I got to the hospital and saw him standing outside smoking one of his Camel Lights, a lifelong habit. He seemed distracted. We went inside and sat in a cramped hospital waiting room while Jill stood at reception, filling out the paperwork and handing over the necessary ID and insurance cards. He told me he had an assignment for me while he was under. He had his Monday New York Times column already fleshed out; it was about the British television show Black Mirror.
“Please look this over and have thoughts for me when I come out,” he instructed.
I nodded and whispered, “Good luck,” and took a seat in the waiting room chairs. His giant backpack rested in the chair next to me, and I ran my hands up and down the mesh, trying to ground myself. Jill waved to me as she quickly exited and headed off to work. I was left alone with my thoughts—something I hated, especially in that moment.
I sat in limbo, surrounded by whitewashed walls covered in shitty generic artwork. I tried to read over his column, but my eyes couldn’t focus, let alone my brain. It was after the holidays and my thank-you cards had not gone out. I’d bought some premade ones on Amazon that I had to fold to make usable—good manners, least labor intensive. The only task I could manage was to fold the blank cards in between touching his backpack, hoping it would provide me with some kind of comfort.
An hour later, as he lay in the recovery room, he sent me an email with the subject line “All good. Are you soon.”
The “good” made me smile; the typo in the subject line made me laugh. I think he meant to say “See you soon.” Perhaps “Are you coming soon?”
A half hour later, he smiled weakly as he walked over to retrieve me and his backpack.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“They thought there was a shadow on my pancreas, but it turned out to be nothing. So, lucky us. What did you think of the article?”
“I…I…thought it was great,” I half-whispered. “I mean, I haven’t seen the show.”
He shook his head at me, disappointed that I hadn’t been able to muster more of a response.
We walked over to a bagel store on Second Avenue. It was an old-fashioned joint with the menu spelled out in black type on a backlit yellow board. I nervously started to chatter on about nothing in particular, unable to withstand the silence.
We ate bagels with scallion cream cheese on plastic lunch trays. I asked him about work. “We already talked about that,” he reminded me.
I walked him to his car, which was parked in an underground lot nearby. He mentioned having advance screeners of an upcoming HBO show in an attempt to woo me back to the family home in New Jersey for some quality time. I shook my head and told him I would have to take a rain check. I had therapy and work and didn’t want to make the trek back into the city later that day. I gave him a kiss goodbye and watched as he pulled out and headed home.
I had a couple of hours to kill before my appointment. I wandered into Sephora, not entirely sure why I had gone in as I didn’t wear much makeup. A saleswoman came up to me. Did I need some help? Before I could stop myself I heard the words tumble out of my mouth: “Yes. I didn’t really grow up with a mom, and so I’ve never really gotten the hang of doing any of this.” My mom, a nearly lifelong addict, had never given up drugs long enough to be a part of my life. I’d never thought to ask my stepmom for help in this department, and she’d never offered.
The saleswoman took pity on me and started with a lesson on how to apply foundation. This temporary maternal substitute guided me toward the high-end stuff as a well-versed, commission-dependent surrogate mom might do, but I didn’t even care. She took a cotton pad and started dabbing a little on my face and rubbing it in. I closed my eyes. I felt a little bit better. I looked in the mirror and saw dark circles under my eyes. “How can I hide these?” I asked.
I got to the checkout counter with a small assortment of potions. The total came to around seventy-five dollars. I fumbled inside my mesh messenger bag for a credit card, already feeling stupid for spending so much on stuff that I would never use.
* * *
—
Looking back, I play this day over and over in my mind: the fact that I chose to squander my free time in a makeup store, in search of a surrogate parent, when my actual parent had asked to spend time with me. The shadow on my dad’s pancreas had rattled me deeply. I wish more than anything that I had known at that time what was to come.
3
The Night in Question
Sitting in the back of the cab, I was frantic. He had emailed me reminding me not to be late, and of course here I was, ten minutes behind schedule. The cab pulled up to the curb, and as I jumped out I felt the slap of cold air hit my face. The wind had been relentless that winter, and this night was no different. Inside, my dad was mediating a discussion with filmmaker Laura Poitras, journalist Glenn Greenwald, and former government contractor Edward Snowden (by way of Skype). They talked about making Citizenfour, a smart, intense documentary about the National Security Agency leaking scandal that unfolded in 2013, a call to arms regarding privacy in the United States. The panelists were thrilling to watch. I took notes; I always took notes at my dad’s talks, as he expected a full report.
Afterward, we walked outside into the cold, and I waited for him to light a Camel. I noticed when he didn’t, and he told me he’d been off cigarettes for four days, a herculean task for someone who’d been smoking one or two packs a day for some forty-odd years. Recently, he’d had a tough go of it—two bouts of pneumonia had left him running on empty. He’d decided cigarettes were the reason and quit once and for all. I considered asking him to dinner, but he said he was tired. He pulled my boyfriend Jasper in for a bear hug (we don’t do handshakes in my family), and I hugged and kissed him goodbye before he headed back to the Times for his backpack. I felt the wool from his scarf scratching my neck as I leaned in to hold him close.
I walked with Jasper from the theater to a local dumpling shack, where we took refuge from the weather. Jasper was tall and angular with a quick and easy smile, and I realized I liked him, a lot. We chatted about conspiracy theories over scallion pancakes. We’d been dating for a little over a year. He’d been to many of my father’s talks and enjoyed them.
“Did my dad seem okay?” I asked.
“Yeah, of course,” said Jasper. “He was just tired.”
It was Thursday night, and I had work to do at my office in Brooklyn the next day, so I kissed Jasper goodbye and headed into the subway. When I got out, I had two missed calls from Jill. I called her back.
“Listen to me carefully, and do not panic,” she said. “Someone called me from the Times saying that Dad has collapsed. I need for you to get to St. Luke’s Hospital. I’m in New Jersey and heading into the city right now, but you’re closer and can get there first. I called Monie and she will be there to meet you. Do not call your sisters. I want to know what the situation is before I call them.”
She hung up and I looked at the subway, calculating how long it would take to get to the hospital, before realizing that was insane and quickly hailing a cab. After I closed the car door, I sat and obsessed over the lack of descriptors in Jill’s call. What did “collapsed” mean? Was he conscious? Alive? I called my best friend, Yunna. My voice cracked. She sounded startled by the news but told me everything was going to be okay.
“What if it isn’t?” I whispered.
“It has to be,” she said.
I listened to an audiobook on my iPad (his iPad that he gave me), anticipating that I’d need to be in a semi-stable state of mind for whatever came next. I played Gretchen Rubin’s The Happiness Project and tried to stop sobbing. When I paid the fare, my cab driver mumbled, “I’m sorry.” I nodded but had no words.
Monie, a close family friend, was there waiting. As I ran to her, she said loudly to the security officer in the triage area: “This is David Carr’s daughter!” Just
hours before, I had heard those words as I tried to find my seat at his event. My whole life it had been my introduction; I hoped to God that I would hear it again.
Dean Baquet, executive editor of The New York Times, walked over to me in the ER reception area. There was nothing to say except the truth: “He’s gone. I’m so, so sorry.” I heard shrieking; Monie was screaming loudly. I was mute. I noticed that Dean was wearing a purple scarf. Jill had not yet arrived.
They led Monie and me into a small waiting room where a young bearded guy was seated. Apparently he was the one who’d found my dad’s unconscious body on the floor of the Times newsroom. He had tried to do CPR but was unsuccessful. He looked down. None of us had a single thing to say. Boxes of tissues littered the top of the generic wooden coffee tables. I reached for one.
I excused myself and went to the bathroom to call Jasper.
“Is he okay?”
I didn’t yell or scream the worst words I have ever said out loud. Instead, I whispered them, willing them back into my head, but there they were.
“He died.”
I threw up immediately.
“Oh my God, babe, oh my God,” Jasper said over and over. His words rang in my ears.
I sat on the floor in the hospital bathroom trying to compose myself. An impossible task. I started a mental Rolodex, automatically flipping through all of the things my dad would not be around for.
My twenty-seventh birthday
My first film premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival in two months
Walking me down the aisle
The career we’d cleverly plotted together
One by one these thoughts crushed me and my vision of the future.
But then I realized my mental Rolodex was missing something important. What about him? His dreams, his goals? So much grander than my own.
Growing old together with the love of his life, Jill
Seeing my baby sister, Madeline, graduate from college
Seeing my twin, Meagan, graduate from her PhD program
Publishing his next book
Teaching another class at Boston University
Achieving his private, long-sought-after goal—a Pulitzer
What happens to all of these dreams when someone dies?
I asked Jasper to come to the hospital before he could even offer. I needed his body next to mine. Everyone was silent when I walked back into the waiting room, looking for Jill. When she appeared, our faces gave it away. She immediately looked down. She reached for no one as there was no solace to be had.
A doctor asked if we wanted last rites performed. We did. Dad’s editor Bill Brink was there to say the Times would be putting out a statement.
“But I have to call Meagan and Madeline and David’s family,” Jill said quickly.
“Can you do it now?”
I glanced down at my phone and found a text message from a former co-worker: “Hey, heard some scary news about your dad. I hope it isn’t true.” How did he know? Why is he texting me? I barely know him.
Apparently during the franticness of the moments between my dad’s collapse and the medics arriving, a reporter at the Times tweeted that my dad had been found unconscious; she’d assumed the news was already public. Twitter had been notified.
And there it was. My first feeling that shattered the shock. Anger. Raw, seething, all-encompassing anger. What the fuck. I haven’t even seen my dad’s body and already people are sending me texts like this. I considered smashing my phone on the ground.
But there was no time for acting out; I had to go in and see my dad. Jill and I followed the doctor into the room where his body lay. His mouth and eyes were open, as if he were in mid-thought, about to say something. It was horrifying. Jill broke the silence: “Oh, sweeto, what happened?” She wrapped her arms around him and sobbed and then backed away, unable to hold on. I lay my head on his chest, but it didn’t feel like him. His body was stiff and foreign. Jill and I held hands and said a prayer.
A hospital worker came in and informed us that the priest was running late and they would have to move “him” to free up the emergency trauma room.
Meanwhile, we needed to let our family know, and fast, before the Times released their announcement. The raw anger returned. Couldn’t I have at least thirty seconds to comprehend what had happened before the Internet chimed in?
Helplessness is a savage feeling on a night like this. There were so many “jobs” to do, and yet I could barely summon the strength to call my twin. She picked up on the third ring. I was at a loss for words, so I opened with the cliché that the movies have ingrained in me: “I need for you to sit down.”
“No,” she answered. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
“I am at the hospital and there was an accident. Dad passed away.”
Her shrieks pounded against my ears. I didn’t know what else to call it other than an accident because to me, it felt like one, a terrible accident. No one just drops dead.
The New York Times sent out an alert; NPR did the same. His death trended on Twitter. The floodgates opened. I was split down my center by hundreds of texts, emails, and voicemails. It was beyond intrusive, and forced me to dissociate. Every minute my phone buzzed, and I would look down to see if it was a call I needed to take. All of the people finding out my dad was dead from a notification on their phone.
Some of my close friends showed up at the hospital and helped us back to Monie’s house. Wine was uncorked, and slowly the shock became grief. Two months before I had secretly started drinking again after a nine-month stint of abstinence. I felt an unabashed need to drink my way through both what I’d just witnessed, and whatever came next. No one noticed. Or at least they didn’t say anything. It was not the time for reprimands.
My stepmom, one of the strongest, most stoic women I know, began to cry out over and over again for my dad, her partner of more than two decades. We sat with her. There was nothing else we could do. We talked about the day that had just transpired, hoping that retracing every single one of his steps could provide clues, but we found nothing solid.
Jasper and I spent the night at Monie’s. He held me as I cried myself to sleep. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to take off my clothes. They were what I was wearing when I hugged my dad for the last time.
I woke up the next morning certain that I was dying, too. The words “My dad is dead” beat like an awful drum inside my head.
Suddenly, a memory flashed. Christmas Eve, a few weeks before. We were all sitting around the living room. My dad had made a point to celebrate how life had worked out nearly perfectly for everyone in our family. Relationships, jobs, money, happiness. I remember thinking how right he was. “Everything has broken our way,” he’d concluded.
Now everything was just broken.
4
The Ghost in You
My dad’s doctor called. It hadn’t even been a day since he’d died. Talking to the doctor seemed a little beside the point to me, but Meagan wanted answers. She’d emailed the good doctor to see if there was any sort of explanation behind our father’s unexpected death. I had Dr. Keen’s number in my phone from years past. I picked up immediately when she called, and she softly stated the obligatory words of condolence. I hit speakerphone and introduced Meagan as the brains of the operation.
My sister paced back and forth in the family dining room as she began the inquiry. I am sure the doc was nervous; she was my dad’s primary care physician, and he had seen her repeatedly in the last six months. It seemed like he was always headed to or from her office whenever we spoke. There were warning signs. His appearance had changed. He had lost his appetite and a fair amount of weight; he had frequent bouts of pneumonia; and his stamina, forever a staple in his life, was beginning to wane. They had been searching for
a reason for his weight loss.
The shadow over his pancreas? The scan came back clean. His diabetes was acting up, but that could have been due to any number of reasons. His smoking was always a problem, but there was nothing anyone could do about that.
Meagan had a simple question: “What did he die of?” Dr. Keen was very careful and measured in her response. She told us that we would have to wait for the official autopsy report, but early signs looked like lung cancer. The scans he’d had just weeks before hadn’t yet revealed the mass on his lungs. He’d had a chest X-ray, but apparently it didn’t extend far enough, and they had missed it. My dad had an appointment with a pulmonologist scheduled for the week after he died. The doctor contended that they likely would have found the tumor then. The call solidified what we already knew—that he did not know he was dying.
Meagan hung up the phone. Then, after a long pause, she said, “Okay, so that’s good. He didn’t know.”
“Yeah, what a relief,” I said sarcastically. I knew the quest for information was an important one, but my fuse was short. Just about everything in the world made me angry at this point.
Right now, Jill was quiet and focused as she concentrated on the task ahead of her. She carefully arranged the hospital and insurance papers on the dining room table, which is what they used to do with their bills. She called my dad’s credit card companies and gave them our bad news. There were piles of newspapers stacked up at the house; he read four papers a day. How was he able to get through that amount of information in one day? No one had thought to cancel any of the subscriptions yet. I watched her silently as she went about the business of dealing with death.
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