I have subsequently learned that this searching behavior, as it is called, is common among the bereaved. It is so common, in fact, that the psychologist John Bowlby, a contemporary of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s, regarded the second stage of grief, after shock and numbness, as “yearning and searching.” And yet, before my father died, I myself had never engaged in it—perhaps because, until then, my dead had always saved me the trouble by coming to look for me. When I was fourteen, my maternal great-grandmother died in her sleep at the age of ninety-three. For as long as I had known her, she had been the very soul of gentleness, but some months later, when I was slouched on our living room couch reading a book, I heard her voice just behind me, telling me sharply to sit up straight and cross my legs, please. Twenty-three years later, her daughter, my grandmother, died at ninety-five. She had definitely not been the soul of gentleness, but she was an excellent grandparent, fierce and smart and interesting, and so it was characteristic, if also extremely startling, when I stood up one night to go to bed, having decided to give up on some piece of writing that was going badly, and heard her say behind me, “That’s a terrible idea.”
My most memorable experiences of this kind, however, began the year I turned sixteen, following the shocking loss of one of my closest friends. One evening after school we talked on the phone for a while, as we often did; hours later, she was murdered. It was sudden and shattering and I was still very young, and the combination made her death exceptionally difficult to absorb. For years afterward, I had dreams that she had faked it, or that we had both been subjected to an elaborate hoax. I suspect it was for this same reason—the near impossibility of believing that she was gone—that, for quite a while, I felt her presence with some regularity. The first time, I was walking home from school when I heard her say my name, sounding simultaneously exasperated and encouraging, as if in cheerful rebuke to my grief. Far more strangely, I was twice jolted into the conviction that I had encountered her again in an altered but unmistakable form: first as a caterpillar and then, much later and even more improbably, as a plastic bag—or, rather, as the breeze inside it that sent it tumbling past me on a dusty back road late one summer afternoon. I hadn’t been thinking of my friend at all that day; ten years had passed since she had died. Yet the moment I saw the bag, I laughed out loud. For no apparent reason—surely nothing could be further from our customary notions of visitation and rebirth—it filled me with instant, overwhelming recognition.
Only years later did I learn that experiences like these are also common among the grieving. “I never thought Michiko would come back after she died,” the poet Jack Gilbert wrote of his wife in “Alone.” “It is strange that she has returned as somebody’s dalmatian.” When they involve seeing, hearing, or sensing the dead, such encounters are called bereavement hallucinations, and somewhat more than half of people report having experienced them. (That percentage is even higher among the widowed, and it rises in tandem with the length of the marriage.) No one knows what causes them, but, as the neurologist Oliver Sacks once observed, they have something in common with the hallucinations experienced by people in solitary confinement, people who have recently gone blind, and people who are exposed exclusively to monotonous landscapes, as on ocean crossings or long polar voyages. In all these cases, and perhaps in bereavement as well, the abrupt withdrawal of familiar sensory input leads the mind to fill in what has always been there before but is suddenly missing.
Plenty of people who have experienced bereavement hallucinations don’t believe in any kind of afterlife, and I am one of them. Vivid as mine were, they neither comported with my understanding of death nor, strange as this may seem, changed it. If they brought me nearer to any kind of faith, it was only to one I have always had, in the infinite mysteries of the human mind. In every case, they were welcome and startling and also somehow slightly comic, yet they felt far more earthly than holy. I never sensed that I was in the presence of anything either angelic or ghostly, or that the curtain had somehow thinned between this world and another. But I also didn’t experience these interactions as happening inside my own head. The voices, in particular—of my grandmother chiding me or my friend saying my name—had a kind of exteriority entirely unlike thoughts or memories or even dreams. To the extent that I could categorize them at all, they seemed to belong less to the uncanny than to its opposite: to the deeply familiar, as if they were a form I hadn’t known that love could take until I experienced grief.
It was this comforting rush of familiarity that I was seeking when I went out looking for my father: since he hadn’t come to me in the weeks after his death, I thought perhaps that I could go to him. The first time I tried—it was late one October afternoon, gray and cheerless, with the first intimation of winter in the air—I turned around after five minutes. I have seldom attempted anything that felt so futile. It brought back a memory from when I was nine or ten years old and had set about experimenting with telekinesis. I succeeded that October day at summoning my father about as well as I had succeeded back then in sliding a pencil off my desk from across the room—which is to say that not only didn’t it work, I couldn’t imagine any mechanism, mental state, physical act, expression of commitment, or admission of need that could possibly make it work, or even count as practice. And yet, in both cases, I kept trying.
It didn’t work the next time, either; it has never worked. I don’t know why I haven’t felt my father’s presence since his death, as I have with other people I’ve loved and mourned. I do know, though, that I have no business feeling surprised and denied when the universe behaves in accordance with my own understanding of it. I have always regarded this to be one of the inviolable terms of our existence: the people we love cease to exist upon death, as definitively as water flows out of a glass when you overturn it.
I know that not everyone shares this conviction. Some people feel watched over by their late loved ones in this lifetime, and some are confident that they will encounter them again in the next one. But I also know that this sense of absolute loss is not just the burden of agnostics and atheists. After his wife, Joy Davidman, died of breast cancer, C. S. Lewis, that most devout and knowledgeable of Christians, wrote a slim and devastating little book called A Grief Observed. He published it under a pseudonym, knowing that it might trouble his more pious admirers—not because it was blasphemous or because he had ceased to believe in God but because the explication of faith it contained was almost entirely lacking in the usual comforts. “Talk to me about the truth of religion and I’ll listen gladly,” he wrote. “Talk to me about the duty of religion and I’ll listen submissively. But don’t come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don’t understand.” The self unaltered by death, the past restored, a glorious reunion on some shining farther shore: that’s “all out of bad hymns and lithographs,” Lewis continued. “There’s not a word of it in the Bible.” Nothing in Scripture promised him that he would be reunited with his wife after his own death, and he felt sure that he would not be, because he felt sure that the woman he longed for no longer existed. “I look up at the night sky,” he wrote: “Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?” Between his late wife and himself, he felt only “the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.”
Thus have I felt about my father since he died. Never in all the time I spent searching did I find the slightest trace of him. In the years since then, I have tried in quiet moments to summon some suggestion of his presence but have felt no stirring whatsoever, no sign at all beyond my own mind and memories. Being his daughter now is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. His absence is total; where there was him, there is nothing.
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