Erosion

None of my father’s children eulogized him at his funeral. Neither did any of his wives (all three of them). We held his funeral at the Episcopalian church where my brother and I were baptized, the church we’d attended in childhood before our parents divorced. My father continued to attend—he became quite involved, sitting on the vestry and singing in the choir—but the rest of us did not return. Even when our parents reconciled ten years later, our mom continued to stay home on Sundays, while my father drove himself to church alone. (She attended a few services after he died, but not even death could revive her bygone interest in organized religion.) A few days after he died, me, my mom, my brother, my father’s two siblings, and my half-sister from my father’s first marriage all sat down with the head priest to plan the service. We sat in a circle on the church’s yellowed front lawn, in white plastic folding chairs. Church leadership were still worried about COVID, despite the widespread—in Massachusetts, anyway—vaccinations that occurred earlier that year. Their worry felt strangely quaint in the wake of our personal tragedy, even though the virus had caused so many losses of its own. Father Patrick spoke of my father fondly. (Earlier that week, my mom told me that when he learned the news of my father’s death, he apparently cried so hard during the eleven o’clock service that he couldn’t give the sermon.) He led us through the various requirements for the service. The guidelines seemed so rigid yet so arbitrary: a verse from this book, a Psalm from that one. I remembered a joke my father used to say: Episcopalians are “Catholic Lite.” “Same religion,” he’d say. “Half the guilt!” My father’s father had been a prominent Presbyterian minister and theologian, so religion was in his blood. He was also a traditionalist, which drew him towards the ceremonial, doctrinal quality of Episcopalian services.

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On the way home, my mom said she wasn’t satisfied with the prescriptive nature of Father Patrick’s instructions. She wanted to talk him into letting her deviate even further from the script (and he’d already made several concessions that day). “I don’t want to hear about God,” she said as she made eye contact with me in the rearview mirror. When I asked her if she wanted to give a eulogy, she demurred. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.” I asked her why not. “Because of the Dark Years,” she said. My parents used this convenient euphemism to talk about their decade of divorce, during which they lived in separate houses, and seriously dated or, in my father’s case, married other people.

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I was twenty-seven when he died, and had just moved back to New York City after graduating law school. Save for the pandemic, I had not lived at home since I left for boarding school in ninth grade. Back then I made the conscious choice to go to boarding school, to not live at home (my father was still married to my stepmother, and our families were not blending well). Just when I began to feel thankful for the distance and solitude of living in a dorm that was a comfortable hour’s drive from everyone I knew, I came home one weekend to my mom’s house to find my father sitting on her couch. “KK!” He said, using his own personal nickname for me. “Dad?” I asked as I gave him a tentative hug. He planted a kiss on my forehead, like this was a normal day and not a freak occurrence that demanded explanation. I tried to nudge him into explaining why he was here and not at his home with his wife and three stepdaughters, but he was either clueless or willfully dodging the implicit query. “So,” he said, “how’s school?” Later, I pulled my brother aside and asked, “When were you going to tell me that Dad was living here?” He shrugged, “I thought someone told you already.” I asked my mom when she and I were alone, “Were you planning on telling me that Dad was moving in?” “I thought you knew,” she replied.

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Within the year, my parents circulated a fresh set of wedding invitations that read, “If at first you don’t succeed...” A few months later and we were celebrating as my parents’ first wedding video played on the venue’s TV screens. They placed photo albums from their original wedding on all the tables, too: everywhere you looked you could see my mother in her puffy-sleeved, eighties dress and my father healthy and upright.

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After their second wedding, my mom sometimes talked to me about my father, especially after a fight. (And they fought often.) Sometimes I’d listen. Other times, I’d say, “I don’t want to hear about this.” I didn’t know what else to say. “You knew exactly what you were getting into this time,” I would remind her. “You know how he is.”

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Multiple sclerosis can cause mood disruptions and emotional changes, including anxiety, mood swings, irritability, and depression according to the National MS Society, the nonprofit we asked people to donate to in lieu of sending flowers after my father’s death. (We quickly learned that people send flowers anyway, and that you will be grateful to receive them.) My father was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in 1991, the same year my older brother was born and three years before I was born. He and my mom kept his disease a secret from most people outside their inner circle for many years. I watched him grow increasingly disabled throughout his life and up until his death—though in the end it wasn’t the MS that killed him, just his faulty heart—and I watched his emotional wellbeing deteriorate along with his physical condition. The usual pattern would go like this: we’d be out somewhere and he’d lose his balance, perhaps catch a shoe on the sidewalk or simply land on his bad leg the wrong way, and he’d crumple to the ground. Strangers would look on in horror—this poor, disabled man! His family won’t even help him! What cowards!—until some well-meaning good Samaritan rushed in to help, forgetting that no good deed goes unpunished. “Don’t fucking touch me!” He’d bark from his position on the floor, just like he’d barked at us so many times before, enough times that we learned to stop offering help. “I can get up on my own.” Sometimes they kept trying, these innocent strangers, but eventually they’d learn their lesson, too; once our father was done berating them, it was our turn. First, he’d test his balance, wobble back and forth with his limbs in different positions and configurations, rock to and fro with his shattered pride. Finally, when he looked ready, we’d step forward without a word. Sometimes, he might even ask, humbled as he was,“KK, will you come over here?” at which point I would jump in, offer a forearm to stabilize him, then a shoulder for him to press off of as he raised himself up. Maybe he’d thank us, or maybe not. Either way, we asked for no thanks and certainly no apology. We knew that wasn’t how he operated. Eventually, the hovering onlookers would cautiously resume their lives, any gathered crowd would dissipate, and we’d walk on like nothing happened, even if we could feel him seething, even as wary eyes remained on us.

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In the early days of his illness, we only saw the occasional fall, which I was too young to understand were omens of what was to come. There was the time he fell off a ladder while cleaning the gutters at our childhood home and ended up in the hospital for several days with “the largest hematoma on a spleen that the Chief Surgeon at Brigham & Women’s had ever seen,” according to my mom’s 1997 Christmas letter. Or the time we were sledding down the small hill in our backyard and he tried to stand up on his bad leg—the one to which the neurons no longer fired as they should—and fell back onto the good one, breaking it. He used a wheelchair for months, and I remember how he would ride the special handicap-accessible elevator that ran along a track up and down the stairs at church to navigate from the services in the chapel to the communal area where they held social receptions with coffee and pastries from Dunkin’ Donuts (as any Massachusetts parish worth its salt will do). Otherwise, unless you were paying attention, you might not have known he had a disability at all back then. During the years my parents were divorced, time had rendered my father’s disability more visible as his multiple sclerosis progressed: his muscles weakened, his fine motor skills declined, and his walk developed into a prominent limp, with his now mostly-numb left leg dragging inert across the ground on every other step. By the end of his life, his mobility had declined such that he relied on a walker to go any further than a couple of feet within the house, where he could lean safely on his palms against the walls and countertops for support as he made his way to his destination.

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My father was a partner at Boston’s top law firm, a fact of which he was obnoxiously proud, having changed careers in his thirties after his first divorce. He expected to retire at age sixty-five like the other partners, but over time it became clear that he would have to retire even earlier. The drive into Boston, along the notoriously congested Route 128, proved to be too much for him to manage with his chronic pain, muscle spasticity, and generalized fatigue. He retired early and began yet another career as an adjunct professor at his alma mater, Boston College Law School. My father loved teaching—he was a prodigious storyteller and relished the spotlight—but soon even that was too much. By the time he died, he was mostly confined to the couch, where he watched hours of sports and old movies. This defeat was not merely physical: his multiple sclerosis also interfered with his class aspirations. My father liked the traditions and liturgies of the Episcopalian faith, but he was also enchanted with the cultural figure of the WASP. He wanted to get into the right country clubs, wear the right clothes, do the right things to fit in with this rarified community that dominated his social milieu in Boston, especially on the affluent North Shore where we lived. He’d grown up in similar communities in Chicago, but only by virtue of his father’s proximity to power as the head of a seminary in Lincoln Park, not the possession of the kind of wealth the other families had. He excelled in the corporate legal world and was well-liked by his colleagues, but at some point he could no longer golf with them or their clients, and then he could no longer walk through the hallways of his white-shoe firm without a mobility aid.

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As his disease progressed, he went from jogging to swimming to walking to barely even being capable of that. At first, he tried to resist. Once a “jock,” as his younger brother would say (my father had a natural athleticism and affinity for exercise). He grew up playing sports, was on his college football team, and liked to go on long runs around Salem and Marblehead when he was in law school. In the years immediately following my parents’ divorce, he used to swim laps, because even though he was struggling more and more with his mobility with each passing day, the buoyancy he enjoyed in the water rendered movement possible in a way it wasn’t on land. At some point, however, even swimming laps became too much, the first of many daily activities to fall to the wayside. He was always stubborn about progressing into the next phase of his disability: he walked unaided longer than he should have, used a cane when he needed a walker, held onto his walker as long as possible, even though he was ready for a wheelchair.

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In the weeks before my father’s funeral, everyone was occupied with something. Even though she didn’t want to eulogize him, my mom took the lead on writing the obituary, largely portraying his life with fidelity. In the first draft, which she circulated to the children for approval, she opened with his multiple sclerosis—and how could you talk about my father without talking about his disease?—but when my sister read it she pointed out that he probably wouldn’t have wanted to be remembered for his disabilities above all else. My mom rewrote the draft, opening instead with “his warm heart, welcoming demeanor, love of story-telling and conversation, and fierce pride in his children and grandchildren.” When she addressed his disability, she wrote that he “inspired so many with his brave and enthusiastic desire to stay active and adventurous notwithstanding his struggles with multiple sclerosis” and “handled the gradually debilitating effect of his illness with courage and humor.”

She wasn’t lying, per se—it was courageous of him to stare down the barrel of uncertainty, disability, and even death. He seldom spoke of his pain, though he might request that someone more mobile fetch his anti-spasticity medication or medical marijuana. He also did not use the marijuana nearly as much as he could have given his pain, that tricky pain that he refused to talk about, the pain we nevertheless knew was inside of him. He valued his freedom and independence to a maddening extent. In the month before he died, he totaled his car after passing out at the wheel, though he initially told his friends that he’d simply been reaching for a coffee. Of the decorative rocks in our driveway, which tore up the bottom of his car as it cruised over them he said, “I don’t remember being asked when they did the landscaping, ‘Do you want rocks with that?’” The line between courage and obstinacy was always so razor-thin.

My father’s siblings, who planned to give eulogies, grappled with the same questions: how to remember a man full of contradictions, the extent to which one could sanitize their loved one’s image while still saying something true. My aunt, his older sister, told me about her creative process, mere days before the funeral: “I just want to write something that can capture all of Dave,” in an ominous tone of voice that suggested that this would be difficult, even potentially inapposite to the very form of eulogy. I ruminated: Why would she say that? How am I supposed to respond? What the hell is she going to say? But I knew that she was right: my aunt had known my father since the day he was born—what right did I have to censor her recollections of a man she knew better than I did, and better than I ever would?

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My aunt had retired to Wellfleet, a town on Cape Cod just south of Truro and Provincetown that my father and his two siblings grew up visiting and where each now owned their own small slices of paradise, and she posted on the town’s community Facebook page about my father’s death. Nearly a hundred people posted their condolences, and many recounted memories of him across the decades he’d spent in town. Some people had known him since he was a child, when his mother would pack up the car and drive him and his siblings from Chicago to spend entire summers there in the house their father built with his own hands in 1959. Some knew him when he lived there full-time in his young adulthood, when he was married to his first wife, my sister’s mother. A small contingent of them knew him through the local church, which he attended whenever he had the chance, but many people knew him from his other favorite hobby: talking to strangers. He made friends everywhere he went: local restaurants, children’s baseball games, pools at vacation resorts, and the myriad doctors’ offices where he was forced by fate and circumstance to spend so much of his time. It wasn’t until I began flying on my own that I, suddenly overcome with the urge to converse with the people in my row, finally understood him.

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In one post, the author recalled that they’d met my father at a local restaurant-slash-bar several years prior. He often frequented the Wellfleet bars alone to get out of the house, especially when he spent weeks in town without the rest of the family, as he often did in retirement. Some weeks, he would drive down on his own while my mother stayed behind at our house in the suburbs for work. He knew Wellfleet better than any of us, and he would navigate the town with his walker, looking for something to do. Apparently, one such night, my father talked to this person’s preteen son like a “real person,” like a budding adult with interests and hobbies and plans for his future, and they described how much of an impression it left on them and how special it made their son feel. (My father was always so good with other people’s children.)

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I wondered if those moments of connection felt tainted by his loneliness, which I never addressed out of a misguided attempt to protect his feelings, which I realized too late was more protective of my own. It wasn’t anyone’s fault, really. His disabilities made it such that he spent most of his time at home, while the rest of us went about our lives. My mom worked a full-time job, a job she loved and that, for the several years leading up to the pandemic, often required travel. Sometimes I wondered if the travel was one of the reasons she liked this job so much, because it gave her a break from him. Being around him could be unnerving and unpredictable; even when things were going well, it was always only a matter of time. He was mercurial, flying off the handle at subtle, even imperceptible slights. A man who truly did have a sense of humor, even sometimes at his own expense, he held us hostage in an unwilling game of Russian roulette: the chambers were mostly empty, but you could never get too comfortable. As sudden and fiery as his rages were, they often disappeared just as fast as they’d come on. One minute, he was seething; the next, it was as if nothing happened, or if it did, he didn’t understand why you were still upset.

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I watched as more people shared memories of him: business partners, longtime friends, colleagues, those who’d lost touch over the years, church and choir friends, mentees and students, and, of course, all those strangers at the Wellfleet bars. I felt a riptide of guilt for not appreciating these qualities that others saw: his sense of humor, his intelligence, his generosity, his loving and loyal nature. To be honest, we all avoided him from time to time when he was alive; we were just trying to avoid his irritability. I thought about all the time he spent on the couch when he was at our house outside of Boston—lonely, limited, and longing for company and affection. I thought about the times I summarily rebuffed his attempts to watch North by Northwest and other Old Hollywood movies with me. One time, I finally indulged him and we watched Casablanca together in the room where he spent so much of his time, on the beat-up leather couch that had been clawed and scratched at by family pets over the years and bore a permanent indent in its cushions where he usually sat. I loved the film—I’d never seen it—and I wondered why I’d never sat down with him before to watch these movies he loved so much. But, I knew that these memories were not fully him, that the father we knew kept this saintly side of himself—Father Patrick literally compared him to Jesus Christ at the funeral—for the public.

 

My siblings and I offered different excuses to avoid giving eulogies. My sister claimed that she wouldn’t be able to speak without crying, while my brother announced that he simply didn’t have any feelings to report, because he and my father were not close. I eluded the obligation by opting to read a poem, Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” I know Frost sounds cliché, but my father could recite this poem from memory, and he taught me to memorize it when I was a little kid. I associated the poem with pleasant memories—an idyllic childhood I could hardly remember, the years before the Dark Years and his disabilities and everything else that followed—and this was the time for pleasant memories. Now, I was twenty-seven, the words long forgotten, so I spent the weeks leading up to the funeral walking on my parents’ street and recording voice memos, repeating the poem until it was perfect.

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When I was in high school, we traveled to Disney World, the one in Florida that we’d been to several times throughout our childhood when the family was still intact, to spend time with my sister and her children. My mom had a work conflict, so it was just my father, my brother, and me. It was right around Christmas, and the hotel we were staying in and the parks alike had been decorated in an elaborate array of wreaths, jingle bells, garlands and red bows, fake snow and ornaments, and copious strings of popcorn and colorful lights. It was charming and, even though I knew I was too old to feel as much, a bit magical. I felt nostalgic for Christmases past. During the divorce, our parents continued to bring the four of us together to open presents on Christmas day, the few hours a year that we could be inside a little snow globe of holiday cheer. In the hotel one night, we wanted to watch TV, and all the channels were playing Christmas movies. We landed on The Santa Clause, a Tim Allen vehicle that centered around a divorced father with partial custody of his young son, in which the father kills Santa Claus in an act of negligent manslaughter and subsequently replaces him. I cannot remember exactly what my father said, but he suddenly looked emotional and he said something along the lines of, “You know, when your mom and I were divorced and I only had you part-time, it was really hard. I really missed you kids.” I remember only one other time he had opened up to me like that. Years before, he and my stepmom had a particularly nasty fight, though I can’t remember why—fighting and raised voices were like white noise in that household, not unlike our childhood home—and he came to me and said, “I am really trying, but this is hard.” I understood. That marriage was hard for all of us. “I’m not okay with how she treats you kids, and I’m going to keep standing up for you,” he said. Although that doesn’t really sound like him, come to think of it—so maybe it’s apocryphal, like so much of our father-lore has become, like so many of the stories he told us were, too. Either way, this admission about their divorce, with Tim Allen as our witness, was the most emotionally vulnerable I’d ever seen him, or would ever see him again.

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Sporadic moments of tenderness ultimately transformed my understanding of my father from an antagonist into a complex person. Only during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when my brother and I were both adults in our twenties living at home as the world held its breath, did our family achieve anything resembling peace. We ate dinner together every night and followed it up with a board game and managed to spend several hours together without a single outburst, like the nuclear Hallmark family we never got to be. Those months felt as if we had been jolted into a parallel universe, where everybody knew how to get along, where the chaos was outside now and home was safe. Perhaps in this universe the divorce never happened, perhaps we’d been living in that same house for our entire lives. Perhaps we had always been that perfect little family and had never known anything but.

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My father died a little over a year later, and when I think back to the pandemic I feel both a longing and a sense of gratitude for that little capsule of a life, despite the constant presence of death in the air, despite the fact that my father’s condition left him at a higher risk of contracting COVID and of developing complications subsequent to infection. We found respite despite the fact that he was in and out of the hospital during that period—a period where hospitalizations meant something new, something frightening—first, a mysterious “respiratory infection” that tested negative for COVID-19, then similarly sudden and unexplained loss of function several months later. Against the constant backdrop of CNN that my mom kept playing in our house, blaring bad news on repeat, we managed to find peace. During those months, I sometimes wondered if I would ever see my apartment in Cambridge again, or if would I be held in this perpetual adolescence for the rest of my life. When Massachusetts cases dwindled that summer and I returned to my apartment in Cambridge for my final year of (virtual) law school, I knew that there was no going back.

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When my father was alive, I thought about his death often. I always pictured him in a hospital bed surrounded by loved ones after a long and protracted battle with his disease. I pictured this scene so often that it started to dominate a considerable percentage of my therapy sessions in my early-to-mid-twenties, but it felt more like a fantasy, albeit a perverse one, than an imminent reality. The thought of his death made my chest seize up, but equally disconcerting was the thought of his suffering through such a long and embattled life. “Just you wait,” my mom used to say. “Dad will outlive us all.” Sure enough, we saw him recover from near-death encounters: nasty falls leading to broken bones and cracked skulls and massive purpley-black bruises that took weeks—and even some stints in residential physical rehabilitation centers—to heal, plus atrial fibrillation so intense he had to go to the emergency room and receive several failed ablations. As traumatic as it was to watch him go through these health scares, there was something comforting in seeing him bounce back time and time again. It felt like nothing could kill him, except perhaps, time itself. When my mom talked about the future, she spoke from a place of palpable anxiety. She grew up in rural poverty in central Massachusetts, and despite her financial stability in adulthood, anxiety about money continued to plague her thoughts. She and I worried about the possibility of his requiring more advanced care and potentially massive medical bills—she already had to phone the insurance company regularly to fight back against their denied claims for my father’s ambulance rides, hospital stays, and expensive and experimental multiple sclerosis treatments—and I resolved to take a high-paying corporate job straight out of law school to save for this long-term eventuality, which felt both oppressively certain and like something for which I would be solely responsible when she was gone (my mom had Stage 3 breast cancer, and around the time I was in my first or second year of college, she began to tell me of my brother, whose battle with severe and treatment-resistant depression seemed it may never end: “He’ll be your responsibility when I die.”). Even when she recovered, she continued to remind me of the responsibility that lay ahead. (With a chronic tendency towards the morbid, my mother was not convinced her disease’s remission would last.) My therapist and I discussed coping strategies to manage my anxiety, to remind myself that this future was on some remote horizon. In those years, I had no indication my father was going to die. Yet I could not banish the thought from my head.

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Right before he died, in the fall of 2021, my friend’s father died of a stroke. I knew his father had been in the hospital, and I’d asked for updates. At first, it seemed that he might recover, but after a few days he took a turn for the worst and died shortly thereafter. This friend grew up in Connecticut, and he invited me out there for the wake. When I arrived, I realized that I wasn’t prepared. I’d been to one other Catholic wake before, and I’d completely forgotten about the tradition of open caskets. My friend and his family received me, and I gave each of them a hug. At one point, my friend turned to me and whispered, “the open casket is freaking me out.” “I don’t blame you,” I replied. I stayed for hours, until the only other remaining mourners were family. When I left, it was dark out, and chillier than it had been when I came in. I was only wearing a thin sweater, and I pulled it tight around me. I forced myself to maintain composure at the funeral home, but the entire time I was having visions of my own father’s death. This funeral happened to be the same week that my father had passed out at the wheel and totaled his car in our driveway, and our entire family was trying to figure out how to stop him from driving; I could sense my mom losing her resolve, and I felt powerless to prevent disaster. I thought about the time he’d spent in the hospital during the pandemic. I thought about his frequent bouts of atrial fibrillation and the pacemaker he was going to have implanted soon. I thought about how fragile he’d come to look in recent years, how old. I called a friend I often found myself turning to for advice. “He’s going to die,” I said when she picked up the phone, my voice breaking with tears as I stood alone under the gentle light from the streetlamps overhead. She tried to reassure me. “You don’t understand,” I said. “My dad is going to die.”

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In the eleven years following my parents’ reunion, my father was in and out of hospitals so often that he could rank them. He favored the prestigious Boston hospitals like Beth Israel and Mass General. Cape Cod Hospital, so obscure and provincial, was his least favorite. He talked about Cape Cod Hospital with theatrical disdain, as if it offended him to speak of the place. His final stay in Cape Cod Hospital came in the summer of 2020. It was June, Father’s Day weekend, and we went swimming in the Wellfleet bay. At this point, my father spent the bulk of his summers at the house in Wellfleet instead, often on his own as my mom could not always spare the two-to-six hour drive on Route 6. Wellfleet is at one of the peninsula’s narrowest sections, with the roaring Atlantic Ocean on the east and the placid bay to the west. My father was far more mobile in the water than on land, and we used to walk him into the beach on the Atlantic side so he could enjoy the waves like he did back when he would body surf with us kids in the tides for hours after the rest of the adults had gone back up to the towels and umbrellas to dry off. We should have known better, because every local knows that the Atlantic contains a strong rip current that can suck even the most experienced swimmer under the surf and out to sea. We finally learned our lesson after one particularly difficult experience getting him out of the water, when he and his able-bodied brother kept falling and falling as they strained against the relentless ebb of the crashing surf. After that, we decided we were better off at the bay where there were no tides and the water was still at all times. My father acquiesced, partially because he could barely walk up and down the steep sand dunes that led to the beaches on the ocean side anyway, but also because our leading the charge saved him the trouble of admitting defeat.

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That particular afternoon on the bay, the sun shone down on us from a cloudless summer sky, and we walked him slowly into the water, as still and smooth as a plane of polished glass, until he was waist deep, at which point he dove forward and skimmed across the surface, gliding through it like he was weightless, like he was as dexterous and invulnerable as he’d once been. He floated for a moment. Then another, so still. “Is he moving?” I said, trying to channel everyone’s attention towards his body. My cousin and brother glanced over. My brother sprang into action, grabbing our father by the armpits and dragging him towards land. I ran over to help, and we pulled his limp body out of the water together. We set him down on the sand, but no one knew how to proceed. Just as the panic was taking over, a woman who happened to be walking nearby commanded us. “Listen to me,” she said. “I’m a nurse! Put him on his side and slap his back, hard.” We slapped and slapped, leaving patches of welted red skin behind until he finally took in a huge, gasping breath and started coughing up mouthfuls of salt water. His back, tanned and liver-spotted, heaved as my cousin ran off to call 911 from the nearby road where there was cell reception. When the ambulance finally arrived, it drove right over the thick strip of beach grass separating the beach from the road. The paramedics wrangled my father up to a seated position and started checking his vitals. He looked out of it, like he had no idea what had just happened. He hadn’t spoken a word since he came to.

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“We’re taking him to Cape Cod Hospital,” they told me. Before I could react, my father interrupted his own ragged breaths to bellow, “I am. NOT. Going. To. Cape Cod Hospital!” The paramedics shot me a pleading look. “Yes,” I shouted in his direction. “He IS!” He didn’t respond, too waterlogged to fight. “Ignore him,” I said a bit quieter, one hand placed next to my mouth. “He’s going.” A cop gestured to me and my cousin to come over and speak to him out of earshot of my father, the paramedics, and rubbernecking beachgoers milling about. “What happened?” the officer asked. I thought of a legal term I’d learned in my first year of law school: res ipsa loquitur. It meant the kind of accident that can only happen due to negligence, such that its very occurrence could prove the presence of negligence. I tried to paint a picture: “Well, he has MS, so we walked him to the water so he could swim—” The cop cut me off, “He has MS, and you put him in the water?” “Yes, but we’ve always done that,” I said. “Seriously, he’s fine in the water.” I paused, but the cop’s face remained expressionless as he waited for me to continue my explanation. The sun was so bright that I could barely keep my eyes open. “Anyway,” I said. “Once we got to waist level he dove in, and he was just floating—but he does that all the time,” I said. “You know, dead man’s float. But then we realized it didn’t look right.” “Then you noticed he wasn’t breathing?” he asked. “Exactly!” I said.

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Later, when I was home and my father was safely resting at the hospital with no permanent damage and only some lingering brine in his lungs, I told my mom the story. She laughed. The next day, he came home and retold the story from his point of view. He laughed, too.

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In the years following his death, I became so depressed and burned out that I decided to go on leave from my job and enter an intensive outpatient therapy program. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) served as the backbone of the program. DBT has several tenets, but it is premised in part on the eponymous concept of dialectics. Famously, Hegel’s notion of dialectics posits a state (synthesis) in which the proposition (thesis) and a contradictory proposition (antithesis) are integrated and resolved, thereby creating a new proposition. However, in DBT the concept more closely stood for the notion that two ideas can be true at once. The idea was that you don’t have to resolve them in order to live a healthy life, have a relationship with that person, or develop a stable sense of self. After my father’s death, how my mom and my brother grieved diverged sharply from how I grieved—they quickly grew tired of the sanitized, lionizing narrative that prevailed in those early days, while I found it hard to let go. I wanted to preserve an image of the man I’d loved on his very best days, remember him as he would want to be remembered, with the flattering sheen of generosity and hindsight; if anything, I wondered if it was time for us to atone for our sins—why should he have to answer to us when he’s the one who’s dead? I could sense the chasm between us growing as the months wore on and I still stubbornly held on. They had a right to their feelings; after all, they’d been living at home, bearing the brunt of him, and I could do my reminiscing from a safe distance, first from Cambridge and then in New York, several states away. I still feel guilty for not giving a eulogy, but what do you say about someone who occupied the intersection of so many dialectics? It feels like there’s something fundamental about him that I need to crystallize in words, and the longer I put it off the more I feel I may never be able to. Sometimes I can feel the truth of him slipping through my fingers like a handful of sand, every grain a testament to some disparate facet of my father.

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When my cousins and I were children, we used to run up and down the dunes near our grandmother’s house until one of the adults caught us and intervened. “Stop it!” They’d chastise. “You’re going to cause erosion!” Erosion is a fact of life on Cape Cod, especially in Wellfleet where the glacially-created dunes form steep cliffs above the sunken beaches on the ocean side. It is a gradual process, one as irreversible and inexorable as the passage of time. Storms, tides, and the carelessness of human beings can accelerate the speed at which the sand slips away, and dramatic results can appear quite quickly. After every storm, we would assess the damage. “Look how much dune is gone!” we’d say, surveying the beach. “It looks nothing like last year.” We’d drive around the narrow, pebbled streets along the shoreline to look at the houses. Erosion can cause entire cottages to crumble and separate from their foundations, leaving behind only concrete ruins, a few planks of scattered wood, and tufts of wispy beach grass in their wake. Every year, there’s usually at least one or two houses that have fallen or come precipitously close to it, even more so if there’s been a Nor’easter or two. Sometimes, you can tell that a house is going to go in the next storm, though you will often see the owners still enjoying cocktails on the deck as they soak in what could be their final views of the Atlantic. One woman who lost her house this way has gained local notoriety. Each summer, she sits in a beach chair on her now-barren plot of land overlooking White Crest Beach, and she shouts at passersby. “Get out of here!” she warns, avidly guarding her portion of the dune. “I own this land!” Someday even the sand will go and only her memories will remain. In the end, memories erode, too.