Five Years Later
Five years ago, on October 3, 2011, Jeffrey William Goodman passed away from a stage four brain tumor. He was 53. He and my mother had celebrated their wedding anniversary two days before he passed; we had celebrated my sister’s seventeen birthday a few weeks before that. It was sudden, but not unexpected. His passing exists in a confounding place of stasis: it simultaneously feels like it just happened minutes ago, while feeling like it’s been decades. His absence is a wound that’s been cauterized — the bleeding has stopped, but it won’t ever fully heal.
It’s hard to articulate what it’s like to lose a parent, but it’s even harder to describe the emotions that you’ll constantly have to come to terms with. It’s a never-ending conversation with yourself, a persistent examination of circumstances and surroundings. The death of a parent was always going to be difficult, but losing him at a time when I was still defining who I was (I was a few months shy of turning 22 when he passed) altered my worldview in a way that I’m still processing. I found myself learning life lessons at a rapid pace, missing his guidance and wisdom.
The first year was by far the hardest. Dad passing in early October meant an onslaught of holidays: Thanksgiving, my birthday, Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, my sister’s birthday . . . all happened in the few months after he passed. Throw in the sudden death of my mother’s mother and it was a perfect storm of grief. The shitty year of firsts makes you grow numb to everything. You become more closed off because you think people don’t understand what you’re going through. You get tired of their seemingly trivial issues. “My dad just died,” you say to yourself. “Can’t you see I’m hurting? Can’t you see I’m barely keeping it together?” You cut people out for no reason. You drink, not to excess, but you definitely drink. You make yourself the center of attention because you’re terrified of being alone with your thoughts for any longer than you absolutely need. You do what you can to make it through the day with the least amount of pain, because there’s no guidebook on what to do when something like this happens. The only thing you can do is survive, as dramatic as that sounds.
Eventually, you become more reliant on yourself. You realize that life moves on and you have to as well. You understand you’re drowning and you’re starting to pull down others with you. You take small strokes back up to the surface. You go to therapy. You start exercising. You stop feeling sorry for yourself all the time. You get out and see people again. You slowly begin to resurface. You go see those movies the two of you would have seen together. It sucks and you tear up — with a combination of both sadness and happiness — because doing those things reminds you of the good times. And you begin to see you’re not alone; that others have been there too. And even if they haven’t, you understand that everyone has their stuff and that you can relate on some level. Sometimes you take two steps forward. Other times, you take two steps back. It’s a process, but at least you’re going somewhere.
I remember how much he informed so much of my own behavior and personality. When someone says lyrics to a song in a normal conversation and I found a way to sing those words back — vaguely on key — to the song they’re in? That’s him. When I play older music and ask friends who the artist is or what the song title is? That was him, always trying to pass along knowledge about the music he loved. The ritualistic trips to the movies, where I make sure I’m there in enough time to find the perfect seat to watch all the trailers with popcorn and soda in hand? All him.
The good memories start to come back. Like the time we went to the new movie theater across town and discovered a restaurant — Frodo’s Pizza — that the two of us would frequent for a number of years. I remember Dad walking out of the restroom and telling me about the teaser poster for Fellowship of the Ring that adorned the wall; he was baffled he hadn’t known the books were being adapted (I’d later learn he would read Hobbit, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and Return of the King every summer as a kid). That tradition, Frodo’s and the movies, became our thing for years. We saw every Lord of the Rings movie on release night. I still have my ticket stub from our 7pm, December 5, 2002 screening of The Two Towers.
I remember he was a meticulous planner. How he spent hours ripping CDs to iTunes, carefully organizing the metadata of the mp3s so they’d show up on his iPod. You remember the care and craft he put into the arrangement of songs in the playlist and how he’d never hit random. There was consideration to the flow, never to be disrupted.
It’s these little things that I miss most. I can’t imagine what his reaction to something like The Avengers or a new Star Wars would have been. I wish he could have been there for the major events in the lives of his kids, or to just be here to talk to about dumb, silly stuff. But you take the days as they come. Some milestones are easy. Meaningless days are often the hardest, because something happens that spurs a memory of him to you. It’s so vivid that you can’t ignore it.
In my first Washington, DC winter, I found myself in the district completely alone, as all the friends I had in town had left for the weekend. I slipped on my Dad’s leather jacket — one of the few articles of his clothing that actually fits my comedically tall frame — and headed out to familiarize myself with the neighborhood. It had snowed a few days prior, so I could hear the white powder crunch beneath my boots. As I walked, I caught a glimpse of my reflection in a car window. Between the jacket and the wayfarer shades, his favorite style of course, the reflection looked more like him than it did me. Moments like that are nearly impossible to shake, but it’s all about how you respond, right? You can read all the intention in the world into perceived signs from the universe. I try not to make a habit of doing so, because more often than not it just makes me upset.
And yet, every now and again, the universe hands you something you can’t ignore.
After Dad passed, I’d stepped outside to call a few friends to let them know what had occurred. As I got off the phone with one friend, I noticed an orange tabby cat slink between the bars of the railing that went down our front steps and proceeded to curl up beside my feet, rolling over so I could pet it. That cat stuck around our front door for a few hours, unknowingly (or maybe knowingly) aware that my father had passed just inside. It was a strange happenstance. The cat showed up a few more times throughout that week. As people rolled in and out of our house like a revolving door, there was a strong chance I could look outside and see the cat perched on our stairs. It was the one constant I could count on during that fugue state of a week as we all worked to adjust to the new stage of our life.
On the first year anniversary of his passing, I came back home to spend it with my Mom. We’d gone outside to release a balloon in honor of him. As we walked back, we noticed something walking out of the bushes.
It was the same cat from the year before.
I haven’t been back in my hometown for October 3 since that first year, but I returned back for year five because I felt it would be good for me to be with my Mom. I was worried, five years is a major milestone, and I’d been dreading the trip for weeks. Sitting at the table tonight, I wondered if that cat would creep back by the old house, but Mom reminded me that the family that owned the cat had moved way.
I walked outside our front door to take a call after I’d had that chat with my Mom. As I was listening to my friend, I glanced across the street and noticed something crossing into the neighbor’s yard. I couldn’t process what I was seeing it at first; it was so unreal, so otherworldly, and so unbelievable that it stopped me dead in my tracks.
It was a cat.
Maybe that wound will start to heal after all.
