This is the essential, avaricious nature of loss: it encompasses, without distinction, the trivial and the consequential, the abstract and the concrete, the merely misplaced and the permanently gone. We often ignore its true scope if we can, but for a while after my father died, I could not stop seeing the world as it really is, marked everywhere by the evidence of past losses and the imminence of future ones. This was not because his death was a tragedy. My father died peacefully, at seventy-four, tended throughout his final weeks by those he loved most. It was because his death was not a tragedy; what shocked me was that something so sad could be the normal, necessary way of things. In its aftermath, each individual life seemed to contain too much heartbreak for its fleeting duration. History, which I had always loved even in its silences and mysteries, suddenly seemed like little more than a record of loss on an epic scale, especially where it could offer no record at all. The world itself seemed ephemeral, glaciers and species and ecosystems vanishing, the pace of change as swift as in a time-lapse, as if those of us alive today had been permitted to see it from the harrowing perspective of eternity. Everything felt fragile, everything felt vulnerable; the idea of loss pressed in all around me, like a hidden order to existence that emerged only in the presence of grief.
This relentless disappearance is not the whole story of our lives; it is not even the whole story of this book. But in the weeks and months after my father died, I could not stop thinking about it, partly because it seemed important to understand what all of these losses had to do with each other and partly because it seemed important to understand what all of them had to do with me. A lost wallet, a lost treasure, a lost father, a lost species: as different as these were, they and every other missing thing suddenly seemed fundamental to the problem of how to live—seemed, in being gone, to have something urgent to say about being here.
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My father had something urgent to say about almost everything. The world was endlessly interesting to him, and he delighted in discussing any part of it: the novels of Edith Wharton, the nature of cosmic background radiation, the infield fly rule in baseball, the lingering impact of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the discovery of a new species of nocturnal monkey in South America, the merits of apple cobblers versus apple crisps. My older sister and I were welcomed into these conversations from more or less the time we could talk, but additional participants were never hard for him to find. When it came to other people, my father possessed the gravitational pull of a mid-sized planet. He had a booming voice, a heavy accent, a formidable mind, a rabbinical beard, a Santa Claus belly, and the gestural range of the Vitruvian Man; collectively, the effect was part Socrates, part Tevye.
The accent was a consequence of my father’s rootless childhood, which also left him fluent in six languages—in rough order of acquisition, Yiddish, Polish, Hebrew, German, French, and English. To my subsequent regret, he raised my sister and me to speak only the last of these, but he made up for it by the lavishness with which he did so. It was my mother, a French teacher and wonderfully lucid grammarian, who taught me how to work with language: how to pronounce “epitome,” when to use the subjunctive, how to distinguish “who” from “whom.” But it was my father who taught me how to play with it. Thanks to his polyglot background, he had a relativist’s relationship to the rules of grammar and usage; he did not defy them, exactly, but he loved to bend a phrase right up to the breaking point before letting it spring back into place, reverberating wildly. I have never met anyone else who could generate such surprising sentences on the fly, nor anyone else who derived as much fun just from speaking. When I expressed disbelief at the “epitome” correction, he furnished, in an instant, an unforgettable mnemonic device: “It rhymes with ‘you gotta be kidding me.’?”
It is a cliché about writers that we come from unhappy families—that we turn to language and stories to either escape from or give voice to our misery. This was not my experience. I came from a happy family, where language and stories were a shared and omnipresent pleasure. One of my earliest memories consists of my father materializing in the doorway of the room where I was playing—all of five foot six, but seeming to my startled eyes like a benevolent and thrilling giant—holding a Norton anthology of poetry in one hand and waving the other aloft like Merlin while reciting “Kubla Khan.” I have a similarly vivid recollection of him entertaining my sister and me a few years later with the prologue to The Canterbury Tales, declaimed out loud in rousing Middle English. My mother gave up early on the project of convincing him not to rile us up at bedtime; it was his job to read aloud to us each night, and he accomplished the task with extravagant gestures, dramatic voices, much thumping of the knees on which we were perched, and an exhilarating disregard for the text on the page. On the best nights, he ditched the books entirely and regaled us with a series of homegrown stories about the adventures of Yana and Egbert, two danger-prone siblings from, of all places, Rotterdam—a location he chose because he knew the sound of it would make his little daughters laugh.
Although my father was far better read than I will ever be, literature was his passion, not his vocation. By training, he was a lawyer and an occasional law school instructor; both jobs suited him, but especially the latter, since he embodied to perfection the figure of the absentminded professor. He had a prodigious memory, a panoptic curiosity, and an ability, in the face of problems of all kinds, to distinguish what was irrelevant from what mattered as swiftly as a coin machine separates pennies from quarters. What he did not have, nine times out of ten, was his wallet, or any notion of where he had parked his car. In keeping with the stereotype, these deficits always seemed like a consequence of his extraordinary intellect, as if he could somehow channel to better purposes all the mental energy the rest of us expend on not misplacing our belongings. Whether or not they were related, however, these curiously contradictory qualities—a remarkable perceptiveness about the world and a remarkable obliviousness to it—were two of the defining features of his character.
Among the many things my father was prone to losing was himself. I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, and several times a year, my family would drive to Pittsburgh to visit my maternal grandmother. In theory, that journey took just over two hours, but before I was out of my single digits, I knew to be alarmed when my father settled into the driver’s seat and announced that we were taking a shortcut. Children experience all car trips as eternal, but those really were drastically longer than they needed to be, because my father, constitutionally genial yet also constitutionally stubborn, could not be persuaded that he didn’t know where he was going. I can recall one version of this experience in which we headed west rather than east for a solid half hour, and another where we managed to take the same incorrect highway exit three consecutive times. My mother could have put an end to all of this, because she was a much better navigator, but she was also a loving and pragmatic spouse, and so she intervened only gently on these misadventures unless time was of the essence—which, in my father’s opinion, it seldom was, because, in addition to having no sense of direction, he had no sense of time.