When the reception was over, Eli’s parents invited everyone back to their home. Most folks said their goodbyes at that point, but a bunch of us continued on to the house. There we spent the afternoon drinking wine first and coffee later, heating up leftovers, talking and telling stories, filling the day with life.
* * *
—
The older I get, the less concerned I am about the specifics of what a given believer believes—still less with the rigidity of the dogma. What interests me is the condition under which belief itself becomes possible. I crave the inner space that faith pries open, even if—perhaps especially if—that space is empty and even if it closes up again. The strong thief breaks the lock, but he does not get to live in the house he enters; he only gets to keep what he can carry with him when he runs away.
In My Bright Abyss, his book of essays on faith and illness, Christian Wiman quotes Simone Weil: “We must believe in God in every way, except that he does not exist, for we have not reached the point where he might exist.” Wiman extrapolates: “Contemporary people…tend to be obsessed by whether God exists. What Weil is saying is that this is not beside the point exactly, but a misdirection: God exists apart from our notions of what it means to exist, and there is a sense in which our most pressing existential question has to be outgrown before it can be answered.”
Faith is the form of that outgrowing. It is our willingness to shed the question like old skin, and dwell instead in readiness and possibility. Belief is that possibility realized, our readiness called upon, but it is not scored like a home run or handed down like a prison sentence. What I mean is that it is not final, not static. It will be achieved and lost many times over, like grief or ecstasy, and each experience will leave its mark, and shape the next one, just as Jacob’s proof of having wrestled with the angel was that when he walked away with his blessing—the blessing of Israel—he was limping on his hip.
In the words of Christ in John 12:36, “While ye have the light, believe in the light, that ye may be the children of light.” Or, as the Grateful Dead put it in “Ripple,” “Reach out your hand if your cup be empty / If your cup is full may it be again.”
The strong thief breaks the lock.
The lock is the silence broken by the song.
* * *
—
I stand at Eli’s grave and listen as the rabbi leads us through a recitation of the Mourner’s Kaddish, and then the singing of “Ohseh Shalom,” which is nothing more than the last lines of the Kaddish set to a tune and incanted over and over.
Ohseh shalom bimromav
hoo ya’ah-seh shalom aleynu
v’al kol Yisrael, ve’imru amen.
I hear the unified rising of the voices, all of us singing, and I realize that I hear myself among that chorus, that my lips and my throat know the melody and the ancient words.
You do it because of who else has done it before you, who else is doing it now, and who else will do it in the future. You do it to be with them, because you are them and they are you.
For twenty years and more I have been unable or unwilling to understand this. But as I stand in the cemetery and hear my own voice singing, I finally know what my father meant, and know, too, that he was right. I weep for him and for Eli and for myself as well. We sing to mourn and to declare the end of mourning, and when the song is over there is nothing for us to do but embrace each other and dry our tears. To timidly inquire about directions to the arts center. I put my arm around Anika’s shoulders. She hands me her car keys. We walk together away from the grave and into the living mystery of an autumn afternoon.
Two Trips to Sunrise
I took two trips to Sunrise, Florida, in the spring of 2017. I was met there both times by my wife and my sister. The first trip was in February, a few weeks after the phone call when Dad described falling down in his bedroom and getting stuck on the floor. The second trip was in April and felt uncannily like a “revision” of the first trip, involving all the same people and apartments and five o’clock suppers at bad chain restaurants. Only Dad himself was missing, having been revised out of the story. And our task that weekend was, in a sense, editorial: to separate the keepsakes and heirlooms from the clutter and junk, get the apartment ready to sell.
I have never been able to untangle these two visits in my mind. Every time I tried to write about them individually they bled into each other, wanting to be told at once. And this second encounter with the Stuff got me thinking about the first time I’d sorted through it all, that day in Nashville a few years earlier. I began to revisit some of the assertions I’d made at that time about what it means to mourn for someone while they are still alive. How did my thoughts about grief hold up now that they were no longer hypotheticals? How did I feel about what I’d said about losing my father, in the harsh light of now having actually lost him?
* * *
—
When I described going through the Stuff the first time, I mentioned finding a poem that Dad had written. I said that as far as I knew, he never wrote another. This is no longer true.
I don’t find a lot of poems, but I do find some. They are written longhand on legal pads or on loose leaf; one is in a draft email, no recipient in the To box. Like the one I found in Nashville, these are in stumbling AA/BB, the rhymes as stiff as a third grader’s, and any poem that runs longer than a page is unfinished. Dad never read poetry, or imaginative literature of any kind, unless you count mysteries; he liked to try to solve the crimes before the detectives, and he usually did. There were always plenty of books in the house growing up, and I was always encouraged both to read and to write, but when I think back on it now I realize that all the works of literary fiction—from The Lord of the Rings to Watership Down—were Mom’s books.
When, at age ten, I discovered Stephen King, it was Dad who stood up for my right to read what many considered too graphic, vulgar, and scary. “If he’s smart enough to read it, he’s allowed to read it” was Dad’s verdict—delivered to every elementary and middle school teacher I ever had, who each in their turn confiscated a King book from me and called my parents to ask if they knew what I was reading. “Justin is eleven years old,” he sneered at Mrs. McClain. “Where do you think he got the money to buy that book? How do you think that he got to the store?” But it was Mom who read those books along with me, sometimes before I read them and sometimes after, in case I had questions about the things that I was exposed to in their pages. It was exactly the sort of parental duty that Dad, under usual circumstances, would have reserved for himself. It’s obvious in retrospect that he must have let Mom do it because he knew all the ghost cars and zombie cats and demon clowns would have bored him clear out of his mind.
I’m certain that my father never shared the poems he wrote. He probably never told anyone that they existed, and he certainly didn’t mention them to his son, the writer. The poems seem to have been written almost involuntarily, at moments of such deep despair that he simply did not know what else to do.
In My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman writes, “Poetry has its uses for despair. It can carve a shape for pain; it can give one’s loss a form and dimension that it might be loss and not simply a hopeless haunting.” In The Poet’s Art, the critic M. L. Rosenthal makes a similar point, describing poetry as “the art that uses language to delight the heart or break it but also to open it to itself.” But confessional writing only becomes poetry, Rosenthal argues, when the writer is able to see the work as a body of raw material separate from himself, and can begin to shape it. The work must then develop its own intelligence, a capacity for induction that the artist instigates but cannot fully control. Art becomes art when it is capable of speaking back to the artist, of originating emotions, ideas, and meanings that have previously gone unacknowledged or did not exist until the work coaxed them into being. Art is the art of self-surprise.
With no disrespect
to Dad intended, I believe that this is why the longer poems remain unfinished. He wrote poems when he felt the urgent need to rid himself of something and could find no other place to put it. In each case, he stopped as soon as the urgency subsided, or else at the moment that the inductive turn might have occurred. He did not allow the poems to speak back to him because he did not want to hear what they would have said.
* * *
—
Among his papers I find a document from US bankruptcy court, dated 5/8/1997, confirming discharge of all debts. It was a week before his forty-fifth birthday, the same week that he wrote what I’d previously thought was his only poem. So this then was the crisis. Okay. I now also know that he offered Mom a divorce at the time, and that she got as far as consulting with a family friend about the logistics of taking such a step, but that in the end she decided to stay with him. She figured they’d get through it, she told me. She wasn’t ready to give up on them or him.
This also means that when Dad confronted me about smoking pot, and I’d thought he was going to give me the Divorce Talk, I wasn’t that far off. The prospect had been seriously discussed only a few months earlier.
My father’s parents hit him up for cash in 1997, around the same time he was declaring bankruptcy. I don’t know how much they asked for or why they needed it, but I know it was the first time he turned them down. And I’m sure that he wanted to help, that he wished he could, but the money simply didn’t exist. They regarded this as high treason and were so angry that they hardly spoke to him or saw their grandchildren for the next seven years. They had never been as present in my and my sister’s lives as our maternal grandparents, but after this episode they basically disappeared. My sister has no memories of them between when she was nine and sixteen years old. A tepid attempt at reconnection was made in 2004, because of the impending move to Tennessee. They didn’t come over to the house, so my sister and I never saw or spoke to them, but they did call Dad to say goodbye.
What all this means is that it was in a sense incorrect to locate the origin of Dad’s decline in 2007, as I did near the beginning of this book, when I said I was trying to “tell…but also to deconstruct” the story of his last ten years. The tempting neatness of the ten-year span elides the ten years that preceded it, both in my telling of Dad’s story and, crucially, in his own telling of it. One could just as easily have started with the bankruptcy declaration in 1997, which is what first sent my mother onto the job market after ten years running a small business.
It had started at our dining-room table: using her art and design skills to hand-paint kids’ names onto rocking chairs, coat hangers, and piggy banks; batches of personalized favors for birthday parties. She sold directly to friends and gave samples to local stores that would then take custom orders, which Mom would fill. Over time, the product line grew and she developed a knack for noticing emerging trends, for sensing what would sell. With a friend who was also selling hand-decorated gifts made at home, she opened The Name Game, a store where they sold what they made alongside scented candles, jewelry boxes, and Beanie Babies at the height of the craze. They invested in a high-end printer and began to design and print wedding and bar mitzvah invitations. Soon they had a couple of part-time employees and a healthy clientele, but the store only ever made enough money to pay for itself, and by 1997 that wasn’t going to cut it anymore.
She got a job with one of the companies that had supplied The Name Game with products. The position was for a product development buyer, and she knew how to buy and what would sell from having run the store. It was her first corporate job, at forty-one years old and with no BA, but she excelled at the work and this led, in due course, to the job that took them to Nashville, where everything fell apart.
Mom had been with Dad since she was a teenager. The unpredictability of his manias, the intensity of his rages, the depths of his depressions were all things she’d long accustomed herself to living with. It would not have occurred to her to question them, or to leave him on account of them. If they’d all moved together, like she had wanted to do, maybe they would have stayed married until he died. What she failed to understand about herself during the year she spent alone in Tennessee was how the aloneness was changing her. The time apart from Dad put the worst aspects of his character into a sharper relief than she’d ever seen them before. And it must be said that he was at his worst, his cruelest and most volatile and unreasonable, those first years in Nashville. My mother must have been the one to realize, sometime in 2005 or 2006, that the marriage had already ended, that it had ended years earlier, on the day that she left Florida alone.
This version of the story, then, doesn’t begin in 2007; it ends there.
But the 1997 story is no origin story either. My parents were never spendthrifts; they weren’t addicts or drunks. The road to bankruptcy must have been long, fitful, and slow. How did they get there? To answer that question I guess we should go back another decade, to 1987, when Dad would have been thirty-five, the age that I am now as I sit here writing this. He would have been in the first year of his job as a stockbroker at Corporate Securities Group, the job he would hold longer than any other, and Mom would have been thirty-one. I was starting kindergarten; my sister was hardly a gleam in the eye—
Stop.
* * *
—
Earlier, when I wrote about my frustration with Dad’s attachment to the Stuff, and how annoyed I was at having had to travel to Nashville and sort through it while he yelled at me on the phone, I described “trying to get permission to throw away as much of his precious garbage as I possibly could.”
I feel bad about having written this, which is not to say that I now think I was wrong. Dad was a pack rat, and there’s no denying that a lot of the Stuff (both the forty-box version I took out of the storage unit and the twenty-box version that got shipped to Florida) were items of no financial, sentimental, historical, or practical value to anybody, including him. Forget whether they should have been thrown out when he sold the Nashville house or whether they should have been shipped down to Florida in 2015; the real question is whether they should have gone to Nashville when they sold the Miami house in 2004. The answer, for the most part, is no.
And yet I feel bad. Because it’s clear to me now, in a way that it wasn’t then, that if I disregard the question of the relative value of the Stuff, and treat its existence as a given, it is easy to understand why Dad wanted it. This was everything he owned in the world, and whatever meager hope he allowed himself of living something like a normal life again was based on two inextricable ideas: getting his things back, and having somewhere to put them. A home. As grateful as he was that Michael had stepped up and bought him an apartment, he was angry—and vocally so—about the fact that the budget would only allow for a small one-bedroom. He campaigned hard for a two- or three-bedroom, solely because he wanted to be able to host his children when we visited. He hated that there was no longer a family home to which we could return. And I suppose it bears stating again that the fact that such a place did not exist was due entirely to his own self-destructive instincts and financial mismanagement. But really, so what? He knew that as well as anyone, and nobody had a harder time living with it than he did.
There’s another reason that I feel bad about what I wrote. My life has, at least so far, not unfolded very much like my father’s, but there have been some key ways in which our experiences have resonated. The dislocation I felt and the depression I dealt with in the first year that I spent in Portland were remarkably similar to what he went through after relocating to Nashville, and again after moving into the hotel. I’d like to think I rose to the occasions better than he did: by being willing to see a therapist, for example, or just by working through it and moving on. Still, it was hard, especially when these issues were compounded by the emotional and practical ramifications of being unemployed.
If I had been thirty years o
lder…
If I’d already been out of work for nearly a decade…
If I hadn’t had my writing to sustain me…
Would I have fared any better than Dad did?
When I did find work, it was far-flung: Indiana, Mississippi. Don’t get me wrong: I was honored to be offered these jobs, desperate for the money, and grateful for the time to write. I enjoyed getting to know these cities and regions, coming to understand them in their granularity and contradiction, their messiness and potential. But I didn’t plan to spend nearly two out of the first three years of my marriage living on the other side of the country from my wife. I did not anticipate the psychic damage that would accrue from living what was, in spirit if not quite letter, a hotel life: an empty bed in an unfamiliar city, a borrowed IKEA desk, pasta for one.
This, too, is similar to what Dad went through during those years in the extended-stay hotel, then at his parents’ apartment, and finally in Sunrise Lakes. A place he could call his own, but only sort of. It had come furnished with the previous occupant’s couch and bed and lounge chairs, her cramped dining table and ugly brown carpet and chintzy low-hanging chandelier. And of course he didn’t own the apartment. He knew that he would never be kicked out of it, but it wasn’t his. He had security but not self-determination. I can see why, in that context, getting the Stuff back was not a matter of stubbornness or pettiness—though it was certainly those things too—but rather something truly meaningful. It was, quite literally, all he had left in the world. Maybe, I sometimes think to myself, something conspired to send me into my own exile to grant me insight into what my father endured in his.
Riding with the Ghost Page 16