One day we’ll all be ghosts
Tripping around in someone else’s home.
One day we’ll all be ghosts, ghosts, ghosts,
Ghosts, ghosts, ghosts.
—The Head and the Heart
It was July 26, 2017, when I got the call that my dad, Arnie, had passed away.
It wasn’t a complete shock. Throughout my adult life my relationship with him was mostly as his caretaker; he suffered from Parkinson’s disease for many, many years and was fortunate enough to spend his last years in an assisted living facility. Still, it was brutal watching this once vibrant and cool man, with more than his share of hair and girlfriends, in a long decline. Visiting him was a chore. He was able to give so little emotionally, and his inclination was to complain. About anything and everything. What finally took Dad’s life was dysphagia, a severely compromised ability to swallow, apparently not uncommon as Parkinson’s disease progresses.
My experience of losing my dad was a bit conflicted. On one hand, just a few months after losing Amy, it was painful to be plunged headfirst back into grief. Just as I thought I was going in a better direction, I had to confront feelings of loss all over again. On the other hand, though, to be completely honest, I was at peace with his passing. He’d been living a very, very difficult life, and he’d never seemed happy. His physical limitations had become so extreme that it was impossible for him to enjoy the simple pleasures of everyday life—going to a diner for a chocolate phosphate, for example, or his weekly outings with his brother Howard for a hot dog.
I was relieved for him that he was free of a body and mind that were making him so miserable. I was relieved for me that I’d been freed from the burden of continuing to be his caretaker; after the long time I’d spent caring for Amy, simply put, I was exhausted. But as with grief in general, the impact of losing my father wove its way in and out of my consciousness and made the emotional process that much more difficult to navigate.
In the end, my father’s death carried an emotional toll all its own—albeit not one that I could have fully predicted. While I obviously grieved for my father, his death made me feel Amy’s absence even more acutely. Amy had always been there for me when it came to him—or to life in general, for that matter—and this was the first loss I’d suffered since her passing. In the aftermath of my father’s death, I was reminded of how immediately Amy and I understood our respective struggles and the unspoken agreement between us that whatever those struggles were, we’d get through them together.
Not many people understood my challenges with my father in the same way Amy did, without my ever having to explain it to her, or even say a word about it unless I just needed to. The complexities of my relationship with him were not lost on her. She was there when I returned from a visit with him and had to unwind by venting to her.
“Did he ask you one question about you?” she’d ask, even though she already knew the answer. I was usually a sounding board for all of the things Arnie found to complain about. Amy would listen to me repeat his list of things that were wrong in his life: the institutional food, his lack of training to use a computer so he could finish his book, the allegedly rough way he was handled by the staff, and on and on.
Amy and I would put things in perspective together. We would remind Dad that he was beyond fortunate to live where he did at no cost to himself; that his sons were there financially if he needed anything; that his kids schlepped him to countless doctors’ visits; that his brother was there religiously to take him out for his regular hot-dog excursions; and that he had incredible grandkids with whom he could develop relationships. Amy had her own unique way of bringing me back to reality after a visit with him, of making me feel like a good son, and of helping me simply get used to the fact that I would not get anything in return from this complex relationship.
Now suddenly I had to confront this maze of emotions on my own, without Amy to lean on. It was humbling to realize how empty I still felt, even after months of what I’d told myself was progress. Above all else, though, it was just incredibly sad.
Perhaps nothing crystallized my fraught emotions more than sitting down to prepare my remarks for my dad’s funeral. As I tried to think of the right words, I was overcome with a feeling of profound certainty—Amy would have known what to say. But not just that, she would have helped me figure out what I wanted to say. Instead, I had to figure it out on my own. And just that fact—that I’d lost my sounding board, my friend who was there to help me deal with moments precisely like this—left me at a loss for words, not just about my father, but about everything.
Thankfully, just when I’d almost given up on finding much of anything to talk about but my struggles with Dad, my high school prom date texted me out of the blue and shared some wonderful memories of him, even though their encounter had been brief. As with many challenges I would come to face, I started to think about him from a place of being grateful for what he stood for in my life. My dad was, after all, a very accomplished artist, a jazz drummer, and a historian, and he had a wealth of idiosyncrasies, including his love of Fanta grape soda, chocolate phosphates, and hot-dog gum. In the end, I was able to eulogize him in a way that showed respect for the man he’d been in my life.
As Arnie’s death threw me back into my grief for Amy, something unexpected happened, purely by chance, that went a long way to helping me focus on my blank space: Miles, who had recently graduated from college in Atlanta, came home to Chicago and moved back in with me.
Now this wasn’t anyone’s “idea,” it just sort of happened in the way that lots of kids move home after college graduation. Miles had his own plans for his future, and home seemed like a good place to put things in motion. The timing could not have been more perfect.
Of course neither of us knew at the outset what it would be like living together without Amy, but as it turned out, the match was great. Each of us provided something for the other at that unspeakably difficult time. For me, the sight of my middle child emerging from his childhood bedroom felt so comforting, a sense of normalcy in a period when nothing felt normal. Oh, there’s Miles coming out of his red room, right where he belongs.
It became clear early on that we were entering a new phase of our relationship, though. My days of fathering a young boy were over. Sure, I had a lot of anxiety about single parenting. Those concerns frequently crept in, but mostly our relationship was redefining itself. I soon began a new life as a single person, and Miles was right there with a window into my new life. Sometimes that would mean I was out late. Other times it meant a traditional “Dad dinner,” something I knew Miles deeply appreciated.
But it was the in-between moments that brought us that much closer. Whether that came in the form of pausing in the morning before work for a good conversation about an article or current events, or diving deep into exchanging thoughts about a podcast we’d heard, I saw with such clarity that this was not just my son and my new roommate but a grown-up man processing his own grief.
We continued our tradition of cooking meals together and trying out new restaurants. We frequented neighborhood joints. We talked about books, and he introduced me to some great nonfiction I would never have known about without him. We explored the new territory of family gatherings and social events together without Amy and learned to enjoy them, and we traveled to a wedding as a team. Having Miles in my life in this intimate way took some of the sting out of the loss I’d been struggling with.