Riding with the Ghost

by Justin Taylor

  * * *

  —

  The last time I saw my father alive was about a month before he died, and about a month after he told me that awful story about falling down and getting stuck between his bed and his desk. Amanda, Melanie, and I met up in Florida for a long weekend, February 17–21. On the last day of the trip, we went in with an agenda. First, we wanted to get Dad signed up for Medicare ahead of his sixty-fifth birthday (May 15), at which point he could begin to receive it; second, we wanted him to eat more fresh and nutritious food.

  We stopped at a Publix grocery store on the way to his house. Since we couldn’t force him to buy healthier food, we decided to cook it for him ourselves. Amanda had a recipe for veggie baked ziti and Melanie had one for some kind of granola protein muffin, a high-calorie health bomb. We bought everything we’d need at the Publix, including kitchen supplies, since we didn’t know what he would have to cook with but assumed that it wouldn’t be much. We bought snacks and fruit. We knew that we had to just show up with it all, not present it as an option, because if given the chance he would refuse us: too much money, too much fuss.

  Amanda and Melanie cooked—more cooking than that apartment had seen since he’d lived there—and I kept Dad busy by getting him talking. How’s the writing going? How are classes? What’s Indiana like? You believe what Trump just said?

  It was cool enough outside that we convinced him to open the windows and the sliding glass door, shut the A/C off, let some fresh air in. We even got him to turn off the TV.

  The ziti was portioned into single-serving plastic containers and then frozen. Melanie, the lawyer, helped Dad parse the Medicare paperwork. They made some calls, got everything ready. We ordered dinner from a Thai place, and Amanda and I picked it up, brought it back to the apartment. Plenty of leftovers.

  As I often find is the case when I’m writing about my father, when I’m remembering him and times we spent together, I find myself recalling less content than form. Proximity, duration, intimacy. Not what we talked about but that we talked. We were parenting him a bit and he was letting us. It seemed, for the first time in years, like progress was possible. That there were things for us and for him to look forward to. I remember that Dad was happy. Thrilled, in fact. That he got to see his kids, spend time with his daughter-in-law, have a houseful of people like in the old days.

  It was well past dark by the time we left his apartment; we all had crack-of-dawn flights in the morning: Amanda back to Portland, Melanie to New York, me to Indianapolis. Dad, for his part, was nodding off on the couch. He’d had more stimulation that day than he usually got in a week, his belly was full of food, and his medicine was working. He was always so exhausted from the shaking, and from the constant pacing with which he tried to mitigate the shaking, that as soon as his medicine kicked in he usually fell asleep. Sixty minutes, maybe ninety—two hours would be a miracle. If it had not been the last night of our trip we would have left without waking him. But we could not leave without saying goodbye.

  He gave us each a long hug and said thank you. I told him that we’d do it again soon.

  Heading back to the hotel, we were tired but buzzing with happiness. The day had gone so much better than we had dared to hope it would. Our strategy had worked! This then was going to be the new model: coordinated effort, a united front, a focus on tangible outcomes over philosophical questions, just enough imperial affect to keep things moving along. When Medicare kicked in, we’d find him a new doctor. We’d get him back in the habit of eating real food.

  * * *

  —

  Earlier I wrote, “I grieve two years for my father and when it is over I lay his ghost to rest, release myself.” This sentence is both true and not true. When I wrote it, I did not yet know what grief was, or not completely. I still don’t, maybe never will. Maybe nobody does. Mourning is, among other things, a form of preservation, and so in a sense it is never over and never should be. The hubris—the error—in the line as I wrote it is less in the presumption of knowing grief than in the presumption of having known it fully.

  And in having presumed that the work of it was finished.

  Or that it ever would be.

  Death revises life. The way a life ends rewrites the story, not only what it means but how it means. The life is rewritten, first and foremost, as the path to that death. In our father’s case, my and my sister’s worst fear came true: Our father died alone and nobody even knew.

  The temptation is strong to read his whole life as a long tailspin toward this oblivion. At times—at the worst times—such a reading is irresistible. But to read his life through the lens of his death is to ignore the ferocity with which he struggled against damning odds to live something like a normal life, a good life. To be a loving father and husband. And it ignores the many ways in which he succeeded. His biggest and dearest-held dreams were not for himself but for his children, and in his children his dreams came true.

  My sister is the hotshot lawyer that everyone always told him he could have been, and that he sometimes talked regretfully about not having tried to become. And me, well, I’m the repressed artist part of him, brought to life and let loose. I think of all the school projects and class speeches he helped me write, the rock band he fronted for a hot minute all those ages ago, the hundreds of black-and-white photographs he took in the only art class he allowed himself as an undergraduate. Printed on card stock and mounted on foam board and saved for forty years. I saw them in Tennessee when I sorted all the Stuff in 2015, and I saw them again in South Florida when my dark prophecy (“Doing all the things I would do if he had died, and knowing that eventually I’ll do it all again…”) came true, so much sooner than I’d thought it would.

  The only thing I was wrong about was that I’d imagined myself doing it alone.

  Melanie and Amanda were there with me. We sat and looked together, going slowly, lingering lovingly as we made our stacks and piles. But still, gradually, making them: keep, toss, donate, toss, toss, donate, keep.

  We found a packet of letters from Mom to him, from when they were apart while she was in New York. For a minute we were giddily reading them, cracking ourselves up at their cheesiness, but also reveling in the evidence of an era when they had been young and madly in love with each other and life was a big chance that they couldn’t wait to take. We had to cut ourselves off when one letter got racy. My sister was particularly grossed out by a line where Mom, eighteen or nineteen years old at the time, tells Dad he is her “father, brother, lover” all in one. My sister did not know that this was less Freudian-pervy than hippie-dippy. Mom is paraphrasing the song “Together Alone” by Melanie Safka. A few years after this letter was written, that song would be played at their wedding as they walked down the aisle. Eleven years after that, in 1988, Mom and Dad would give me a sister and name her Melanie and buy a little house in North Miami Beach for us to live in.

  * * *

  —

  His record collection, those four boxes of vinyl, were exactly as I’d found them in the storage unit in Nashville. As predicted, they had not been opened since they’d been shipped to Florida. I opened them now. I texted Mom and told her we were trying to find someone interested in buying the whole collection. They’d be worth more if we sold them individually, say on eBay, but not if I first had to pay to ship them to myself in Portland. I’d asked my aunts if they had any interest in taking on that project but it was more than they could handle. I was going to make an inventory, choose a few for keepsakes, and then start calling around to record stores.

  For the first time in all our discussions of the Stuff, Mom said something that should have been obvious from the get-go but had never occurred to me before that moment. In fact it floored me. She said that they were her records too and that she would like to have them. My sister and I went to the UPS store. I taped the boxes shut without taking anything for myself, and we shipped them b
ack to Tennessee, where I am happy to report that they are being played again. Mom bought a record player. When I visit she asks me if there’s anything I want to hear.

  * * *

  —

  Whenever I used to hear people say of someone who succumbed after a long battle with illness, “At least he’s at peace now,” I thought they were speaking metaphorically. I thought, too, that they were full of shit. I understand now that I was wrong on both counts.

  My father’s pain, both physical and psychic, had weight and volume. It was a permanent presence in his life and the lives of the people who knew him. It expanded and contracted. It was flammable, toxic, volatile. The silence since he has been gone is unimaginable. It terrifies and unsettles, but also—I won’t mince words here—exhilarates and relieves. Every worried thought about how he’s doing, every anxiety about his future (what will he need? how will we pay for it? what will the next phase of the nightmare be?), every strategy for managing him, every effort to fend off or mitigate disaster, every fear I ever had on his behalf: It’s all silence now. There is so much open space in my mind, heart, and soul that I can hardly survey it, much less occupy it. I will spend the rest of my own life crossing that great plain.

  Stereo up, windows down.

  I am not saying I am glad he’s gone. I am saying that I feel the absence of his suffering just as palpably as, for so long, I felt its presence. A storm has passed and a calm prevails: the “peace” of the apt platitude. That peace is here because he isn’t here and yet it is also his, is him.

  I’m never going to be one of those people who pushes a silver-lining-of-illness narrative, who asserts that it was all serving some ultimate purpose, some greater good, or—worst of all—“part of God’s plan.” No God of mine would have planned this. My father lived his whole life in turmoil, and his last years in constant, all-consuming pain. His illness took his health, his self-sufficiency, his intellect, and finally it took his life. He didn’t deserve any of that. Nobody does. But this is a realm of experience in which the term “deserve” does not apply. I would give anything for him to have been spared what he suffered, and for my sister and me to have been spared having to watch it unfold, inexorable and nonsensical as biology or fate.

  But here is a fact: My father’s illness forced me to understand that the man who raised me, the man I was so angry at—whose shortcomings, misjudgments, and failures, both real and imagined, I wanted to reckon with and indict him for—no longer existed. He was replaced by a weaker man, one who would have been obliterated by the force of my anger if I had unleashed it. All this new man needed from me was love, patience, compassion, and sometimes a Target gift card. I know that I did not always rise to these occasions. That could probably go without saying but I will say it anyway. I need to say it. I wasn’t always there for my father; I didn’t always have what he needed, and sometimes I had it but didn’t give it. I wasn’t good enough. I’ll carry that with me. But sometimes—maybe, by the end, most of the time—I was able to give him what he needed. That he allowed himself to receive it was its own kind of miracle. I’d like to think that this succor and repair—this redemption—could have happened if he’d stayed healthy, but I’d be lying if I said I was sure it would have. So while I will never say that I am “thankful” for his illness, I will say that I am thankful that we were granted a second chance, to love each other without reservation, to say and mean all of those things you usually only wish, after it’s too late, that you had found the words to say.

  * * *

  —

  We are standing in the open-air hallway outside of his apartment, saying our goodbyes. He’s still a little foggy from having just been woken up. I can feel him in my arms, the fabric of his white polo shirt tucked into jeans that sit loose despite the belt being on its innermost notch. I can smell him, the animal fact of his presence, something I have never not known. His thinning hair half gray, grown out long enough to tuck behind his ears. He is skin and bone in my arms, shaking not from his illness now but from the love shuddering through him, crying for happiness for a change.

  I make him promise to go back to sleep when we are gone. He says he will, but first he is going to see us off. He stands at the rail and watches us cross the parking lot, pile into the rental car. I’m driving. I reverse out of the spot, wave once, put the car into drive. I see him in the rearview mirror, a dark shape framed by the light of his open front door. He makes no move to go back inside and I know that he won’t. Not until we are fully out of sight. And then, if I know him—and I do; I know him better than I have ever known another person—he will stand there awhile longer, not yet ready to let the day we’ve shared be over, to let the present become the past.

  The Road Home

  The days go slow but the weeks go fast. It’s been eight months of driving Dad’s car around Hattiesburg: to campus, the gym, the hip brewery downtown, the famous BBQ place out on Highway 98. And farther afield, all over Mississippi: to Oxford, Jackson, Taylor, and Water Town. To Pass Christian (I asked a colleague why it is pronounced “pass kristy-anne.” “Is it French?” I said. “It’s Mississippi,” he replied) and Gulfport and Greenwood and Richton, because I had to see with my own eyes the former Emery Home for Unwed Mothers (now a private residence) where the poet Frank Stanford was born. And farther still, across the South: Sewanee, Nashville, Memphis, Tuscaloosa, Pensacola, New Orleans.

  How many times, in these eight months, have I listened to Beggars Banquet by the Rolling Stones? A hundred? Two hundred? I know it by heart now, from the still thrillingly sinister opening notes of “Sympathy for the Devil” through the country-fried sketch comedy of “Dear Doctor” and the louche daydreams of “Jig-Saw Puzzle” on through “Street Fighting Man” (Dad’s favorite) and the insanely problematic “Stray Cat Blues” (“I can see that you’re fifteen years old…”) which gets cringier every time I hear it but I never skip it because a rule is a rule, and the rule in this car is that when Beggars Banquet comes on it always plays uninterrupted, all the way to “Salt of the Earth,” which can feel stirring or obnoxious depending on how much sarcasm and sneer you want to let yourself hear in Mick’s delivery.

  Before I know it, it is March again. Dad has been gone a year and it’s time for me to start getting ready to leave. I’m bringing Dad’s car back to Portland—or it’s bringing me back—and we’ve decided to make a road trip out of the drive. Amanda’s going to fly to New Orleans, where I’ll meet her, then we’ll camp and hike in national parks as we make our way. She’s been plotting a route for us, reserving campsites, buying gear. She’s been going on practice hikes in and around Portland: the gorge, the coast. What have I been doing? Dragging myself to the gym for an hour a few times a week, spending half of that time on weight machines and half on the elliptical. Listening to a lot of podcasts. Eating homemade salads alongside take-out Mexican food. Convincing myself that all this, somehow, constitutes getting in shape.

  But I’ve got another trip to take before that one.

  I’ve been invited by one of my undergrad writing professors from the University of Florida to visit the school’s MFA program in my capacity as fiction editor of The Literary Review. I’ll talk about the magazine, sit on a panel with some other publishing people, give manuscript critiques to the grad students. They offered to fly me in, but it’s only eight hours from Hattiesburg to Gainesville, and so it comes to pass that on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, I find myself driving his car and blasting his music as I take the same exit for campus that he and my mom took when they drove me here eighteen years ago, only I’m coming from the opposite direction. The last time I was in this town, in 2014, Dad was with me and he was driving. This same CD was probably on.

  * * *

  —

  The school booked me a room at a brand-new hotel at the corner of Thirteenth Street and University Avenue, which in my day had been a tiny strip mall with a burrito place
staffed by stoners from whom you could often beg buckets of unsold black beans at closing time. In my sister’s years here, just before and after the ’08 crash, it had been an empty field—the strip mall razed to make way for a new development that had never come. Only now it had.

  I valeted the car, checked in, dropped my bags at the room, hit the street. I walked downtown, taking note along the way of what had survived and what had not. Gyro Plus and Leonardo’s Pizza were both still there (though someone told me later that Leo’s had lost their lease and was living on borrowed time). The Mellow Mushroom, where I’d worked, was long gone. The Top, in its day a punk-run vegan-friendly dive bar, had taken over its whole block and metamorphosed into some kind of family gastropub. The queer feminist bookstore was gone, but an indie upstart had opened a few blocks away.

  I walked back toward the hotel but kept walking past it, into the so-called student ghetto, where blocks and blocks of houses had been torn down and replaced with apartment buildings. It felt like walking through a Disney Village. But old Abraham itself still stood, and from the outside appeared unchanged from the early aughts. If it had looked like someone was home I might have knocked, asked to come in, told them a few choice stories, but the blinds were drawn and there were no cars in the driveway. I contented myself with a souvenir photo and walked on. When I got back to the hotel I called my sister and told her about everything I’d seen. We didn’t talk about Dad; we just talked. We talked for a long time.

  * * *

  —

  April melted into May. Dissertations were defended; the school year juddered and lurched to a close. I shipped a few boxes of books back to Portland, packed a suitcase full of off-season clothes to leave at my in-laws’. Everything else was either donated or thrown away.