Passeig de Gracia

Barcelona had put on her best for us. The evening light, still bright at nine p.m., was rich and gold. It touched breezy sixth-story windows and lingered on the brown arms of Spanish women as they crossed the boulevard. Gaudi’s La Pedrera was shining further down the street, beautiful and proud and odd. The Hotel Majestic’s rooftop sign was glowing too, writing its name across the skyline in perfect cursive.

And the moon. I gasped when I saw it—a deep orange color that did not exist on my side of the Atlantic. It hovered over the city, marking these last quiet hours before real night came in and turned the volume up. Later the discotheques would throb with music until dawn, and the Spaniards would fly through the narrow streets of the Barri Gotic shouting from their motorcycles. But for now there was just the clink of dishes in the cafes, the low thrum of the subway beneath the street.

I closed my eyes and tried to save the memory.

The girls came and we ambled off toward dinner, choosing our café by one thing only—the presence of cava on the menu. As we walked, they said all the obvious things: “I’m going to miss this so much,” and “I love Barcelona.” I could hear the exclamation marks punctuating their sentences—even the sad ones—but I still enjoyed the enthusiasm in their monologues about leaving. As they planned future visits, and linked arms, I was reminded of Anne of Greene Gables and her bosom buddy, Diana. I was reminded of a lot of things I loved when I was a kid, which was why I had chosen these two dinner companions in the first place. “We’ll keep in touch,” they said. And they meant it. Here in the last evening of their first trip to Europe, everything was possible, everything was still to come. At this table, in the company of these two women, I could be something I hadn’t been in almost two years: young.

As soon as our cava arrived, we felt like toasting.

“To Spain!” Sara said.

We raised our glasses.

The food arrived. As if flattered by our praises, Spain had delivered a Catalan banquet: grilled octopus with lemon, roasted potatoes, thick, crusty bread covered in fresh tomatoes and garlic, hard cheeses and chorizo arranged in lovely patterns on blue ceramic plates.

Sara laughed through a story about her mother trying to call the Nikbor. “Doesn’t anyone speak English over there,” her frustrated mother had asked Sara when she finally managed to get her on the phone. Sara’s family was having a difficult time imagining a country where their own language was not used; “No one speaks English?” Sara’s sister had asked, incredulous, “No one?” The significance of Sara’s story hit home as she told it; I recognized how much of a risk this trip had represented to her, what a step it was to go so far away from the familiar and the comfortable.

I was overcome by all the things I wanted to tell them about travel and independence. How many competing priorities there would be: health insurance and car payments, and the ever-looming IRA, IRA, IRA! All the terrible monsters of responsibility, all the time suckers and money takers, the boyfriends who wouldn’t want them to go alone, the children who, someday, they would feel guilty for leaving.

I looked at my friends, who were holding their arms up against one another. “You’re more tan,” Hillary was telling Sarah.

“Maybe, but your tattoo is fantastic. Matt will love it. Will you try to convince him that it’s real?” Sarah asked.

The cava made me want to stop their conversation, to call their attention to the value of this night. To say important things aloud: You think you can always come back, but you will not always have these chances.

I didn’t say anything. Maybe only on Oprah can you get away with such grand, sagacious statements. Besides, this was not the time for teaching. I looked at our delicious meal and at the gorgeous city. We learn our own lessons; we teach ourselves. So I said only, “I hope you both always take trips.”

They nodded, they toasted: “To trips!”

“Now let’s all toast to something,” Hill said, “Each of us gets to choose. Anything you want.”

Sara began, “To our secret colors!” We laughed and clinked glasses.

“To Matt,” Hilary giggled, “I’m sorry! I know we’re having a girl’s night. But I can’t help it! I really wanted to say that.”

I smiled—really smiled—thinking of Harvard, and then of all the boys who’d made me fall. Of how incredible it was to be in love like that. The long-distance phone calls; wanting to curl myself up and crawl into my lover’s voice. The patience simple things took. A subway ride felt interminable: Just get me there. Just get me to him. Those memories had seemed so far away since my father died. They were things I had felt in another lifetime. But here was something—distant, but familiar—an old friend whose face I hadn’t seen in a long time. Not love in its sad, last measure, or in the throes of loss or good-bye. Not love in its placid, comfortable middle. Here I was, across the table from the first, wistful moment of love, beginning.

That’s when it happened.

(Bear with me, because this part is hard to explain.)

In college, I studied art history, and at the Met once I had seen Degas drawings. They were charcoal sketches of women (prostitutes probably, but that’s only important to differentiate them from his ballerina drawings, which are very different). These drawings were almost violent—the way the thick, black lines cut across the paper, separating the women’s bodies from the surrounding negative space.

Before coming to Barcelona, I had felt like those drawings: crisscrossed with dark slashes of depression. My sadness marked me like a heavy, jagged outline. It kept me from making direct contact with the world, everything was muted, distant, seen through soot and smoke.

All the loss I’d experienced was messy and, the same way charcoal gets all over your hands when you draw with it, grief had smudged over every part of my life. For the past year, I had had trouble remembering happiness. I had difficulty remembering Harvard before he failed me. And most disturbing, I could not remember my father’s face except as it had been during his illness, ravaged and sharp with cancer.

But sitting at this meal, I got the feeling, the same one I had had on the mountaintop and at the Picasso museum and the flamenco concert. This time it was less fleeting. It rose up from inside my chest, my heart, my throat. It wound itself around me like ocean water. It was slow and total; it stayed long enough for a vision to form. The way one ray of sunlight breaks through clouds after a really violent downpour, a single, clean, pure memory started to tunnel its way through the darkness in my head.

It was a very particular memory from my sophomore year in high school. We were waiting for my prom date to arrive. Dad was wearing a navy blue sweater with three wooden buttons on the front of it, near the collar. He looked vibrant and strong. His head was thrown back and I saw every detail of his face. Not his sick face. His face: healthy, handsome. I heard his laugh.

My memories of him had been drawn over with so much sadness; the whirring of the machines that helped his breathing, the sounds of his soft crying, his thin frame doubled over, listless, in his chair. But like a bird released, this image of him came into my mind and filled my eyes and ears. It rang. It rushed. It was as present and real as the food on our table. And, just like that, I got my father back.

It was my turn to toast. Still hearing my dad’s voice in my head, I smiled at my friends. I didn’t need to tell them what I was toasting to. I raised my glass and drank.

I wouldn't think about it till many weeks later, but the name of that street in Barcelona was the Passeig de Gracia. I noticed the street sign for a last time the next morning, on my way to the airport: the passage of grace.

Passage: an occurance or event. Death.

I came back to Philadelphia and--after almost a year of barely holding my life together--I finally allowed myself to crash. I admitted for the first time that my relationship with Harvard was over and that I needed to create a life in this new city that did not include him.

Passage. An act of emptying.

I started talking about my dad. I started writing again. I spent day after day in my office with the door shut, hoping my co-workers wouldn't hear me cry. Eventually tiring of this, I started therapy with a very nice woman named Laura who told me that everything that had happened to me sucked, and that what was still ahead might suck too, but that--if I was patient--it would all someday be ok again. I let myself believe her.

Passage. The process of passing from one condition or state to another, as in the passage from childhood to adulthood. A journey. A path, over or along which something may travel.

I made a home. I made friends. I wrote a story that won me the chance to study this summer in Prague. I slept with a world-renowned musician who introduced me to ten thousand kinds of touching when he played Prokofiev on my naked back. I auditioned for American Idol and sang for my father, "Someone to Watch Over Me."

Passage: a segment of a composition, especially one that demonstrates the strength or virtuosity of the performer or composer.

Grace: (n.) Mercy; reprieve; gracefulness, charm; amnesty; beauty; pardon; prayer.

Grace: (n.-- my definition.) If life is a movie, then "grace" is the moment when the soundtrack kicks in. Nothing flashy. Something exactly perfect for the action of the scene. An acoustic guitar. One singer’s voice--a Billie, or a Joni. The kind of voice that’s beautiful because it’s been through things; the kind of song you take with you on road trips.

Grace is a song you sing along with every time you hear it. Even when you think you can't, or when you don't really want to. Because it's just that good. And, though you know the words, and though you know the ending, grace (n. -- still my definition): the thing that opens you up and leaves you ready for more.

This year. This black, dark year.


I moved to this city in love, part of a partnership. I remember walking through Rittenhouse Square in August of 2006 and feeling as though I was on the verge. At the crest. Exciting things were beginning. My father was alive. Harvard was all the things I thought I wanted him to be.


Tonight, all I can do is shake my head, thinking back to all of the changes that came. So quickly, so quickly my father was gone. And Harvard, too: I remember standing at my father's funeral without him: The plane tickets aren't refundable. I wish I could be there. Me telling him, "It's ok. I understand."


And then, again, when he decided to throw a party for New Year's. A little over a week since my father had died, and I was expected to be a hostess. "It's fine, if we can just keep it small. Close friends," I asked. Of course, he said.


There were people at that party I had never seen before.


When I fell in love with Harvard, I fell in love with the calendar we made together: my vision of our days and years. We functioned, I thought. We hosted dinners and did the shopping and decided things as a couple and laughed some and loved some, and I suppose, looking at it now, it was tablespoons and wine glasses and thank you notes and he was handsome and a prince, really. On paper.


The whole thing was paper. Wedding invitations, birthday cards, sympathy notes: the way all of those are perfect, squared up, neat representations for things that are, in truth, deeper and more joyous and more jagged than paper can convey. Invitations are gorgeous, with velum and pristine, creamy card stock, but the reality of the party is that the hem of the bride's dress will be filthy by the end of the night. Someone will drink too much. Someone else will sit in the corner and feel jealous of the dancers.


I did not know it then, but I know it now: Harvard and I were paper. And you cannot build the life I want--cannot support the life I have--with paper.


And so.



Let it all go. Let go clean, easy sentiments and choreographed, precise calendar days. Let them drop into crumpled bunches, soar away in paper-airplane arches, smolder into dust and clouds of ash.


Bring in what happened: Harvard offered a delivery of white flowers and a note instead of himself, and I stood in the greeting line, thanking strangers for coming, and knowing that my boyfriend had lost his last chance to ever know my father.


Harvard was a coward and a cut-out, and I left my New York life and lost my father before I realized it.


Bring in what happened: my father was a vital man with a throw-his-head-back laugh who loved October cold snaps, and would let me eat the olives in his glass of brandy every time. People drove six hours and stood outside in Wisconsin December to tell me and my family that they would miss him in remarkable ways: miss his hands, his early-morning rises. How he had made them notice their own lives.

My father was a good and smart and loving man, and he died anyway, too early, and with too much pain. But my father's death and my father's pain were a pause, not an ending. And the way I miss him is blood, not paper.

The rest: let it go.

December 19th was the one year anniversary of the day he died. I had been waiting for it, scratching off the days from the prison of my last year. All of the fear. The last-time's. The loss. The whole of 2007 was lived by comparison--what was he doing this time one year ago.

And then on the 20th of December, there was no him to remember.

Today, I am sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco. My father was dead when my brother moved here. I have no memories of our family spending Christmas in a place where there was still so much green, so many flowers. Today--every moment since I woke up--has been entirely new.

The landscape of my grief is changing. Let it change.

I am leaving the grid of last year's calendar days, moving off the page. Let me move.

I can see, in my mind, the dates and their disconsolate record. But I ask them now to be finite, bounded things.

I fold each one, carefully. They honor a great man. They honor a dark year.

I send them out as boats into a current.

It brings me to my knees, this terrible blessing.

The End of Days

Tonight I will let go of this memory. And this one. I will be a great, dark tree. I will let fall the days like leaves. Let fall each sad, dead moment. This one. This one. My father crying and crying. My mother laying across his body. The black bag they zipped closed in front of our Christmas tree.

So many people in my life would say, "Shhhhh." Would ask me to keep the secret. "Shhhh, don't talk about it."

But it happened.

All the squatting, plastic machines in our living room, the tubes across our rugs. A hospital bed between the bay window and the sofa. We watched The West Wing because we could not speak. Shhhhh. We could not say what was coming.

We could not tell it. Not a single word was big enough. I stopped listening to music. There wasn't a note--not strummed or beaten or sung--that could put sound to it. He asked me to help him: "Girl," he asked me, "do you have any words of wisdom for your dad?"

And I, who have so many words, who copies Faulkner passages for the love of those beautiful words...a myriad of immolation and abnegation and time.... I, who have poem upon poem...here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life....

If my boundary stops here
I have children to draw new maps on the world....

...and we and the words and the world are emptied into a dream--

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow....

I shook my head and looked down at his hands. I have no words for you. I have no words.

I felt how soft his skin was--skin that had never been soft, getting thin now, thinner and thinner. Thin enough to see the universe inside him, all the destruction and decay. Life gone berserk...blood and heart and lungs. Cells, like planets, exploding.

...rendering death and forever with each breathing....

Father, all the words I could not muster. I had none. I have none still. It can't be written. I couldn't have known or told you...love and loss and sorrow...they are the color of water...they are the taste of snow...impossible. Impossible.

Larger than I can carry.

Calendar

As the year marches forward, I track the days like this:

What was happening last year? In the beginning of October I remembered the day we had to put my father's dog to sleep. And the anniversary of the day he called me, crying. Last year, around this time, he had pneumonia.

And soon the harder days will come. The day before Thanksgiving when he sat in his chair by the fireplace and told me the results of the tests. That nothing had worked. That he had six months.

In reality on this day last year (we did not know it then) he had 42 days.

Forty-two days. Til I would get the phone call at work. Til I would feel that strange sense of relief. It is over. Thank God. It is over.

I recognize now that the relief was just temporary--a small feeling. One that could actually be processed. Unlike so many of the others that were (and still are) as big as planets. Taking up so much room inside me there is not space for anything else.

The last thing my father said to me was, "I love you, Girl." He said it as I left my home in Wisconsin. Through the medication that by then had left him slumping in his chair, barely able to lift his head, he looked at me from the living room, clear and sharp and strong for one last second, and told me that he loved me.

I wish I had my father's eyes.

That night they were like razors.


Soon after that, he stopped talking altogether. I would call anyway, and we would sit on either end of a phone line and listen to each other breath. Sometimes I would tell him that I loved him or tell him about my day, but mostly I would just clutch the phone and know that it was the last thing that would anchor me to him in this lifetime.

I have not yet reached the stage where I feel he is with me after death.

I seek him out whenever I look at the ceiling or the sky. I do catch him in moments of clarity: a goose gliding across the water. A sparrow that hops across my path unexpectedly. Birds give me hints of him, but nothing makes me feel like he is always here.

I am hoping that changes, but I'm afraid it will not. I am not religious: I have no sense of where he is now. I guess I feel he is part of everything, but then I become selfish. I don't want him as a blade of grass in an Alaskan meadow or a speck of dust on the foot of a cow in India. I want him here. I want him only in the things that I touch, that I see. I don't want to share him with the universe.

So then I'm back to square one.

I tried to fall in love this summer, and I failed miserably. I saw the whole episode from a distance. When we had sex, I floated above or stared past or emptied out or became as still as a blade of grass, as far away as dust in a foreign land. I told him about my father and he tried to take my mind off of it, to make me laugh. It doesn't work like that I wanted to tell him. I did tell him.

My summer boyfriend was a doctor and he told me about a new experiment. Some study they did on patients who were dying to test the life-after-death hypothesis. If you do truly start to rise above your body, he explained, then you should be able to see things in the ceiling. So the scientists hid shapes in the ceiling above the almost-dying patient's beds. Whenever they began to die, and the physicians brought them back, they would quiz the patients. Did you see anything, they would ask. Was there anything unusual about the ceiling?

He told me this, and I began to sob. He told me because he thought, as a scientist, it was interesting. All I could think about was those people, being tricked in their last moments. Feeling peaceful as they saw themselves begin to rise. Suddenly shocked back into the present world. Did you see anything? The doctors scrambling around them with notepads. Any shapes in the ceiling? Later, the patients would understand that they had failed the test. That there had been no peace. They had not seen the purple triangle, the red square, the yellow diamond. There was nothing to rise toward or to.

Then I thought of my father. Of how I had wanted to believe that he had felt himself rise upward. Had felt himself expand toward peace, becoming larger and greater and everywhere, including within me. Beneath my skin and curled inside my ear. In my eyes, my heart. That he had seen and known. Had risen and flew.

I sobbed and sobbed. My doctor boyfriend said things: Let it out. You've never let me see this before. I wanted to hit him. I can't let it out. Still, now. If I start, I will never stop. It can only come out drop by drop by slow drop. Time will not heal it, but it will give me the lifetime I need to drain the resevoir. If I let it out in gushes, I will drown.

The History of Loss

I have done this thing before. If I want to remind myself of all the times I've said the words, asked the questions, made the phone calls and taken the walks, all I need to do is scroll down the list of dates next to this entry. There they will be:

The night in Riverside Park. October and Dan. The end of my first relationship with a grown-up (read: someone who had more than ketchup and beer in his fridge). Struggling for weeks to identify what it was I was feeling. Why it was that, suddenly, I was back to college and sitting by my phone, waiting for Dan's call, when, for all the months before, I had felt so confident. So certain I was cared about. And then this odd change in his behavior, taking me from my happy role in my new adult relationship, to memories of dorm rooms and confusion and smoky bars and Left Behind.

I remember when I realized The Talk with Dan was necessary. I remember understanding all at once that he had introduced me to a new way of being loved: to dinner parties and dates arranged ahead of time and this lovely thing called Intimacy that went along--like an unbelievable wine pairing!--with Sex. It hit me so hard that I picked up the phone almost immediately. He had raised my expectations, and now I could not go back.

"We need to meet," I told him. Riverside Park in October and good-bye to Dan.

There have been so many others since then. Train station (David). Via email (M the time he cheated). Silently (Aron). Gradually (M the time he loved me back).

I have stood on street corners and felt the moment brand me, knowing from then on that His will be the face I will look for--on purpose, on accident--in every crowd. I've stared at my feet and mumbled the difficult words, knowing as I've said them, that they are fossils already, hieroglyphs and cave drawings, on the walls of my mind. I will return to them a thousand times. Holding up my sputtering candle, I will attempt translation. I will unearth. Then bury. Then unearth again.

Died December 19, Age 63

Daddy, I will think of you every time I see a bird. A goose, a red-wing blackbird, a mallard, a goldfinch: I will know the difference because of you. I will notice the colors of their wings--the blues or reds or greys or blacks and think of you at our kitchen table painting those colors with so much care.

I will be the only girl in New York City who knows that you mount a wood-duck house at an angle so that the babies can get out of it easily.

Fall will always be my favorite season. Because the ducks are flying, yes, but also because I will marvel at the changes in the trees, and love the crispness of the air and its smell.

It has been my honor to have you as my role model, my teacher, and my friend.

You and I walked down our driveway once after a snowstorm and you told me to listen to how quiet the world was. We held hands and enjoyed it together. Wherever you are now, know that I will love you every day. And every day, I will wish you the peace and beauty of that snowy night.