The Body

Yes, yes, it's been a long time since I've written, long enough that I had to check to see what I wrote about last (surprise, surprise, it was Jonathan. Man oh Manischewitz, am I shocked). What's kept me? Why the lull in verbally transcribing my long face? 

My father died on December 3. 

My father died on December 3, and after schlepping my dogs to Orlando so my son's girlfriend could watch them, flying to Charlotte with Griffin, organizing and emptying my parents' mom's house because she and my dad were in the middle of a move down to South Florida when my father died, tying up the loose ends I could manage to tie while I was there, renting a car and driving to Orlando where I picked up my dogs and schlepped them back home and then having my mom come stay at my house while awaiting the closing on her new place, I just haven't had it in me to write. 

I wish I knew what to say. I wish I knew how to feel. But I don't. I have a very, very good friend - my oldest friend, actually, who I've known since I was four - whose wife is a self-confessed sociopath, and one of the things my friend relayed to me is that her wife said she's always acted the way she feels like she should. She would observe other people's behavior and act like that in similar situations. Now, I'm not copying anyone's behavior, and I'm pretty sure I'm not sociopathic, but I'll tell you, I'm at a loss right now. 

By the time my father died at roughly 2:15 in the morning late Saturday night/early Sunday morning, he'd been living several states away from me for over sixteen years, so saying I miss him isn't right. Other than talking to him when I would call my mom and he would answer the phone, something that had become semi-frequent in the last year or so, we didn't interact much. That's not to say we weren't close although I don't think we were although who's really to say what defines closeness? He did send me a shopping bag with Hudson's and Jazzy's faces imposed onto each side after they died and a recycling-bin mug to thank me for making him see the importance of recycling and little magnet hooks for my fridge after I admired his and a pretty little bag that looks Mexican since that's what I think I was in a past life, and he did ask me gently if he could ask me what happened between me and Jonathan when the two of us broke up and send me a vegan recipe for cacio e pepe afterwards telling me he hoped I felt better plus other little emails he thought would interest me here and there, so going back to being close, were we close? Maybe not particularly, but writing this now, it occurs to me that he did always try to show me he loved me in the ways that he knew how. 

And yet here I am, two weeks and two days after my father died, two weeks to the day after I walked into a funeral home and saw his unprepared body lying under a sheet, not knowing how to feel. I know that I loved my father, and I know that I'm sad, but I also know that if I compare the way I feel now to the depths of sadness I felt when Hudson and Jazzy died and the torrents of tears I cried for them to the tears I've cried for him, I'm ashamed. The sadness - if sadness is the word because more than sadness, what I feel is disbelief; I just can't believe that my father is no longer here - isn't omnipresent but rather it accompanies certain thoughts. I don't have a father anymore, I'll think to myself, and then I'll picture him lying under that sheet. I'll look at the yahrzeit candle glowing in my kitchen, and although I hadn't forgotten my father was dead, seeing it will make me realize it again. I love you, Dad, I'll whisper, but once away from the candle, it's like I once again forgot-but-not-forgot. 

Having a dead parent is a weird thing, or at least it is for me. I'm forty-eight, yes, a good age to have a parent until, far older than many, and while it makes no sense, the thought that I'm an orphan drifts through my mind (yes, I know I have a mom; I'm telling you, my thoughts make no sense). Still, it's not a feeling of sadness that I feel with that thought, but emptiness, I think? That's it. When I think about my dad having died, when I think about his no longer being here, when I think about his no longer being with me, I feel empty more than I feel sad. Fatherless. 

Like -

like something is gone. 

Like something is gone. 

No. Not like something is gone; 

because something is gone. 

Something is gone. 

Something is gone. 

My father. 

My father is gone. 

And now I know. 

What I feel is empty and fatherless.

I am empty and fatherless.

My father has gone.