Eventually, I realized that I had underestimated my mother, as adult children so often do. She really did miss my father as much as I feared, but I soon found that she grieved as she had always done everything: patiently and tenderly, with a remarkable ability to accept the worst days as inevitable and a remarkable will to live as well as possible on all the rest. Her grace and fortitude awed me, not least because I kept demonstrating the opposite qualities, literally: in the aftermath of my father’s death, I grew uncharacteristically clumsy and prone to ailment and injury. I ran a low-grade fever for the better part of three weeks, suffered a pinched nerve, pulled a hamstring, fell twice for no reason, was plagued by unexplained tooth pain, and, worst of all, one terrible morning while making coffee, overturned an entire carafe of boiling water onto my forearm. A psychologist would say that some part of me was unconsciously trying to make manifest my emotional pain, and I’m sure that’s true. Yet at the time, all these mishaps and maladies felt less like an ongoing psychosomatic calamity than like a pervasive loss of balance, as if I were no longer on familiar terms with the basic physical operations of my body and the world.
Whatever caused them, the cumulative effect of these various debilities was to make me feel tremendously old. Or maybe that’s backward—maybe I incurred all those debilities because I already felt old. Grief of any kind will age you, partly from exhaustion but chiefly from the confrontation with mortality: to feel old (as distinct from actually being old, which can be a perfectly contented state) is to feel that both your days and your remaining quantity of joy are diminishing. But grief over a parent will also age you because it pitches you forward an entire life stage. Losing my father felt like advancing one notch in the march of generations—like taking, all at once, one very large step toward oblivion. I seemed overnight to have become middle-aged, which was strange, because my sadness also sometimes made me feel very young, still needing my father and not yet fit to be left without him. In a peculiar, circular way, I felt old because I felt like a child, at a time when I also felt that I had been a child so very long ago.
Disoriented, anxious, injured, ill: given all this, it is hardly surprising that, for some time after my father died, I was also spectacularly useless. I had lost, along with everything else, all motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, that was because action felt like acceleration, and I dreaded getting further from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed—the service over, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written—I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent almost a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.
Now, obliged to carry onward through time, I realized that I didn’t know how. I found some consolation in poetry, but otherwise, for the first time in my life, I did not care to read. Nor could I bring myself to write. In theory, I had a full-time magazine job, but I worked from home, on a schedule of my own choosing. That was a luxury I had previously cherished, but in the early days of mourning, it left me unmoored; even after the tactful post-death pause had passed and obligations and deadlines began crowding in on me, I found myself too drained and preoccupied to focus. Day after day, I turned my laptop on and stared at it for a while and turned it off again, feeling a profound kinship with its empty screen. I knew that for emotional as well as professional and financial reasons, I needed to start writing again; I knew that I needed to go to sleep at a decent hour and wake up at one, too; I knew that I needed to eat right and reach out to friends and call up a therapist I hadn’t spoken to in years. I knew everything I should be doing, yet knew of nothing at all that I wanted to do.
It was my father, predictably, who gave me the word for the one thing I was doing. In his lifetime, he had possessed an astonishing vocabulary, one so nuanced and capacious that even when it failed him, it succeeded. Once, after I somehow came across the word “circumjoviating” and had to look it up—it means “orbiting around Jupiter”—I challenged him to define it. He thought for perhaps five seconds, then guessed, logically and sublimely: “avoiding God.” I have used it that way ever since then—for what other word so concisely describes the experience of ducking one’s deity or conscience or responsibilities? Like so much of what I got from my father, it is a gift of ethics inside a gift of language. And so it came back to me after he died, when I sat there impassively and watched it start to define me: avoiding work, avoiding books, avoiding time, avoiding joy, avoiding reality.
I did not exactly feel lost, as my father was unto me. I felt at a loss—a strange turn of phrase, as if loss were a place in the physical world, a kind of reverse oasis or Bermuda Triangle where the spirit fails and the compass needle spins. I stretched out for as long as I could the small acts that felt manageable and right (calling my mother and sister, curling up with my partner, playing with the cats), but these alone could not fill up the days. Every night I went to bed exhausted and slept for an absurd number of hours, slept in a way I had only done before when seriously ill. Every morning I woke up in the grip of two opposite fears: that my time on earth was streaming away behind me with unbearable swiftness; that another day loomed up in front of me with leaden interminability. Not since the age of eight, when I was still learning to master boredom, had life struck me so much as simply a problem of what to do.
* * *
—
It was during this time of torpor and drift that I began to go out looking for my father. Because I find peace and clarity in nature, I did this searching outside, sometimes while walking, sometimes while out on a run. (Running was the one thing I kept doing during those long doldrums after my father died. I knew enough about its role in my life—as body maintainer, mind clearer, mood regulator—that I didn’t dare stop.) Like so much else during those difficult early days of grief, these expeditions had a hazy, half-formed quality. They came about without any planning or perceptible decision, as if I knew that they wouldn’t bear the weight of serious thought—which they would not, because nothing in my understanding of death suggested that they would succeed. I don’t believe that the essence of each of us endures unchanged after we die, or that the dead can commune with the living. But grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all, and I thought it possible, in an impossible kind of way, that if I went out looking, I might find myself, however briefly or inexplicably, in my father’s company again.