I am looking for a language of grief to mourn someone still living.
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When I was small, I would pull down the sun visor of the passenger’s side of my father’s van, exposing the mirror to the back window to see the traffic behind us. I’d say to my dad, “This is my t.v!” and watch my world fall behind us in the rearview mirror.
It was always an open road for us, Dad and I, and sometimes my brothers, driving down the highway at night. And I was much too small to be in the passenger seat but I sat up there anyway, feeling the significance of my co-pilot chair. My most memorable moments with him were spent by his side in the van, listening to classic rock radio, and driving for hours. First were our trips from Washington, D.C. into the mountains of West Virginia, and later from those mountains to the southern tip of Florida.
My dad left my family when I was five. Because of my father’s addiction, his infidelity, his emotional indifference, and arguments condensed and construed across the years, my father is not so much a parent as someone who shares my eyes. When he moved out from my mother’s apartment, we began to see each other only some weekends, and sometimes went for months without a word from him (or hastily scrawled letters on yellow legal pads) when he was variously and mysteriously incarcerated. Our relationship has always been one of long silences, of few words.
On those journeys from his apartment in Washington, D.C. to the mountains was when I heard from him most. While we drove he spoke to me like I was the new kid in school who direly needed to catch up on what was cool. He was willing to mentor me, so long as I didn’t embarrass him. And he spoke with such authority I assumed he was the only person who knew what the real world was like and what music was good. He always made mixed CDs for our trips. Jethro Tull, Rush, The Doors, and most holy of all – Led Zeppelin. The nights he asked me what I wanted to listen to, I always asked for the same song, “Going to California.”
Maybe everyone wants to believe this of their father, but mine was something of a rockstar, once. When he was young he drove around in a red convertible, grew out his hair in long dark curls. He starred in plays, and played varsity football. He got kicked out of the army for God knows what. He smoked Camel cigarettes and rolled joints. Someone told me he wrote a play, but I never read it. He blew off college and drifted aimlessly along the coast like some Didion character who came East. I am the product of his wandering.
Nowadays we don’t talk much at all. I never knew what it was, why he never called, why he kept his distance all these years. But I message him every time a hurricane comes up the gulf. He’s in central Florida now, holding court with the palmetto bugs and kicking around sand dunes, somewhere in the shadow of my last living grandparent. Maybe he’s writing. Maybe he’s waiting. Anyhow we’ve traded in our long car rides together for sporadic messages, the miles between us accounted for in the airwaves instead of the interstate.
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I’ve been spending a lot of time at the shore lately.
Shaws Cove is a quiet paradise hidden within Laguna Beach, California. Just past the city beach, the cove lies between a cliff and a peninsula that shelter the shore from large swells and rip currents. From the residential street above, you descend a long wooden staircase to sand, speckled with mussel shells and seaglass. On the northern shore are often divers suited up and traipsing into the shallows, lugging behind them their tanks of air. And to the south is a rugged cliff hanging over clear tidepools where sea urchins and anemones cache themselves between rocks and barnacles. Shaws is intimate, a field of sand tucked away from the world.
Since the pandemic began I’ve been coming to this secluded beach often, laying out my blanket with supermarket flowers and fragments of shells. From this vantage point I have watched the same regulars return week by week, playing out domestic scenes in the dunes.
Often among the regular beachgoers is a father and his young daughter. She is maybe 2 years old, with long blonde curls that reach her belly. She is learning to swim. Through the course of summer, I have watched her gain confidence as she dips her toes in to meet the rush of white tide, and bumbles back to the beach, giggling at the rush of cold. Sometimes she even chases after sandpipers into the seafoam. She is still afraid, but learning to tread the shallows. And her father is so kind with her, carrying her on his
shoulders into the waves so she can feel light in water. I like to watch their quiet language, their little world in the waves.
Most of the regulars pack up by sundown. I often stay after dark, gazing long enough into the horizon that the steady movement of water creates a static – the sensation of staring at the television screen when it’s gone off into the grey-white void between channels. Every week I come to the cove and watch that horizon without blinking and I remember. From my blanket I am holding vigil.
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I haven’t seen my father in three years now. Once I left Appalachia and he expatriated to Florida we never had much reason to cross paths, no long drives to take together. It’s been a long hurricane season, so I’ve been hearing from him more these days. We talk about his preparations, if he’s leaving or staying.
In September of 2017, 5 months after I last saw him, he wrote this to me: “There she is, 11:15 on a Sunday morning. She spent the weekend dancing on Cuba and she came out a hot, wet mess. She wanted to stay, but it was the Earth that moved her – onto Florida. The further west she sails, the less damage to Ocala. There hasn’t been any gas in this town since Thursday, unless you waited at the pump for a truck to come in and the gas would be gone in a couple of hours. I never planned to go anyway. The mobile homes were evacuated last night, poor people, didn’t need to go until tonight. If some catastrophe befalls us, I’ve got some heroes half a mile down the street at the firehouse. They ain’t allowed to drive, but they can jog. Anyway, it’s just gonna be noisy and I predict no loss of power for me anyway. We came to Florida to die, sometimes it’s quick – sometimes you linger.”
I archive his words and try to piece together who he is from the scraps. I like his writing voice. I see myself in it, sometimes. He is alive and fragmented. The most I have of him are these strange messages online and the rare phone call. But I still hear him in the lyrics of old songs, his steady tenor voice taking the melodies. I am his echo.
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When I was older, the long drives began. In retrospect, they were likely drug routes – that straight shot on I-81 from Miami to Washington, D.C that everyone back home knows about. But I wouldn’t have known then. I was just happy to ride in the passenger seat and watch the world unfurl through the window.
Oh, these drives. There was never enough to eat but there were always enough drugs when I was old enough. I slept only when absolutely necessary, blinking into the cool dark, wide eyed and ready to jump out whenever he stopped the van. My favorite stretch of road was the approach to the South Carolina state line, a strange little neon town called “South of the Border,” garish in neon lights and faux-Mexican style architecture. Driving through the American south at 2 am with Zeppelin on the radio and cigarette smoke encircling us: this is what I know of childhood, of fathers and daughters.
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In late summer I brought a pamphlet to read at the cove called “Gone From My Sight: The Dying Experience,” a guide for the dying and those who care for them. The pamphlet is given to nurses, chaplains, and other carers in grief, instructing them of the
physical processes of a dying body. The language is instructive, technical, but poetic in its economy and brevity. I have been reading about loss to help create my grief language. On the cover is a loosely sketched sailboat on the horizon of the sea, and the image suggests that the deceased has simply gone aboard that boat and sailed just out of view. And within the booklet, Henry Van Dyke is quoted: “I am standing upon the seashore / Gone from my sight / and that is dying… “ I thought of my father, gone from my sight, at once alive and dead.
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Over the years it was made clear that if ever we were to see our wayward father again, we would have to come to him. The spring my father’s father had passed away, February 2017, seemed as good a reason as any to break the silence and miles between us.
That spring of ‘17 it had been two years since any of us had seen him. This was the tenor of our relationship with our father, though: long weekend stopgaps between a stretch of formative years. He didn’t need to keep up with the dailies, wasn’t bothered by the horrors and joys of his children’s adolescence. What he got instead were broad strokes of events, impressions told after the fact, half remembered and quickly forgotten. He was always away, even when sitting near.
My youngest brother and I flew from Washington, D.C. to Orlando, Florida to see my father. After a short flight down the continent, we stepped into the humid night and got into my dad’s car. This time I slipped into the backseat, and let my brother ride shotgun. The car’s interior was thick as ever with smoke, the fabric ceiling now hanging low with time and neglect. “Welcome to Florida,” my dad said, passing back a joint back
to me. I was happy to see he was smoking weed because that usually meant he wasn’t using heroin. I didn’t make the mistake of bringing that up again. The last time I asked if he was using, he smiled and told me that the best place to hide track marks is between your toes. So I kept the peace and smoked the joint and we drove through the bog-like air, just north of Orlando to Lady Lake where my still-living grandmother was hiding out in her guest house. We would be staying in her family home instead for the long weekend while she was there, tucked away from the world.
I have never had a stationary or stable grandparents’ house to visit. I’m very interested in this Americana myth, though, and was charmed to experience it for a weekend once more, the last of treasured few visits. I savored the borrowed feeling of home, the plush green carpet, the large walk-in closet with clothes for both granddaddy Ray and my grandmother Nina. I loved the Jack and Jill bathroom where Nina taught me how to dry roses; the sun room they had built for their 50th wedding anniversary; the lush gardens around their house with birds of paradise and palmettos in resplendent bloom all year round. I considered how bereft I was of memories in this space, how I wish I could have been here more often.
Scattered around the living room then were the requisite cardboard boxes in the process of being packed away. A life distilled. In the boxes, the pictures of my brothers and cousins, my grandfather’s model trains and golf balls. These boxes of two lives I barely knew, in a house with a stranger called my father, and my brother and I holding it all up.
That weekend I slept in Nina’s bed, like I did when I was a child once before. I have three memories with her: watching the snow fall from her bed on Christmas in Nova Scotia when I was five; her teaching me to dry roses when I was a teenager; and finally her taking me to breakfast at a diner that spring, when she told me she wanted to go to Ireland to die.
My grandfather slept in his own room for the entirety of their marriage, or so I observed. I walked in once when I was a teenager and admired his floor to ceiling bookshelves. He stood quietly in front of his library, his back to me, a man often left to his own thoughts. That day he lent me a complete collection of Hemmingway’s short stories. He specifically said to return it sometime and we could talk about it, but I never did. He had a soft Missouri drawl, a farmer’s son who studied journalism. I think he was a good father. Ray was a man of few words with me, but they were good, and they were kind.
Having missed the official family funeral — we were strategically uninvited, to be sure. My dad being the broken branch of the family tree, everyone else on his side never really had much to do with us. They kept a polite and holy distance, perhaps worried coal dust from us barefoot mountain children would rub off on them.
A few days after the family funeral we drove out to the sand flats behind the Tri-County Baptist church and paid our respects, as they say. Granddaddy was buried there under the high willow tree with no marker. Spanish moss hung over him like a prayer. My brother and Dad smoked a Camel cigarette in the shade of the moss and I watched from the car.
The next morning we drove northeast to Daytona beach, and had our own kind of funeral there. This would be the first of my ocean rites, the first of many improvised funerals. We walked belly-deep into the murky Atlantic, and thought of Ray. And that was it.
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In the city of Laguna Beach there are emergency routes for flooding. The flood route signs remind me of hurricane symbols on Florida street signs. We have no storms like that in California, of course, but I wish just once a hurricane would barrel down the southern coast and bring me warm rain.
One morning this summer I heard the news about a hurricane coming up the gulf coast. I asked my father, as usual, if he would evacuate. He said he wouldn’t, that he was ready for the rain. He wrote back to me like some kind of solem prophet:
“For me water is everything needful yet hiding the wrath of God. Quench my thirst, yet I can drown in 2 teaspoons full; cleanse my body, there could be a deadly virus lurking. Leap or dive into the sudden cold embrace and smash my spine or head on a rock; the undertow, the river current, the giant wave, the hurricane all can take me away.”
He speaks about water in a holy language I can understand.
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A few days ago I bid my farewell to summer at Shaws. I wore a long green dress that slopes off my shoulders. I tucked a pink daisy behind my ear. I hiked up my long skirt to my knees, skimming the water. And I savored the pull of the current, the weight
of wet fabric on my ankles. The water is getting cooler now, I thought. Soon it will be winter, and the families who came here all summer will recede inland and I will sit alone on my blanket, a quiet watcher.
That morning I touched an orange sea star, sunning itself in a perfect stretch between the rocks. I knelt to see the little school of fish go by and the red crabs scuttling along a crevasse, settling into their kindergarten before the reef. A few heliotrope urchins glowed at the bottom of the shallow pools. And then the shy, sea-shell covered anemone (did you know they cover themselves in broken seashells for sunblock?) that closed at my touch. I marveled at this hidden world. And the ocean and sky that morning were the warmest blues. And I watched the girl with blonde curls wander back from the shore and chase after her father, and then they were gone.
There is a kind of grief for the living who have left because it lacks a language. How do we speak to smoke, to receding tide? My father is alive and away, gone from my sight but not from life. I mourn a life we did not share, and remember little of what we did. So I gather fragments and phrases like shells and cache them for winter. It is a lean season of remembrance.
With my father I often confuse memory and myth. A smoke haze hangs between us, and I have trouble remembering his features. But when I go to the cove and watch the light fade from the crests of waves I can see his hazel eyes, kind and full of ghosts.