I was living with my parents, preparing for my senior year at Northwestern. The orange and blood August sunset washed the Oakville sky in a brilliant haze. We’d had a small pizza party celebration for my twenty-first birthday, just my family, Rose and her mom. At the end of the night, my dad, tipsy and happy, said, “Good for you, Lu. You’re ready to fly where the wind takes you.” His eyes were at half-mast and his skin felt clammy when he hugged me. Wobbling up the narrow stairs to his bedroom, he blew me a kiss. He was sweet like that, blowing kisses, speaking to me in optimistic clichés, especially after a few glasses of wine. My parents had offered me wine too that night, but I turned it down. In reaction to my father’s overdrinking, I’d become a teetotaler early on.
I went to bed the way I did most nights, listening to “Hallelujah,” the rumbling poem-anthem of a song by Leonard Cohen. I was asleep before the song’s refrain, awash in anticipation of my final semesters in college, feeling more adult at twenty-one than I’d felt the day before. In what I first perceived to be a half-dream, I woke to my mom’s panicked shouting. It seemed like it had only been five minutes since I went to bed, and I couldn’t make sense of her yelling, the sounds of paramedics scuffling and bumping about, and the baritone “Hallelujah” still playing on repeat.
By dawn I was standing in an over-bright hospital lobby with my mom and Doctor—White? Brown? Black?—his name was a color, only I didn’t recall which one. His mouth was moving, but his voice came from a tunnel somewhere else, saying that my dad had a stroke in the late-night hours and there was nothing to be done. My mom chimed in, robotic, and said that his skin had been blue-grey and cold by the time she noticed him, unmoving beside her. I was a block of ice, my nerves frozen in a state of alarm.
“He was intoxicated last night?” the doctor said, not waiting for a response. “We could do an autopsy…?” My mom declined the autopsy, unwilling to hear the results, saying what did it matter, he was gone now anyway.
A flurry of activity followed. Friends filled up the house, casseroles and cookies occupied every surface. Then came the small funeral and burial at the local Unitarian church. We weren’t members, but they were kind enough to host us anyway. The thing I remembered most clearly from that day was the casket dropping down, slowly, mechanically, into a brown dirt rectangle. I couldn’t reconcile my father with this wooden box and the white roses splayed on top. Since the night of his stroke, everything moved so fast until that moment at the hillside cemetery when it all slowed down. It took an eternity for the coffin to inch down into the grave. My mom threw another rose, red, down into the dark hole and I imagined it dripped its color onto the white ones, staining them.
I called my college advisor and told her I wasn’t coming back to school. She offered me a delayed start to the semester, but I declined. Paralyzed by a chainmail of grief, I was unable to think or feel or venture outside our tiny tidy house. My mom, stuck in her own sorrow, didn’t comfort me or ask comfort of me. She seemed still and far away, perched on the edge of her bed, like a baby bird about to tumble to the ground from a swaying tree branch. She clung to each day quietly, a beating heart her only moving part. I stayed in my room and watched Hunger Games movies and Kpop videos. Rose tweeted at me and texted me, but I told her not to visit. I didn’t have the energy to talk, and if she had tried to hug me, I’d just start crying again.
Growing up, my mom had been a boulder, steady and strong, the solid ground under my feet, anchoring me and righting my missteps. My dad had been sky, open and limitless, urging me to any possibility. “Be an astronaut, be a singer, anything you do is good, Lu,” he’d say. Now with Dad dead and Mom wholly changed, I was ungrounded yet bolted in place, staring into a dim unfamiliar horizon. Things carried on this way for a year, I didn’t think of the present or the future, only wallowed in the past when my father was alive.
The weekend before he died, we spent Saturday morning on the public tennis courts. I finally managed to return one of his fireball serves and even won a few points. That afternoon we warded off pretenders and hogged the reflex tester at the Museum of Science and Industry. We liked to track our speed stats and maintain our status in the top ten. That night, we’d gone to the Oakville Pub, a raucous sports bar where most parents didn’t take their kids. I ate chili with extra onions and cheese, and he guzzled beer. I relished time with him, and he loved doting on his only daughter. When his eyes began to look glazed and faraway, I called Mom to pick us up.
Dad was a minor-league alcoholic, the type who mostly drank at home, became bleary and happy, and went to bed early. One terrible time though, he got drunk at my senior prom. He was a chaperone, which was embarrassing enough, and I was on a first date with a shy, smart boy I’d liked for a while. My dad either snuck alcohol in, something a student would’ve been expelled for, or he snuck out to his car to drink. I was slow dancing with my date and saw Dad slump down on the bleachers like a sack of laundry. Teachers and parents rushed to help him as a circle of students looked on. Two adults carried him out and took him home. I told anyone who would listen that he had the flu and a high fever, but my date and the other students knew the truth. For months afterward, I couldn’t look anyone in the eye. My dad never set foot at my high school after that, not even for my graduation ceremony, and I never spoke to my prom date after that night.
Over the years I fought off my own urges to drink—oh how I wanted to—and only once, on the evening of Dad’s funeral, did I succumb, guzzling white wine until I wept in the corner of the church parlor. For a long time after that I was as sober and cold and hollow as a tomb.
My pragmatic mom, I later learned, almost left my father because of his drinking. He passed out at their tenth anniversary dinner table and she said she was done. But in the end, she decided her life with him was enough for her. He was mostly a cheerful drunk and they shared passions for academics, civics and me, and so she stayed. I found this out years later, and when I did, I understood why she was so steady and quiet. She was holding on, staying on her chosen path, but without hope for more. “I love him. And that’s that,” she’d said.
My love for my father was complicated by being ashamed of him and afraid that it was genetic, and I’d become a drunk too. Still, his death left me bereft. Even though I was angry with him for messing up his life and probably contributing to his death, at the core of my heart I burned with love for him. At my young age, and despite my sheltered upbringing, I understood that to love someone meant to accept them, that if you knew someone fully, faults and all, and accepted them anyway, that was love. That’s what my mom taught me, both by her words and be her steadfast commitment to my less-than-perfect father.
A hot day eleven months after he died, I sat listless, half-staring out my bedroom window at a plump robin who stared back at me from his perch on an oak limb. A gust curved the branch sideways and the bird clenched his claws, holding tightly to his leafy seat. When the wind stopped, he cocked his head to one side, eyeing me with suspicion. Though of course he didn’t, I clearly heard him say, “Are you going to sit there forever?” It was the first coherent thought I had—maybe it didn’t come from the bird, but from inside my own head, I wasn’t sure, but it startled me into the present moment.
The robin gave me one more skeptical look and flew away as another breeze whooshed through the leaves. I squinted into the sunlight that danced through the branches of our old backyard tree; it was a different sun, brighter than on recent past days, more piercing. I’d deferred my senior year of college but in that sharp sunlit moment the chains fell off my limbs and it was time to go.
And so, I continued my scholarship at Northwestern in Evanston, several towns away from Oakville, my hometown, and from my mother who still sat in stony grief in her bedroom. Mom and I talked on the phone but it was like talking with a zephyr. She’d always been stolid; now she was barely a breath of air. “Lucy, be safe,” she’d breathe, at the end of each conversation and I promised I would.
Good for you, Lu, I heard my father whisper on the windy morning I headed back to school. I hadn’t been raised in any church, didn’t adhere to any doctrine, didn’t believe in angels or ghosts who whisper from beyond, but that day I heard him, and it pushed me along.
For the first time, I’d relinquish the faded familiarity of my childhood bedroom and live on campus, be fully integrated into college life. My dad and I had set it up before he died and I would follow through, despite the nudge of discomfort I felt when touring the dorm, surrounded by bodies and smells and sounds I wasn’t used to, sour perspiration odors, unexpected clangs and clunks from down long halls. One girl snorted and babbled as she slept on the common room couch, and some annoying soccer players yelled as they ran up the stairs. It was way outside my Oakville safety zone, but I’d suck it up, the way my dad and I had planned. Just one more year until graduation and my life could begin. Next year, I’d get a job, take an apartment in the city—the whole adult works.