Where the hell have you been? (2019)

Sometime in the first year after my father died, we were visiting my Uncle Joe and his family at their home, and his daughter Barb asked my mother a question. “Aunt Shirley?” They were sitting on a couch in the living room. “If Uncle Clint came back, what would you say to him?”

Barb was fifteen or sixteen at the time. She expected a romantic answer—part of a story, somehow, about a reunion between a wife and her husband.

My mother often used a question like this as a teachable moment—a chance to share a perspective that a child might not have considered. But there was nothing deliberate or pedagogical about her answer. Instead it burst out of her, with all the raw pain of widowhood. “If Clint came back, I’d say to him, ‘Where the hell have you been?’”

My mother knew what she would say because she had been having a recurring dream where she did discover him at home, living as he lived before. She wouldn’t be glad he was back. She would be frustrated and angry that he had been gone. And that same question would end each dream.

When my father was still alive, we used to attend an antiques auction near the farm. Families parked in a field and walked to a barn where a cantankerous Yankee named Mr. Sena stood on a stage and auctioned off furniture, farm machinery, and whatever else he had found in his travels around New England the week before. This is where my parents bought Emily’s bed—the bed missing one cherry side rail. My father loved just listening to the auctioneer. Mr. Sena was a small man who had at least two gigantic sons. His sons would hoist something like an armchair or a desk above their heads, and he would start the bidding by saying, “You’re never going to find another one like it.”

What is the measure of a life? There are probably many. But one measure is how much we miss you when you’re gone, and for how long. You can aspire to great deeds. You can strive to contribute to science, learning, art, and so on. But the human measure, the measure within reach, is the hole you leave behind. Success is being uniquely irreplaceable. Specificity makes one life so valuable, and specificity makes grief so hard. But whoever you are, however great your loss, we still do learn to live without you. In what felt like a betrayal to the hole we knew was still there, my mother and my sisters and I all began learning to live without him.

In 1974, the summer after we built the stone wall, my Uncle Joe hosted a Smith family reunion. Everyone who came posed for a picture.

Looking at this picture recently, my mother found the four of us on the far left side of the deck and mused, “We were a pretty sad family then.” When you zoom in, you can see that Emily was the only one smiling. My mother is just squinting.

At six and then seven years old, Emily would go find what she needed outside our home on Everit Street. She often went and found the father next door. If the Ramseys left their front door open, she might just run inside and climb into his lap. If they locked the door, they might hear the bell ring and find Emily standing on the porch, carrying a book she wanted him to read to her. At the other end of the street, Anne Schwartz remembers Emily appearing at their house in the afternoons to play with her boys and then just hanging around until Anne invited her to stay for dinner. Emily roamed the neighborhood like this, creating friendships in other people’s homes. Sunny and sociable, part of this was her delight in other people. But part of it was a need, I think, to escape.

When we went to events with other families, I often felt ashamed—the way someone might feel who lost a leg. We were missing something everyone else had. At home, we reorganized how we sat around our kitchen table. Before the funeral, Emily still sat in the space between my mother and my father’s empty chair. Now she took his chair, and hers held newspapers in a corner. My mother and I sat facing each other at either end of the white oval. Mandy and Emily faced each other across the middle. And one night, as I tried to fall asleep, I could no longer remember his face. Kicking off the covers and sitting on the side of my bed, I sobbed and sobbed. My mother came in and wrapped her arms around me. But I was old enough to feel, the next morning, that my tears had been slightly foolish.

Sears and Roebuck was where we shopped in those days. We went all together, the four of us, to buy tools and shoes and clothes that never needed ironing. In the years after he died, spending any amount of money made my mother anxious and aggressive. She also had a strong sense of justice that corporations frequently offended, and she reached a peak of consumer indignation by the time our purchases reached the cash register. She would argue with the cashiers about the way pants were sized or socks were packaged or how the price of shirts suddenly rose. Embarrassed, we would argue with her as we walked out of the store.

“Why do you always do that? Why did you argue with them like that? They’re just taking the money!”

“You have to complain to somebody,” she would say, “if you want anything to change.”

We usually parked in a side lot to the right of the store. I remember most vividly the row of parking spaces against the wall.

I too used to dream that my father came back. He would be waiting outside Sears, in that row of parking spaces against the wall. Around the corner we all came, arguing with our mother, and there he stood beside the station wagon—leaning on the locked door with his arms folded like a neighbor waiting for a ride. What happened to his keys? I would wonder in the dream. Did he forget them? Only then would I realize that he was once gone forever. Once gone forever. But that was wrong. Here he stood. I wanted to tell him so many things. There was so much he needed to know!

But that surge of joy crested and crashed as my mother sat behind the wheel and leant across to unlock each door. She drove now. I sat in front now. We didn’t know where to put him in the car. In those dreams, he sometimes sat in back with my sisters. He sometimes sat between my mother and I on the bench seat in front. As the car would start moving, the four of us would start talking, but he wouldn’t know what to say. The man who never heard a conversation he couldn’t join would ride with us in silence.

The hole was still there. Yet there wasn’t a place for him. He didn’t belong with us anymore. When we went to the farm, I shared his blue work shirts with my mother, and I started doing things that he used to do.

We used the Jeep to mow the fields. It pulled an old horse-drawn mower that we had found in the barn. The mower looked like this.

Raised like a wing on one side was the sickle bar. We pulled the handle out from under the seat and laid the sickle bar flat on the ground. As the Jeep pulled the mower forward, the little triangular blades moved back and forth to cut the grass. We used the handle to position the bar so it followed the contour of the ground. We also used it to jerk the bar up before it hit a rock or a stump. If the bar did hit something hard, the mechanism that moved the blades back and forth popped apart, and we had to stop and put it all back together. There were times when I hoped this would happen because it was so uncomfortable on that seat. Those iron wheels absorbed no shocks.

Mowing the field this way required two people: One to drive the Jeep and one to ride the mower. Riding the mower was something guests enjoyed for about five minutes, but to get the real work done my parents used to take turns driving and riding. The summer before my father died, my involvement was more like a guest. Here I am making a cameo on the mower as my father drives, barely tall enough to keep myself in the seat and control the bar.

After he died, my mother drove and I bounced on the mower for the hours and hours it took to cut the fields.

My mother felt a deep, driving urgency about the work we needed to do at the farm. Any weekend there started with a list of tasks she used to recite as we pulled into the driveway. Mowing. Clearing brush along the stream and around the pond. Cutting and stacking firewood. Fixing the water line. And so on. I tried to help with these tasks as best I could. But they were all so sensible, so necessary. I missed the adventures my father would dream up—those questionably necessary projects, not exactly sensible and laughably ambitious, like building the stone wall. I kept imagining the adventures we would have had up there together. I began to feel that I might accept the hole he left in the family if I could dream up some not exactly sensible and laughably ambitious project of my own. And so at thirteen, I became obsessed with building a log cabin.