Chapter 39

MY MOTHER IS IN CALIFORNIA. At some point there had been discussion about my taking time off from college and going with her, but a decision is made; hers—not the one I chose. “You need to go back to school,” she had said, sitting very close to me. I was crying. She was insistent. So pragmatic. So convincing. “You need to get on with your life . . . staying with me won’t help either of us right now.” And so a few weeks later, I am back at school and she is there, in California, alone.

I don’t know how my mother manages in that big empty house, memories of my father, his empty office in the backyard, the stunning realization of his absence assaulting her at every turn. She takes classes on stock investment and finance, educating herself in areas my dad usually took care of. She sees friends, stays busy, and seems to keep her sadness at bay.

Jodi, too, is moving on. She goes to nursing school; a decision motivated in part, by watching and being impressed by all the nurses in the hospital taking care of our father. Like my mother, she, too, seems to be coping. Why can’t I?

Sometime during that year, I take a class called “Death and Dying.” We learn how different cultures and religions deal with death. We learn the different rituals, burial procedures, and beliefs, and we see how occupation, religion, and social class all affect mourning. We talk about suicide and the terminally ill and the death penalty. We read a book by Elizabeth Kubler Ross and learn the various stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.

At the end of the class I receive an “A.”

Proof positive I am healed, prepared to move on. I have accepted my dad’s passing. Only I still can’t say “death.” I say “passing.” I am extremely anxious and experiencing what the textbooks call “complicated grief” or “prolonged grief.” I am having panic attacks, moments where I feel I can’t breathe. I am becoming agoraphobic, but I don’t think this is even a word back then or if so, rarely used. I don’t know what is happening to me. I am prescribed Valium. Here’s what it does: Takes the edge off. Here’s what it doesn’t do: Bring my father back.

 

 

I go home to LA on a school vacation, but it doesn’t feel like home. I want to sleep all day and stay awake at night. In the darkness I can pretend my father is just upstairs, and there is no light to challenge that.

Lying in my twin bed I think about when I was little, spending hours playing hide-and-seek with the dogs. I would tell them to stay and I’d run off and hide, sometimes flying by my dad in the hall. Then I’d call them, trying not to giggle when I heard them bounding up the stairs to find me. I wonder if my dad is just hiding. Behind the door or crouched behind the living room chair. Maybe behind the tree in the yard. I think about that possibility, or the alternative one: that I may be losing my mind.

Dick Berg and another close friend of my dad’s and the family’s, Hal, call and take me to lunch on separate occasions. What do we talk about? How do we fill that enormous empty space at the table?

I see the sadness in their eyes, the strain in their smiles as their hands rest on the table, folding and unfolding.

On television I sometimes see or hear about my dad when I least expect to. One night Johnny Carson suddenly is talking about The Twilight Zone. Referring to my father, Johnny says, “God bless him.”

Back at school, I do just what I need to do to pass. I go to my classes, eat meals in the cafeteria, and meet with friends, and Ken, though less and less. I inadvertently exile myself into a stunned silence. A month turns to another, nothing defining one day from the next except the cold, and then, suddenly it would seem, the green of summer.

A year has passed since I have seen my father, and we are back at the cottage. It is the eve of the anniversary of his death. I need to find a Yahrzeit candle by sundown and haven’t found one in any of the grocery stores. I am desperate. Finally Rochelle remembers that her cousin knows the son of the owners, the Geldwerts, who own a Mom and Pop grocery store on Plain Street in Ithaca. We race to the store and I ask the woman if she has Yahrzeit candles, and she walks me over to the shelf. I feel tremendously relieved, and then speechless when I see the numbers tattooed on her arm. The Geldwerts had been at Auschwitz.

At sundown I light the candle. It burns on a shelf in the corner of the room. I stare at the photograph I have placed beside it. There, my father looking at whoever took the picture. My father smiling, alive. I check the candle throughout the next day. It continues to burn long past the hour my dad died, long into the dark night. There is some comfort in that as we all pass by it.

John Palmer, a friend and one-time agent of my father who I met with my dad in Chicago, sends a rose bush with small, red buds. It arrives in a floral delivery truck driving slowly down the cottage road. Rochelle helps me place it beside the others my dad planted.

Although she lives in Ithaca, my sister and her husband spend time at the cottage while she studies for her nursing degree. I often see her sitting cross-legged on the couch, a stack of books by her side. Sometimes I see her just staring, and I’ll wonder if she’s thinking about Dad. Occasionally I will sit beside her and will start to say something about how she’s doing. I want to ask her, “Do you miss Dad? Do you think about him all the time?” but the words never come and I sit, for the most part, silent, watching as she highlights pages in her book and then looks back at me with a sad, empty smile.

 

 

Another slow passage of days, weeks, and months, and again I am back at school. My mother encourages me to push myself through. I try. I try to stay focused on my classes.

One day a friend introduces me to someone she had dated and who later became a friend of hers. He graduated from another college two years before. We begin to go out.

I knew he was bright. I thought he was kind. Within months he asks me to marry him. Despite the drastically limited knowledge we have of one another, and the fact that he tells me if I say no, we can’t see each other, I don’t want him to vanish, and so I agree.

I don’t know what either of us was thinking.

Hal, now in psychiatrist mode, calls me one night from California. He does not mince words. He says, “I’m not sure you realize what you’re doing. You are trying to replace your father.”

On some level I am certain I already see this. I must realize that, for my part, I am completely absent in this relationship. It eventually collapses. Not, though, without the inevitable ending: the anger, the rush to pack things, shirts, pants, everything pulled from drawers, then shoved into bags; the irate words, his, mine, slicing at one another, the car rushing away, and all the drama and sadness and misery you’re quite certain will never fade away. And it doesn’t fade for me, not for a long time. But this is a grief I can touch, I can deal with and manage. This is a tangible grief. I almost welcome this loss because it is a surface sadness that seals up the much greater loss. It distracts me from grieving for my father.

I move back into my dorm room and at some point call Hal. After an hour or so, he calls me back with a name of someone to talk to. The person he recommends for me attended the same medical school as Hal. Dr. Feinstein practices out of his home, here in New York, and as it turns out, not more than a few miles away.

 

 

It takes me a while to make the appointment—months in fact.

I sit quietly in Dr. Feinstein’s office every other week or so. I offer virtually nothing. Dr. Feinstein nods a lot and doesn’t say much, either. Silence pervades in those early sessions; expectations feel minimal, manageable. It’s a steep price to pay, though, to just show up, and the panic is increasing, the agoraphobia escalating, too. I am becoming more and more incapacitated. I don’t want to go out, don’t want to be with friends, don’t want to be in social situations where I’ll have to come up with some explanation as to why I am suddenly fleeing. One day Dr. Feinstein asks, “Why do you think this is happening?” Initially I am frustrated with him, hate him even. “I don’t know,” I spit back. “Why do you think it is?” He stares back, offering nothing. My heart is pounding, my hands sweating. I want to leave. I start to. “Sit down, Anne. Put words to what you’re feeling.” What he is saying feels so stupid and clichéd, but I am afraid enough that I try. I look at the books on the shelf just past him and say, “Because I miss my dad? Because I hate every morning that I wake up and realize he’s not there, that I’m not going to see him ever again and because I don’t know if I can accept that, live with that, move on.” I know that my face is bright red, I’m shaking, but I’m talking, I’m finally talking, and Dr. Feinstein is, too. “I think that’s exactly right,” he says, and if nothing else, it’s a start.

My appointments are switched from every other week to three times a week. Months on end. Things seem to move in slow motion, I feel water-logged, deadened. Still, in June 1977 I graduate from college with a degree in Elementary Education and a minor in English. On graduation day, Ken pulls me into the pond with him, a tradition at the college. We are soaked and shivering and ridiculous, yet, for a moment, I am laughing. There’s a photograph: me looking like a normal girl.

This is what I remember from that day: my dad is absent in those rows of applauding parents; I have a diploma; the water is freezing; I am already numb; the cap and gown need to be returned; I need to do what Dr. Feinstein is suggesting. I need to go to my father’s grave. Yet still, I can’t.

Sometimes I hear one of my dad’s commercials. I am not focused on the product or the message, only his voice. “Stopping pollution is a people thing. It means cooperation and understanding. It means getting together and working . . .” Hearing him is surreal in the solitude of those months. Initially jarring, it becomes comforting. I close my eyes. My father is there.