My father died on a Tuesday in March, which is the kind of detail that means nothing until it means everything, until Tuesdays for the rest of your life carry a faint, specific weight that no other day does. I want to tell this story in order. I have tried several times. It refuses.
The Room With No Doors
Here is what I mean: the version of this that goes chronologically — the diagnosis, the decline, the hospital room, the funeral, the year after — is the version that feels the least true, even though every fact in it is correct. Grief does not experience time as a line. It experiences it as a room you keep re-entering from different doors, and the sequence in which the doors appear has nothing to do with the calendar.
The Chair, the List
So instead: eight months after, I found his handwriting on a grocery list stuck to the inside of a drawer, and it undid me more completely than the funeral had. Two years before that — before any of this — an argument about a chair, the one in this essay’s photograph, which he refused to get rid of despite my mother’s decade of campaigning against it. The chair outlived him. It sits in my apartment now, and I have inherited, apparently, his refusal to discuss it.
Grief does not experience time as a line. It experiences it as a room you keep re-entering from different doors.
Fewer Doors Now
The pacing I’ve settled on for this essay is the pacing grief actually kept, which is no pacing at all — long stretches of nothing followed by an ambush, usually from an object rather than an anniversary. The dates that were supposed to hurt (the birthday, the deathday) mostly didn’t. The grocery list did. I don’t have a tidy theory for why.
What I can say, four years out, is that the room stopped needing new doors quite so often. I still enter it. I no longer mistake that for a setback.
- Didion, J. (2005). The Year of Magical Thinking.
- Barthes, R. (2009). Mourning Diary.
