by Dan Robson
“There you are,” I say.
Idling in the mechanic shop parking lot, I run my hands along the steering wheel as my eyes well. On the back side of its faux-leather wrap, near the top left side of ten o’clock, my finger runs across a small divot. It surprises me, but I understand the mark immediately. There he was: his right arm resting on the console, his body tilted slightly towards me in the passenger seat, and his left hand gripping the wheel—always in the exact same spot, on top, to the left, so his wedding ring pushed into the soft wrap, leaving a permanent impression. A trace of him that time had not got around to effacing.
My finger circles the indent again, slowly this time. I close my eyes and lean forward, resting my forehead on the wheel between my hands as the truck trembles beneath me. After a long moment, I sit back in the seat and shift the truck into reverse, ready to bring it home. I grip the wheel with my left hand, holding the memory of his.
5
The wedding hit us a few months after the funeral, pulling us towards it while we tried to hold ourselves in the past. It was going to happen. And it was going to be beautiful, the kind of celebration my little sister Jenna and her fiancé, Tim, deserved.
But it was also going to be brutal.
We’d never had a family celebration like this. Jenna, the youngest by five years, would be the first of us to get hitched. While our parents had been supportive of both me and Jai as we blundered unmarried through adulthood, there was always an underlying—and sometimes overt—hope that we’d just hurry up and settle into our duty as humans to wed and start families of our own. I’d been a terrible disappointment on that front. But not Jenna. She’d been dating Tim, her teenage sweetheart, for years. He was a strong, burly lumberjack of a man, with a soft heart. He was lovely and perfect for her.
Our parents had paid for the venue, even though Dad wasn’t keen on the rustic, understated fieldhouse with its sizable downtown price tag. It didn’t matter, though. He’d wanted Jenna to have everything exactly as she dreamed it up. He’d told his close friends how proud, how excited he was about the day he’d get to walk her down the aisle. Even that would have been a task. He’d have cried the whole way.
We know he’d want the day to be perfect for Jenna. But as much as we wanted to push past it, the reality was that he wasn’t there—and the depth of that hole would be impossible to avoid.
A few days before the wedding I stay up through the night, driving towards another book deadline I’d botched. It’s the day of the wedding rehearsal. Everyone in the party is coming over to run through the game plan in our backyard. I lie down a couple hours after sunrise and wake up to the sound of people laughing downstairs. In a daze, for several moments, I’m confused. I’ve forgotten about the all-nighter and the rehearsal. I just know that I’m lying in bed at our home and that I hear my family downstairs having a wonderful time. For a few brief moments I allow myself to imagine Dad in the kitchen with them, flipping pancakes and frying bacon. I imagine him laughing along while Jai or Jenna fills the room with some wild, exaggerated story. He smiles and shakes his head, listening as they go on and on. It was one of his favourite things to do, he told me several times—just listening to “his girls” laugh and tell tales. He’d have spent his life doing that if he could.
The illusion lingers a few moments longer. I lie there listening as long as I can before the truth of it returns. This is reality now and I have to deal with it. I’ve tried to push it down for months, but it’s back and it’s unavoidable. It crashes through me, and I break into a heaving sob.
I feel pathetic. Grief has obliterated me. The bags below my eyes rest on my cheeks, which sag with the weight of my wild, untrimmed beard. In a few months I’ve aged physically and regressed emotionally. I’m at least a dozen pounds heavier. I’ve allowed myself to crumble. He’d be so disappointed in what I’ve let myself become.
We make it through the rehearsal with smiles and laughs, and carry the act through dinner at my parents’ favourite Italian restaurant. I force a smile through the next few days leading up to the wedding. I feel terrible about it—about not being able to fight through the cloud that hangs over the celebration. Jenna deserves better than that, although I know she feels it too.
Grief is universal, of course. We all fight with it at some point. Some people live their entire lives constantly facing it down. Some endure such brutal bouts—the death of a child, I can only imagine, being the worst of all. Still, I hadn’t expected such a blow to follow my father’s death. I’d witnessed good friends go through the exact same thing, and while they each dealt with the pain differently, they each dealt with it. But I’m not dealing with anything at all. Part of me doesn’t want to because moving forward feels like some kind of betrayal. And what’s the point of the coming days and months and years if he’s not there to share them with?
I know it’s a completely irrational way to think. I’m furious with myself for it, but I still can’t break it. During those hours at my father’s desk working on the book I’m behind on, I’ve spent far too much time procrastinating by flipping through the C.S. Lewis anthology he left on top of a stack of old bills. One of the titles in the collection is A Grief Observed, Lewis’s reflection on the death of his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960. He’d initially published it under a pseudonym, N.W. Clerk, perhaps because the raw sentiment of his pain and spiritual doubt seemed incongruous with Lewis’s great esteem as a writer of faith. Having lived with a similar faith for much of my life, forged through my evangelical upbringing, I appreciated his honesty.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” Lewis wrote, describing the unexpected emotion that overcame him when he lost his wife. “I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”
I swallowed hard, reading that.
Lewis’s vulnerability gave me comfort. Fear was exactly the feeling. Constant, unabating fear. It’s that feeling you get when you just know that something isn’t quite right, isn’t quite secure, and all that should be safe is exposed. Not fear of something, in particular—but a fear that fills an absence. So maybe what I felt and what Lewis described wasn’t really fear so much as it was loneliness. The great, wide, unavoidable absence. I was surrounded by family and friends who loved me. But none of them had been the voice that wrapped around me since I was young. Although I loved them, I didn’t rely on them or seek them out. None of them meant what Dad had meant to me. They didn’t play the role of supporter or confidant. I didn’t think to call them when I was awed by an adventure or faced with some terrible fear. But I did with him. I hadn’t realized that we spoke almost every day, for no reason and every reason. We’d shared it all. And now that he was gone, even though I was surrounded by everyone, I had no one. No one like him, anyway. No one who could fill the space he left behind. Yes, that was it: loneliness. That was the feeling of fear that ached in me.
“At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed,” Lewis wrote. “There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.”
I was mildly drunk, too. And quite often. Lately I’d found that most things make more sense with tequila. I could feel that blanket separating me from the rest of the world, and I had little desire to rejoin it. That probably should have been the scariest feeling of all. The drinking had become a point of contention between me and Jayme. More than anyone, she knew what I was doing to myself. And I was good at it—meaning, I’m a good drunk. I don’t get belligerent or angry. I get louder, but just enough to avoid offence—and I’m never the loudest in the room. Usually I just fold into myself, drowning out everything else around me. Or, with good friends, I melt into innocuous conversation, washed in numbness—having another, and another—until I can feel something like happiness down to my toes.
Those are the binges that create the most tension with Jayme, because I stay out late and lose all sense of time. It’s irresponsible and sloppy, and a form of self-destruction. But I’m defiant. The world keeps on spinning, and I simply and truly do not care. It is so uninteresting. I’ll stay drunk behind the veil, restless and fluttering and swallowing, swallowing—stuck firmly, stubbornly, in this place between then and now.
The night before Jenna’s wedding, the four of us meet in a suite near the venue—my mother, sisters, and me. It feels like an odd return to those long-ago days when we’d pack up the van and travel south through the States, where we’d visit family in Georgia and Disney World in Florida. We’d drive through the Appalachians, riding along sweeping tree-lined hills and cutting through long dark tunnels. And at night, when Dad—who always drove—was too tired to keep going, we’d find a roadside motel to settle into for the night. The five of us would snuggle into two beds somewhere in the middle of America. The comfort and safety of home travelled with us. It didn’t matter how many hours or days we were from the start; if it was the five of us together, we were home.
Years later, when I was away in Ottawa working on a post-graduate degree in journalism, the four of them came down for a weekend to visit. I’d rented a small bachelor apartment, which Dad had driven five hours to move me into—the two of us hulking up bookshelves, a desk, and bed—before he drove five hours back home that night. When the four of them came down, we didn’t even think of renting a hotel room. We all crammed together in my three-hundred-square-foot apartment. It was crowded, but after a day of skating on the Rideau Canal and exploring the capital’s ice sculptures, we all just passed out on the couch, futon, and bed. I’d lain on the lumpy loveseat, tossing and turning, trying to find an angle in which to sleep while Dad snored loudly a couple of metres away in my bed. I thought about the many journeys we’d shared on the road, our ship carrying us through the days and nights.
Our last journey together was the winter before he died. For Christmas, we’d surprised our parents with a family trip to a cottage in Muskoka. For years they’d unveil our next “Robson Family Adventure” as we sat around the tree opening presents. We’d been to typical hot spots like Jamaica and Mexico, although in later years we went mostly to the Ontario woods for snowshoe or snowmobile treks—but also just to sit by the fire in a rented cabin, playing board games and sipping hot chocolate. We knew this would be the last with just the five of us, with Jenna getting married the next fall.
A snowstorm hit on that final trip in early January. We sat inside the A-frame cottage overlooking a lake as enormous snowflakes swooped and swirled in the moonlight, landing softly on the white blanket that covered the ice. We played Risk late into the night, with Dad becoming champion of the world. The next morning, before any of us had woken up, he was outside shovelling several feet of snow off the driveway and clearing the cars—even though we had no intention of leaving. It was just an old habit, I guess. I opened the door with a coffee in hand and felt the cold rush in. He stood there smiling with apple-red cheeks, a shovelful of snow, and a clear driveway behind him. He wore a black toque and my blue Brampton Capitals parka from when I’d played junior hockey a dozen years before.
“Need a hand?” I asked.
“Now?” he laughed. “It’s already done.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Perfect timing.”
He came in from the cold, and we had a feast of an old-school winter breakfast—cinnamon buns, pancakes, sausages, everything. And afterwards we all went to explore the wonderland. Dad grabbed hold of Mom—who wore a bright-pink one-piece snowsuit she’d had since the eighties—and swung her around playfully in a bank of snow. They both had bigger smiles and laughs than I’d ever remembered, flirting like they were young. We tossed around snowballs, made angels in the drifts, and marched across the white fields, sinking down to our knees. And as the three of us walked ahead down a clearing, Mom and Dad stayed back. He snapped a photo of us moving away from them, up the path between the trees.
Dad was always the one who took the photos while we played in the sand and waves, in autumn leaves, on the ice and in the snow. It was always us looking back at him as he’d pause to capture the moment. I’d searched through hundreds of old photographs when he died, looking for one of us together—but there weren’t many with him actually in the frame. We had piles of photos of our world through his eyes. But there were so few of how we saw him.
He did get to see Jenna in her wedding dress, though. The girls sent him a photo of her in it when she went for a fitting that December.
“She’s beautiful,” he texted. “And I haven’t even cried yet.”
A few minutes later, he wrote again.
“Okay, now I’ve shed a few tears.”
As my family slept the night before the wedding, I sat on the couch in the hotel suite, thinking about how our lives had been framed by him. Dad was the happiest behind the lens. He’d build the deck, barbecue the food, fix the cars, clear off the snow, take the pictures—he’d build and provide everything we needed for those small moments of our lives. He’d take it in from the sidelines, finding his joy in watching ours. So it was terribly fitting that it was the four of us left without him. Dad had to be the first to fade away, because as difficult as it was for the rest of us, a world with one of us missing would have been unlivable for him. This was always how it had to be.
It’s a bitter morning, with rain on the way. Guests are given blankets in the courtyard to keep them warm. Jai and I stand at the front, just ahead of Tim. Then Jenna emerges. I can’t imagine what she feels not having her father there to walk her down the aisle. But my little sister is brave and tough and makes the long walk alongside my mother, the two of them the perfect picture of strength and grace. The dress is beautiful, and the girl in it, just as Dad said. All eyes turn to her. She smiles at Tim, her lumberjack prince.
They are married just before the sky opens.
It is the most beautiful day our family has had. And it’s the worst since May. Every smile hurts because our lives are moving on without him.
* * *
—
Jai and I went to Dad’s office to clear out all his things a couple of weeks after the memorial. Everyone stopped in their cubicles and stared at us as we walked by to unseal the tomb marked Rick Robson, with a key from human resources. A whiteboard near the front desk lined with employees’ names still had his name up, with a circle magnet marking him “In.”
His desk was untouched since the last time he’d been there, a week before he died. It was cluttered and messy. It looked like he’d been in a rush to leave. There wasn’t much to the space—a modest rectangle on the second floor with a wall of windows that looked out over the parking lot. A dusty fake plant standing in the corner by the frosted glass wall and door to the hallway. A half-empty jar of cashews. One of those old calculators that print answers on a roll of paper. Photos of his wife and kids. A version of us, as seen by strangers.
There were at least a decade of documents and notebooks stored in the shelves in and above his standard-issue faux-mahogany desk, and rolls of old blueprints stacked in the corner. It looked as though he’d kept a record of every project he’d ever worked on. A water main and sanitary sewer on Dixie Road in 2010. A 7-Eleven at Spadina and College. A contract for a Shell gas station in Fort McMurray, dated May 13—the project he went out West for, when I spoke to him last. The brochure for Paramount Design Build, the company he’d started in the mid-1990s and sold to a bigger company that led to this office and his magnet marked eternally “In.”
I couldn’t picture Dad enjoying his time there, although several of the solemn onlookers stopped to tell us how happy he’d made them and how shocked and sad they were that he was gone. I could tell they meant it. The receptionist started to cry. We nodded and said thank you, because no one ever really knows what to say in moments like that.
We wer
e told we could take only personal items, but it all seemed personal to me. I quickly filled a dozen bankers boxes with his old files, as though I were securing state secrets. The language of contracts, work orders, and blueprints was all foreign code to me—but it still felt like part of him, and I resented the notion of having to leave any part of him behind. On his desk I found a pad of graph paper—the only kind he ever wrote on—with notes he’d written to himself, the letters perfectly proportioned within the squares even though they’d been written quickly.
“Remember,” he wrote at the top of the page. “Don’t rely on our understanding. Proverbs 3:5.”
It’s a Bible verse I’d learned by heart as a child and was still lodged deep in my memory, like an old tune you can’t forget. Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct your path.
I wondered why Dad had written that and why he’d left it on his desk. Years before I probably would have read it as a divine sign. I took a picture of it with my phone and slid the notebook into a box along with all the other coded messages I vowed to decipher later.
Those boxes are now stacked in Jai’s old bedroom—the room where we used to say our prayers as a family each night, the room he’d turned into a home office when we all left for school. It’s been six months since we packed them up and brought them here. None are opened.
* * *
—
For me, it’s been half a year of falling apart.
I’ve finished writing two books in that time, written almost entirely in my father’s home office, at the black-brown Ikea desk next to the stack of boxes filled with his career. My mind and body worked, co-operating with the spinning world—but my heart has remained stuck in the past. I learned that I can function well enough on autopilot, especially when there’s no alternative. Deadlines have to be hit. Bills have to be paid. But the fear of failing was the only thing that kept me going.