Tag Archives: Death

How to observe the birthday of someone dead

Sleep late. Ponder your dreams. Feel queazy then remember you ate a jar of Nutella the night before. Get up when you’d rather stay in bed. Stare out the window. Watch the palm fronds whip around the parking lot. Text your mom. Mentally high-five Obama for his Selma speech. Grow morbid. Understand that your inborn disposition is far from presidential. Think about the birds. Wonder how the birds are doing. What do they do when it’s windy like this? What do I do when it’s windy like this? What do I do when my person is dead? Take a run along the ocean. Feel lucky to have an ocean. Feel lucky that he had an ocean. Smell the ocean. Smell it until your eyes burn. Try not to be depressed. Think of him casting his line into the surf. Think of him catching a big saltwater fish. Think of us eating it tonight at the party. Think of all the cake! Remember that there is no party. Consider having a party anyway because no one should be deprived of cake, especially since you’ve just determined cake to be a portal to the afterlife. Acknowledge the self-serving nature of this determination. Watch a beach cat devour a dune mouse. Note the cat’s resemblance to your childhood cat and the mouse’s to your childhood mouse, minus the blood. Come back to reality, which is death, which is what we’re all capable of bearing, according to our president. Cling to the reality of birds and fish, cats and mice, because human reality is a battering ram. Convince yourself that the man walking by is wearing flesh-colored underpants and isn’t just trying to show you his penis. Realize that you’ve strayed onto the nude beach. Admit that you’re the kind of person who’d probably wander around crying in a field of land mines as well. Forget the words to his birthday song because it’s been five years since you’ve heard it. Forget the words to everything. Just watch the seagull bobbing on the ocean like a flame you can’t blow out.

 

 

 

The Death Ship

I’m not sure why I wanted to post this today. It’s something I wrote in graduate school after my father died and I started reading the books on his nightstand. All quotes are from The Death Ship by B. Traven except for the Nick Cave lyrics.

How a Book Became Holy in a Dead Sailor’s Hands

Books are profane until they are last books. They look like plain things until they outlive you, when the stack is still tall and teetering on the nightstand and your side of the bed is empty. I’ve read books about ships. I’ve sailed the high seas in maritime stories. I’ve been on boats, but mostly I’ve just waded on through.

Walking down the creek, the sun splashing through the trees, I tripped forward to my death. I’d been trailing an unfamiliar birdsong, my heart transfixed by those little bird lungs. I fainted in the shallows and inhaled the current, cloudy from yesterday’s rain. Then I found myself in exile. Exile, at first made up of vague impressions: a bear on the bank, my toes turning blue with cold, a beloved woman screaming my name, a tractor pulling the ambulance that had sunk deeply in the mud.

The farm had been lit up that afternoon, all bright and clear with winter. I’d removed a tangle of branches from the egress of a lake we’d all skated on once. I’d paid no mind to the day turning dark. My work there was almost done. The waning light still seduced rocks and eddies further down the creek. My family awaited me, but so did that song in the treetops. I’d recreate it now if I could. But all I can hear are those beats of my heart, those erratic rhythms. Beating extra beats that day, budum, budum—you probably know the sound. I cursed myself as I stumbled, fell forward: “Stupid man, stupid man.”

Let me remind you: I’ve scaled water towers. I’ve climbed trees to heights unheard of. I’ve tripped acid on college rooftops. I’ve read the books that turn boys into men. And yet the truth stands: I’ve been on boats, but mostly I’ve just waded on through.

I’d worn special boots made for tramping through water, rubber soles suspended all the way from my shoulders, rubber all the way down, insulating my legs and my feet from the cold, for a time. I’d eaten eggs for breakfast, skimmed a Sunday newspaper. I’d read special books written for the dying. Books critical to my survival. Books written just for me.

Days before I joined the current—stupid man, stupid man—I lay in bed beside my wife, rereading a novel about a sailor on a death ship. The sailor had been dozing on the railing when the Yorikke’s engines went silent. Pause here to consider a fictional moment beyond this nonfictional moment. Something final is happening here:

Suddenly I was wide awake. I could not understand at the moment what it was that had made me so. It had been like a shock. Fixing my mind upon this strange feeling, I noticed a great quietness. The engine had ceased to work. Day and night there is a noise of the engine; its stamping, rocking, and shaking make the whole ship quiver. It makes the ship a live thing. This noise creeps into your flesh and brain. The whole body falls into the same rhythm. One speaks, eats, hears, sees, sleeps, awakes, thinks, feels, and lives in this rhythm. And then quite unexpectedly the engine stops. One feels a real pain in body and mind. One feels empty, as if dropped in an elevator down the shaft at a giddy speed. You feel the earth sinking away beneath you; and on a ship you have the stark sensation that the bottom of the ship has broken off, and the whole affair, with you inside, is going right through to the opposite end of the globe. It was this sudden silence of the engine that was the cause of my awakening.

Shortly after I inhaled the murky water, my blood ceased to warm my body like the steam that scalds the engines of the Yorikke. The cold slipped into my rubber suit. The pulse stopped sounding in my wrists. My vessels went still and numb. I never knew how loud a body was until it went quiet. Then I awakened on a lonely ship.

I can’t tell you yet about awakening.

As a young man I heard the ship’s engines. The engines drove me across continents. They carried me to Alaska, to England. To Haiti and the Grand Canyon. I manned the outboard motor of a fishing boat, I shuttled my children between islands in the Chesapeake. I saw the breaching of a humpback whale from the aft-side of a party cruise. So many times I ferried my family across the water.

In the shippy story on my nightstand, a sailor’s vessel leaves the port without him. The cabin of the ship held all the sailor’s earthly belongings, including his proof of citizenship. He stands on the dock and watches his whole life drift away from him:

I have seen children who, at a fair or in a crowd, have lost their mothers. I have seen people whose homes had burned down, others whose whole property had been carried away by floods. I have seen deer whose companions had been shot or captured. All this is so painful to see and so very sorrowful to think of. Yet of all the woeful things there is nothing so sad as a sailor in a foreign land whose ship has just sailed off leaving him behind.

There are no homefires burning on the absconding vessel. There are no misplaced mothers. The daughters are far away, dressed in mermaid costumes. And yet the sailor wanders from port to port. But he gets to choose the manner of his homecoming, by land or by sea. Either he will stick to piers and boardwalks, or he will bounce back on the waves.

You bring nothing with you to the afterlife. You have no credentials, no documentation. And so you drown, and you pray that the bottom of the ocean lacks customs officials. You hope the red tape can’t reach all the way down. You sink, a piece of coal tied to your foot so you’ll be heavier, more efficiently submerged. Your weight is your passport. “What right have you to be here?” asks the old man of the seabeds. “What qualifies you for admission to eternity?” You can only answer, “My DNA, the science that makes up my body. The paper of my skin. The stamp of my mouth. The license that my sodden heart has earned.”

My daughter’s hand on my sailor’s cheek, my sailor’s cheek tickling her palm for the last time with its whiskers. My sailor’s rags buried in a coffin ship.

I watch them all, the members of my family, casting lines into the Atlantic. My wife washing her wintry hands in our kitchen sink. I watch and wash them all with water, as warm as I can make it. My eldest daughter, she hates taking showers, she dreads each repetitive, droning action like using a toilet, like pouring milk on cereal, like waiting for the teabag to seep. She was born without the landlubbing instinct. I can see her when she’s sailing. I can see all my children as ships because I, too, am a ship, rudderless in some uncharted ocean. My aquatic exile, can it compare to days on solid earth? Can any part of death compare to life? Can what remains of me speak the argot of those on shore? Stupid man, these are senseless questions. No sailor can commune with earthbound faces. My loved ones can’t correspond with the dead; they don’t know the mailing address of the ship I’m on. They can’t foresee my next port of call. Stupid man, stupid man. He can’t find the harbors, he can’t find the docks.

But hear me out. I’ve been with them on boats. That one with the glass bottom that could’ve cracked on any reef. That one that was sinking, that boat that was a body, her arms clasped around me. We’ve stood together on the boat circled by whales, the mother diving, the calf bobbing on the surface like a coal-black log. We’ve been to the brink and back. If it had been a daughter who had died, I would still be in the ocean right now, probing the equator, never resting till I’d searched every sunken stockhold. If it had been a daughter, I’d be scuba diving in the Bermuda Triangle right now. I’d be rooting through shipwrecks. Will she never find me in her spyglass?

When I’m scared, I look for shipping lanes. They must be around here somewhere. They must lead me home. My daughter consoles herself by lying on her back in currents of fresh water. Perhaps in the morning she’ll wake up in the ocean. I’ve been on boats, but mostly I’ve just waded on through.

We’ve had enough of life and death today, agreed? At a certain point it’s over the top, over the treetop with the last briny birdsong. Enough with these ships around the bend. There’s always a boat to be boarded, something to carry you around Cape Horn or through the Straits of Magellan. I’d have the course if I had the map.

When the kids were little, we could see a lighthouse from our home on the shore. The keeper could have turned his spotlight 180 degrees from the bay, and shone it through our windows. He would have seen children fast asleep. He would have seen a young man and a young woman reading together under lamplight. For the sake of setting us ablaze for a moment, the keeper’s ships would have shattered against the rocks. That’s too bad. Not as bad as this.

I’ve read my last book. It was a book about sailors. My final library, she’s committed to memory. She’s my final calling card, my final decimal system. I scoured her pages, I took her chapters with me into exile. Perhaps I share her vision of hell, circling my family for eternity, watching them struggle together on the seashore. I’m in a tub, in a bucket. Stupid man, stupid sailor. I’ve abandoned everything on earth: my sons, my daughters, my wife, my medical supplies, my passport, my shaving cream.

They all say it’s a terrible song. They all say it’s sentimental. No one likes this song. They all say it’s maudlin. I’m making this up. I don’t know what they all say. No one likes death. They say it’s too easy. No one likes ships. No one boards ships. No one sails ships anymore.

“The Ship Song”

Come sail your ships around me
And burn your bridges down.
We make a little history, baby
Every time you come around.

A long time ago I attended a memorial service for a boy from Virginia. He had also died in an accident. He’d been standing on a seaside cliff in California when a rogue wave swallowed him alive. No teenage body to bring back from the Pacific. At the memorial service, the boy’s father pulled out a boom box. He played a rock song at full volume while howling lyrics toward the pews, like a miserable karaoke machine. The father tore off his shirt and you could see the sweat on his naked chest. Wet salt and stringy black hair. The father wanted to play the song in its entirety; he wanted to make everyone feel what he was feeling, through the music. The other mourners were embarrassed. His ex-wife pulled him off the stage, wadding his soaked shirt into her hands. Perhaps I’ll meet these drowned men on my travels.

I’ve been on ships but mostly I’ve just splashed against them. I’ve been a strong mast on a deck rocked by storms. I’ve been a regal sail, I’ve been a barnacle. I’ve been on boats, but mostly I’ve just waded on through.

For a simple sailor on the Yorikke, some days are worse than others. Here is the order of one’s shipside melancholy:

In the end I got a craving to feel a solid street under my feet. I wanted to see people hustling about. I wanted to make sure that the world was still going on in the usual way, doing business, making money, getting drunk, laughing, cursing, stealing, killing, dancing, falling in love, and falling out again. I really got frightened being alone there.

I had an ugly feeling in my throat now, when I knew the last minute had arrived. All my life I had wanted so badly to live in Australia and make good. Now my life was snatched away from me. There were hundreds of things I had planned to do some day. All over now. Too late. Terrible words: too late.

The little word “Why?” with a question mark. So what could I do, a sailor without papers, against the power of the word “Why?”

Of me there is not left a breath in all the vast world.

Now where is he? A man fine at heart and body, for ever willing to work true and honestly. Where am I? Where are all the deads to be some day? On a desolate reef.

After a shipwreck, the simple sailor’s delirious friend lets go of a rope and sinks for good into the ocean. The sailor, clutching his own rope, cannot fathom his friend’s disappearance:

I looked at the hole through which he had slipped off. I could see the hole for a long while. I saw it as if from a great distance. I yelled at the hole. . . He did not hear me. He would have come. Sure he would. He did not come up any more. . . There was something very remarkable about it. He did not rise. He would have come up. I could not understand. He had signed on for a long voyage. For a very great voyage.

Once, when I was a boy in a thunderstorm, I huddled under an upturned canoe with my parents and my brothers. We’d left the lake so we wouldn’t be electrocuted. I heard the rain beat hard against the hull. Budum. Budum. Every time the lightning flashed, I could see my family’s faces secure inside our cabin. We stayed dry within the belly of that landed ship. Traven writes, “It is not the mountains that make destiny, but the grains of sand and the little pebbles.” Drowning in an ocean or a raindrop, it’s all the same, you know. I’ve been shipwrecked in rural creeks. I’ve stumbled in the ocean. I’ve been on boats, but mostly I’ve just waded on through.

 

This article has everything I look for in an article

I grew up next to a funeral home in Easton, Maryland. At least once a week a white truck lumbered down the alley, pulled into our neighbor’s rear parking area, and left with mysterious boxes labeled BIOHAZARD and INFECTIOUS WASTE. Because I was a kid, I usually watched these proceedings from a tree limb or a swing or a bicycle seat, and I didn’t think too much about the cargo’s hazardous contents. But I was vaguely aware that the boxes issued directly from the garage that doubled as a mortuary, the place where the hearse delivered all the bodies. And I assumed that strange things happened in there that probably had to do with bloodletting. Eventually every dead body that arrived at my neighbor’s house was disassembled into the tidy corpse that would be displayed at the front of the home and the remains that would be shuttled out the back.

This Atlantic article by Saira Khan, “Smelling Death: On the Job with New York’s Crime-Scene Cleaners,” was so grim and unnerving that it brought back my whole childhood. (Kidding, Mom. Sort of.) For me, a red plastic bag full of carnage is like Proust’s petite madeleine. So I’m reading along, just savoring my heartwarming memories of the morgue next door disgorging body parts to men in hazmat suits, when I hit this passage:

Anything that gives personality to the dead affects crime-scene cleaners—things like a neatly folded jacket hanging over a chair, a Victoria’s Secret bag from a recent shopping trip, a pot of macaroni and cheese with the wooden spoon still in it. “It’s like someone literally hit the pause button on someone’s life,” says Baruchin. “It’s actually one of the most serene things you could see, a preserved moment in someone’s life, but when you think about the death part of it, it can get upsetting.”

Renner adds, “It can be very surreal, or freaky, kind of like a snapshot because you can actually picture what the person was doing right before they were killed or died.” Both men say they prefer to know as little as possible about the victims.

I guess I never thought about a crime scene as capturing a moment. Detectives do this with a specific objective in mind: they’re trying to decipher the etiology of a homicide. But when the body is gone and there’s only the immediate aftermath to contend with—those frozen objects all around—it’s tempting to imagine what the dead were doing, seeing, and generally experiencing at the moment their lives were cut short. Like right now I’m sitting at my desk with an empty bowl of watermelon (at least her last meal was one of her favorite foods), an empty glass of water (a shame that she was thirsty though), a to-do list with many open items (this delay on buying a bicycle helmet proves that she was courting death), and photos of my loved ones (man, she’s gonna miss them). Unfortunately one of the prostitutes living in the illegal strip club/brothel across the street has pointed a rifle through my window and shot me through the ears. Does this moment of dying represent me? Do these scattered, splattered objects on my desk tell a story? Can they communicate a life to a cleaning crew? If I just step away for a moment, can I ever come back?

Maybe we should treat all moments in time and objects in space with the delicacy and absorbing interest we’d grant those that belonged to the dead. I can hold up my sticky fork that once pierced a watermelon. What if this is my last fork? What do its little tines tell me about the life that I’ve lived? I can smile back at my nephew as he grins up at me from a photograph. Where did you come from, you little goof? And where are you going? I can contemplate the tree through my window before the prostitute’s bullet tears through its leaves. It would be nice to be a kid perched in that tree, heedless of the worlds that are drained from people when they die. These surroundings may not form a crime scene (yet—for now I’m still in the whore’s good graces), but they are worthy of attention. And it’s indeed criminal that one day they will all disappear.

I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and so effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. We have delivered them: they have overcome death and return to share our life. (Proust, Remembrance of Things Past)

Something borrowed

The other day I walked through the rain to my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, where I would get a card to make this move official. Until you have a library card you can pretend you’re off the grid, but my gypsy days are over because I borrowed a spy film and a copy of Chess for Dummies. But the walk, the rain. The Bed-Stuy streets were basically deserted, so I felt the presence of the approaching man from a block away. Wondered if I should play it coy, keep my eyes lowered until the last second, then say something affable about the lousy weather. Was my neighbor also formulating a plan for our intersection? Maybe he would compliment the bright colors of my umbrella. I’d have to be conversationally flexible in case he had his own agenda. Most likely we’d exchange a few universal words about spring. (Me, privately, to spring: For fuck’s sake, spring!) We’d walk away from each others’ faces feeling either worse or better about ourselves.

Sharing the world with other people is draining. Not draining: the puddles on the sidewalk that the man was fording with his shopping trolley. They were deep and wide and barely navigable by human persons of our sort. As we closed in on each other, I noted that the man’s cart was filled to the brim with folded laundry. But the top of his laundry duffel was loose, open, getting drizzled with rain. I nodded mutely at the man with what I thought was an exemplary amount of neighborly affect. He nodded back, and at that moment a dozen bundles of paired socks dove out of his shopping trolley like lemurs, then became absorbed by the puddles I described earlier as build-up to this lemur analogy (perhaps the most overextended analogy of all time, yet still applicable to at least two thirds of my enterprises).

At first the man didn’t notice that he was dribbling socks behind him like a trail of breadcrumbs that would return him to the laundromat. (Sometimes it’s fun to really commit to making certain things like other things.)

“Sir!” I said. “Your socks!” The man stopped short and turned toward the wake of his shopping trolley with dread that bordered on existential.

“Oh noooo,” he said, surveying the carnage with hands crumpling in slo-mo to his face. “It’s a dreeeaaam.”

When he said it was a dream, I was immediately transported into a storyline where the soiled socks and the cold rain and the library books I coveted and my soggy shoes and my wet hair and Brooklyn-at-large and the seasons distorted beyond recognition were all part of a dream, his dream. The man’s dream made sense of the past ten months, when I wrote a book, got divorced, said goodbye to my Virginia family, moved back to the city, stared through countless windows at countless grey skies, ran back and forth across bridges, shivered, blew clandestine snot rockets, held babies, listened to a million songs, burned to write, wrote little of worth, made my peace with obscurity, washed the stink out of my clothes, neglected most films, most books, most people, lay facedown on the hardwood floor long enough to make my roommates uncomfortable, thought about whales, thought about the sex lives of teenagers, explored bad and worse habits, drank green tea to counteract aforementioned habits, made a profession of having feelings, contemplated dropping out of my profession the second I had something tangible to offer it, discovered rap music, fell in love with Dunkin Donuts, mourned my grandmother (forever), mourned my dad (forever), did a lot of dishes (when you do the dishes, do the dishes, says the Buddha), gave too much leeway to men, briefly inhabited the Pleasure Dome, and then was asked to leave.

Don’t you see, my bloods, that it’s all been a part of this laundry man’s dream? A dream, not a nightmare. Let’s not cast our judgment upon a stranger’s subconscious. His long winter created this fantasy world. Our sleep world where the rain can’t get in. If life is but a dream, my own modest butt is square in the middle. Together we made the dream, a function of this beastly climate. We wear the dream, launder the dream, in an infinite wash cycle until we die clean. Or maybe dirty. The dream tumbles out. Who died? It’s a dream yo the deaths don’t count. Who loves or is ditched for other lovers or feels hurt and want. It’s a dream. It’s a dream and then there are libraries to give expression to it. It’s a dream, it’s a borrowed book, and then it is pure, dry, dry as a desert, dry as sleep.

It’s weird to see a cemetery through a Starbucks window

I’m at a Starbucks in Charlottesville and from where I’m sitting by the window I can clearly see the cemetery across the highway. Which is pretty weird, right? From this angle it looks as though all the cars exiting the shopping center are driving straight into the graveyard, maybe because the passengers just bought some cool stuff at Target that they’re now looking to deposit on some tombstones.

Yesterday I read about Mary Ellis’ grave, which is in a New Jersey parking lot. I don’t know which is better: to be buried in a beautiful, remote place where people trek once a year to pay their respects, or to be buried in the midst of a profane hustle and bustle where your death is acknowledged every day in between shopping lists and rearview mirrors. My dad is buried on his parents’ working farm, so he gets a lot of traffic: dogs and tractors and little brothers and delivery people and my grandmother passing by with her walking stick. That seems all right, but the minute someone installs a coffee kiosk next to the graveyard and people start pacing across the sacred earth, talking on their cell phones and chugging Americanos, I will lose my shit.

Items that I will gratefully accept on my shopping center tombstone:

1) Anything from the dollar bins near the entrance of Target – that’s usually pretty good stuff.

2) Starbucks skinny lattes poured out homeboy style, but please don’t leave the empties.

3) Bed Bath & Beyond 20% off coupons.

4) The giant pastries that Panera Bread employees like to give away at closing time.

5) Magazine subscription gift packs from Barnes & Noble, specifically for Lucky or another shopping-oriented periodical.

6) Anything from ABC.

Items that I will absolutely not accept:

1) McDonald’s chicken nuggets.

2) Blu-ray discs from Best Buy.

3) Anything from Gamestop. Nerds be trying to change me when I’m dead.

Heartwarming story about bird shit

Birds have shit on me exactly three times since my dad died: once in my hair when I was on my way to bereavement therapy, once on my suitcase when I was traveling between New York and Virginia, and once simultaneously on me and my poet friend, who lost his father two weeks ago. Yesterday we were sitting together in the sunshine outside Dodge Hall, the building where we take all our classes. I showed my friend a photocopy of the turtle/frog/spider picture, because I’d just been staring into the creases in my dad’s hand, examining the pool water dripping from his skin, realizing that I’d always looked at the three animals instead of the disembodied hand that held them aloft. My friend showed me a photo of his family which he keeps in his wallet. In this way we were introduced to each others’ dads. Then I heard a sound like my friend had been hit by a falling acorn. His shoulder had been massively bird-bombed. While I tried to clean the poop off his red shirt, I realized that some of it had splattered onto my photocopy.

This led to a discussion about the cosmic meaning of rogue bird shit. Some people say it’s good luck, which it’s obviously not, because you have just been shat upon. But one thing bird poop makes you do is stop what you’re doing and look up for a second. So my friend and I, we both stopped being tearful and we looked up at the clear blue sky and we laughed to think that birds’ bowels might have a direct line to heaven. Maybe our dads wanted to send us a more palatable sign that all is well in the afterlife, but the only material that can navigate between Earth and the spiritual realm is bird shit. Maybe our dead loved ones have to debate every day whether they’re going to remain invisible or shower us in crap.

These are all Big Maybes. But you can’t deny that bird shit creates a moment. And our lives are made up of moments. And there’s a lot of shit in our lives, not all of it dive-bombing us, thank god, but omnipresent nonetheless.

My husband thinks it’s weird that my therapist was the one who first suggested to me that bird poop might carry a message. I was complaining to her about the slimy shit in my hair, and she said, “Didn’t your dad love birds?” Yes he did, and so do I.

Beforehand

I want to write about the hand I saw in the subway car, how I was sitting in the corner of the train and the five fingers crept around the mirrored surface of the car in an odd, backward way. I remember that the nails were wide and the fingers themselves were thick and sturdy and pale brown. The fingertips were almost near enough to touch my hair, which was still wet from an evening shower. I was drinking white wine out of a travel mug because I was on my way to my bereavement group at the university. I used to drink wine at a neighborhood bar before bereavement group, but lately I have started commuting with wine so I’ll be ready to talk about my dead relative the moment I arrive on campus.

When I boarded the train that evening with my mug of wine I had a feeling that I smelled like an actual wino, perhaps a homeless woman. I had done nothing to convince the other people on the train that I was not a homeless woman because I was sitting very still and sad in the corner and probably appeared spaced out to them. There was also a half-smoked cigarette in the pocket of my coat, which can tend to smell worse than any other thing, even if the cigarette is only five minutes stale.

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On the death of my father

My dad liked to read my blog. In fact, the last time I saw him he bragged to my mom that he had “made it onto Wistar’s blog!” (I’d recently written a post about our mutual glee regarding the Dictionary.com snafu.) Dad also played a crucial role in the One Star Watt Turtle/Frog/Spider Saga of 2008. After a woman wrote a letter to the Charlottesville Daily Progress chastising pool owners for letting innocent creatures drown, my guilt-ridden father fashioned wooden rafts for the pool filters. He envisioned that the tiny ladders he attached would enable mice or frogs to climb to safety until they could be rescued. But Dad said the rafts hadn’t worked as well as he’d hoped so he was devising another system when he, himself, drowned.

You can imagine that I have a lot of feelings about my father’s recent, unanticipated, unfathomable death, and many of them are on the verge of being unbearable, and others are too private to express here, but there are a few things I would like to share with my people on the other side of this immortal Internet.

1) When the worst happens, it is okay to cope by picturing your loved one working really late at the office. If a week goes by and he or she is still not home, then start thinking California or New Zealand. I bet the weather is great there this time of year. I hope Dad remembered his hiking boots!

2) Diet Coke is the official bereavement beverage. My friend Mary and I decided the company should launch a new marketing campaign. Maybe the ads could show a glass of Diet Coke on ice beside a glass of fizzy tears on ice. “Can you taste the difference? No. Unfortunately I can’t taste anything right now.” That slogan needs some work.

3) When close friends fly in to be with your distraught siblings, it is probably not okay to fuck with them by yelling, “Dad’s favorite coffee mug!” when they accidentally knock one from the kitchen cabinet to the floor.

4) Online registries have provided many newlywed couples with china and silver, but a bereavement registry has even more potential. “Toilet paper, plastic cups, cheap white wine, whiskey, we’re good on Kleenex.” We also considered an iPhone app that would photograph and take notes on flower arrangements so you won’t get in trouble with your mother by just writing “flowers” in the little book. The app would be called iMsad.

5) Bringing babies to a household in mourning is always a good idea. Just make sure you dress them in their cutest outfits, or let them get into something beforehand like one greasy, adorable, unsalted visitor whom we were forced to nickname “Butter Baby.” Kids rubbed in food make good conversation starters. If you truly feel sympathetic toward the grieving family, you will sacrifice your child’s dignity to make us laugh. Puppies are also good accessories.

6) For at least the first few weeks (also known as that endless day) after you’ve lost someone (Where is he? When is he coming home? He forgot all his stuff!), don’t try to drive. Don’t try to leave the mourning compound. Don’t try to return phone calls. There’s nowhere to go, nothing to say. There’s no focus, there’s no agency. Find the safest, most loving place and just be there quietly until your legs and arms and lungs work properly again.

7) Count your blessings if you have a mother who allows you to joke about “Dad’s other family” that might show up at any minute asking for money and heirlooms.

8 ) Recall the Buddhist saying: “Before enlightenment, tote water, chop wood. After enlightenment, tote water, chop wood.” Lugging around compost buckets, trash bags, vacuum cleaners, and frozen lasagna can be pretty Zen too.

9) Speaking of toting, don’t come over unless you come bearing soup, alcohol, a Virginia ham, or pie. Exceptions can be made for people who give really good hugs or for those who possess a sick sense of humor.

10) Every email, card, text, Facebook comment, and phone call matters, even if you don’t get a response right away. Don’t be a stranger. If you feel uncomfortable getting in touch or you don’t know what to say, just remember that no one knows how to navigate death*, least of all the people who just had their hearts ripped out. And if you want to come over and be awkward or accidentally have your fly undone when you do the hugging rounds, all the better. We will find comfort in laughing at you later. Again, sacrifice.

Dad, you made the blog. I love you.

Latham Murray
1951-2009

* WTF