he would have liked my house.

On the Changing Hue of Grief

He really would have.

When Susan and I moved here in 2004, the house had been recently emptied of masses of Danish modern furniture — not the knock-offs that we see today online — collected over the years by its original owners, one of whom was (actually) Danish. On one wall was a massive, floor-to-ceiling teak bookcase with a dropdown bar, much like the one I grew up with in the sixties. There were two black leather sofas and two matching chairs, each of them on a metal base. Hanging over the teak dining room table was a Sputnik chandelier of the sort that can be found in places like 1stDibs for many thousands of dollars.

My father loved Danish modern furniture so much that my childhood home was packed with it, as was his advertising office on Madison Avenue. Photos of his bachelor apartment on East 79th Street in Manhattan looked the same. When I stepped into the house that Susan and I would buy a few weeks later, the familiar woody, oily smell of teak overtook me in a way that can only be described as Proustian, and a manifestation of olfactory grief.

We moved in twenty years ago, just two years after I lost my father in a car accident on a hot, sunny Saturday morning in August. After he was gone, strands of bitterness squeezed me like toothpaste from a tube out of the familial throng where I had lived for thirty-nine years. When he died, the last thing I expected to happen did: those he told me to turn to in the event of tragedy vaporized into a cloud of indifference. I lived in a state of numb sorrow and isolation, and I clung to whatever I had left of him: memories good and bad; photos; audio recordings; letters to his parents written while he was in the Navy; the letters I sent home to him from sleepaway camp; the sound of his voice when I coughed, as though he was standing behind me.

If you have lost a loved one under sudden circumstances — perhaps they were not ill; perhaps they were in the wrong place at the wrong time; perhaps they went out to run an errand, the way my father did the day of his accident — you know that the so-called strict Elisabeth Kübler-Ross-ian phases of grief may not apply to you. There is no time to prepare, no time to codify or organize, no time to weep over impending loss, no time to think about moving through specified phases. In her seminal essay, The Love of My Life — I carry this essay with me, folded and stuffed into the back of my notebook —

Cheryl Strayed

writes Not only was I supposed to feel these five things, I was meant to feel them in that order and for a prescribed amount of time. Which then begs the question: but what if you don’t? What if you can’t?

What if you go off-script?

Cheryl goes on: We want it to be true that if someone we love dies, we simply have to pass through a series of phases, like an emotional obstacle course from which we will emerge happy and content, unharmed and unchanged.

But those of us who have lost someone to the expected — age, illness — don’t seem to deal with grief any differently, or, for lack of a better way to say it, neatly. It is a different journey for every one of us, and as Cariad Lloyd, host of the podcast Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone puts it, quoting Reverend Richard Coles, There’s a sort of impatience with mourning because it’s boring. Grief is boring.

For the most part, people just don’t want to hear about it, or talk about it. It’s like a virus: get too close to someone who has it, and you might get infected.

The long view.

The seven days between my father’s accident and his death — the latter of which was planned: on a certain day at a certain time, I was called upon to remove him from life support and the medical assumption was that he would die quickly, which he did — were a swirl of practical tasks: dealing with lawyers and insurance companies and finding his papers and calling the veteran’s administration and trying to locate his honorable discharge papers from 1945 and meeting with clergy and fending off attacks from someone who, smelling blood as a wild animal might, set upon me with everything they had including imploring my wife and me not to be intimate in front of the rabbi during our meeting with him in his office. I actually laughed. Look away, I wanted to tell this person: We’ll be engaging in unspeakable relations on his desk right between Job and Leviticus.

When it was finally over — the planning, the doing, the sorting, the funeral, the burial — it was just the beginning of a journey that has continued for more than two decades, and that I would write my way through, as though words were my pick-axe and chisel. My Elisabeth Kübler-Ross directions were obsolete, like the 1948 pre-highway Florida roadmap my father used to carry in the glove compartment of his car. There were no directions, and my journey took me in overlapping loops that moved backward and forward. I had done everything I was called upon to do ritually and I had taken care of everyone who needed to be taken care of, but I had not begun to think how I would carry the weight of sorrow with me into the future, or what role it would take on in my life; I was just trying to put one foot in front of the other. I tried to remember to breathe. When Susan and I returned home after it was over, a book was waiting for me on my front stoop: Emotional Control, written by a friend of the person who implored me not to jump my wife’s bones in front of the officiant. What had set this person off? They had seen me quietly crying in the casket room of the funeral home.

Grief scrambles your ability to think straight, to make sense of the words that people are speaking to you and you to them; it results in a kind of syntactic aphasia, as though the language of your birth is no longer familiar.

I tell you this not to shock, and certainly not for pity, and not to exact rage on the person who was so comically cruel that my therapist likened their behavior to the scene in Curb Your Enthusiasm when Larry goes to visit his father and discovers that his mother has died, but no one has told him because, in her last hours, she told her husband Don’t bother Larry, he’s in New York. I tell you this so that you understand: sometimes grief is met head-on by the inexplicable and the ineffable. It scrambles your ability to think straight, to make sense of the words that people are speaking to you and you to them; it results in a kind of syntactic aphasia, as though the language of your birth is no longer familiar.

Grief mangles more than the grief-stricken; it unravels relationships and rearranges the tides. It takes by the lapels those who were once prevented from grieving by either culture or situation or familial demands and tosses them into an angry sea of schadenfreude. If they had been prevented from grieving a particular loss, they would be damned if they’d ever let anyone else grieve either. It took me years and hours of therapy to find a way to save myself from the same kind of fate, and on bad days, I still slog through it. My heart broke for this person and it still does, but only now from a very far and very safe distance, with no contact.

Over the next few years, I looked for my father everywhere.

I wore his navy blue woolen Pendelton shirt, his flight jacket, his English duffel coat; he was a diminutive man, and we were almost the same size at the end of his life. In the pocket of his duffel coat, I found an old dry cleaning stub and a single key; only he knew what it was for. I took possession of his hundreds of jazz albums from the late 1950s and bought a turntable so that I could listen to them, which I did, one by one. Not one family member checked in; no one called. Susan and I spent the next months in stunned silence. It took its toll on me physically: My heart literally broke, and I was diagnosed with an aortic enlargement and Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, neither of which were aided by the enormous amounts of gin I was drinking almost nightly because a good and cold Gibson had been my father’s favorite, so much so that after moving me into my first apartment in Boston, he left a large bottle of Bombay Sapphire and a jar of cocktail onions in my refrigerator so that I would always be prepared. Where there was gin there was my father, and everytime I made myself an ice cold Gibson in a coupe, he was with me, as if it were just the two of us, the way it had always been. My father was not an alcoholic, but he did love his gin from time to time; as for me, I just wanted him with me again, as often as possible, in whatever way I could find him. Even in a glass.

---

Twenty-two years later, I sit on my couch with my wife of over two decades, and I look around at this relatively humble, center-entry ranch house we live in, which is like the ones my father took me and my mother to see on weekends in the sixties and seventies, when one of his biggest advertising clients was a Long Island real estate developer of spec house communities. I was very small, and we went from one to the next like Burt Lancaster in The Swimmer; we drove from town to town to visit these houses, and he was always drawn to the single-level ranches because they were inevitably a little more contemporary, with Danish modern touches here and there. I was in single digits and didn’t understand that in model homes, you couldn’t open the fake refrigerator, or sit on the fake sofa, or wash your hands in the fake sinks, or pee in the fake toilets, although, according to my mother, I tried.

Every weekend, we made a journey to yet another stop in the post-war land of hope and promise, with no chance of attaining either. Every weekend, the message was reinforced that my father had failed to attain the so-called American dream unlike other family members: the houses were fake, and nothing inside them was real, although they looked it. This comparison and attendant shame were brutal, and I inherited the tendency towards them from him the way I inherited his height and his crooked smile: he felt his work was never good enough, he wasn’t funny or smart enough, he wasn’t tall enough or thin enough, and his financial sensibility was alternately okay and deplorable. After the war, he was engaged five times to five different women. His parents and sister disapproved of each of them, setting up a test for him every time: it’s us, or her. He always chose the former, and finally married at thirty-eight a few months after he brought home my bombshell/television singer/model mother who was inarguably as perfect for him as the Long Island spec houses he yearned for: gorgeous on the outside, but, like the fake sinks and the plastic fridges, just for show. Despite her beauty, my mother could not navigate the messy business of love.

My father ultimately did find love after the divorce; he and Shirley adored each other in a way that I never knew was possible for him. They created a home together, finished each other’s sentences, laughed at each other’s jokes, wept over each other’s losses. She was in the car on the day of his accident and severely injured, and the EMS team took him to one hospital and she to another, and after twenty years of constant companionship, they never saw each other again. The impending loss of my father was a top layer of grief, a limbo, like Dante’s first circle. Beneath it lie layers of grief, fashioned like the layers in a strudel, each with its own color, its own flavor, its own texture. It was not just the horrendous grief over my father’s accident that would eventually paralyze me; it was everything else that came along with it—the fact that he and his beloved would never see each other again, the fact that he was ironically the healthiest he’d ever been, the fact that people he trusted so implicitly had become strangers to me and, by extension, him.

This was the first time I gave any thought to what the physical and tactile properties of grief are — what they look and feel like, what color they are, how they taste and smell. On the day of the accident, I felt flattened, as though a house had fallen on me. When we had to decide when to tell Shirley about my father, lying in another hospital in another town, the hue of grief was kaleidoscopic: it wouldn’t settle on a color and instead just spun like a top, and I remember feeling knocked off my center and seizure-y: my hearing shut down and my peripheral vision blackened the way it had when I once nicked an artery in my right hand after accidentally breaking a window when I was a kid, and the world went dark. I had no anchor. I could not explain what I was feeling; I could only exist inside it.

What I didn’t understand during that week and the years that followed was that grief is wave-like; it pounds the shore, it crashes hard, it recedes, it storms, it’s as gentle as a ripple. Like the sea, it goes gray, and then bright blue, and then black. But it is absolutely always there; there is no end to it. Even now, twenty years after his death and having only recently unknotted the last of the cords that bound my grief over his loss to the abuse I endured at the same time — for years, the former could not exist without the latter — I think of the day of his accident as though it happened yesterday: I can tell you what I was wearing, what I was doing, what water glass I was drinking out of when the phone rang. There are days of benign memory, and days that make me laugh when I think of him, and others that feel like a sharp, endless sting: the accidental drop of lemon juice in a paper cut. They will always exist side by side, and when I wake in the morning, I often never know what kind of day it will be where grief is concerned. I do not think that this is emblematic of some deep-rooted pathology; I think it is emblematic — whether it’s me, or you, or anyone else — of what makes us human: the enduring bonds that tie memory to heart.

And when I sit on my couch with my morning coffee and look at the house around me, with its windows that need cleaning, the Sputnik chandelier that we had built, the Herman Miller chairs that Susan inherited from her aunt, all I can do is smile and think how much he’d have loved it.

For my father.