I Can't Go to Greece
But I can keep beating myself up about it
Sometimes I remember that my dad’s body is just sitting in my closet and it really fucks me up. I’ll be rinsing dishes before I poorly load them into the dishwasher, as I do, and the curve of a cereal bowl will direct a stream of sink water into my neck, soaking the top half of my carefully curated ensemble. I yelp like a dramatic parakeet and then hear my dead dad respond, calling out to me from the living room, “Ha! Bowl or spoon?” And I remember that this very person is in ashes next to our unused baby gear and art supplies. And I feel literally sick to my stomach imagining his toes mixed with his hair, my sense of hunger closing for the day.
Does my dad know he’s in there? Is he comfortable in there? Is his belly scar in there?
The shame of still not having homed his ashes pecks out the meat of my eyes until I can’t see my deservingness. I ask myself what’s taking me so long to honor him, to spread his ashes where he grew up and was supposedly happiest. I lean on the fact that I can’t really afford a trip to Greece at the moment, certainly not a trip with my husband and infant whom I refuse to travel without. Not after Covid, a wedding, having a baby, and an industry strike derailed my career plans. I lean on this very true justification. It’s too hard to fly! It’s too hard to fly! But I also wonder if part of me just needs to live under the same roof as the man I haven’t lived with since I was two years old. My inner child might be more at ease with control over my daddy’s whereabouts when, for thirty years, I’d obsess over if I could count on him to show up. The man I’ve been chasing my whole life is finally contained. He’s in my house now, and he sits where I tell him to sit. I should put pants on his beautifully carved urn, buckle him into the passenger seat of my car and drag his ass to an AA meeting. You know why? Because I finally can! *laughs in Disney villain*
Whatever the “true” reason is, I’m still sick and crippled by the shame of it all, losing sight of my situation’s complexity. I never even organized a memorial service of any kind. My brilliantly mean voice has so much to work with here: You’ve let your deceased father sit in a box for 18 months? In a dusty, disorganized closet? He specifically told you he wanted to be under a tree, Peach! You know I want to be under a tree, in Greece, with the animals, Peach! I was trapped by my illness my whole life— how could you keep me from finally being free? Why won’t you honor me? Because you’re disgraceful, disgusting. I’m your blood, Alexandra.
It’s relieving to notice the voice isn’t mine.
Am I letting the guilt speak to me this way? Or am I without control? I genuinely don’t know. I only know how unpredictable and seemingly authoritative it can be, how destabilizing it can be. And I can’t help but believe if my dad were still alive, or better yet, if I had honored his death “perfectly,” my mean voice would still find something to bitch about, something sensitive to shame me for. And I want better for my son’s mother. Nobody can speak to her that way! Do I deserve no joy after I’ve done a wrong thing? I can’t dance with a tail between my legs.
So let me take the time to respond to this voice, because responding to it is an unfamiliar exercise and is maybe easier than shutting it up:
My heart doesn’t feel any less broken more than a year after the tragic loss of my dad. I thought it would feel less broken but it doesn’t. Some days at the sink it really doesn’t. And in that time I’ve honored him in a sweet range of ways; I always begin each Wordle with PEACH, starting each day putting faith in the five letter nickname he’d use to identify me. I gave birth to, and am raising, a precious child with his face. I keep his photo on our piano so that every time I play I perform for him. I use more thyme than necessary on my over-easy eggs. I raised 5,000 dollars for a Pitbull rescue in his name. I hung up a painting of him as a boy in our bathroom.
The bathroom, Peach? But that’s a nice painting.
Yeah, that I had to ship here after I broke my emotional back finding homes for your Greek cats. It’s too hard to fly! I still love you, can’t you see!
Guilt is an incessant, irresponsible teenager wanting the keys to your vintage car. And I began this essay under the impression I was someone who struggled with guilt and shame. But I suppose if I were someone who always let guilt drive then my dad wouldn’t still be in a box right now.
I at least have the urge to dismantle it, hold my shame up to a prism and watch it break into all its true colors— one of which is certainly narcissism. Annie Lamott said it best, “I may not be much but I’m all I think about.” Maybe if I don’t make the logistics of his death so much about me and my failings it’ll allow me to move forward; if my baby cries but all I hear is “you’re a bad mother!” then I waste precious time and energy that’s better spent nurturing my son.
I’ve worn handcuffs made of could-haves and should-haves. How long did I stand at the sink with the water running?
My baby boy woke up from his nap and I closed the dishwasher door to go fetch him. I took him outside, pretending the fresh air was only for him. “Want to go see the birds, Claude?” I faced him north to relax his blonde brows fighting the sunshine. Just then, a flock of birds rainbow-ed before us, flying made easy. Claude stretched one arm towards the sky, “Bur! Bur!”
His first word.
A new voice.
My dad and I will get to Greece, we’ll fly together. And we’ll both be okay until then, right?
It's been 18 years since my dad died. We also had a complicated and fraught relationship and his passing was the beginning of many years of guilt. It woulda been so easy to forgive him his failings. I coulda been a better son, I shoulda called him more. And yeah, these things seem sooooo obvious in the immediate aftermath of his death, when the pain is so brutally fresh and it occupies most, if not all, of your thoughts. But (and this took a LONG ASS TIME to realize) our relationship was terribly complicated for a reason. He wasn't always pleasant to talk to, his failings weren't actually easily forgiven. And despite all of the horrible shit my head-voice said to me, this deeply flawed man was still my dad and he still loved me and he would not want me to spend the remainder of my young-man-years beating myself up.
I wish I could say "it gets better with time". I mean, it sorta does. As the years ticked off, I could talk about him more and more without feeling that crushing sadness. I could criticize him and feel angry without feeling a subsequent sense of guilt or shame. I was able to write all this just now without choking up. And then other times, I still cry really, really hard over him. I still miss him, or talk to him as if he's still beside me. And when something really cool happens, like the Rangers finally winning the World Series, I still feel this split second urge to reach for the phone and call him. So I guess I'd say it gets better, but only kinda. And it never fully goes away, you just kinda learn to live with it and eventually deal with it like almost anything else.
I started thinking about grief kinda like this: when the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs hit, it wiped out the surface world. The entire planet became engulfed in death. And you can see evidence of it in the rocks now -- these incredibly high concentrations of iridium that goes all around the globe. At one point in time on this planet, that impact threatened every single thing. But eventually time passed and now it's just a band of colored stone buried underneath eons of other things that happened. Grief is like that. For a while, it's all you can think of, and then life just insists on marching forward anyway. I suppose that is kinda nonsensey, but it helps me.
"I can't dance with my tail between my legs." This stopped me in my tracks. I'm going to be thinking about this for the rest of the day.