To Dad, Through Our Necklace
     
It’s my eighth time calling everyone you left behind,
and I’m scared they’re starting to forget.
 
I’m scared I am too, Dad.
 
The day comes too quick, though,
It’s not my fault
the calendar eats its own.
 
Clawing at my neck,
Looking for that last piece I have,
                                                       Of you, 
                                                       from you,
this is                                                             to you, Dad.
 
I used to think I was allergic to the nickel in the chain,
I wouldn’t wear it for fear it might burn.
 
But I’ve only had it for eight years, Dad,
it had you for thirty.
And how is that fair, Dad,
that it knew you better than I did?
 
I’m sending you an invoice, Dad, for everything you’ve missed:
for the birthdays and Christmases, sure, but for the summers
and shouting matches and all the people we'd become, too.
 
It’s been eight years, Dad, I only knew you nine.
 
By the end of eight years, the body you live in is a new one.
All the cells that saw you
are gone.
All the hair you rustled,
the skin you touched.
 
I’m beginning to forget, Dad.
And I’m scared,
And I want you to tell me it’s alright
                                              even though we both know it won’t ever be,
because I want that lie,
                                              Dad, so 
say
you’re ok, Dad.
          even though your cheek winces at the pain.
          even though you're thinner now
                         than when you said it last.
 
And Dad,
I want to remember your face without a photo,
I want to remember your voice so I can change mine to match it.
Remembering it now
               is like
               trying to cup water
                             with     spread     palms.
 
Dad, it’s been 
Eight years, and 
Eight     years I’ve tried to be you, and
Eight               years it’s gotten harder because
Next year         I’ll have known your memory
Longer than I’ll have known you.
 
 
And I have no way of knowing
if that’s better, or not.
Because, for all I know, you were an asshole.
And I’ve been better off without you.
 
But all I have is this memorial in stainless silver.
And it’s cold.
And it’s lifeless.
And I don’t even know who it belongs to anymore.
 
God, Dad, it’s
                         been
                                        Eight
                                                       years.
 
And I’m running out of things to say to you.
 

     I sunk back into the warm water and brought the book down with me. At five years old, I didn’t quite realize what a bad move that was. At five years old, I also didn’t care. I read the sopping pages until the ink ran too fast for me to follow. D’Aulaire’s Book of Greek Myths, before its pages were too warped to read, taught me what the world had in store before I knew there was a world outside my apartment. It told me that every villain in the world came with a hero, and every hero with a villain. Good and evil incarnate lived in Olympus and in Hades. On Earth, you could be one or the other without much room for in-between. 
But, for all they taught me, I can no longer subscribe to the fantasies of my childhood. No, I wish I could say that the myths D’Aulaire’s taught me were true. I wish that the binary of good and evil could be that defined, or that it could even be accurate. Unfortunately, I did not learn the truth about the nature of the world when I was five. And I don’t claim to know it now. But when I passed a Hudson News on my flight home from school, fumbled out the money my grandma had sent me for my birthday, and slipped Tara Westover’s Educated into my backpack, I took a step closer to that truth by taking a step away from the myths I had been taught.

     In Educated, I saw complicated people. I saw Gene, a father who wanted the best for his children, but who didn’t know what that meant. I saw Shawn, a brother torn between his anger and his love. I saw a family divided by their inability to accept each other’s faults alongside their virtues; I saw the consequences of believing in the myth of good and evil. 

     When I was a child, it was easy for me to assign the roles; in my own mythology, my dad was the good guy, my stepdad the villain. When my parents divorced, my stepdad was filling shoes he wasn’t quite meant for. To me, he was taking a place — stealing something from my dad — and, in doing so, stealing a family from me. After their marriage, seeing more of him confirmed what I had thought. But when he started to lose his temper, when he took it out on me, my stepdad didn’t actually become any more evil — he just reaffirmed the role I’d already placed him in.

     Each summer, I’d visit my dad in San Francisco and spend each day in awe of this man I barely knew. He was good, I thought, just because. That’s not to say my affection wasn’t deserved — I still love my dad, and for good reason, but his “goodness” was no more earned than it was just me finding what seemed a necessary counterpart to my stepdad: since the evil existed at home in New York, there had to be good in San Francisco. So, at nine, when I watched my dad lose his battle with colon cancer, I cried uncomplicated tears.

     In May of 2016, I left class early. My teacher answered a phone call from the front desk, told me to pack my bag, and I joined my mom in the car not knowing what to expect. The day itself was unremarkable: the sky was dotted with clouds but mostly clear; it was just mildly warm. Maybe it’s fitting, then, that the news didn’t come with the same weight as it had when I was nine. When my dad died, it rained and I cried. When my stepdad died, I balanced between emotions — a sense of relief, a sense of complicated grief; I kept a blank stare that admitted nothing.

     The car pulled into a driveway I didn’t recognize filled with some faces that I did — my stepbrothers: 9, 17, 20 years old, and their families. I felt out of place — if it was the bond of marriage that joined us, then what were we now? Was my younger stepbrother still my brother? He walked over to me, and I knew the answer as I held him in my arms, as I felt his sobs rise and fall on my chest.
Later that night, as he fell in and out of sleep on my lap, I watched history repeat itself. I saw my face in his, saw him cry just as I had at nine. And I realized, regardless of who my stepdad was or what impact he and his actions had on me, he was gone. I would not pretend that our past did not exist; I would not and still don’t forgive all the memories my stepdad has left me with. But I determined then, as my brother rubbed the last of the first set of tears from his eyes, that this man could not have been wholly evil. At least not in the sense that I imagined that word.

     The reality is that “good” and “evil” are caricatures. They suggest absolutes that reality often fails to replicate. For all the times I felt scared to go home, there were just as many times that I listened with admiration as my stepdad related some advice or laughed as he cracked a joke. But because the nature of each of those words negates any sense of an in-between, because we imagine them so separately, I find it so hard to remember the good times. Any recollection of a happy memory seems to diminish the gravity of a painful one.

     But I don’t think it has to. In my mind, there is a nuance that escapes these words, a nuance that the language we use should aim to address. When I relate stories of my family to my friends, they often jump to their own moral conclusions. Recognizing good and evil has become a badge of merit in itself — it makes one a good judge of character. But if people must be either sinners or saints, we end up excusing behavior that seems uncharacteristic of them.

     Two years ago, I went back to San Francisco for the first time since my dad’s death. My mom and I walked to Crissy Field, and I knew that each step I was taking was filling the same footsteps I had each year before. We found the spot where we had spread his ashes six years ago and laid a bouquet of yellow roses — my parents were big Pablo Honey fans —across a tree that’d fallen nearby. While we listened to “Creep,” play on repeat, my mom and I talked and watched the waves roll in and out of the bay.

      I learned that day that my dad did not leave for California out of choice. He had cheated on my mom. 

     For a long time after, I couldn’t accept that. There was a dissonance between the man I had loved—even after his death—and the man who had actually existed, and I couldn’t rationalize the one with the other. It was easier to deny the “evil” and cling to the good I needed him to represent. In Educated, I learned, there was another option: to deny both and accept the good in him and the evil in him as facets of a larger identity rather than as identities in themselves. When Tara left home, when she traveled from degree to degree and, eventually, when she left her family behind, she did not idolize the memories of her family. But she did not demonize them either. She accepted them for what they were: complicated, flawed, human.

     If we continue to believe in this myth of good and evil, if we continue to place an emphasis on that binary, we risk not only mischaracterizing those who lie somewhere in the middle, but also excusing acts that fall at either end. My father was not a hero, my stepfather was not a villain. Each was great and each was awful in their own wicked, human ways, and I do their memories a disservice when I remember them for anything but the totality of who they were.

     So, I don’t want to enforce these categories anymore. I will no longer play into these myths: good and evil just aren’t good enough.

1. pro forma

Graham Glenn, 59, of Brooklyn, NY, passed away on Sunday, August 25th, 2019 following a two-year battle with liver cancer. He is survived by his wife, Jane, and two sons, Lucas and Hugo.     

1. ex ante

I, Graham Glenn, of Brooklyn, New York, revoke any former Wills and Codicils and declare this to be my Last Will and Testament.
 
            Dad wasn’t talking. But he’s got three months, if that, and sometimes that gives him the right.
            The three of us — dad, the nurse, and I — were sitting around, just waiting. Waiting for what, I don’t know. But he doesn’t walk anymore, or doesn’t like walking, so we do a lot of sitting. He was leaning back in this old, wrinkled recliner and looking out the window with some glazed look over his face, and it’d been a few minutes, with him just like this, so I turned to him and asked him the same question I’d asked him five minutes ago, the only question I knew to ask.
            “How do you feel?”
            “All, alright. Yes,” he said, coughing a bit.
            The timer on his watch went off. He got up and I didn’t know whether to offer a hand as he shuffled over to the long seven-day strip and shook out three, skinny pills. His shaky hands guided them to his mouth. He slid them one by one over and into trembling lips, each pill resting a second on his tongue. His finger lingered a moment on his chin; all the while he kept his eyes focused out the window.
            Dad used to be a lawyer, “when it meant something,” he’d say. Had this office — all mahogany and a fern, like a thousand other lawyers. Offices like his always had some greenery. I guess it livened the place up a bit, made him feel like others were comforted, as if he seemed more personable when relative to a plant.
            From where I sat, though, Dad didn’t look like he’d ever been much of anything. He’d given up the hiding, started waxing his head like a mirror. His eyes sunk back like they were hiding from something. After a while, I had to look away, so I turned to watch the window with him.
            “Dad?”
            “Hmm,” he sighed.
            “You looking at the beach?”
            “Mhm. Pretty…,” he stumbled, “the waves and such.”
            “Remember how we’d walk there, when I was younger?”
            “Little then, real small,” he said, his eyes losing a bit of their glaze, “Let’s go tomorrow.”
            I looked at the nurse, “Yeah, Dad, let’s go tomorrow.”
            “Real little, Gamie. And the birds,” he muttered, “always liked them.” 
            I chuckled a bit and let the silence lie. Out the window, I could see the waves crashing onto the beach, down where we’d. Calm today. The wind didn’t seem to have much pull.
            As the sun fell lower, casting first the beach and then the apartment in its dying light, the room got quieter. The waves picked up, and I started to feel the wind pushing through the curtains. I was about to get up to shut the window and draw the blinds, when I thought that Dad might want to catch the view.
“Dad, you see those waves?”
            “Dad?”
            An orange bottle fell from a limp hand and made its way across the room, letting out a rolling, rattling groan as it tumbled over the hardwood.
 

1. in articulo mortis

            Ma kept a bible in her purse and clutched the thing like she thought it might help. When she felt the light was too strong through the curtains, she pulled them shut. “Don’t want no one looking in,” she sighed and shook her head. 
Dad’d been in the hospice for a few weeks, which meant that the nurses had started bringing a pastor on their afternoon rounds, just in case. Lucas joked, “He should get a rewards card,” and mom gave him a nasty glare. I was just glad they all could come, long drives and all.
           On the TV hung in the top corner of the room, some syndicated sitcom was running the same episode for the third time today.
            “You know, Graham, it might do you some good to try some exercises. I heard from the nurses that even just sitting up can have a huge influence on your health. Exercise, sure, but also morale and all that,” mom paged through notes she’d scribbled down.
            “Graham, are you listening to me?”
           On the TV, a large man in a three-piece suit missed a few golf shots, then slammed his club down in rage. Dad let out a small chuckle, joining the chorus of the laugh track on the speakers.
           “If you can pay attention to that thing you can pay attention to your own health. Come on, Graham.”
           “Don’t bother,” he said, not looking her way.
           “Don’t say something like that, Graham, that’s morbid.”
           “Yeah. Something like that.”
           Dad lifted a bony arm that looked like it might break if he let it drop.
           The chunky golfer let out a scream and dad turned back to the TV. Lucas laughed with him. Mom shot them both another glare. Dad turned to me, vaguely motioned a cup with a stiff hand, his IV dancing off his wrist.
            “Water, Gamie?”
            “Sure thing.”
           I turned the corner to the nurse’s station. “Some water for room 104, please.” In the hallway, with the pitcher in my hand, I heard the tinned laughter again, followed by mom: 
           “For Christ sakes, Lucas, can you turn that damn thing off?”
           “Oh come on, let him laugh.”
           Then a scream less comic. I turned into the room and dropped the plastic pitcher to the floor. 
            “Graham?” The remote slipped out of his palm and fell to the floor with a crack.
            “Dad?” The batteries rolled out from the case, whining as they slid along the floor.
            “Oh my god, someone get a nurse. Graham!” A frantic beep from the EKG. Lucas’s hand shaking as he tried to start compressions.
            The laugh track on the TV kept ringing out through the room, leaving a dull, metal echo that remained long after the show cut to black. 

1. ipse dixit

Where is my good death?
my happy family, 
sick nurse, 
IV?
 
What are my last words?
Tell me, so
I can write them down,
be sure to get them right.
 
Give me the easy way
if that’s what I deserve,
if my total’s in the black.
 
Where is my good death?
my varicose goodbye,
scribbled in formaldehyde,
a last epileptic fit.
 
Put on a show,
as my eyes close,
  I grasp for a goodbye
           with no words.
 
 

1. inter vivos

We, the witnesses, sign our names to this document, and declare that the testator willingly signed and executed this document as his last will.
 
            Dad’s smile looks fake. I guess I can’t really fault the home for that, though. Even if he were still here and really smiling, I’d probably think it was fake. It’s just unnerving, is all. I pictured it different.
            “We’ve gathered today to honor the memory of Graham Glenn,” the pastor said, stopping before dad’s name to make sure he got it right. Can’t blame him, either, though, he’s done it too many times before to make it personal. For him, it’s a job. “Before we continue, Lucas Glenn would like to share some remarks.”
            “The Oxford English Dictionary defines greatness as…,” I laughed, “no, I’m just kidding. Dad always said if I started a speech like that, he’d kill me.” I turned to face the casket, “Here’s your chance, dad. Give me your best shot,” I lifted my arms in mock protest, “… No? Alright then.”
            “When I was eight, Dad took me to a waterfall. It wasn’t all that special of a place, and, to be honest, it’s not all that special of a memory. It was one of our only trips. kind of a ‘less is more’ parent, huh dad?” I said to him. Mom sent me a bloodshot glare.  “But when I sat down to write this, it was what came to mind, so um, here goes.
“I remember we got to the top, we’d climbed these steep rocks and I’d narrowly missed some falls. He pulled me up and I felt the water run past my feet, and I looked down.”
 The stage was about fifteen feet from the front row, four from Dad. Or what was left.
           “It couldn’t have been more than like ten or fifteen feet, but, from where we stood, I could’ve been leaning out a skyscraper. Dad laughed when he saw my face.” I felt hot, scrambled for the next page. “He pulled me back a bit from the edge and we laid down in the fall, letting the tide roll over our arms and legs as we watched the sky run past above us.
            “And uh, after a while, when our fingers started to get pruny and the water began to run cold, dad got up. He walked to the edge and motioned for me to watch as he let himself fall backwards into the water.” I thought how similar he looked now to that moment in mid-air. “I rushed over, fingers clinging to the rounded corner of the precipice. From below, he yelled for me to join him. From above, though, I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell if it was deep enough to break my fall, couldn’t tell if I had it in me to jump, couldn’t tell if it was worth it. 
            “What I could tell was that I loved him, that I trusted him, that I knew he wouldn’t hurt me.” These are the things you have to say, right? “ I creeped to the edge, pulled myself up, and let myself fall as he had. In that moment, suspended in air, I was comforted knowing I was falling into that same water he had.” 
            “Dad was always there, even when he wasn’t.” I looked at Gamie, caught a knowing eye. Yeah, that’s comforting.“When he was away, at court or at the office, he was guiding us with his absence, showing us what it meant to work for, uh work for a family, for a better life. Dad wanted what was — best for us, and did anything and everything to get it.” I sped through these last sentences, didn’t want to linger with my shrinking throat. “I always knew that whenever I had to face something, whenever there were waters I was unsure of wading into, he’d already jumped; I could count on him to catch me.” I put my notes away.
            “But now I’m standing here, and I don’t know if the water in front of me is too deep or not, and you’re not here to catch me anymore.”
           I turned to the casket, “So, dad, what now?”

1. postmortem

           Dad gripped a coffee best he could between two hands and sat with his back to the café window, past which I could just catch a glimpse of the bay through the fog. Though his thin grey fingers shivered against the paper cup and the clothes he wore hung loose and baggy around the sinewy flesh of his arms and legs, he looked comfortable. He looked awful, but he looked comfortable.
           “I was researching this drug, Denalix, and it’s got good reviews online. Not a lot of side effects. Relatively,” I said.
           His thin lips buzzed, “Mhm.” The overhead lighting reflected off the dark pools gathered under his eyes; his cheeks were thin, caved inwards like the dents on the sides of a car. I could tell he wasn’t looking at me, that he was drifting, tired. I wondered if I should ask about his symptoms.
           “I was thinking I’d talk to Dr. Martin and if you wanted we could start next week. I think it’d be good for you,” I said, “better than the last one, at least.”
           “I don’t know, Gamie,” He took a sip of coffee, and his sleeve slid down past his wrist as he lifted the cup. Beneath the cuff, I could make out the thin veins of his arms, each a trail with circles in green and black. “I don’t know.”
           “Well, think about it. If you want to beat this — we — if we want to beat this,” I corrected myself, “we need to hit it pretty hard.”
           He sighed and moved in his seat to face the beach, and I couldn’t tell whether he was shaking his head or just craning his neck.
           “It’s so calm today, Gamie, can we not talk about this? I don’t know what I’d do if I had to swallow another set of pills.”

           I felt a response rising in my throat, so I sipped my coffee to stop it.
           “It’s so calm here,” he said, “Do you see those waves?”
           I couldn’t, the fog was too thick, “No, Dad.”
           “It’s beautiful, Gamie. They rise and fall with one another. The tide swinging back and forth, like a pendulum.”
           I leaned towards him across the table and tried to watch with him. His head shone in the sunlight peering through the clouds. For a moment, the dark circles lightened, his cheeks seemed fuller.
           “There’s trees there too, by the waves. I can see their shadows in the water. When they fall, they won't make much noise.” 
I could do with six more months of this. Maybe there’d be a dryness to his voice, a grey behind those eyes, but at least he’d still be here. I watched as his gaze swept over the beach, past all the trees and the waves. What was in that fog, what could he see that I couldn’t?
           Above us, the fluorescent lights let out a low hum. A cashier, armed with a broom, swatted the cheap strip a few times before giving up. On its own, the buzzing stopped. Signed and Declared by Graham Glenn to be his final will and testament.

         Mom was driving. It was late, and her head was bobbing up and down as she tried to stay awake. She wasn’t talking, but I wasn’t expecting much.

         Dad left a few weeks ago. It wasn’t exactly unexpected, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting. Before their marriage, she had a smile that never failed to bring a room towards her, and when I saw her sad, I knew it was a mood and not a state of being. I’m not exactly shocked that they finally came to a breaking point. It’d been months since I’d seen that smile, and I wasn’t so sure this mood would lift. “Sooner or later, Joan, I’ll do to you what you’ve done to me,” Dad always said, and I guess he meant it.

         “Mom,” I said, my words reaching out short in the gap between us. It felt fake. Mom was not mom anymore, she was Joan — but I wanted the difference not to matter. Step-, half-, whatever. She was who she was, whatever that meant to me now that it had to mean something. She told me she still loved me anyway, and I had to believe her.

         She ignored me and tried to keep her eyes on the road. The dashboard let out a beep to let her know she was swerving. A warm orange light the shape of a coffee. A warning that would never land. Sooner or later.

         “Mom,” I repeated, this time with a put-on sense of urgency, as if her response would change anything. 

         “What.” It was not a question. Not a response, either. Tired by years of arguing with a man who never changed, she went through the motions of a conversation, “Is something wrong?”

         Isn’t there? I wondered, tired as well. From the passenger seat, she looked as if she was holding up well. Was it any different now if it never mattered if Dad had come home or not? We never expected him to stay.

         Sooner or later.

         She drove on to the ramp and took a left — an exit I didn’t recognize. I looked into the mirror and saw the car’s reflection lead into a trail of yellow lines that each slowly faded into black. Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. I slumped down into the seatbelt and let the tension on my neck lull me to sleep. When I dreamt, I dreamt of Joan before Dad, of Dad before jealousy, of a life I never could’ve had.          Our lives drag on — beginning, middle, end. I was born; I will die. Joan was born; then she lived and will never hear the end of it. We weren’t the first, the burden was always there: in the men and women who came before us and the children and pain born thereof. You call your parents by their names once they stop being parents, you call your parents mom and dad to remind yourself of where you fit into the family, remind yourself that you belong — to them, to someone, somewhere.

         I woke up to Joan passing me a bag of Fritos. I stared into the gas station as I pumped the gas, eyeing the other lives playing out behind the glass, the Cheetos on the counter and the people who would only ever exist to me in this one moment. Tightening the gas cap, I wondered what lives they wished for. The lock clicked, the car left, and I forgot all about them.

         Joan kept adjusting the heater, trying to find a balance that suited her. Every few minutes, she’d lean to either extreme — we’d freeze and thaw in intervals as she forced herself to stay awake. 

         “Do you want me to take over for a bit? I honestly don’t mind.”

         “No, it’s fine. Just read me something or put on a podcast.”

         “Are you sure? You’ve been driving for a while.”

         “Trust me, I’m ok. Just give me something to listen to.”
         The man on the speaker had one of those crooning, condescending voices that made me feel guilty for not caring more about climate change or whatever other issue I should be paying more attention to. When I looked at Joan, she seemed not to hear him. I guess I couldn’t blame her, as long as he was doing his job.

         “You know, you can talk to me,” I said, turning my head to face hers.
         She took another ramp and crossed into the carpool lane.
         “I know.”
         On our right, a motorcycle flared its engine, wheeling away on its own.
         “Do you want to? I don’t bite.”
         She sped a bit as she passed the car in front.
         “I don’t know, maybe in a bit,” as she turned to me, I saw a small sliver of her smil—
         Blur. Jerk. Black. Objects in the mirror.          I didn’t wake until after it was all over. Wrapped in a blanket, sitting on the side of the road, I stared at nothing, focusing ahead until my vision faded in on itself. Dad was on his way, probably, when he heard. Or soon after. She wouldn’t have wanted him to come, wouldn’t have wanted him to sign the documents needed to confirm the logistics and bear witness to this. He verified it was her. Or, verified the wallet was hers. They’d rushed the body off already to give some hope to some other family in a hospital a few miles away. Maybe she’d prefer that. They’d make better use of it than she would, she’d have joked. Before.

         Dad came over to me and put a hand around my shoulder. He tapped lightly on the small of my back, looking away from me off somewhere into the trees. I didn’t notice he was there until he left. 
         “Hey, are you okay?” the cop asked.
         “Yeah. I will be.”
         “Do you have a ride?”

         I looked at Dad walking away, then looked at the wrecked mess — tangled metal bending in on itself, broken glass, a license plate ripped down the middle. Mom’s seatbelt was torn where they’d cut her out, the side mirrors were strewn across the road.

         “Yeah, I’ll call someone.”  

(Names and some details altered for privacy)
 
     There was a breath on the other side of the phone, and then nothing. Mom and I knew somewhere, three thousand miles away in San Francisco, nurses were rushing to pull out tubes and pump an already-stopped heart back to life. We knew there was a phone hanging from an empty receiver, bouncing up and down on the tangled cord that carried our final, unheard goodbyes. We knew what the steady beep of the EKG meant, but neither of us could bear to hang up the call. Then, out of rage or jealousy or carelessness, my stepdad felt it necessary to shout from his room at a sobbing, confused nine-year-old and his now-widowed mother to silence their grief. Emotion, it seemed, violated his order. Perhaps it was some display of male authority, an acknowledgement that he had won the fight—he had outlived the other man, the other husband, the other dad. Now, he was in charge, and as he shouted, “Shut the fuck up. I’m trying to sleep,” I knew what it meant to be a man—to be his kind of man. 

     I printed out a picture of my dad—my real dad—and slipped it under my pillow. Feelings, I learned at nine, are best when they’re kept hidden.

     The extending door shut behind me, and the school bus continued its route. At each stop another nuclear family stepped out excitedly to welcome home their children—at mine, Sam stood alone. “Mom’s gonna be late tonight,” he said, rustling my hair. His hands were rugged and worn, callused from his job—the carpentry that reaffirmed his identity. “Only a real man could work all day on those tall scaffolds with only a beer or two to get him down,” he would comment, only half-joking. He’d had more than two beers that day and was lounging comfortably in his drunken stupor. To him, booze was a better excuse for his actions than to admit the cause that lay dormant in his genes. Years later, I would ask my mom why she stayed put. “To fix him,” she’d reply, an answer I could never understand. The fragile disguise of masculine normality he’d adopted hindered his potential progress—he would never listen to a doctor for fear of being “off.” Because he couldn’t accept the diagnosis, his bipolarity became my burden. Later that night, my mom came home from her own tall scaffolds and asked me what I was crying about. A crooked line across my knee serves as a reminder of that day—when I fell from a balcony and couldn’t explain to her how or why. When he told me the next morning, “At least I didn’t drop you on your head,” I knew what it meant to be a man.

     I waited as the wound healed then sealed then shut—and my lips followed suit. Scars, I learned at eleven, show how tough you are.

     Then he cheated, or at least my mom caught him this time. He gave into that desire that he always had to cover up—the lust he’d blame on the booze or the drugs or the whatever it was in the moment that he thought could excuse him. “I’m not a bad guy,” he must’ve thought, always shifting culpability from himself to the nearest person or thing he could scapegoat. “It’s just what guys do,” he said, as if to mean in the heat of that late January night he’d lost control of his body as masculinity overrode his free will. My mom forgave him. I didn’t. While his gender became an excuse, hers became an obligation. “An unmarried man his age is a bachelor. An unmarried woman my age,” my mom explained, “is a pariah.”

     A few weeks later, he drifted slightly over the double-yellow line and died in a head-on collision while picking up a basketball hoop for my step-brother, Lucas. I don’t remember my last words to him—after he cheated, I couldn’t look him in the eye. I had no idea what to feel or how to show it—since my dad’s death I’d known only that to cry was to be weak, and I knew that I couldn’t be weak now that I was all my mom had. But as I held Lucas in my arms and watched another sobbing, confused nine-year-old and his now-widowed mother grieve, I knew that I wouldn’t—I couldn’t—repeat John’s mistakes. I would be a different kind of masculine. As I whispered into his ear, “I love you and it’s going to be okay,” I knew what it really meant to be a man.

      I sat by Lucas as our tears dried and let him squeeze my hand until he couldn’t anymore. Stroking his hair as he fell asleep, I watched the same emotions fly over his face as did over mine years before. Brisk air danced through his curls and blew the fire at our feet. I knew what my life looked like after loss and saw that I had the chance to shape what that life would be for him.
Feelings, I taught him at nine, are not worth hiding. I hope he never thinks they are.
 

      I’d tried to visit. Phone calls were easy — to the doctors, to mom — but visits meant time, meant new memories replacing old ones.

    Dad’s voice crept slowly from the shadows, nearly drowned in the noise of the movie, Biutiful, that had already begun to play, “Come in.” As I entered, the light from the hallway crept across the walls into his studio apartment. Everything was open, all the drawers and doors. Clothes too big strewn across the floor, the medicine cabinet an empty metal reflection, bloody tissues in the bath. There were scratches that ran along the tan hardwood floor to a spot by the window warped by years of a chair’s weight, now bare in the filtered moonlight. I entered, closed the door, and let the darkness mold around my body.

    My eyes never adjusted to the light—I sat by him on the bed, but imagined myself under his arms, remembering the rhythm of his chest’s rise-and-fall. I wanted to ask if he remembered. But in the blackness, we didn’t speak. We just listened to the movie play:
      I could hear the bay through the open window, the drifting tide that dragged to the right. I wondered if Dad could hear it too, with his ears covered by the sides of one of the pillows propped behind him. 
      There was a flash of light from the TV as the scene panned over a snowy forest, and in the moment before the shot changed, I saw what was left of him.

    His eyes were hollow and sunken, his brows now cliffs above the steep drop to the cheeks which clung tight to his jaws. Where before the robe had simply hung loose, it now seemed to clasp desperately at whatever skin it could still hold without slipping fully off. Through the slip in its middle, I could see a thin plastic sac that spread across his flat stomach. Tucked tightly under his ribs, a clear membrane showed through, brown and rotten. Before I could reach for him, he dropped from the bed. The robe shuffled loose against his skin and his feet fell with a muted slap against the wooden grain. 
      I breathed deep and felt the brine drifting through the window cling to the back of my throat and sting in my nostrils. It seemed to whistle in the curtains, carefree, as it entered. Choking for breath, I turned to the figure I could barely see among the shadows.
      After he clicked the TV off, I wanted to go on watching in the dark. In the silence, I could hear his breath, his lungs rasping, raking for air that wouldn’t come. 

    “You’re not taking your meds, are you?” the air felt heavier, each syllable dragged down on my brow.

    “It’s not as easy as that, Alex. You don’t know what they do to you.” He was standing in the spot where the bed used to be, before it was moved, fitted for new equipment.

    “So what, after all that I’ve done for you, all Dr. Andrews has done for you? You’re just giving up because of what, some nausea? a headache?”

    “It’s not giving up if it’s a fight I’ve already lost.” 

    “Go ahead, then, give up. Just a few more months, and then you’re free, do whatever you want wherever you’re going. But let us have those, at least. Because that’s it for us, Dad.”

    “When your body is eating itself—”

    “You stop it. You cut it up, you take one pill or a thousand, I don’t fucking care, Dad. You do what you can to stay with us. Please.”

    “Alex, I’m sorry.” He took a half-step forward, bracing against the TV.

    I lowered my head, “No, Dad. You’re not.” I waited outside in the hallway, hoping he’d give me some excuse to come back in. Instead, I heard rain against the rooftop, and knew my door was closed.
 
    The memorial was on a Saturday. On Sunday, I walked to the bay. 
 
    In the parking lot, the smirking smiles of headlights and grilles seemed to be taunting me:
    Why would it be you? You think you loved him?

    The black jar, cupped between my waist and arm, wobbled as I stepped past the gate and onto the beach. 
I never thought it would be this heavy.

    The waves crashed, roaring against the shore, and people by the bayside ran back and forth to dodge the rising tide. With the wind pushing, the waves were always going—in, out—never a moment’s rest. I saw where he and I had swum by the low docks and waited, holding each other, for the tide to recede, for the seats to be safe again.
It was here.

    A long trunk lay in the sand, split through the middle by a storm. I stood by the one side and remembered when we’d sat together on the other, watching the boats sail under the bridge. I raised the urn to my chest, lifted its cap, and watched the wind carry the ash across the bay.

Inside the letter he’d left me, I thought find the same curlicues of script that I’d seen run wild through his old notebooks. Instead, I found short, choppy strokes in smeared, warped, ink, that I couldn’t find the strength to decipher.

    It started to rain. I sat with him, gripping him tight as the winds grew faster, as the families packed up, as the last of the ash vanished from the sand.

    I dropped the note to the wind, hoping it would carry his message back to me.
 

Saltwind is like
acidburn in the nose and throat.
but feels cold in your stomach
like rain in the breeze of
an August day that is just warm enough
to make you forget
what page it is on the calendar.
     
When you’ve realized,
          you’ve forgotten.
 
It feels like you’ve betrayed
that part of yourself 
that you consider good,
how ever-shrinking the care
with which you tend it is.
 
I planted black tulips in checker plots
as a reminder to remember
the day I thought I’d never forget.
 
But the deer know only
that the day is better fed,
and so in place of tulips,
                  I have stems
                             and no blossoms to speak of.
 
When I knew
            what it was to know you, 
I danced in the image
of who you were,
Took evening trips through
dreams of our shared past,
 
and tasted saltwind 
            when I came to
                                   in the morning.
 
That was your word:
saltwind.
 
And you used it to mean something
I could never understand, but
            I use it all the same
to mean the things you left behind.
 
The memories boxed-away,
The happiness long past shelf-life.
 
Your dictionary was dog-eared at M;
the sound which now holds
center-stage when I stare at the black lines
in my notebook: M is a hum.
A gentle remembrance of a sound,
              but not one in itself.
 
It caresses,
   holds ideas.
 
Warms thoughts until they are born
onto the page through ink-
                                              fear-          
                                                        pain.
 
M is the sound of curbwashed icemelt
when sun blinds
the snowpacked winter streets.
 
M is indefinable,
because I can’t read your handwriting.
 
But when I feel for a pulse
in its tear-smudged ink,
                         I remember your
                         fainting heartbeat
 
and the bristling touch of 
Saltwind, in the air
That held us,
                Me,
                just beneath your chin,
 
                                     I feel your coughs, still.
Bones 
              rattling
like chestrock.
 
Solid enough to hold me,
                but too distant now
For me
 
to place a finger on the sound
Of your empty,            drifting breaths,
                    Indefinable.
 
like the tempo of 
gridlock just past rush-hour
or the taste of your first, bad kiss.
 
But like the letter M
Or saltwind,
          I can imagine
          That I understand.
 
And can fall asleep to 
The lulling sound
off the face
I no longer
          remember.