Instead, I found sadness to be, in every sense, a vulnerable thing, a small neutral nation on a bellicose continent whose borders were constantly overrun by more aggressive emotions. I also found it to be strangely furtive, strangely insubordinate; it went into hiding easily and could not be roused against its will. I could think about my father, I could miss my father, I could love my father, but I could not make myself sad about him when and where I chose, any more than I could tickle myself or compel myself to fall in love. It rose up in me of its own accord, for reasons I could only sometimes deduce even after the fact, or it was provoked by one or another cause entirely external to me. These were seldom the predictable triggers of holidays or my parents’ anniversary or the necessity of attending a funeral, all of which I could brace myself to experience. By contrast, the things that undid me were almost always unexpected and generally oblique—as on the day a little over a year after my father died when, in an instant, the words on my laptop blurred over in front of me and a bite of bagel turned to chalk in my mouth because, sitting in a café in Manhattan, I overheard a man say to his lunch companion, “I wish my daughter would call me more often.”
I sometimes yearned for more moments like that, moments when my sorrow ran through me like a river at night, dark and clear, untainted by any more insidious emotion. Yet such things aren’t responsive to our wishes. If we could summon sorrow, we could banish it, but the whole lesson grief teaches us is that we are not the ones in control. Books and manuals and websites about bereavement are full of advice about how to “move through grief,” and it is true that there are better and worse ways to cope with the death of someone you love. I tried hard to steer to the side of better—to not mourn alone, not remain too much indoors, not numb or deny the pain, not neglect too often or for too long my family and friends and body and work and the events and needs of the rest of the world. I am sure it all helped, if only by keeping things from getting worse. But even in the midst of those acts of self-care, it never felt to me like I was moving through grief, with all the striding agency that phrase implies. It felt like grief was moving through me—like it was a force outside my influence, entirely wild, no more swayed by my will than a mountain lion or a storm. Like all truly wild things, it was overwhelming and sometimes frightening up close but strangely compelling from a little distance, stark and awesome in the old sense of the word; and when it went away again, especially as the amount of time between its unpredictable appearances lengthened, I sometimes longed, perversely, for its return.
Most people, I think, are at least a little afraid of ceasing to grieve. I know that I was. However terrible our sorrow may be, we understand that it is made in the image of love, that it shares the characteristics of the person we mourn. Maybe there was a day in your life when you were brought to your knees by a faded blue ball cap or a tote bag full of knitting supplies or the sound of a Brahms piano concerto. For my part, I have been moved to tears by a pile of my father’s button-down shirts, amassed in my parents’ bedroom awaiting donation; by a polished wooden wall clock, identical to one he had in his law office when I was young, that shocked me with how much of my childhood it suddenly summoned; by a battered edition of Middlemarch, creased down the middle where its spine had been broken (my father bent his paperbacks in half to read them as reflexively and contentedly as New Yorkers fold a piece of pizza before eating it); and by a pale green packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum, half its little paper sleeves emptied of their silver foil. But here is the curious part: all of these things, which grief wielded like weapons, are actually quite wonderful to me—strange, specific, welcome returnees from their long exile in the land of the past. Part of what makes grief so seductive, then, is that it seems to offer us what life no longer can: an ongoing, emotionally potent connection to the dead. And so it is easy to feel that once that bleak gift is gone, the person we love will somehow be more gone, too.
Thus our strange relationship with the pain of grief. In the early days, we wish only for it to end; later on, we fear that it will. And when it finally does begin to ease, it also does not, because, at first, feeling better can feel like loss, too. “The trees are coming into leaf,” the poet Philip Larkin once wrote,
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
This type of circular mourning, the grieving of grief itself, is perfectly normal and possibly inevitable yet also misguided and useless. There is no honor in feeling awful and no betrayal in feeling better, and no matter how dark and salted and bitter cold your grief may be, it will never preserve anything about the person you mourn. Despite how it sometimes feels, it has never kept anyone alive, not even in memory. If anything, it keeps them dead: eventually, if you cannot stop mourning, the person you love will come to be made only of grief.
* * *
—
The loss of someone you love is too immense an experience to take in all at once. Only belatedly does it begin to reveal itself in its fullness, after the terrible king tide of grief has receded, leaving all kinds of strange things behind. I would not have predicted, for instance, that of everything about those final weeks in the hospital, what would stay with me most is my father’s silence. Although it baffled and upset me at the time, it did not command as large a share of my emotional attention as it does now. There was so much else going on, so many critical systems of his body in crisis, so many hours spent talking through seemingly pressing issues that, in the end, would never matter—would he be on dialysis for the rest of his life? did we need to look into long-term care?—that his mysterious inability to speak did not seem like the most urgent of his problems. No one, after all, has ever died of silence.
And yet if anyone ever could die that way, it might well have been my effusive, communicative, multilingual father. His silence was so unlike him, so contrary to the whole spirit of his existence, that in retrospect I feel I should have known what it portended. Instead, I did everything I could to counterbalance it. Together with the rest of my family, I sat by my father’s bed and talked to him, recited him poetry, called up music on my laptop and filled his hospital room with Tchaikovsky and Chopin and Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” All the things he loved, all the remarkable things people have forged out of ideas and emotion and sound: I hoped then, and still hope now, that he could hear them and know them for what they were. Failing that, I hope he could hear them and find them wonderful all over again, wonderful the way they were the first time he encountered them. Failing that, I hope he was at peace.
My father’s familiar brown eyes, following me mutely around a hospital room: this is always what I think of now when I think of the time he was dying. I wonder often what was going on behind them. It is impossible to say whether his silence reflected a deeper breakdown, the slow coming apart of thought itself, or if it was simply the result of a breach in his relationship with the world—some barrier descending or some longstanding connection being severed. Was the silence inner as well as outer? Or was it, for him, like looking through a window in a lighted room at night, the interior illuminated, everything outside shadowy and difficult to see? I don’t know, and I don’t know why I am so troubled by not knowing. In the end, we leave the world and we leave ourselves, and I suppose it doesn’t really matter in which order. I could not even tell you which of the two I think is lonelier.