In Roman mythology, one of the goddesses of death was named Tacita: the silent one. Ovid reports that, to propitiate her on the Day of the Dead, the devout sacrificed to her a fish with its mouth sewn shut. It was an apt offering, to an apt deity. Death sews every mouth shut; everything about it defies language. The dead themselves can’t speak, and the living can’t speak firsthand about dying, and even finding appropriate words for mourning can be extremely difficult. You learn something about grief from grieving, but it is a lonely, threadbare knowledge, hard to describe, bespoke in almost every detail. I was vexed to discover, after my father died, how useless I was when called upon to console someone else in the face of death, how almost impossible it was to say anything at all that, in accuracy or helpfulness, could best the average platitude. Even when I was talking with my sister, whose sorrow pains me more than my own and who is the only other person on the planet to grieve my father as a father—even then, I don’t think I ever once said anything remotely comforting or useful. What comes to mind now is being on the phone with her one afternoon some months after his death and, into the silence following a sad acknowledgment of how much we both missed him, saying only “Ugh.”
It was a representative syllable. Ugh, ach, argh, oy: those inarticulate, literally meaningless little interjections are the equivalent, on a less dire day, of moaning and keening. Even when grief doesn’t level us, it mocks our ability to put the world into words. The stark fact at the heart of it—gone, gone, gone, gone—is at once too obvious to merit saying and too terrible to say as often and indiscriminately as we feel it. Tearing our hair, gnashing our teeth, rending our clothes: the impulse may be there, but the action is generally inhibited by the helpful but comically mismatched dictates of polite society. You go to work, you go to the baby shower, you say that you are hanging in there, thanks for asking. And all the while you are suppressing the news that someone you love has undergone that everyday, unimaginable passage out of this world.
I suppose that is the other reason why my father’s silence has stayed with me: because it is still with me. It was a foretaste of the permanent one to come, a loss so total that for a while I did not understand its real scope. And then one night, during that early stretch of grief when I could find solace only in poetry, my partner sat me down and read me “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” In it, Walt Whitman leans against the railing of a ship, just north of where my father first looked out on New York Harbor, and exalts in all that he sees. So expansive is Whitman’s vision that it includes not just the piers and sails and reeling gulls but everyone else who makes the crossing, too: all those who stood at the railing watching before his birth, all those presently watching around him, and all those who will be there watching after his death—which, in the poem, he doesn’t so much foresee as, through a wild, craning omniscience, look back on. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” he admonishes, kindly.
And just like that, mid-poem, mid-grief, my understanding of loss revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I had been missing about my father—talking with him, laughing with him, sharing my thoughts and feelings in order to hear his own in response—was life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. But the most important thing that had vanished when he died, I realized in that instant, is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All of my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was like to be him, and all of my loss pales beside his own. Like Whitman’s, my father’s love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind—not just the people he adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea.
It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of a consciousness. Viewed from any distance at all, it is, I know, the most common of all losses, repeated every hour of every day since the dawn of history. But viewed up close, it is shocking, a whole universe flashing out of existence. I lost my father; my father lost everything. That is the absolute loss that his silence in the hospital foretold: the end of the mind, the end of the self, the end of being a part of all of this—the harbor, the city, the poetry, the world. “He became his admirers,” a different poet, W. H. Auden, wrote of Yeats when the latter died. Now we who loved my father are all that is left of him.
* * *
—
There is a chair in my sister’s living room that my father used to claim as his own every November when our family descended on her house for Thanksgiving. He would settle into it shortly after arriving and occupy it more or less continuously until the time came to leave, give or take meals and the occasional stroll down the hall to his granddaughter’s room for bedtime stories and animated discussions about current affairs in the land of dolls and stuffed animals. This was toward the end of his life—in earlier years, my parents had hosted the holiday themselves—when, between poor balance, a bad back, and time served, my father had been permanently discharged from kitchen duties. “I have become,” he once declared, after the act of standing up from the chair to help out had triggered a chorus of voices ordering him to sit back down, “an adornment.”
Neither in the pejorative nor in the complimentary sense was my father ever what you would call ornamental. Still, he did improve every room he ever entered. At Thanksgiving, he would sit there all day in his chair, not exactly holding court and not exactly holding forth yet nonetheless seeming like our own private philosopher-king. When the rest of us were lounging around in the living room with him, he would play with great gusto his many overlapping roles: father, grandfather, scholar, wiseacre, fielder of questions, benevolent inquisitor, master of ceremonies. When we were busy cooking or working or out for a walk, he would push his glasses up onto his forehead and return to whichever book he was reading—“Hebrew for Ancient People,” he once joked when I asked him, an effortless double entendre.
“Where there was him, there is nothing,” I wrote of my father earlier, and that is true, with the caveat that “nothing” is not a neutral blankness. In the lane behind my house, there is a tree where I once saw an owl; now, every time I pass it, I look up automatically. That is something like the nothingness left behind after death: the place in the tree where the owl is not. From the first Thanksgiving after my father died, I have never once looked at that chair without remembering my father in it. And it is not just the chair. My father is not in my life in the same way he used to be in my life: everywhere and unmistakably. I imagine this is true for almost everyone who has lost someone they love. To be bereft is to live with the constant presence of absence.
This sounds upsetting, and at first it is. From almost the moment he died, I understood that my father, who never wanted anything more than for his daughters to be happy, would not want me to remember him in sorrow. And yet for a long time afterward, my world turned into, in both senses, a negative space: a map of where my father was not. That map did not just include all those places, like the chair, where he had always been. It also included all the places where he would never be. Not long after his death, I fell to talking with an older friend, who told me that his own father was still alive, at ninety-four. I can’t remember what I said in response, and I don’t know how I kept the conversation going, because all I could think was: twenty more years. I could have had my father in my life for another two decades—an unfathomably long extension, a literal generation of more time with him.