Remembrance

A year ago today, we buried my father. My friends and I got into a traffic jam with the hearse in our rented Kia, a car my father had previously suggested, sarcastically, I might want to lease. We were wedged between the luxury vehicle hauling the giant casket of his bled-out mass and some coastal live oaks at the base of Mount Baldy. The ceremony would be held roadside; afterwards, he would be lowered unceremoniously by a crane after we all went to a “luncheon” in a strip mall sports bar.

They had asked me to help carry his coffin, but I refused, so crushed I was already by his weight.

So I crushed together the plants that evoked him, mixing a thanatotic unguent I would use to infuse the dirt he would become. I brought lemons, red roses, and a branch of rosemary foraged from our Pasadena Airbnb lawn. “For remembrance,” I remembered. After the mirthless service, I asked to be given a moment with the empty earth hole awaiting his coffin.

The tall, thin undertaker (my friends and I called him Slenderman) conceded solemnly, and told me he would chaperone me to the grave. What does he think? I am going to bare my breast, keening, throw myself into the earth?

We trampled the longer dead bodies of others, including my dead baby brother, their small grey stones. Slenderman looked away, indicating that now was my moment.

I knelt in the grass on my black cotton skirt, peered inside. Dark. Surprisingly cool. The smell of old wood, live roots, wet rocks, and something not-quite-not-human. It was only a few feet deep, a few feet wide, and I could hear my tears as they plummeted onto my father’s forever bed.

In my mind’s eye, I saw a drawing of Persephone in D'Aulaires' Book of Greek Myths - my favorite childhood possession. There she was, young daughter of grain, pulled down by the waist, her flowers falling, uncontained. She had been dancing around in the fields, fertile, vegetative as was her wont, foraging, but now down she went, wrapped in the arms of the God, the Dead.

As a child, I had wanted to be an adherent, a Hellenic worshipper, a garlanded priestess of those fucked up Olympians. I had wanted to dance in a flowing tunic, palms upturned in Ouranic revelry. I had wanted to imagine a sacred world that included girls and had wondered why we didn’t seem to have places for them anymore.

I thought: Every year, Persephone disappeared from the land of the living. Every year, when I disappeared into my father's house, I learned to live inside my head.

I wished I wasn’t thinking this as I scattered fistfuls of Whole Foods red rose petals, the Bezos-bloodblossoms with no smell or thorns. These flowers had no life so violent as those my father grew, a five-minute drive from here in the Otherland of Childhood.

I thought: This is it. Until we die, no one becomes more worthy of life. You will never become more worthy of your soul.

Late that night, after the burial, we heard the excruciating howl of an unidentifiable animal. It was calling out as if in the most profound sorrow, or agony, or hunger. Like being skinned alive. Or burned. It was a horrible sound, so lonely and emblazoned with pain. We all heard it.

Said nothing.

Drank champagne.

Smoked cigarettes.

Looked into the dark cleft of night.

My father had once told me that a black bear had wandered down from Eaton Canyon and had swum in his pool. I wondered if he thought of that when he submerged himself after bleeding out for a while in the kitchen. He had been bitten by his own distinctly un-ursine five-inch serrated blade, over and over, but not very deep. How long did he last with his life leaking out?

Spirits haunted his house. They filled his fridge, his bar, and every surface of every counter. My sister's new husband took shots of Yamazaki with our dad’s new assistant. I had never met him, but was told he was “like a son to him.” My friends and I called him Glengarry Glenross.

---

It was the year of my divorce and his suicide. It was a year of losing home after home. It was a year of sickness and inflammation, of confusion and Ativan. It was a year of periodic high-altitude asceticisms so close to the sky that planes were like vineyard flies. It was a year of black trumpet mushrooms and glances backward. It was a year of whirlwinds. Whirlwinds of fire.

And then the new year started with a lot of the old year in it. My father’s house, haunted by those spirits, went up in a torrent of flames, burned down to the ground.

Everything is now nothing.

On the plus side, inherent emptiness is the bright foundation of being. On the minus, emptiness is a caustic hole at the center of a psychotic whorl of a world without meaning.

And I have been sick this year. Bone sick. My father’s house burned while I was in the bathtub. I lay in the water with my arms crossed over

his chest

my chest

his chest

just as his arms were when he was found, after he climbed out of the pool he bled out in to die.

My sister thinks he was re-baptizing himself. I think his mammal body already knew death through water. He had died in a world of water to be reborn into one of air. Perhaps he was retracing his steps.

What was he feeling, what was he thinking as he lay there that Friday on Shabbat HaGadol? Did he see Venus among the stars? Through the bare arms of those coastal oaks, their legs wrapped in ivy and periwinkle? Was the light from the helicopter still shining down on his eyelids? Were the police still calling him to come out unarmed? He was unarmed, he was undressed, he was unthroated. Could he answer them with blood spurting out of his newly ripped mouths?

When I visited the house after he died, I looked up through those same oak arms and saw a baby hawk. It seemed to be learning to swoop and glide. I thought its parents might not know the best way to do it. They just teach him what they’ve figured out.

I had wept in the wind, took some of those oak leaves, thought of how his blood watered the life there; how that unflinching life looked to his soul as it moved out through holes he made in his neck, dissipating a person into the past.

Everything is gone.

Now, I spoke to his black cashmere Brooks Brothers blazer, the one I took with me from LA. I told it: you are lucky to be alive. I saved you from the fires.

I took the blazer, some cashmere socks, and his ivory-encrusted lederhosen. I took Lolita, Mein Kampf, The Invention of the Jewish People. God, he hated the Jews.

I found an envelope my former stepmother sent containing letters I had written to him, school photos, and drawings from the 1980s. She noted: You probably don’t want these, but I found them in our remodel.

I found a manuscript he wrote at the bottom of a box, went thrifting in his divorce settlements, his framed prints: I took the one I was looking at with his girlfriend when she asked if my mother actually had big boobs. I took his toothpaste and face wash and cologne, needed to bring them back to New York, to smooth them over my living body, let his blood pulse under them just a little longer.

I smelled the bottles, moisturized my face, and asked: How do I form myself out of what is left of you? Your illness is my backbone. Your suicide is our symptom. I have never felt so close to you.

I found that photograph from 1972 that I had kept thinking of. He is running across the finish line of a marathon. He looks pursued, driven as if impelled by a perverted gravity pointed and persistent at his back. There is victory in his eyes.

I remember: we are running the rough Devil Winds at the university track. You are muscular and fast, you eat up your lane, you bound. I feel small and erratic, my little limbs unruly but like you, competitive. We are alone together in the rhythmic pounding, pulsing, muscles pinching, fatigue, the burst of oxygen in the undeniable aliveness of the running body, pushed to the edge, pummeling beating, screaming sensation.

I can feel that I am made from you. We are driven by the same spirits.

When the LA fires started this past winter, I was happy my father was already underground. Safe. I thought of ancient Greek mothers ululating over the bodies of their war dead, tucking them into their earth beds.

When we had left his grave, I thought you’re mine. It was an odd thought. I felt fiercely possessive of his dead body, of his soul. Like I suddenly realized some special bond- we had come to the planet for each other.

They said his death was Shakespearean. No, he died like Jon Keates. He took his hand to his name. He slew himself on the altar of his god; he raged violent death against death. He took it, grabbed it, and stabbed it.

Before he died, he laid out an installation of an empty trust and Matterhorm: A Novel of the Vietnam War. He took off his clothes and shoes. I have them now. In the bathroom after the burial, my sister and I held them between us.

Smells like dad she said.

Smells like psychosis I thought.

That acrid metal smell, its poison shape, its little teeth on the blade he used to rip out his life. Smells like my husband.

Remarkably, one really can marry one’s parents.

---

When I first met my husband, I made a note of my impressions on my phone:

Given the precarity and certainty of loss, it’s a miracle that anybody loves at all.

Compensatory charisma.

I want to be more queer, but I have Stockholm Syndrome to the patriarchy.

A few months later, he proposed to me on New Year’s Eve at “The Artists’ Bar” in Norrmalmalmstorg, best known as the point of origin for Norrmalmstorgssyndromet – Swedish for “Stockholm Syndrome.” On August 23, 1973, Jan-Erik Olsson took four hostages during a failed bank robbery in the square’s Kreditbanken. He negotiated the release of his prison friend, Clark Olofsson (Sweden's first "celebrity gangster"), who was delivered to the bank by the Swedish police. Together, they held the hostages captive until the 28th, and when they were released, none of the hostages would testify against their captors. Instead, one of the hostages became Clark’s lover.

The first days of mourning were full of signs and symbols

I stood under a gnarled hawthorn on the bank of the Weiss River, white blossoms in full bloom, perfuming and pummeling down in a hailstorm

A short snatch of arc-less rainbow above the canyons of Chelsea

A squawking flock of green parrots and peacocks

The knocking dialect of California crows

A silent ancient oak and a bed of soft violets on Violet Road

After the burial, I sat shiva for seven days

Remembered the five remembrances

Hymned kaddish three times daily, and

Contemplated God as one

I searched for him in the wilds of myself

I yearned for him while he lived, and then waited for him to die

I reflected and raged, crouched and howled, wrapped my fingers around green branches and held on to earth

The portal of the future must open, it will dilate, inevitably, as death is born by the living

When a person dies, you inherit them