Remembering what grief looked like in our family. It looked like chaos. And it felt like my fault. What shaped my perception of this chaos was a crushing sense of failure.
Imprisoned in the hospital, I can do almost nothing for Suzanne as she withdraws from friends and family. Day 28 is when the doctors say I might leave. I start counting toward that day as if it were a promise.
Remembering the intensity of my mother’s commitment to us and how our constant conflicts made her feel like she was failing. She often said to me, “You wish I had died instead of your father.”
My company comes to a halt between Christmas and New Year’s. Pencils down. Leukemia surprised me that week, but so did a new perspective on my professional life.
Remembering how my mother’s brother died suddenly when I was a young adult. The shocking immediacy of this loss reawakened my grief about my father dying—and about how we handled our grief as a family.
The monument I built to leave behind didn’t last for long. The cabin started rotting as soon as we finished it. In a professional setting, I concealed my attempt to build something else—another dream I had as a teenager that decomposed in adulthood.
Remembering how my cousins and I built a log cabin deep in the woods and almost entirely by ourselves. I suffered a rage about finishing it that I couldn’t control and couldn’t explain.
Struggling with the collapse of an industry and the viability of my career just as the 2008 recession struck, I found myself grieving about the direction my life had taken. And I felt I had failed my mother.
Remembering how we learned to live with the empty space in our family. The people we love most are the most uniquely irreplaceable. It is their specificity that makes grief so hard.
I became my father’s good man. If he could have seen the life I chose to live, he would have approved. But filling his hole, being his good man meant being just as vulnerable as he was.
Remembering the empty space in our family after my father died. My mother and I kept looking for him in each other and were continually disappointed.
As an adult, I talk to my father while sitting on the wall beside his grave. I have built projects in sight of the cemetery, and I imagine him talking to me during sugaring. But our conversation will vanish into the conversations my children have with me.
When my mother turned seventy, my sisters and I gave her a family trip. Anywhere she wanted to go. We ended up on the Mississippi in a houseboat called The Trump. I ended up in charge.
Remembering my father’s funeral and what many people said to me there, in the casual sexism of the time: “Take care of your mother.” I felt stunned each time I heard it.
Twenty-four hours a day the chemo drips into my veins. The IV pole follows me around the room. I think about myself and who I suddenly am not.
Remembering the final months of my father’s life. “When you are dying,” he said, “everyone you love grieves just for you. But you must grieve individually for all of them.”
Dying of cancer in 1973, my father had one question, “Did it spread?” Today oncologists answer many questions, but the more they explain, the more I have to trust them. We are all helpless in the face of expertise.
Remembering how my father’s doctors resisted disclosing his condition. In 1973, surgeons did not tell patients that cancer had spread. In fact, they actively concealed it, and this delayed him from starting to say goodbye.
Am I high risk or low risk? My test results keep getting delayed. Scared and upset, I need the warmth of people I know and trust. But my doctors keep changing.
Remembering how my mother helped us in precisely the right way at exactly the right time. This was her planted garden—cultivating who we would become. In tending this garden, she was deeply dependent on my father.
