JANUARY 7, 2014
NOBODY’S SON
1
I lost my father this past year, and the word feels right because I keep looking for him. As if he were misplaced. As if he could just turn up, like a sock or a set of keys.
It’s not unusual. In fact, nothing about his death, or my grief, is unusual; there’s no news here—nothing remotely tragic. I know what tragic is: eight days before my father died, a skinny young man walked into an elementary school fifteen minutes from where I live and killed twenty children, something so outrageous that the laws of physics should have stuttered in sympathy, the thrown rock cleared the horizon, the bouncing ball kept bouncing forever.
My father’s death was not in that universe of things. Really, nothing happened. An old man who seventy years ago had held the national Czech junior record in the eight-hundred-metre run walked out of a restaurant in Prague that he went to every day, started making his way up the sidewalk with the cane that I had bought him, complained of feeling weak, sat down on the stoop of 74 Vinohradska street, and died. He was not a person of interest; he’d pass through the mesh of the New York Times Obituary section like dust. He’d lived a long, heartbreaking, and extraordinary life, lived it, on the whole, more decently than most, and when he came to the end of it, he died. It doesn’t get more ordinary than that—the dying part, at least.
Except that he was my father. And grief, like love, is resistant to reason. It was him and me. And now it ain’t.
I have other loves in my life that are greater. It helps. And it doesn’t.
I can’t look at his picture yet. Not yet. I will.
2
I thought of calling this piece “In Memoriam,” because “in memoriam” has always suggested a place to me—Memoriam, Oklahoma, say, or Memoriam, Tennessee—and because, to my tinker’s brain, “in memoriam,” sounds like “in memory am.” Which I am, now more than ever. Lost, basically, wandering that ancestral home, all polished wood and anecdote, wishing that I could unload it somehow, knowing I never will. Like it or not, I have an investment in Memoriam now. My father’s casket between the potted palms is the cornerstone. Welcome home, kid.
It’s an odd, slightly ghostly predicament. Lacking brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, with my mother’s memory having long ago lost any trace of me, I find myself the sole surviving owner of ten thousand names, stories, jokes, associations—that time the raccoon reached up through the knothole in the cabin floor when I was four; those Friday nights when the three of us would watch “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”; that evening, a memorable night in 1966, when my dad, with his professorial air and his Czech accent and his horn-rims, put on my mother’s shoulder-length blond wig on a dare and went out to pick up the pizza—that mean nothing, except that they were the soil of our lives.
What am I supposed to do with this nest of thorns? Driving through the tiny town of Putnam Lake, I notice the ugly metal railing he’d lift me onto when I was two, helping me to balance along that airy height, sailing me across the gap, and I remember his hands and I wince. Actually wince. Would it hurt less if I’d hated him more? Maybe, but I doubt it. Indifference would have helped. Absence would have helped. But those options were foreclosed on years ago. Even when I did hate him, or thought I did, at sixteen or seventeen, he was there.
With him gone, there’s no one to reminisce with, no one to corroborate my memories (or correct them), no one to identify the little girl smiling up from the curling photograph at the bottom of the shoebox. In 1942, in Brno, my father’s family hid a man in the rabbit hutch for a week, until he could be moved. That’s all I know of the story, and now it’s all I’ll ever know. With no one to check me, error will spread like weeds. Which is how the past is transmuted into fiction, and then the fool’s gold of history.
3
It’s interesting how unsteady a process grief is; the conveyer belt taking me away from him shudders and stalls. Reverses.
“It gets better, right?” I asked a woman I met recently, who’d lost her own father three years ago.
“It changes,” she said.
I can believe that. In the first weeks, especially when I was alone, his death was surreal: late at night, sitting up reading, I could feel it there, just past my sight, like a river seething by in the dark. I couldn’t look at it straight on.
Four months later, I began, once again, to do what I do. Every writer is an anatomist by trade. At some point, it was simply time—time to hack through the rib cage, palp the heart, assess the damage. Hearts, like rocks, can only take so many blows. His had given out once, then cranked up again, run for another twenty-one years (the exact age of our daughter, whom he loved unreservedly), then quit for good. Mine was just stunned.
The problem, you see, is that I didn’t think he’d ever die, that his voice would ever be gone from this world. I knew it, but I didn’t, just like I know now that he’s dead—I can talk about it, can report it to the Social Security Administration, which sends its condolences—but I don’t, not really. I’m having trouble with the word “gone.” Gone where? For how long? I have moments when I have to fight the urge to pick up the phone on the off chance that my stepmother will answer and say, in that dutiful voice, “Yes, he’s right here, he’s coming,” and hand him the phone so he can spend the next ten minutes pretending he can hear me, before saying, “Good, that’s good—I didn’t quite get all of that—can you write it to me?” I keep wanting to send him an e-mail, just hit “reply” and tell him that we’re fine, that our son’s back from Ecuador, that the bullfrogs are back in the cove. When I scroll back through my inbox, his name appears, six pages back, then quickly multiplies: four e-mails on page eight, then two, then six. Amazing how much it hurts to page forward, to see his name disappear. I did it the other day, pressing “newer,” then “older,” over and over, hoping to inoculate myself. I don’t recommend it.
4
When I learned he was gone I was holding a running shoe in one hand, thinking of going to the gym. I was looking for the other shoe when I thought to check my e-mail. A message from my stepsister, in Czech. “I’m afraid I have some sad news for you. Your father died suddenly today.”
Which is how it goes. Not with a bang. Definitely not with a bang.
My wife and daughter knew right away. “What? What is it?”
“My dad died,” I said. I was still holding the shoe.
I remember drawing the two of them around me like a coat, and when our son arrived, a few hours later, still spattered with mud from doing hurricane-relief work on Long Island, my defenses were complete. We laughed at the dinner table that night—twenty years of habit dies hard—then we laughed some more on the plane out to Prague for the funeral. We cracked each other up drinking coffee in the mornings, struggling up Petřín Hill to the castle in the cold, drinking wine at night. Every now and then, a spasm would grip my chest—but it would pass.
The rainy-day service, at the great Olšany graveyard, only a few yards from where Kafka lay buried next to his father, was ironic, tasteful, and brief. I declined the offer from the officious young woman at the funeral home to say farewell to my father’s body. My stepbrother engaged a young man with a round face and long, greasy hair—a character straight out of Dickens or Hrabal—to take pictures of our grief.
We sat there looking at the casket, wondering if the palms were fake, listening to the opening movement of Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, which was fine until the piccolos came in, evoking happy gnomes in turned-up shoes. We couldn’t help smiling: my father would have loved that. At the end, the heavy drapes wouldn’t quite come together until a white, disembodied hand emerged from behind, groped irritably around in the air like a magician’s prop, then yanked them shut. Perfect.
I returned home with my family thinking I’d gotten through. Then came January. And February. And March. Work didn’t help. Wine didn’t help. Talking about it helped, but only for so long. Odd things occurred to me. The two times in my life I’d actually cried in my sleep both involved dreams in which my father was about to die but worried only about protecting me—dreams that delivered a grief as potent and irresistible as laughing gas. Yet now, trapped in the sheath of reality, I couldn’t cry.
Sometimes you just have to keep walking. This was my time.
I don’t want to be misunderstood: I’m not selling this as any kind of blueprint, any kind of three- or five- or eight-step program to anything at all; as far as I can tell, there is no after-map or, more precisely, we each begin making our own the instant the news reaches us that someone we loved is gone. Which is unsettling: this terra is your own, brother, and as incognita as they come. Kübler-Ross? Sorry, the good doctor can’t help you here. The run-up to death may have its stages, as clearly marked as the Tour de France, but past Paris, so to speak, for those remaining on the field, things get fuzzy quick.
No search engine can find you. The guides have disappeared—they don’t know this place. And what were you going to do, anyway, Google: “Dad, who used to tip up sixty-pound rocks so I could grab the red-backed salamanders hiding underneath them when I was four”? No, in the aftermath of loss, the ones you love will keep you whole, but the journey is yours alone. Whatever you do, whatever you feel, becomes the map.
So it’s a problem. Because I miss him. Because I want to tear down this fucking wall between us with my hands. Because the angels and the harps don’t work for me. Because it wasn’t Our Heavenly Father who carried me out to the car at dawn when I was a child, who laid me down on the back seat of the DeSoto and covered me, who was there as I grew, who embarrassed me, disappointed me, loved me.
Back in February, I smelled him coming out of the supermarket, a smell like wool and books and stale tobacco, and I put the paper bags down and just stood there for a few seconds, a bespectacled fool in a winter hat, blocking traffic.
5
For years I hid my parents in my work. Submerged their names, their lives, in stories. Nobody would know. I let them come closest to the surface in a book called “The Visible World.” Even the title pointed to all that I couldn’t say.
Was it cowardice? Decency? All my life, I’ve been better at taking pain than giving it—which suggests a bit of both. Truth brings either freedom or grief, and I didn’t want to risk it. I didn’t want to hurt them. It was just the three of us.
That danger’s passed. He’s gone, and my mother, in her way, is, too. So that, as they say, is that. And here I am, orphaned at fifty-five, nobody’s son, trying to plot my coördinates, to see my way clear. I’m free now—free to tell his story, their story, to the extent I know how, to the extent I ever knew it. It’s my legacy, this freedom, though I would have delayed this gift just a little bit longer, had I been able.
Graham Greene counselled that you should write with a splinter of ice in your heart, advice I’ve taken, well, to heart. Except that I’m fresh out of ice lately. My heart feels overfull, vulnerable, and part of me, nursing grief as a tribute, prefers it that way. Yet lately some buried self has been dreaming of ice, of running a finger down its hard, clean edge.
How strange, this feeling I have that writing about him, even mentioning his death, is a betrayal of some kind, a betrayal of that lifelong conversation between us, of our days together.
“What’s the takeaway?” a neighbor of mine is always asking his kids whenever they run into something harder than they are. Good question.
I have no idea. The only thing your life teaches you is how to live your life. And that’s only if you’re very lucky. And you listen very hard. Life teaches elliptically, epigrammatically, retrospectively. If life was a professor, you’d flunk him on his evaluations. Just tell me the goddam answer, you want to say.
It’s a race between your foolishness and your allotted days. Good luck.
That’s my takeaway.
6
It needs to be said: in some strange way, my father’s death has made the thought of dying easier. The door opened, and he walked through it successfully; the land of the dead is a peopled place for me now because he’s there, somewhere. And, because he’s done it, because he’s pulled this thing off, it’s become conceivable for me as well. Hell, if the old man can do it, I can do it.
It’s an unexpected gift, this release from fear—it’s like a gentling touch, a father’s voice. He lifts you onto his lap, presses your head to his chest, pets your hair. You can hear his heart. Sh-h-h, sh-h-h, it’s O.K., it’s O.K., it’s O.K., he says as your sobs begin to slow, then catch, then slow some more. Don’t cry. There’s nothing to be afraid of, nothing at all. We all must die. Accept, accept.
And I just might, except that this is not my father’s voice, which is as alive to me as anything in this world. This is something very different, a flowering as deceptive as cancer, blooming in the light of his loss. A flowering fed on self-pity and orphaned love.
Accept? My father was irritated by death, chafed at and ignored it. It was an annoyance, an inconvenience. He fought it to a standstill, refused the morphine of the ages. Harps and virgins? Please. Oblivion would do fine, thank you. In the meantime, there was injustice and stupidity to perforate, cruelty to expose, the absurd and gorgeous carnival of the world to watch going by.
“What is this sickly sentimentality?” he’d say to me, “this weakening at the knees? I was old. I died. It’s to be regretted—certainly by me—but so what? Think of me when you need to, that’s more than enough. Now pour me another and get out of here—don’t you have somewhere to go?”
Six months in, the heart, the soul, the spine, begin to regenerate. Slowly. In moments of weakness, his voice saves me, which is appropriate. He was my father. Is.
Don’t be stupid, he says. You don’t love me less by living more. Live! Live like you mean it.
You could do worse for fatherly advice. And so I’ll take it. I’ll ignore the truth. I’ll laugh in its face. I’ll disrespect it till the day I die.
Mark Slouka’s most recent novel, “Brewster,” was published in August.
Illustration by Keith Negley.
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