the sofa with him, eating applesauce straight out of the jar and listening to Bedrich Smentana’s “Die Moldau” as he described the song’s fairy tales scenes along a river in central Europe.` My earliest memories of music came wafting down the hall with the strains of Beethoven that he played on Sunday mornings. I can see him sitting in his garage shop as I drive up, surrounded by cases, tools at arms’ length, testing the horn on his lap. Beauty came to him through sound.

And not since the nineteenth century has anyone elevated sentimentality to such a virtue. That pure, sweet smile he had for dogs, babies, weddings. Was there not a time in his life when a hound sat on his lap? There was the holy trinity and a half of dachshunds, Rascal, Gretl, Fritz, and Frida the chiweenie, with the bassets Klyde and Sousa in between. And babies! He had no shame, waving and making faces at them in restaurants, stores, museums. We went on a tour of the Seward House up where I live, and he made a bee-line for a lady with an infant on the tour. He fawned and cooed until that little pudge giggled at the funny white haired man with walrus mustache. How poetic that his own first baby was me and his last was Claire, the daughter of his youngest son: two girly-girls with foul mouths and a penchant for pink, bookending four very boyish boys — Karl, Keith, Jake, and Bradley. Then, the gratitude that we three — Karl, Keith, and I — found our partners, our person, who would enlarge the love he felt. Dad grew up a little prince in an extended family, wrapped in the certainty and safety of love. This he wanted for us, for all of us here. Extending his love.

For he was a man of great empathy and emotion, more than was encouraged in men of his generation — of men in most generations. He alone could find the strength to sympathize Velma Kemp, that principal-of-the-world mother-in-law. He saw beyond her thick, bitter crust to the frail, lonely old woman who had alienated everyone by her final years. And he could sit with anyone, any type of person no matter how different they were from him, and interview them about their lives out of pure curiosity and without judgement. At my doctoral graduation, he looked over to see him asking my radical lesbian Persian friend about fleeing the Iranian Revolution as a child. Yet, the sight was not at all incongruous, but warm, in keeping with him, and the curiosity about individuals that broke down prejudices about groups.

So, really, his biggest presence — and now his biggest absence — will be on the other side of a conversation. We pondered great spiritual matters conducting a seance with  my Ouija board when I was twelve, and worked through big ideas of life, the universe, war, history as we built my dollhouse, or he tooled around the garage, or while he worked on Big Bird my yellow Buick Skylark. He loved that car — my car —  so much because it was one of the last cars he could really work on using old school mechanics skills. Whatever we talked about when he helped move me from Indianapolis to Boston, I really do not remember. Riding across country together, sharing a joke about being followed by a green Mazda the whole way – my car in tow behind the moving van — filled me with warmth and an aching sense of the fragility of those days.

Most of all, he tried to hear what you meant below the words you were saying. Because he listened, because he genuinely sympathized with you, and took whatever blow you offered to discover the source of conflict. He was someone who, no matter how angry you became with him or he with you, would always forgive. You could depend on him. His love was stalwart.

He told me a story of putting together a bookshelf with his grandson. As a father, he said, he would have become frustrated at how long the process took because his focus would have been on the task of construction. Now, as a grandfather, he had realized that the point was not the bookshelves but the time with this charming, impish little boy. By that measure, putting together a bookshelf with his grandson should take hours, days, weeks. He wished he had figured that out earlier. He was glad that Karl and Keith did.

I have finally begun to hear him through all of my own noise, to finally realize what he had been trying to tell me even as he himself figured it out. Time doesn’t just pass quickly. It accelerates. And love demands epic courage. Anger, resentment, guilt, fear, disappointment, dread — work those out quickly or don’t waste your time on them. You receive this gift of another life in yours and you will never, ever have enough time with them. Losing them will always feel unbearable. Dad, I understand now. I wish I had the strength to hear you all along.

Only the most gifted of poets have the skills and the fortitude to transform agony into beauty. So, I turn to a poem by W.H. Auden. The words have returned to me every day of this last wretched week:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.

the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I’m sorry for all of the bad times, Daddy, and the times I was ungrateful. Thank you for my life. Thank you for yours. I loved you so much. I always will.

The words can hardly form in her mouth for the grief. You know. You see his white hair, the pink of his scalp. An emptiness begins opening. You don’t feel it at first, but you see it widening as time stretches, suspending you in this moment between unreality and the inevitable real of the fact.

It hits with the force of a punch. You let it. You want it. This is the last genuine expression of love you will have with his existence as it slips from you. You and your mom, babbling the language of loss through the phone.

He is an absence in the world. The rest of the day, the absence weaves in and out of abstraction because his presence lived half-way across the country. You hold even for moments. This one. Another one. Another. You book a ticket back to Texas. “I should have stayed,” you think. “I knew I should have stayed.” A sudden nostalgia for the hell of ICU. Then, the retching reality. Uncontrollable. Condolences leave you shaking, bracing yourself. No images, no sound, or all of the images and all of the sounds. Pure emotion sucking out your insides. You think “too much.” Then you think, “is ‘too much’ at all possible? Is there ever ‘too much’ to fully express this loss?” Too much is not possible.

This moment can be borne. This is bearable. Then it is not. You wonder when, then worry that, it will. Bearable cheapens his life, his love, he being.

The pure, prosaic commonness of it all shocks you the most. So, perhaps it is a moment of poetry that you spend the end of your first day without him, he who took you on your first plane ride in your first months of life, in an airport.