The Ellipsis of Grief
The easiest thing to understand about death is the hardest to accept
Dad was always convinced he’d turn into Willie Nelson.
To realize how funny this is, one had to know Dad. He was buttoned up, as they say. A Vietnam sergeant who never hid the fact that he favored his pants pressed and his haircuts high-and-tight. He requested clamps for his birthday — every year. Punctuality was a virtue, as was regular coffee. No flavored syrups, no whipped cream, no frou-frou adornments of any kind. Coffee should taste like coffee was practically a commandment. Cuppa Joe only, please
And good God, did he get up early.
I blame my penchant for being a night owl directly on Dad’s early-to-rise routine, which for some reason compelled him to be wide awake long before the sun cleared the horizon. His early bird approach was so clockwork, in fact, that I consistently teased him for his 7AM wake-ups on Saturdays.
“That’s practically sleeping in,” I’d say.
He’d just laugh, shrug, and admit to backsliding.
And yet, despite all that, the vow that he’d eventually transform into Willie Nelson endured. He expounded on it gleefully whenever possible.
The chronology went like this: immediately upon retirement, he’d grow a ponytail and a beard. The greasier, the better, in both cases. Then, when his whiskers were shaggy enough, he’d buy a slow and ponderous motorcycle, festoon himself in cut-off denim, and haul ass out to the Grand Canyon in a full-on embrace of the vagabond’s life.
Self-aware to a fault, Dad knew exactly how silly this was. But it was the whiff of threat that made it particularly hilarious, the idea that he was holding it all together merely for the family’s sake. When the moment of truth arrived, he’d go from Major Dad to liberated stoner grandpa, and we’d all have to fend for ourselves as he went off in search of himself.
There’s always truth in humor. But Dad never got the chance to make good on it. In 2017, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare type of cancer that attacks the body’s plasma cells. Three years later, after a barrage of treatments, tests, and pain, he was gone.
The easiest thing to understand about death is also the hardest to accept: the finality. Death is replete. There will be no new memories, experiences, or conversations. No trivialities, even.
That last one cuts twice as deep once you’re face to face with it. The fact that I’ll never again see one of Dad’s missed call notifications, for example, is something that intensely haunts me.
The mind does odd things when confronting that sort of loss. Mine has turned inward. In the months following Dad’s death, a sort of “ellipsis” has formed in my brain, churning random dreams and memories out of my subconscious like successive dots in an unending string.
The first time I realized this was happening was the night after Dad passed, when one memory I’d completely forgotten about emerged from the gloom and attached itself to the end of the sequence.
I was a twentysomething living at home, “enduring” a post-grad malaise familiar to so many millennials. I use quotations there because, looking back, it was never anything more than a humiliating blip of self-pity. I had a roof over my head, food on my plate, and endless resources available to better my life.
Still, the despair was sincere. I felt like a loser, and everybody had to hear about it.
Indirectly, Dad was responsible for smashing that self-indulgence to pieces. And it all started with the doorbell ringing.
It didn’t ring often in our household, so just hearing it usually meant something interesting was about to happen. Opening the door, I was greeted with the sight of a small crowd on our doorstep. The family from across the street. A half-dozen kids peppered the outer edge of the brick walkway, their mother wrangling them. The father stood closest. Even through the dust-caked glass of the storm door, I could see the torment in his eyes. This was hardly a social call.
But it wasn’t until I opened the door all the way that I noticed the girl draped across his arms. His daughter, no more than seven or eight, and as pale and lifeless as the moon. She wasn’t breathing.
I picked up the phone to call 911. Dad was suddenly behind me as I fumbled to dial. Quickly, he scooped the child up, laid her on the hallway floor, and started administering CPR. The parents shook and sulked and prayed as he blew into her mouth. The girl’s siblings watched, wide-eyed and grave.
Seconds later, I stared dumbstruck as the girl’s eyes started to flutter. After a few moments, she sat up and began to cry, instinctively reaching for her father. I gawked at my own.
Who knows what I ended up telling the 911 operator? I’m sure it was incoherent — which had suddenly become a fitting descriptor for my sad-sack blues. Dad’s heroism had shrunk my personal gripes into microscopic blips.
The moment has taken on a surreal quality over the years. Time has a habit of laying a strange gauze across everything, sometimes ugly, sometimes beautiful. Today, the people in the memory resemble a diorama of fuzzy still life. Dad is the sole moving object at its center.
As I replay the scene over and over in my head, I’ve started wondering whether that little girl ever asked about him. If she tried to at least learn his name. And it occurs to me that, even if she had, those details wouldn’t be enough to convey the enormity of what he meant. They wouldn’t tell her anything about the enduring humility, the droll sense of humor, the near-supernatural patience, the stupidly wide range of elbow-grease knowhow…the list goes on. He saved her life, and she didn’t know a single thing about him.
That might sound like indignation, but it’s not. It’s led me to acknowledge that, for both that little girl and the young, self-pitying man with the phone hanging limp in his hand, Dad is now unattainable. Irrespective of the shares of him we already have — hers tiny, mine vast — neither of us will ever be able to get any other piece. We’re the same because we’re powerless.
And with that, another odd realization was stuck to the end of the ellipsis.
Dad didn’t have a funeral. Not just because of COVID-19 social distancing restrictions, but because he fully rejected the idea. His exact demand, delivered emphatically throughout his life (including after the cancer had ravaged him), was that he didn’t want people looking at his lifeless body in a box. He considered it embarrassing, pointless, and — though he would never use the word — grotesque.
I feel the same. But that doesn’t change the fact that grieving alone is a far different animal than grieving together. Irrespective of the pandemic, mourning Dad has been an isolated affair. Confined to my head, would-be eulogies manifest daily in that same endless stream of half-wrought memories and what-ifs. They will never exist in ceremony, as a speech delivered to an audience of fellow mourners who would treat them as the definitive word on a life lived.
As I wrangled with this ever-lengthening trail of thoughts, Dad’s cremated remains arrived in the mail. It had been nearly two weeks since he died. Incidentally, it was also Christmas Eve.
After I’d gotten the remains into the house, I spent the rest of day ruminating on how I’d carried him up the driveway in a USPS parcel no bigger than a cooler. I thought about how the box felt unusually heavy. About how it might be disrespectful to leave it on top of the coffee table. About whether it was a demented lark of fate that it arrived like a rush-order gift. About…
The thoughts kept coming. There was that dot-dot-dot again, that string of indiscriminate emotions dangling down, confounding me. From moment to moment, I wasn’t sure what I was going to think or feel, what sort of indiscriminate sketch would pop out of the darkness.
According to clinical psychologist Sue Morris, inconsistencies can arise between expectations and reality when a family member dies, especially when the cause is terminal illness. “The greater the discrepancy,” she writes, “the more difficult it can be to adapt to the death of a loved one.”
I suppose that’s where I find myself now. Before Dad, my experience with grief was purely as an interloper. I’d never been touched by it, not directly. Nevertheless, I thought I knew it: Tears and regret and depression. The seven stages. Those old chestnuts we see in movies and read in books.
But grief, it turns out, isn’t so clear-cut. Mine has been fluid and unpredictable, haphazard even. It’s been funny and disorienting, too, sometimes all at once. It’s a catalogue of arbitrary questions and neglected memories and monotonous dreams. It’s endless conjecture, not all of it conscious or deliberate.
Grief, in other words, is guesswork.
Which brings me back to Willie Nelson. I’ll never know if Dad was destined to level up into his hillbilly hippie fantasy, or whether he’d ever shell out the clams for a noisy, smelly Harley.
Knowing Dad, he’d probably find that funny. As much as he retained the discipline and guts of that army man he once was, in the end, it wasn’t the sure thing that delighted him. The punchline, forever and always, was to keep you guessing.
