In the month since my father died, I’ve tried reading many things. It’s hard to find the right thing, to feel any sense that I am in the right place mentally, just as it’s hard to get comfortable physically. It’s as though I’m navigating a new skin.
My mind is busy, my thinking stuttered, punctuated by memories of him, his final days, final utterances. Or else I’m suspended in a state of strange numbness. Either way, I don’t have the mental capacity for a narrative. I’m a bit annoyed by narratives, actually, by the arrogant, almost manspreading sprawl of a Big Plot.
On the plane to New Jersey to see my father in the hospital, before hospice, before death, I started Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White at the recommendation of my boyfriend. I loved what I read of it, I even laughed out loud in a middle seat — at a yellowed, 648-page, three-dollar Penguin Classics paperback with tiny, faded print. Collins is that funny. But when I opened it again as the new person I have become, I found the prose too jaunty, too high-spirited.
I tried reading The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s Booker-longlisted doorstop, but only got about an eighth of the way in — its darkness also seemed too merry for me. And my patience for teenage narrators is sadly (?) very low. I know from reviews that the narration revolves among the family members, but on this attempt I didn’t get past Cass. The novel is about a struggling Irish family, but the first 90 pages of their struggle is no match for ours, and I returned it to the library. Maybe I’ll try again later. I was amused by the presence and prompt disappearance of a sexy-mysterious female poetry teacher at the high school in the book. There’s a similar character in season 2 of Derry Girls and I wondered whether teachers like that are just a fixture of the Irish schoolchild’s experience or whether, in this case, one drew on the other.
My mother sent me a copy of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, a short reflection on the death of her father. I read it in two sittings — or really, two lyings. Collapsed as I often am lately, my face slack, limbs hanging off the couch. Waiting for something that will help. As a daughter, I found the book comforting and highlighted lines like “Grief is not gauzy; it is substantial, oppressive, a thing opaque.” The writer in me found it a little thin. At 85 rather austere pages, it reminded me of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which I also felt was both lovely and weak. Diluted, somehow. That book is so beloved that I’ve questioned my own opinion of it — maybe I just didn’t “get” raw grief because I hadn’t felt it yet? But now I do feel it and still I think I’d find something lacking in Didion’s accounting. An excess of control, a goyish frigidity.
Now at home, five days after the memorial, I pick up books here and there, read a line or two, and cry.
Maria Stepanova, from In Memory of Memory, on the imposed immortality of photography: “What photography now registers is nothing other than the body of death: the part of me that has no personal will or choice, which anyone can claim, which is fixed and preserved without effort.”
Laurie Colwin in More Home Cooking: “In all your life you will be hard-pressed to find something as simple, soothing, and forgiving, as consoling as lentil soup.”
Derek Jarman in Modern Nature: “Long indigo shadows of trees fall across the hills. A swollen yellow moon lit up far below as we flew from Glasgow late in the gathering shadows of a scorching day, rose-red and purple.”
Everything feels grand, everything feels pointless.
The day my father died, I bought a copy of Earlier by Sasha Frere-Jones. It was my first time visiting Troubled Sleep in Brooklyn and I loved its tall pine shelves and geometric flooring.
But before that, he died. We wailed over his body, then lay with him, then sat in the room with him, making phone calls, experiencing a guilty relief at the quiet that followed days of fretting over his every labored breath. Then we gathered some of his things, went out into the humid August day, got in my sister’s car, drove to the city, and bought produce — beautiful, brightly colored produce, an array of greens, bell peppers looking almost Gatorade-neon, like the heightened palette of nature just before or after giving birth. We got iced coffee, said hello to a beautiful dog outside the coffee shop, and ended up at the bookstore. I made a snide comment about a book and the guy behind the counter chuckled. It felt like a betrayal not to explain where I’d been. Could he tell we’d been crying for two weeks?
Earlier is the book I’m least offended by at the moment. It’s just memories. Traces. Each entry is dated but they aren’t chronological. It was written at the request of Frere-Jones’s late wife, the mother of his sons, who died in 2021. Which makes it a grief book, I suppose, but it’s not really. It’s about music, love, New York City. It’s about a lot of shit that’s gone forever but it comes at grief slantwise. Death is like a disco ball at its center, picking up light from other directions.
It’s one book I think I’ll finish. It’s the most like life at this particular moment — all fragments. Like the boxes of letters, birthday cards, like his favorite records, the Ziploc bag of snapshots I still haven’t taken out of my backpack. These objects now assembled in the corners of my room, in no particular order, waiting to be assigned further meaning.
So deeply sorry for your loss and so moved by what you have shared.
Grand and pointless…thank you for writing, love you.