Tag Archives: death

dread

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Eight years ago tonight, I got a phone call. “Your dad’s in the hospital.” There was something in the my grandma’s tone of voice that conveyed the gravity of the situation. She didn’t say, “get on a plane asap because your dad is already pretty much dead.” nor did she say, “He wouldn’t wake up this morning and he’s been on life support all day, you need to be here.” All she said was, “Your dad is in the hospital.”

It was around 9:30pm. I’d talked with my dad briefly the day before, and he’d left me a voice–mail that previous night. We were daily talkers. When the phone rang that night, I thought it might be him, although it would have been 11::30pm in New York – rather late for parent/adult kid chatting.

Sometimes, you just know.

I told my grandma I’d catch the first flight out in the morning. It was too late for me to get the red-eye out of O’Hare to JFK.

The airplane landed at 8:40am in New York and my uncle picked me up. We made tense small talk for the 40 minute drive to my grandma’s apartment in Brooklyn. As we walked through her weighty door, the phone rang. The hospital was calling to tell us that my dad had died. Machines that went ‘ping’ were no longer able to give him the life-support to keep him with us.

It was Passover week and all the Jewish services were on hold. Getting my dad a funeral and burial was difficult, but my grandma and aunt and uncle managed to make the arrangements.

Passover is such a wonderful holiday full of family and ritual and, of course, an abundance of food. My dad loved Passover Seder and when I was a kid, he made sure that I had a few with that side of my family. One year, my grandpa gave me $15 to retrieve the hidden matzoh! That was a small fortune at age eight.

I’ve never been a very good Jew. But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve grown to appreciate the rituals and history more. There is a deep familial connection to ancient past.

It’s a little ridiculous how much I dread the anniversary of my dad’s death.
Nothing new is going to happen, and I have plenty of daily reminders of my dad,
so why does the anniversary of the day he died bother me so much?

I think some of it has to do with the feeling of being untethered. In some ways, our connection to this world is defined by our families – whether blood family or chosen. We measure the world based on our own opinions, and that of those close to us. When one of those people goes away, we lose a perspective and their unique way of interacting with the world.

We can no longer see through their eyes, nor listen to their observations. There is a part of ourselves tied in to that specific person. When that person is gone, it can feel like losing part of one of our senses.

This time of year, I feel untethered. Disconnected from my past and free floating in the present. It is a fleeting feeling, that buries itself not terribly deeply and tends to resurface during stressful times.

I’m going to visit my grandmother and dad’s side of the family soon. We will sit and observe the Passover Seder together and remember my dad. We will reaffirm our connection to each other and to our history.

It will be good.

ambiance

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There is a lot of ambient noise in my house.
The tv, fridge, microwave, computer, monitor… all give off this high-pitched whine.
I’m sure you’ve heard it, or felt it on some level. It’s an extra bit of high tension current oscillating in your living room.
There are plenty of days that I never notice this intrusion. Those are the days that should concern me.

My dad and I had a tool we called, “Damage Assessment”.
The way it worked was you go into the country, somewhere with only trees and fields and a night sky full of the Milky Way.
The measure of how weird it feels to be disconnected from all your phones and tvs and cars and radios and fluorescent lights and microwaves and jack hammers and neighbors and everything you are used to from living in a city is your “damage assessment.”
If you don’t feel odd at all, good for you! You aren’t damaged from your city livin’.
However, if you feel nervous, or vulnerable, or disconnected – the intensity of that feeling is equal to how much living in the city has fucked you up.

Do you remember how quiet it was the afternoon of 9-11 and the following days?
I remember walking my dog and wondering about the odd silence.
I was living in Chicago at the time. A city that gets just a wee bit more sleep than New York. Alyosha doggie and I went outside. There was something different, but I couldn’t exactly place it. There were fewer cars on the road, and not as many people walking on the sidewalks, but that wasn’t it.
I looked up and realized that there were no airplanes in the sky.
Chicago has a highly trafficked airspace. It has two major airports (O’Hare and Midway) on opposite ends of the city, plus some smaller airports (well, Mayor Daley took care of one of those in 2003) With no air traffic, there was a solitude to the city sky. It was unnerving to have a quiet in that vast blue overhead.
There is something intrinsically wrong with feeling weird because the sky is silent of machinery cutting through it.

When there is a power outage in your home, block, neighborhood, it is quiet. Storm-related power outages were not uncommon when I was a kid. I cherished those times. It was so peaceful, and exciting at the same time. We kept a heavy yellow flashlight magnetized to the fridge. Mom or I would retrieve it, then we would open the drawer with the thick white emergency candles. We lit those candles and placed them strategically around the house. We didn’t want to challenge the darkness, we welcomed it (but still wanted to be able to read).

Elie Wiesel wrote in his book, “Dawn”
“Night is purer than day; it is better for thinking and loving and dreaming. At night everything is more intense, more true. The echo of words that have been spoken during the day takes on a new and deeper meaning. The tragedy of man is that he doesn’t know how to distinguish between day and night. He says things at night that should only be said by day.”

I think that all these gadgets and noise and electronics act as a buffer for us against the night. We have an instinctual fear of the dark, but like many of the residual animalistic instincts we still have buried in our reptilian brain, over the millennia it has gotten distorted and misshapen into a caricature of what it started off for us: a protective device. Now we Masters of The Physical World fight back against the dark, our unknown assailant, by flooding it with neon and spotlights and noise in hopes that will keep the shadows at bay.