Page 37 - WTP VOl. VIII #6
P. 37

 cumstance defined me.
I was the girl, then, whose father just died, the one who counted the days since. Since a former patient gripped my hand and cried, since I wiped the dirt from my good black shoes. Since the people brought candy and sat in our living room. I counted the months between surgeries, the admissions to the hospital, the hours the oxygen was used. I counted whatever could be put on a clock, before and after, after and before, a spin of data. How long would I
do this, how many minutes, years, decades would I calibrate the absence? I was quantifying the pain, I suspect, now, giving it a form, an expectation. I didn’t know, then, that it couldn’t be done. I count, still. He
um visits and Automat lunches. The afternoons at the theatre, dressed up in skirts and tights.
I stared at the man as he approached. There was a subtle resemblance, in the mouth and chin, some- thing about the shape of the jaw. But maybe not. Maybe he really looked nothing like my dad. I couldn’t tell. Tricks. A subconscious in high gear. In the instant when we reached the same spot on the sidewalk, I was tempted to speak, to brush his arm, knowing
how crazy that would have been. He looked about the same age. Maybe he had a daughter. Maybe he would tell me something wise. He whisked past, not notic- ing my face, or anything. I swiveled and watched him disappear. Like that.
I walked from Grand Central up to 96th, then back down Fifth to 79th, through the park to the West Side, up Columbus to my old neighborhood on 81st, down Broadway, then back to the station, automatically,
like a wind-up toy. Nine hundred miles. Along the way, I heard Guatemalan flutes and smelled pretzels. I admired zippy dresses and the freedom of ties blown back in the wind. Hours passed. I boarded the train and returned home.
Two years later, I saw him again, a few nights after bringing my new baby home from the hospital. I had a white bedspread, which I used to fold and put on a wicker chair before going to sleep. On top of
it, I piled assorted decorative pillows, all white, a mountain of whipped cream. I woke up that night and saw my father floating above the bedding. From his vantage point, he would have been able to look down into the bassinet.
My dad didn’t meet my daughters. He didn’t see me find my voice, finally, after decades of timidity, of fulfilling expectations. He didn’t see his lessons come to life, in me. In me, now. I have not derived any comfort for this, despite what the experts say. They say that grief changes, that it takes a course that ultimately leads you to peace. Acceptance, I think they call it. I have not accepted that my father never met my daughters, or that he never saw who
I have become. Or that I can’t thank him for who I have become. I feel the same loss now as I did two decades ago. In certain ways, it is worse. I think that the experts are wrong.
Kripke is a journalist whose essays have been published in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, Slate, Salon, The Huffington Post, Underwired and numerous other maga- zines and newspapers. Her work was submitted for a Pulitzer Prize in 2011, and she has written a memoir, Girl Without a Zip Code.
"W
hands on the top of our shoul- ders and squeeze them back until our scapulas found their rightful planar position across the upper torso."
would have been eighty-four.
An afternoon of Manhattan bustle would be therapeu- tic, though; it would shake up the regimen. As I walked west on the south side of the block, a man in a blue suit came toward me, popping in and out of view behind a barrage of shoulders. The fair skin struck me first, and the determined expression. Places to
go. People to meet. He had fine features, not like a lot of men whose eyebrows protrude or noses bulge. There he was, on his way to somewhere. He should have told me he’d be in the city. We could have met for lunch, maybe taken a whirl through the Modern. Okay, another time.
In those seconds, I truly thought that the man in the blue suit was my father. There is probably some psychological theory for that, some record of monkey data that proves the brain remembers early experi- ences more efficiently than recent ones. New ones that haven’t yet made it into the long-term storage bin. I had feared, then, that I’d remember only the new ones, the bad ones, that they’d usurp the muse-
ithout warning, Dad
would place his
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