White Hot Grief Parade Read online

  We had presents that year, but for so many across this planet, there are no gifts. Hope is all that remains.

  That year, it may have been a dim, flickering speck, but we had hope too. As well as 1367, and one another, and a sky full of stars.

  Death Therapy

  “Your ’death therapy’ cured me, you genius!”

  —What About Bob?

  In the beginning, truth be told, it happened all the time.

  For many weeks, it happened almost every night. I didn’t talk about it back then, I worried that uttering a word about the visitations would make me sound like Hamlet (my second-favorite college drop-out with a dead dad, next to myself). I also worried talking about them would make them stop. I didn’t want that. I wanted them to continue forever.

  I also didn’t know if anyone else in the house was also receiving visitations. I would wonder if the reason why Mom hadn’t slept well was because she had been up all night talking with Dad. Or I’d scrutinize Grey’s bouts of strong emotion, or the look on Kent’s face when he could not decide whether or not he had just heard something rustling downstairs. But eventually it was clear to me that I was alone, nose pressed up against a window that gazed upon another realm. Once again listening just outside another kind of door.

  Lilly lay beside me, as she always did when the five of us were all together. I glanced over at Lilly’s warm, sleeping body before slipping out of the bed, making my way downstairs to the lower-level living room where Dad had always stayed up late watching news or sports, reading or thinking.

  And there he was.

  Again.

  Silent and very still except for a gentle flicking action of his thumb; the thumb of his left hand would begin inside the other four fingers and he’d flick it out, like striking an imaginary match of inspiration. He always did this when he was thinking deeply, and the speed and frequency of the motion could tell you the exact speed of his flowing thoughts.

  He sat there in a chair in front of the television in the middle of the night just as he had done in life. He wore the green velour bathrobe and held the stem of an already-eaten apple as he took his eyes away from the TV—which was actually on (I checked time and time again when this happened)—to smile at me.

  It had been a month or so since I’d had a visit from Dad. About a month. The visitations were becoming more infrequent.

  The first time it happened, I had joked. I had quoted Bill Murray, of course—from Scrooged. It’s what Bill Murray as Frank Cross says when he first sees the ghost of his dead boss: “No, you are a hallucination brought on by alcohol . . . Russian vodka poisoned by Chernobyl!” I had laughed a little when I said it, probably trying to lighten the mood. Dad had laughed too. Then, we both went quiet. Straddling the netherworld didn’t put either of us in the mood to get into a Bill Murray quote battle.

  Now, I didn’t say anything; I just pulled up a chair beside him. I’d already cottoned on to the Rules: his talking was limited and, if we touched, he would have to go pretty much right away. So we usually just sat there, either watching reruns of films we loved together—Bob, of course, A League of Their Own, Sister Act, and Shakespeare in Love— as well as classic films we’d never watched together—Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Sometimes we just sat in silence together, lost in thought.

  I wanted to tell him I loved him. I wanted to tell him I knew that I would never stop loving him.

  I wanted him to know that I knew we were just alike. I wanted him to know that we were different.

  I wanted to tell him that I understood that life without him was going to be hard. But I wanted him to know that I forgave him for leaving me— not without a father, I would say, though I was undoubtedly disappointed about that, but without a guide.

  I wanted to tell him that if I had been his mother, he would have been allowed to play baseball. That I understood all he ever wanted was to be a good son, to be approved of and loved by his father. I wanted to tell him that I understood—that I saw him as a giant among men but still recognized that I knew he had been limited by life. I wanted him to know that I understood he was a man and not a god.

  I wanted him to know that I did not think he was a failure. That I understood that no amount of talking, or wrestling, or overreaching logic could ever explain the behavior of his parents, and that desperately striving for their love had been his Achilles’s heel, his kryptonite, the weakness that defeated him. I wanted to say that I forgave him part of that responsibility, but not all. Because you taught me better than that, I might say.

  But I did not say a thing.

  I did not have to.

  When love is that strong, some things—most things, in fact—do not need to be said to be understood.

  We just sat there as we always did, side-by-side, soaking in these moments—moments we had both been robbed of. He reached across the chair and, breaking the Rules, he grabbed my hand and squeezed it tightly—just as he did the night before he died, with a grip so strong, it cannot be described in words. I felt an unspoken love so great no vessel could hold it, save perhaps the vast infinity of the sky.

  I woke downstairs in the chair just before dawn—as always—draped in the blue hush of early morning.

  Dad was gone, leaving only a distant waft of his cologne and, of course, an apple stem.

  Where Memories Go

  From the time I was little, I have always clutched fiercely onto ordinary moments. If I shut my eyes tightly and memorized every detail, I could paint and repaint the moment with white-knuckle accuracy and will myself to remember, over and over again. Writing it down felt like cheating, so I would stare and think, contemplate and document with my mind alone as I stored more and more details away, terrified that even one might escape me.

  But would they be there in twenty years? Would they remain in their place, right where I had left them? Or, like all natural things, would I return to find them turned to dust? Disintegrated by time and neglect? Might I return to the Great Library of Memory to find that entire sections had been destroyed by a fire, or ravaged in a storm, or sold off to another city to pay for modern repairs?

  Would I remember the way I wept on my first day of First Grade at El Rodeo School when Tara Pascal told me it was not the first day of fall and called me a liar when I insisted it was? Would I recall how I cried so fervently because my Mom had told me it was the first day of fall, but really it was because I didn’t know anyone at my new school and I felt so achingly alone? Or how Mrs. Divine (true to the name) held me and told me it was indeed, the first day of fall, and that everything was going to be all right very soon?

  Would I remember the taste of a Flintstone’s push-up ice cream? The way the cardboard would get soggy, and the way my heart sank when I reached the bottom?

  Or would I recall being disheartened when that girl at preschool raced to the dress-up box and got the gold shoes before everyone else?

  How about the way my skin stuck to my dad’s black leather chair as I spun round and round, accompanied by the hum of his vintage IBM typewriter?

  The quality of the California light?

  The exquisite awe of my first winter in Michigan?

  And the sounds of my father’s breaths—his final breaths—through a bedroom door?

  What of all those seemingly forgettable everyday moments? The in-betweens, the forgot abouts, the oh yeahs? What of them? Would they one day be precious? Would they one day be treasured vintage volumes?

  The thought of losing any of them petrified me.

  I wanted them, no matter how unremarkable they were.

  Even then, I wanted them all. I still do.

  Have you ever wondered where memories go? Do you suppose memories are stored in a kind of great library with a comprehensive card catalog filled with time-worn cards, all dog-eared, fingered, and browned with age that notate the time, and place, and subject of each encounter, each vision, smell, and feeling in alphabetical or chronological orders? Where will your wedd
ing day be logged? What is the exact decimal configuration of learning to read? The ISBN number of the day your heart first broke? Your first taste of chocolate? Your last sight of home?

  Prim librarians with pinched mouths would shush you as you ran up and down a long unexplored aisle, children you faintly recognize guide you to sections you thought were long destroyed. These are our guides, and they will sit you down and insist you pore and pore over the pages of newly rediscovered volumes. Or they will point the way toward your favorite titles, reminding you (harshly or gently) that though you may have your favorites, there are millions of unexplored tomes, not to mention a world beyond the library itself. Great collections begging to be explored—the basement of lies, the catacombs of dreams.

  And as you collect more and more memories, the aisles and rows of books all magically lengthen. They elongate alongside your experiences with infinitely expanding and elevating shelves, and nothing, not a long-lost garment, an airplane seatmate, or a kid from the playground goes uncataloged. Same for our less than impressive lunches, boring school lectures, the scents of strangers’ perfumes, and fathomless snippets we’d prefer to forget. They are all there, in perfect order.

  Libraries all have different cataloging systems based on their functions, but one thing is certain—unless it is a collection of academia or a medical library, there is always a children’s section. When you pass the section in adulthood your mind wanders back to the days when you belonged there. The sticky smell of spilled food on stuck-together pages; well-worn stories read again and again (and again) by readers you could connect with only by the name scribbled in a child’s printing on the front-page card. Illustrations. Little tables for little bodies, reading. There is the children’s section and there is everything else.

  In years to come, this event would define that border of childhood for me: there was everything before he died, and everything that came beyond it. There is Before and there is After. Perhaps that is why the librarians employed in this section of my Memory Library take such great care. The titles are precious, they have greater weight for they cannot be shared with, or expanded upon, by him.

  Further, every new book will be cataloged, organized, and above all, measured by its relation to the Great Event. This is where library cataloging becomes complex: is the new volume close in proximity to the Great Event, or far—and close by date or close by subject relevance? There will be countless ordinary days, but also anniversaries, Father’s Days, birthdays, graduations, opening nights. In years to come, where will these be shelved, these memories from After?

  I am running in the early morning through Glasgow park with my classmate Kirsten on October 9, 2002. I have only been in Scotland for three weeks, and it all feels very foreign. Kirsten offers me company, a card and little candies, and is generally so kind to me on that very strange first anniversary of Dad’s death. She makes it special, understood. What it marks is that there shall never be another “first without him” moment ever again.

  I am in my second year of drama school in Scotland when I fully realize that every single person I ever meet again will never know my father. It isn’t like my mom, who these wonderful people have all heard about and might meet someday. I weep at the magnitude of the uncountable friends, lovers, partners, children that shall never know him, and in the midst of this despair, my soulful friend Rebecca Sloyan grips me tightly, insisting that she does know him, through me.

  I am in London. My close friends Beverley, Tomm, and Julie from the West End production of Fiddler on the Roof take me out to celebrate what would be my father’s seventieth birthday at The Ivy. I reflect on the gift of being able to finally say a proper goodbye to him in the train platform scene. As my character Hodel declares every night on stage: “Papa, God alone knows when we shall see each other again,” her father Tevye responds “Then we shall leave it in His hands . . . ” We talk about him. We raise glasses of champagne. It is a magical night.

  I am in Edinburgh during out of town previews for the West End production of Carousel. I am learning the nature of what my mother lost through Julie Jordan—what it really means to not merely lose someone, but to lose the only one. On the seventh anniversary, a two-show Thursday, Lesley Garret sang, “You’ll Never Walk Alone” straight into my still-aching heart, not once, but twice.

  I am opening a birthday card from Damian, the love of my London life. Damian is very good at cards, and remembering dates. The card is handwritten, and addressed to “Mike.” It updates him on my life thus far and congratulates him on raising a great kid. Damian promises “Mike” that he’ll look out for me. I won’t save a lot of things from London, but this one I’ll never part with.

  I am painting my New York apartment on the eighth anniversary of his death. Mom is here to paint the kitchen a teal-blue named “Mermaid’s Dream,” and the furniture hasn’t arrived yet, so we sleep top-to-tail on an air mattress and make “T-shirt pillows” laughing so hard we nearly forget the date. We light a candle and keep painting.

  I am weeping backstage at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on Broadway. Weeping uncontrollably after exiting on the opening night of Master Class. I have performed this play, with this cast, countless times, but after exiting the stage as Sophie DePalma on the night of my Broadway debut, I weep. For it is in these moments that I always remember he will never be here—that every victory is also about his absence.

  I am sitting in the cinema watching Sierra Boggess in the live performance of Phantom of the Opera at Royal Albert Hall. As she sings “Wishing You Were Somehow Here Again,” I burst into tears for I know so much of our summer sharing a dressing room at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre was learning about and holding our individual aches. As I turn my phone back on after the ending, I receive a text from her: “Soph: you were with me tonight and so was your father. That one, was for you.”

  I am being walked down the aisle at the Tony Awards by Danny Burstein, the “Papa” I have come to know in the Broadway production of Fiddler on the Roof. I will never be walked down the aisle by my own father, this is the closest I shall ever come, and to do it while fulfilling a lifelong dream, and having the world bear witness to it, is a level of explosive joy so piercing and poignant that as the dancing reaches its peak, I can smell my father’s cologne. I cover my face to keep the scent close. I shout, arms raised, exploding with joy.

  I am sitting in a hospital bed in midtown Manhattan, being kept overnight for observation. To my left is Lilly, asleep: still my best friend, still looking out for me. At the foot of my bed, I see him. Dad. He is wearing a beautifully tailored black suit, looks happy, at peace, and in the prime of health. With his presence are also warm breezes and bright light. I know this is not a dream. I know I am gazing at the portal but do not yet belong there with him. I rip myself away from it and return. He was right all those years ago: it is everything you hope it is and now I do never have to fear it.

  Neuroscientists say every memory is actually the memory of a memory, and every time we remember the same memory, it gets distorted slightly over and over again until at some unnamable point, all we are left with is the skeleton of truth draped in the fabrics of our imagination. I have been told that I have a photographic memory. But after thirty years and change of life, I have really only managed to hold on to what feels like a few measly scraps.

  Who are we without our memories? Who are we if we make no meaning of them? Above all, what belongs to us?

  What are we meant to keep?

  PART FIVE:

  TOMORROW

  Emma and Her Dad

  In June of 2016, after a performance of Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway (in which I played the oldest daughter, Tzeitel), I met a young girl at the stage door of the Broadway Theatre. She was accompanied by her father. The two of them were waiting in the crowd that had gathered outside the theater door on Fifty-third Street to get an autograph, to say hello.

  The daughter, I eventually learned, was named Emma, and she was beautiful. A young woman of m
aybe thirteen or fourteen. Her face was punctuated with a bright-red lipstick and trendy glasses, and I was tickled to see that she still had her braces. The lipstick with the braces was charming—a little giveaway of her youth, as was her unabashed excitement at the stage door, and, of course, the presence of her father.

  This had been their second time seeing the show, and they appeared to be overcome with feeling. The sight of them immediately lodged a quiver in my throat—one of sentiment and envy.

  For me, it was just an ordinary Tuesday. The audience had been lively and responsive, but this wasn’t a particularly remarkable night post-show —no glamorous guests or special events. I didn’t have any personal friends who had come to see the show, so I was looking forward to heading home and getting to bed in anticipation of a two-show Wednesday. Broadway was amazing, but it had become ordinary life. How quickly had this dream I had had since childhood become quite commonplace, as so many dreams do. That was no bad thing. It is reality, it is life. It does not take away from the sense of honor, gratitude, and service. But eight shows a week is tough, repetitive, physically and emotionally grueling work, no matter how rewarding. We achieve our goals. Our dreams come true. Or they don’t. Either way, we must always strive for new dreams.

  Emma’s father was trying to hide the intensity of his emotions by plunging his hands into his pockets; you could tell he was overwhelmed to be sharing this moment with her. I asked if they did this often.

  “We do,” he answered, “but honestly we should do it more.”

  Their faces were raw—this timeless story of fathers and daughters had affected them deeply, and tonight, I had been a part of that story.