A Collection Of Thoughts On The Death Of The Father

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I place my rose oil next to a violet tincture by the Midnight Recovery Elixir of my just-dead father. I needed to take his toiletries from his cabinet in California. I needed to bring them back to New York, to smooth them over my living body, to let his blood pulse under them just a little longer. 

I smell the bottles, moisturize my face, and ask: how do I form myself out of what is left of you? Your illness is my backbone. Your suicide, a symptom, and your spirits are in my pantry filled with flowers.

The Zohar describes death as conception, arriving in stages. Thirty days before the “first” death, it is announced, and the four elements agitate within The Dying One: earth and air and fire and water, finding flow or ferocity depending on the life lived. How did these elements conversate in the flesh body? This temporary ingathering of metals in bloods, oceans in bones? At night, the Zohar says, the Dying One’s soul begins to wander around, straining for a glimpse of what's to come, a portion of paradise perhaps. Or something else. There is fear, of course. And trembling.