Anniversary.

One year ago tonight, at about this time, Steve had just taken his last breath and last spongebath. Emma and I were waiting in the quiet house for the hospice nurse to confirm his death and the solemnly efficient team from Twin Cities Cremation Society to transform his complex and admirable cells to ash. 

This year Emma is into her first month of social work grad school, and on her way to a party tonight with her boyfriend. When I called her I couldn’t tell if she knew what day this is. It seemed  a blessing if her calendar was less marked with memories than mine. 

We scattered the ashes on Lake Michigan from the back of a chartered motor boat on the weekend of August 5 which would’ve been Steve’s birthday. A warm clear night filled with stars and magically lit cityscape.

On the way back,  there were fireworks and music for summer fete from a Monroe Harbor barge. Steve would have loved it except he got vertigo on boats and covered his ears around firecrackers. So, actually, he loved the idea of it, it was exactly his dying wish, and he would’ve loved a movie that showed people enjoying what we did. Plus, it wasn’t cheap. 

And  it was really beautiful. I said, tossing handfuls of soft gray ash off the sterninto a soft breeze: Goodbye, Steve. Travel safely to the ocean. Be atoms, be stardust, be real. You are free now of pain, sickness, all the worries, all the lying, all the fear. Forget all that, be free of it. Ash and bone and nothing but real.

I felt sad but relieved, peaceful in a convalescent way, like someone hopeful of full recovery after long illness.

Emma said, F- you, Dad. Just for starters. She hadn’t planned on being so angry but she was.

And so after awhile I said: Thank you Steve for this smart beautiful talented incredibly honest daughter. She is the best thing you ever did and you knew it. You knew that. The one true thing. No small achievement. And yes, F- you for a lot, but thank you for Emma.

And that was the end of the ashes, and then there were fireworks and the warm night, and after a while we chatted with the boat captain, the way strangers do when they meet at a wake. 

I think we might’ve shocked him a little, but he was a kind young man with an even keel. 

Emma was furious that night but also seething, on and off, all weekend, with that terrible wrenching filial rage which remembers every wrong and gives no quarter to any distinction between context and hypocrisy, intent and impact, malice and mistake.

Dead parent and living parent. 

And all I could do was say, yes, all of that really happened. Yes, I said and did that. Yes, what you remember is real.

And yes, I know what it is to remember all the hurts, the terrible things parents can say so casually and thoughtlessly that work their way like toxic thorns into your heart forever. To feel such rage towards someone you want to love, to be so engulfed by history that every word they say in the now, every glance and gesture, no matter how reasonable  or sorry or loving, just makes you want to scream and claw their face off, because there is no turning back the clock.

To be so flooded by memories of hurt that whatever was funny or happy is totally eclipsed. I have felt that, and hated that feeling. 

I am so sorry. 

So we drove around Chicago having planned, at Emma’s request, a nostalgia tour that became a journey of miserable recrimination. Every family landmark triggered bitterness for Emma, every affectionate story of her toddlerhood a reminder of all the times we had later wronged and failed her as parents.

And weirdly, though all her miserable memories were truths, from miserable times which I did not make better, still for me those Chicago years shimmer with youth and happiness.

You might think what happened later would tarnish it all. Maybe it should, but it doesn’t. It really was glorious. Being a full fledged young adult. Driving my U-Haul alone from Boston to Wrigleyville. Discovering that vast amazing city of neighborhoods and cultures. Falling in love. Growing in confidence at my first professional job, and leaving it to teach. Being pregnant, that miracle, becoming a pool for a small mammal who swam around for 10 months not wanting to be anywhere else.

For me those landmarks, Keeney Street, Loyola, Lakeshore Drive, Halstead Strret, Grant Park, Chinatown, are full of happy ghosts and funny stories, which I realized (a little too late) I had to bite back because telling them was making it worse for her. 

Maybe some day. But Emma’s childhood memories showcase the slough, not the bright meadow. I have happy memories of her childhood, of doing fun things with Emma as a child at every age, but she is not now holding happy childhood memories. I hope some might surface but I know they’re under a ton of shit, some of which I shoveled. 

In Chicago, she said she doesn’t have any happy memories.

Or not at that moment.

Memory is a funny thing, it will come back to beat you. Sometimes, astonishingly, it comes back to bless you. 

And then there’s realization, insight, a reconfiguring of memory. The moment when you realize as a parent that your child has rarely seen you really happy in a context that included her.  That a generally unhappy marriage, tolerable as only one part of your own life, was for formative years the whole ground and horizon for her. That two households likely would have been a better plan, however difficult to arrange and fund. That you really were not as smart as she thinks you ought to have been. Or as careful and discerning as you thought you were. That it would be nice to have it all to do it over again, and to do better.

You can’t go home again. Oh lost, and by the wind grieved, ghosts…

I had expected my parents’ deaths to spark reflection on what it meant to be a daughter, particularly their daughter. But we had done that work, mostly, before they died, so more than anything, their deaths changed my understanding of my siblings and of myself as the oldest sister.

 I knew Steve’s death, even without all its disclosures, would make me think about what it had meant to be his wife and what it means to be his widow,. what kind of marriage I had expected, aspired to, worked on, accepted, let go, stuck with. 

I hadn’t bargained on his death requiring such reevaluation of how I’ve been a mother to our daughter.  And how to become one, better yet.

But we are interdependent, the siblings, the ancestors, the children. 

And here we are now, on the cusp of the day of atonement, Yom Kippur, with our weird story and dead Dad, with secrets revealed and forever concealed, with all the memories we share and don’t share. Alone, and not alone. Telling one another on the phone across a continent: I love you. Enjoy the party!

I love you, we say, and I know you know. 

I carry your heart in my heart.