my father

on a loss

My father was a musician.

He had two sisters, my aunts Ellie and Lorrie, who love me and my sister as if we were their own children.

He liked magic. My mom says he was good. One of my earliest memories of him is doing a trick with some sort of soft ball, making it disappear and then multiply. Singing “Little Red Wagon” to my sister and me. The sound of fingers sliding on a fretboard sounds primal to me, because of my father.

I don’t have many memories of him after that. My relationship with my father is, was, has been, complicated. As many things are.

But my father. He is someone’s son, someone’s brother.

There is a photo of him I find with the original members of the band Metallica. There is a photo of him in a suit and tie, a photo of him graduating high school, a photo of him with my sister and I balancing in his lap, small, mouths open at the camera.

I’m at the mall when I find out. I’m trying on pants. My mom is covering her mouth, I am feeling something in my throat grow.

Do you have to bring the clothes out of the dressing room after you find out about your father’s death?

There’s that Richard Silken quote, about how really ridiculous it is to fall to the floor crying. How you’ll realize, on the floor, that you didn’t do a very good job painting. And there: a dressing room in the mall, that horrible, fluorescent, dressing room lighting, fuzzy walls. All those pants I didn’t put back.

And I can’t remember how to spell ‘fluorescent’. I keep thinking the ‘u’ should go after the ‘o.’ Flower-scent.

My father was good at skiing, but he had a terrible time getting his feet in the ski boots.

My father was very smart, and very good, and sometimes good people get sick, and sometimes bad things happen to good people.

I am not sure, really, how you’re supposed to tell people when something like this happens. By the way, my father, who was my father in some ways but not in many, my dad, died.

The way I am doing it is by forgetting how to spell fluorescent, writing, trying to explain how it feels to look at pictures that are of a person you know but a version of them you never met. I think maybe there are better ways, but probably there are worse.

My father had red hair when he was a child, and freckles. Neither of us really look like him. But my sister’s hair glows like lit coals under the sun. Summer comes, and we are covered in spots.

He will be buried beside his parents, and my Uncle George in a plot of land in New York.

My father is survived by me, by my sister, by his sisters, my cousins. His friends. Music. Card tricks that make a kid’s jaw drop. The sound of fingers squeaking on guitar strings. Freckles in the summer.

“Eventually something you love is going to be taken away. And then you will fall to the floor crying. And then, however much later, it is finally happening to you: you’re falling to the floor crying thinking, “I am falling to the floor crying,” but there’s an element of the ridiculous to it — you knew it would happen and, even worse, while you’re on the floor crying you look at the place where the wall meets the floor and you realize you didn’t paint it very well.”

— Richard Silken