I traveled often between Brooklyn and Boston in the months after my mother’s death and was busy in both cities. In Boston, I was still cleaning out her house, moving things into storage, and helping my sister finalize our mother’s estate. In Brooklyn, I was teaching and finishing my thesis. I didn’t have enough time for even one of these tasks, or to be patient with Marko or my friends who hovered nearby and asked me, again and again, how I was doing.

Death liberates you for a short period of time. You get to do whatever you want. No one can be mad at you, and you never have to explain why you want to do something or not. Marko and I had a running joke—one of us would say “My mother died!” whenever we wanted to go out to dinner again, or take the train to Boston instead of the bus. I loved the excuse, but I never made it because I was sad. I wasn’t. I’d preformed sadness at my mother’s funeral but only because I thought I had to.

My friends, some of whom had been around for my dad’s death as well, came over one by one to make dinner for me. They offered food with big eyes and sat, ready to listen to me cry or complain. But all I could do was scarf down their baked cod and crack jokes. They’d come expecting something that I couldn’t give them. They thought they’d find me transformed, if only temporarily, by the loss of my mother, which would be particularly hard for me because I’d also lost my father.

I began to resent everyone’s expectations. I became defiant, proud of my lack of sorrow. Both of my parents were dead, and I was fine. People who still had their parents seemed like wimps by default. And people who’d lost parents and were really sad about it? They were wimps, too.

It was easy, and enjoyable, to tell myself that my parents were bad parents. But I kept thinking that there had to be a primal connection that made all of that irrelevant. I retained my childhood fears about being defective, and they shook my bravado. I wondered if I wasn’t sad because something was wrong with me.

I read grief memoirs, hoping they’d stir up sorrow, but they made me feel lacking as well. I wasn’t devastated or depressed like those authors, and could not connect to the books’ blue beauty. Sometimes, I’d get jealous. Not of the writers’ pain, which was too powerful and destructive to envy, but of the relationships that had caused them to be so burdened. I thought it was incredible to be close enough to your parents, to love them so much that you were bedridden with anguish when they died, so comatose or unmoored that you ruined other relationships and found the world empty.

I justified my ambivalence by telling myself that I wasn’t very close to my parents, and since my family wasn’t a very happy place to be, there just wasn’t much to miss. I felt lucky that my parents had died when I was youngish. I’d never have to put them into homes, witness their memories evaporate, or support them financially. But what I’d glimpsed in their early letters nagged at me. Instead of fading, my curiosity grew.

As I cleared out my mother’s house, I filled boxes with my parents’ most personal belongings and brought them with me to Brooklyn, where I arranged papers and photographs into piles on my bedroom floor. One was for the letters that my parents sent to each other. Another for those my mother exchanged with her lifelong friends Sylvia and Chip. There was one for the condolences we received after my father’s death. Some were typed on official stationery from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Nigerian Banking Corporation; others were scrawled in store-bought cards, the sender’s words written under a preprinted statement. There was a stack of my mother’s speeches and reports for the Sierra Club; a stack of articles about my father from The Economist and BusinessWeek; one for photographs of him, one for her, one for them together. Some items lay alone and apart: my father’s 1953 certificate of American citizenship, which stated that he was born in Poland, and which he’d corrected by hand to read “UKRAINE”; my parents’ wedding invitation; the psychological and educational evaluations I’d started receiving when I was ten; and a soft doll, the size of my hand, that had belonged to Yuri.

I sat among these piles and questioned every item in them. I arranged letters chronologically, then by topic. I spread out photographs like decks of cards, picked them up, shuffled them, and spread them out again to see if something new was revealed. When they provided no answers, I stood and circled them, studying them from across the room as I paced and talked to myself. Depending on where I stood, the piles looked like a cityscape, an audience, an orchestra, or an insurrection.

I returned most often to the letters my father wrote to my mother because they were the most confounding. I read them silently and aloud until I could anticipate and recite long passages.

In July 1966, he wrote:

Life seems so much more mechanical without a loving sweetheart to look forward to—to talk to, to laugh with, to smile at and with. I love you dearly.

And in February 1971, he told her:

Whenever I leave you I feel a powerful and wonderfully terrible series of emotions…there is an emptiness inside me, a true aching of the heart. It is a longing and a dull sorrow for leaving behind that which I love.

His descriptions of his infatuation were unraveling lyrics of openness and devotion, and they made me furious. I’d always believed he wasn’t able to be the person I’d needed him to be, and I had found that idea comforting. If he was deficient, then our bad relationship was inevitable. But his letters to my mother proved he was capable of tenderness and suggested that he’d chosen to behave very differently to me. I knew the love people had for a partner was different from the love they had for a child, but how could it be so different?

I spent months wrestling with this material and months ignoring it, pushing the piles to the edges of my room and pretending they weren’t there as I graded papers, watched movies with Marko, or got undressed. I could have packed it back in the boxes I’d brought it in, but I knew I wasn’t done. I returned to the piles, followed ideas, got lost, crawled back to reality, then went in again, hoping a new path would lead me to the answer of my biggest questions: How, and why, did they become the people they did?

One day, I decided to look further back. I picked up my father’s high-school yearbook—he’d graduated from Hibbing High School in Minnesota in 1958—which I hadn’t opened since I was a teenager, when it had been shelved in our living room next to Nomads of the World. I’d first reached for it to see what a dork my father had been, then went for it again a few years later when my aunt mentioned that my father had gone to school with Bob Dylan, then known as Robert Zimmerman, to see if Dylan had been a dork, too. Then again when I bragged to friends that my father had gone to school with Bob Dylan and needed proof.

When I opened the yearbook in my apartment, acceptance letters from Harvard and John’s Hopkins, which he chose to attend for premed, fell out, as well as a certificate from the National Honor Society. Accustomed to my previous interest, the pages fell open right to Dylan’s junior-year photo. I had to wrestle with the ones that followed to find my dad.

In his portrait, my father chose to stare at the camera, while the other end-of-the-alphabet seniors looked into the distance. Next to his name was the phrase “Let’s get down to business.” His accomplishments and affiliations were listed to the right: student body president; president of the debate team; member of the German, science, and social studies clubs; the prom committee. Notes from his peers and teachers spoke to his work ethic and future success. “Keep on plugging the way you have been, and you will be on top, where you belong…”

Even as a teenager, my father was motivated by a desire to be great and the expectation that he would be. When I was in high school, kids like him were a mystery. They had visions of their future, of themselves, big goals, and the diligence to work toward them. They seemed to understand that high school was an unglamorous part of the journey to real life. For most of high school, I operated on the belief that I would fail, that it was pointless to try because my future would be messy and forgettable. He put that belief in me. Who put his beliefs in him?

I let the yearbook dangle from my fingers and looked at my parents’ things. I’d been working as if what I had would form a complete picture if I just arranged everything the right way. Instead of seeing piles of stuff, I saw the spaces between them. I could keep reorganizing and examining what I had—or accept that what I wanted to know could only be found elsewhere.