by Hilton Als
So began my second, darker season of losing things. Three weeks after my father died, so did another family member, of cancer. Three weeks after that, my hometown baseball team lost the World Series—an outcome that wouldn’t have affected me much if my father hadn’t been such an ardent fan. One week later, Hillary Clinton, together with sixty-six million voters, lost the presidential election.
Like a dysfunctional form of love, which to some extent it is, grief has no boundaries; seldom this fall could I distinguish my distress over these later losses from my sadness about my father. I had maintained my composure during his memorial service, even while delivering the eulogy. But when, at the second funeral, the son of the deceased stood up to speak, I wept. Afterward, I couldn’t shake the sense that another shoe was about to drop—that at any moment I would learn that someone else close to me had died. The morning after the election, I cried again, missing my refugee father, missing the future I had thought would unfold. In its place, other kinds of losses suddenly seemed imminent: of civil rights, personal safety, financial security, the foundational American values of respect for dissent and difference, the institutions and protections of democracy.
For weeks, I slogged on like this, through waves of actual and anticipatory grief. I couldn’t stop conjuring catastrophes, political and otherwise. I felt a rising fear whenever my mother didn’t answer her phone, hated to see my sister board an airplane, could barely let my partner get in a car. “So many things seem filled with the intent to be lost,” Elizabeth Bishop wrote, and, as much as my specific sadness, it was just that—the sheer quantity and inevitability of further suffering—that undid me.
Meanwhile, I had lost, along with everything else, all motivation; day after day, I did as close as humanly possible to nothing. In part, this was because I dreaded getting farther away from the time when my father was still alive. But it was also because, after all the obvious tasks of mourning were completed—the service over, the bureaucratic side of death dispatched, the clothing donated, the thank-you cards written—I had no idea what else to do. Although I had spent a decade worrying about losing my father, I had never once thought about what would come next. Like a heart, my imagination had always stopped at the moment of death.
Now, obliged to carry onward through time, I realized I didn’t know how. I found some consolation in poetry, but otherwise, for the first time in my life, I did not care to read. Nor could I bring myself to write, not least because any piece I produced would be the first my father wouldn’t see. I stretched out for as long as I could the small acts that felt easy and right (calling my mother and my sister, curling up with my partner, playing with the cats), but these alone could not occupy the days. Not since the age of eight, when I was still learning to master boredom, had life struck me so much as simply a problem of what to do.
It was during this time that I began to go out looking for my father. Some days, I merely said to myself that I wanted to get out of the house; other days, I set about searching for him as deliberately as one would go look for a missing glove. Because I find peace and clarity in nature, I did this searching outdoors, sometimes while walking, sometimes while out on a run. I did not expect, of course, that along the way I would encounter my father again in his physical form. To the extent that I thought about it at all, I thought that through sheer motion I might be able to create a tunnel of emptiness, in myself or in the world, that would fill up with a sense of his presence—his voice, his humor, his warmth, the perfect familiarity of our relationship.
I have subsequently learned, from the academic literature on grief, that this “searching behavior,” as it is called, is common among the bereaved. The psychologist John Bowlby, a contemporary of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, regarded the second stage of grief, after numbness, as “yearning and searching.” But I had never knowingly engaged in it before, because, in my experience, my dead had always come looking for me. After other people I’d loved had died, I had often felt them near me, sometimes heard their voices, and even, on a few exceedingly strange occasions, been jolted into the uncanny conviction that I had encountered them again in some altered but unmistakable form. (This, too, turns out to be common among the grieving. In his wonderfully matter-of-fact poem “Alone,” Jack Gilbert writes about the strange way that his late wife “has returned / as somebody’s Dalmatian.”)
These experiences, to be clear, do not comport with my understanding of death. I don’t believe that our loved ones can commune with us from beyond the grave, any more than I believe that spouses occasionally reincarnate as Dalmatians. But grief makes reckless cosmologists of us all, and I had thought it possible, in an impossible kind of way, that if I went out looking I might find myself in my father’s company again.
The first time, I turned around after five minutes; I have seldom tried anything that felt so futile. After he lost his wife, C. S. Lewis, who had likewise previously felt the dead to be near at hand, looked up at the night sky and, to his dismay, knew that he would never find her anywhere. “Is anything more certain,” he wrote, in “A Grief Observed,” “than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch?” Between his late wife and himself, he felt only “the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero.”
Thus do I feel about my father. “Lost” is precisely the right description for how I have experienced him since his death. I search for him constantly but can’t find him anywhere. I try to sense some intimation of his presence and feel nothing. I listen for his voice but haven’t heard it since those final times he used it in the hospital. Grieving him is like holding one of those homemade tin-can telephones with no tin can on the other end of the string. His absence is total; where there was him, there is nothing.
This was perhaps the most striking thing about my father’s death and all that followed: how relevant the idea of loss felt, how it seemed at once so capacious and so accurate. And in fact, to my surprise, it was accurate. Until I looked it up, I’d assumed that, unless we were talking about phone chargers or car keys or cake recipes, we were using the word “lost” figuratively, even euphemistically—that we say “I lost my father” to soften the blow of death.
But that turns out not to be true. The verb “to lose” has its taproot sunk in sorrow; it is related to the “lorn” in forlorn. It comes from an Old English word meaning to perish, which comes from a still more ancient word meaning to separate or cut apart. The modern sense of misplacing an object appeared later, in the thirteenth century; a hundred years after that, “to lose” acquired the meaning of failing to win. In the sixteenth century, we began to lose our minds; in the seventeenth century, our hearts. The circle of what we can lose, in other words, began with our own lives and one another and has been steadily expanding ever since. In consequence, loss today is a supremely awkward category, bulging with everything from mittens to life savings to loved ones, forcing into relationship all kinds of wildly dissimilar experiences.
And yet, if anything, our problem is not that we put too many things into the category of loss but that we leave too many out. One night, during those weeks when I could find solace only in poetry, my partner read “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” aloud to me. In it, Walt Whitman leans against the railing of a ship, exalting in all he sees. So expansive is his vision that it includes not just the piers and sails and reeling gulls but everyone else who makes the crossing: all those who stood at the railing watching before his birth, all those watching around him now, and all those who will be there watching after his death—which, in the poem, he doesn’t so much foresee as, through a wild, craning omniscience, look back on. “Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt,” he admonishes, kindly.
And, just like that, my sense of loss suddenly revealed itself as terribly narrow. What I miss about my father, as much as anything, is life as it looked filtered through him, held up and considered against his inner lights. Yet the most important t
hing that vanished when he died is wholly unavailable to me: life as it looked to him, life as we all live it, from the inside out. All my memories can’t add up to a single moment of what it was like to be my father, and all my loss pales beside his own. Like Whitman, his love of life had been exuberant, exhaustive; he must have hated, truly hated, to leave it behind—not just his family, whom he adored, but all of it, sea to shining sea.
It is breathtaking, the extinguishing of consciousness. Yet that loss, too—our own ultimate unbeing—is dwarfed by the grander scheme. When we are experiencing it, loss often feels like an anomaly, a disruption in the usual order of things. In fact, though, it is the usual order of things. Entropy, mortality, extinction: the entire plan of the universe consists of losing, and life amounts to a reverse savings account in which we are eventually robbed of everything. Our dreams and plans and jobs and knees and backs and memories, the childhood friend, the husband of fifty years, the father of forever, the keys to the house, the keys to the car, the keys to the kingdom, the kingdom itself: sooner or later, all of it drifts into the Valley of Lost Things.
There’s precious little solace for this, and zero redress; we will lose everything we love in the end. But why should that matter so much? By definition, we do not live in the end: we live all along the way. The smitten lovers who marvel every day at the miracle of having met each other are right; it is finding that is astonishing. You meet a stranger passing through your town and know within days you will marry her. You lose your job at fifty-five and shock yourself by finding a new calling ten years later. You have a thought and find the words. You face a crisis and find your courage.
All of this is made more precious, not less, by its impermanence. No matter what goes missing, the wallet or the father, the lessons are the same. Disappearance reminds us to notice, transience to cherish, fragility to defend. Loss is a kind of external conscience, urging us to make better use of our finite days. As Whitman knew, our brief crossing is best spent attending to all that we see: honoring what we find noble, denouncing what we cannot abide, recognizing that we are inseparably connected to all of it, including what is not yet upon us, including what is already gone. We are here to keep watch, not to keep.
John Seabrook
My Father’s Cellar
from The New Yorker
Mrs. Hall, my third-grade teacher at St. John’s Day School, had given the class a homework assignment: draw a floor plan of your parents’ house or apartment. Our house was big, but I did my best to include all the rooms on the first floor—kitchen, dining room, breakfast room, library, drawing room (a funny name for the room where the adults sometimes played cards), living room, two powder rooms, and bar.
I had to restart a couple of times until I got a feel for the proportions. I liked the way the assignment made me think. I was momentarily outside the familiar rooms and the lives we lived there, looking in. Eventually, I managed to fit all the rooms into the square boundaries of my plan. I was proud of my work, and showed it to my mother.
“Oh dear,” she said, and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“It’s just the size of the bar, darling.” She laughed again—light but with a hint of tension. “It’s so big. Mrs. Hall will think we’re alcoholics!”
My bar, labeled BAR in big, blocky letters, was a large rectangle exactly in the middle of the plan, as big as the kitchen.
The bar was a narrow passageway off the dining room which connected the front of the house with the back. Although small, the room produced maximum merriment per square foot. The bar was like a magic hat from which a magician pulls impossibly long scarves of colored silk. It sounded big—the violent rattle of the martini shaker and the muted explosion of a champagne cork reverberated throughout the house. The liquor cabinet was a men’s club of masculine archetypes: someone’s ornery grandfather on the whiskey bottle; on the gin, a British Beefeater, dressed like the real ones we had seen at the Tower of London, in a bright-red jacket and round black hat, holding a long spear. There were chrome-plated grippers and squeezers and shakers that my father washed and laid out on a dish towel before the guests arrived. There were the names of cocktails: martinis, daiquiris, manhattans, old-fashioneds. My favorite, the bullshot (it sounded like “bullshit”)—Worcestershire sauce, beef broth, and vodka—was for the morning after, if someone had a hangover.
I dutifully erased the rectangle marked BAR and made it smaller, but now it was smudged, and more of a focal point than ever.
So I redid the whole plan, trying to draw the bar to scale, but it still came out larger than it actually was. “That’s better, thank you, darling,” my mother said, but I could tell she was worried about Mrs. Hall.
Most of my father’s alcohol was secured in a cellar somewhere in the basement. Its location was a mystery to me, at first. Clearly, the wine and the champagne he served at dinner and at parties came from somewhere. There was no wine in the bar except for a few bottles of lesser whites in the fridge, for those sorry guests who preferred a glass of wine to a cocktail before dinner.
My father, John M. Seabrook (called Jack), was the scion and president of Seabrook Farms, a large frozen-food company that operated on more than fifty thousand acres in southern New Jersey—a kind of feudal empire that resembled, in his mind, at least, the venerable inherited estates of Great Britain. He had seen the wine cellars in some of those places, and he had set about building one for his own demesne, in Deep South Jersey. But by the time I was born, in the late 1950s, the frozen-food empire was no longer his—C. F. Seabrook, the owner of the company, had sold the business to a wholesale grocery outfit from New York. Soon my father became the CEO of a public company in Philadelphia. “Cee Eee Oh” was among the first sounds I recall hearing at the dinner table. It was like whale talk.
There was a key marked wc that was kept in the drawer of a side table in the dining room. My father said that WC stood for “water closet,” which was what they called the bathroom in England. But what bathroom door did the key fit? Most of the doors didn’t even have locks on them. My father often said that there was no reason anyone should lock doors in the house.
After some time, I realized that the bland, trust-me look on his face when he explained about WC meant that he was joking, and, moreover, that he wanted me to see that he was joking. He was going to show me his wine cellar. And one day he did.
“You can help me pick the wine for tonight,” he said one Saturday afternoon before a dinner party, when I was seven or eight. Thrilled, I followed him down the steep, curving steps that led to the basement. He was dressed in his casual weekend clothes: wide-wale corduroys the color of straw, a pale-yellow dress shirt, beautiful brown ankle boots with pink socks poking out of the tops. He moved carefully on the stairs, gripping the right-hand railing and lowering his foot slowly onto the next step, then stamping down with his heel to make sure it gripped before putting his weight on it. Years before, while riding alone one Sunday morning, he’d been thrown from his horse and landed on an irrigation pipe, cracking his pelvis. The horse had run back to the farm, and the men had gone out looking for my father, not finding him until several hours later, lying in a ditch. That was one of the few stories he told in which he was ever at a disadvantage. It wasn’t heard often.
At the bottom of the stairs was a low-ceilinged passageway that led to the basement’s outdoor entrance. Along one wall was some cabinetry for storing excess kitchenware and picnic stuff, and, next to that, a floor-to-ceiling plywood bookcase, painted white with green trim, holding books that had belonged to my older half sisters, Carol and Lizanne—Eloise, Black Beauty, The Happy Hollisters.
He stopped in front of the bookcase.
“See anything?”
I looked at the books. Among them was The Boy Who Drew Cats, a Japanese folktale about a rebellious artist-boy who defeats a goblin rat that lives in the temple and has killed many mighty warriors, simply by drawing pictures of cats on the walls and going to sleep. In the morning,
when he finds the terrible rat dead in the temple and can’t explain it, he notices that the cats’ mouths in the drawings are dripping with blood.
My father grasped the shelves and pulled to the right, and the whole bookcase slid noiselessly into a recessed pocket behind the cabinetry. Before us was a wide, arch-shaped wooden door, painted glossy gray, with a brass key plate. He fitted the WC key into it and pulled the door toward us just enough to catch the edge with his fingers, being careful not to pinch them against the edge of the now hidden bookcase.
The heavy door swung open, drawing the cool air of the cellar behind it. The viny scent of wine, cut with the stringent reek of strong alcohol, enveloped us. It was pitch-black within, and, in the moment it took my father to find the light switch, I imagined a demon rat rushing past us and disappearing into some other part of the house.
Then the lights blazed up on a square room, about fifteen feet per side, filled from floor to ceiling with wine and liquor, resting in sturdy wooden bins stacked four high, stained dark-brown and built around three sides of the room, along with a two-sided row of bins in the middle, forming two bays. It was like stepping into King Tut’s tomb.
The first bay held champagnes on the left and bottles of liquor and port on the right. There were exotic bottles such as framboise, calvados, and Poire Williams, and drinks I’d later come across in Hemingway—Campari, Armagnac, Pernod, marc—as well as liqueurs in garish colors, such as Chartreuse. I knew that “proof” meant percentage of alcohol by volume in the liquor: 100 proof was 50 percent. Most potent of all was the 151-proof rum, which my father used to set alight crêpes suzette on New Year’s Eve. There was a cache of those bottles down here.
