On the First Anniversary
(written three years ago)
“This is no way to live, right?” My father said this to me in the hospital room where a year ago he lay dying. His blood had gone haywire, pooling all over his body, so half of his skin’s surface was colored deep purple. Does anything teach one about life more than the death of a parent? I can’t exactly detail what the benefits are — a year has gone by, and some things, besides the most important world event since World War II, have stayed the same, except someone doesn’t call to check up on me; that mountain of unconditional love turned out to be a mountain that crumbles. Without it, there is a great difference, like living in a small town with no friends and only unfriendly bars to visit or, worse, living in a metropolis where everyone is in love with themselves and your pain is not fit to float on the patterned waves of indifference bolstering supposedly decent company. Maybe I need three more decades of living to find out what a seventy-five-year-old sees as fit and what he sees as negligible — what’s worth getting angry about and what will only drive me off into my own abandoned park. But there is a triple grief going on, because I have a three-year-old daughter and watch her grow up into a world so fraught and fractured, where the literal center of the earth is not holding anymore, and neither are the souls of its population.
My father did not have a funeral — this was not my choice. It was said he didn’t want one, but the dead shouldn’t dictate what is to occur when the living by then have a much harder job. One year later, I still keenly feel that the absence of this ritual was a mistake; that if I, perhaps obnoxiously, had pressed the point against the two people who vetoed me, I might have won, but at the cost of never being forgiven. Still, rituals are what helps us through life, even if we don’t believe — we come together as human beings for a banquet that often elevates us when we can’t stand. One might never know how much one needs them, until it’s too late.
Several years ago, when numbed after the Sandy Hook shooting, I posted an excerpt from a Henry James letter (with a photograph of his great, domed head) on a website that no longer recognizes me as the author of hundreds of articles I contributed — this irony is perhaps fitting, given the ephemeral qualities of the Internet, on which a host of data can become souped in much different water from one minute to the next. I doubt that anyone comes upon the post anymore, but I’m sure they do so on LettersofNote.com, from which I stole it: “I don’t know why we live…but I believe we can go on living for the reason that life is the most valuable thing we know anything about.” I don’t like to send people quotes, koans, or platitudes by others to help them with their hard times — if it’s the thought that counts, it should be one’s own thought — and seeing this again after the death, I acutely felt how dull and clangorous it sounded, speaking more to the fantasy of pain than to the pain itself, which is unique, a snowflake for every person. If someone had sent me a link to Henry James in my earliest days of grief, I might have (hard-heartedly, despite my love for James) packed his books up and sent them to a used-book store so they could glower from a high shelf, astonished at not being bought. There are times for language and times for silence, and yet, people sometimes just want someone else to sit nearby while they are wordless, but many are unable to provide such an oasis when language has been taught more as a shill than as a fount of feelings.
Our new world-wide common ritual every morning is to open the phone or computer and see what has happened on the Internet — a tool that, though live, continually calcifies as it grows, like the tumor it is. Death is good for getting off the Internet — for one sees how much of it, versus real life, is insubstantial and petty. This ritual, let go of in the aftermath, became so again, some weeks after my father’s death, but I must use caution — my daughter seems to be getting a little addicted to videos like Peppa Pig, a short, piquant British cartoon in which a family of swine snort and laugh through their adventures and, often, at the end, will wind up happily jumping up and down in muddy puddles. Can the core of my ego, that which I’m expecting to steroidally pump up through Twitter mentions, outstrip my offspring’s growing delight in sedentary brain-curdling activities that will likely hamper her imagination? Henry James won’t save me from this one, but Etta James might, since my daughter likes to dance and sing, pretending I am her audience, which in fact I am.
Facing us from across the room, as we sit on the couch and look at the computer, are two pictures of my father, one with me, the other with my nephew as a newborn. I sometimes ask my daughter if she remembers her grandfather, whom she saw only twice, for a few hours each time — the last just before she turned two. With a picture reminder, she says she remembers. She is just working out what “alive” versus “not alive” could mean. I don’t want her to think about it and prefer the lie of “he was very sick and had to go to the hospital” to “he is gone forever.” The coronavirus is known as “the sickness,” and she asks multiple times a day, “When the sickness is over, can we…” The lie saves me from a morbid conversation and keeps a sliver of him alive, out of reach of everyone else’s memory, most especially from the quaggy frailties of the Internet, where only two photos (not the ones saved on my hard drive) give the ocular proof of his existence, though they will disappear when the Internet dies.
Ezra Pound had a number of hateful bones in his body, but also endless creative ones and a great number of generous ones — as Guy Davenport wrote, “Joyce said that he was more in his [Pound’s] debt than to any other man.” Sitting in his cage in Pisa at age fifty-nine, under penalty of death for his treasonous broadcasts against the war, Pound scribbled out the words that make up the Pisan cycle, and there alighted on perhaps the central line of the fifty-year-old life’s work called The Cantos: “nothing counts but the quality of affection,” a line taken from Cavalcanti. After everything, after all the propaganda, the distant maniacal protestors of the lockdown and the wonderfully acute ones spreading from Minneapolis, along with the poseurs running things, after the death, these words come back for me to seize upon. That morning, I defiled my chance at demonstrating them by yelling at my daughter for running in the house. I hugged her and told her I loved her before suggesting an appearance by Mom, so I could go into my writing chamber (our bedroom) and hunch down into my chair, an inconsistent grousing gurgling up in me. No new e-mails. The day lengthened, a butte of doom in the distance. It begins in an instant, but it had already begun and it never ends — the finger can only ever be pointing at oneself. If I can’t enhance the quality of my affection for my daughter, I might end up as impoverished as a King Lear who doesn’t make it to the heath.
