The First Month: A Death Diary
July 10—Fez, Morocco
My father died today. It was sudden and unexpected. I didn’t get to say goodbye. My last text to him will forever be about how there is WiFi in the Sahara.
He died, in fact, while I was trying to reach him. K sat next to me as I called the hospital. The doctor began to explain my father’s condition, but stopped mid-sentence.
“He just passed,” he said.
I didn’t hear him say it, but I could tell by the way my friend gasped that he was dead.
I didn’t hear him say it, but the message entered me as if on a blade.
There are some things not even hearing loss can take from you.
—
At 3:30am, I wrote to myself in the third person, “He’s dead, Anna.” As if I were a god. As if the grammatical distance would change anything.
That only lasted one day though. My “I” returned — puny, familiar. I held it like a fire that could never warm me.
July 11
He’s still dead.
I ambled through the windy maze of the medina, my heart a cut flower, existing in a state of dead-aliveness, uncomfortably occupying both realms.
And I cried until I forgot I was a child.
His heart gave up. But mine kept going.
—
We’re heading to Volubis, a Roman ruin from the third century.
I cried thinking he’d never again like one of my posts or my writing on social media.
There were so many omens. That K’s father also died while she was traveling abroad. The grave site we visited yesterday, the Merenides Tombs. And our driver’s father, who was sick and rode with us from the Sahara.
And the Neutral Milk Hotel song that made me cry for no reason and starts “Daddy please hear this song that I sing / in your heart there’s a part that just screams…”
I cried and cried and didn’t know why. He wasn’t dead yet. Maybe I was feeling his distress.
I want to tell you he’s dead, but we aren’t speaking.
A funny thing my aunt said, “Don’t let anyone spike your hookah.”
July 12
“I’m excited to go to a country that won’t make me shit my pants.”—K
In the middle of the night, I felt a desperate urge to be on the floor, and so I got out of bed and laid on the floor, and after a while K said she couldn’t bear it and joined me while I sobbed on the riad’s carpet.
She said, “You don’t have to suffer,” and I don’t remember if I said, “Don’t I” or “I don’t?”
I should just tell you.
July 13 — Madrid, Spain
I told you. You didn’t respond. You didn’t even read it.
I caught some horrid stomach virus. K, too. Allah’s Revenge, I am calling it.
While trying to book a flight back to Tucson, I had to run to the bathroom and, while violently shitting, started weeping, and then laughing at the absolute absurdity of it all.
My stomach feels like it’s fisting itself.
Maybe you blocked me and that’s why you didn’t read my message.
S called me “love” in a text. “How are you feeling, love?”
I had just fucked K.
What I felt was alone but I didn’t say this.
—
A year ago we were supposed to be in Palm Springs, but my mom had a stroke. “Go to her,” you told me. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
In Palm Springs, we were supposed to love each other back from the grave.
But instead I flew to my mother and in the hospital bed, she rolled over on her side and bid me to climb in with her. I did, the guard rail pressing uncomfortably into my back.
I held her and listened to her labored, choked breathing all night long.
“Don’t let them take me,” she said, convinced someone was coming for her. Maybe death itself.
“I won’t,” I said. “I won’t.”
July 14
and my father is still dead.
How does one reconcile the relentless ongoingness of the present?
The ache in my spine pulls me ever backward to then, the time he was alive and texting me and not a box of dust I’m to pick up next week.
I had an image of dipping my finger into the ashes and tasting his bones. Because I am ever the child, discovering the world by putting it into my mouth.
July 15—Tucson, Arizona
I found a box labeled Walmart’s Finest Jewelry in “my” room, and inside it was six marbles. It made me laugh.
I also found my retainer from high school. It still had my dried spit on it. Gross, dad.
July 16
He didn’t see the last text I sent him. I broke into his phone and there was the message staring at me, unread. That was the text where I told him I loved him and would call as soon as I could.
I know it doesn’t matter really in the grand scheme of things—to not get one last heart emoji—but it broke me. Because I couldn’t be there. Because I was a literal world away.
I found a picture of a note I once sent you that said, I would burn everything just to feel something change in my hands the way you have changed me.
Then his phone rang. I silenced it. Another death.
July 17
Pain ravages my face and body. Eczema flaring all over. Residual stomach cramps from Morocco. Sore throat. Muscles stiff from 18 hours of plane travel. Delirium from not sleeping. Skin cracked and reddening in the 110-degree heat. Face ragged with crying.
Grief is a question only a body can explicitly answer.
—
“You should always carry a hankie,” he told me years ago. “You never know when a pretty girl might need it.”
And I have carried them, for years, not knowing that the pretty girl who would need it most would be me.
He’s been dead a week.
July 18
What is a day now? Something to be squeezed through, a strainer that leaves only the strain.
July 19
Everything has its menace.
The way water can both hold you and kill you.
Like love.
July 20
Can love only be understood through the loss of it? The way we can’t know beauty without knowing ugliness. Without one, the other has no meaning.
No. The love is in the reaching.
“Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.”—Anne Carson
July 21
S said she respected me more than any of the men she’s involved with. “But then,” she said, “men aren’t people.”
Then she sent a hot photo.
She blushes like the desert—feral with unknowing.
—
The cicadas’ song is one of death. They sing until they die, forgoing food and drink. All they know is song. All they desire is song.
I hear them even indoors. Their relentless hope opening every valve in my heart, the way the desert opens to the desperate promise of the monsoons.
But here I am, a cloud caught between the rain and its falling. A tongue caught between the teeth and its longing for the taste of you.
Pity us. All we know is song.
July 22
I keep running, busying myself, hoping the grief won’t catch me—as if the fact of his death isn’t twice as fast as the sound of my sobbing.
July 23
I picked up his ashes today. They came in a black plastic box. The box was placed in a gift bag, as if I’d done some light shopping.
While waiting at the funeral home, I perused the bookshelves and found one on losing a parent. I turned to a random page and read the advice: “Are you taking a multi-vitamin? If not, now is probably a good time to start.”
Later, sobbing on the couch with my dad’s ashes, I turned to R, who was also sobbing, and said, “If only we had a multi-vitamin!”
July 24
And then you hear the rain alarming the windows in the airport terminal and you go to the glass, bringing all your possessions with you, which now includes your father, the heft of him in your arms like a baby, which feels very wrong and very right, and you watch the rain chase its soul to the tarmac and find yourself ravaged by witnessing something so strong when you are so weak.
July 25
Not even death can stop me from groping after your bones.
—
“The heart lies because it must!”—Jack Gilbert
I keep thinking I am lying to myself about S, but which lie? That I love her? That she loves me? That we could be together? That I even want that? That I am just grasping at anything because nothing can fill this hole? That I am the hole? That I want too much? That I am too much?
Well, which is it?
I don’t want to be someone clinging to my stores of pain, as Anne Carson writes in Autobiography of Red.
Is that what I’m doing?
You would say yes, but you don’t know me.
July 26—Oakland, California
These nights when no one can hold you, not even the rain.
I am desperate for someone to talk to me and then everything they say is wrong and I want to be alone and then I am desperate for someone to talk to me.
I want to hurl my grief at you like spaghetti. But I have better manners than that.
—
I see S tonight. How will it be? I’m pretty volatile right now. I cried for 40 minutes remembering how my dad nominated me for Queer Eye, even though I told him not to, that I wouldn’t be chosen because I didn’t live in the place they were filming, and how endeared and annoyed I was that he did it anyway.
How do I put down this torch? Why is it soldered to my hand?
Everyone keeps saying, Don’t do anything rash! Don’t change your life!
But how could his death not change my life?
July 27
She is statuesque and honey-hued. We’ve just returned from the ocean and the desire seems to have sprung from us fully formed, like a sea god, like debris from an unknown celebration*.
And she holds me as she comes. As if I am a precious stone. She wraps her arms around me, her skin dense and burning, her hands on me soft as an unmade bed.
The wave of her collapsing and building and collapsing my grief in the pink light of the afternoon.
“What is time made of?”**
“Time is an abstraction—just a meaning that we impose on motion.”
I watch our bodies twist in imperfect alignment, two war heroes limping home, my face buried in her neck, my lips resting on her clavicle, sweat and sigh and feral foam there, in the hollow where I rest my lips.
The joy too swift for our bodies, too expansive to fit on our faces. But all we have are these teeth, these fingers slipping through the day.
Time will always be both punishment and balm, but oh how I love to impose myself meaninglessly on your motion.
-
*Merleau-Ponty, talking about Cezanne: “Nine days out of ten, all Cezanne saw around him was the wretchedness of his empirical life and his unsuccessful attempts, the debris of an unknown celebration.”
**Time quotes from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red
July 28
When we were walking to the ocean, S told me this beautiful story about her grandmother passing. She said she realized she had a choice, that either her grandmother’s love for her, which was immense and beautiful and uncomplicated, was simply gone, or that she could take that love and gift it back to herself, to become her own champion, and let it live on inside of her.
I loved that message so much, I opened a Google Doc and titled it “How to be your own champion.” Then I wrote nothing because I don’t actually know how to do that.
Each day for the next month I would open the doc and watch the cursor’s damning, relentless wink and write nothing and then I would go do something else.
—
S doesn’t want to be with me. I know this. I won’t end it though. I can’t bear another loss. I will take anything she gives until she stops giving it.
But she holds me when she comes. What do I make of this? And she got me flowers. What do I make of any of this?
A strange thing: Death has ruined my orgasm. They are sad blips of nothingness now. They are plastic bags stuck on a car windshield for a moment, and then vanish.
July 29
I keep my phone near me at all times so that I can NOT respond to the people who message me with condolences.
Am I subconsciously waiting for you to write me? God I hope not.
July 30
You wrote to someone else and accidentally sent it to me. You offered your condolences TO SOMEONE ELSE. This is not the first time you have “accidentally” sent me something, but I find this time to be especially callous and cruel.
There is no god wrathful enough to contain the hatred I feel for you in this moment.
I’m done I’m done I’m done.
July 31
He comes to me in dreams, the most ordinary dreams, and says fantastical things.
What took you so long?
“The stars were blocking me.”
Is there a god?
“Yes, and she’s pissed.”
I take his arm as we walk through the desert. I rub his back. He tells me I was always good at basketball.
This is how we hold each other now, in this fantastic, unbearable place.
(Part 2 is here.)
