Emails from My Father’s Mistress, Posthumously [Part III]

The feelings of closeness and solitude with other people after my father’s death were like the ocean tides: there were patterns of rushing in and rushing out. The first week after my father died, people rushed in: it was a crush of folks coming to his shiva, people coming to see me, my mother, and my brother.  I saw friends and relatives I hadn’t seen in years and they acted like not a minute had passed.

After the first week, I felt the rush out, leaving my proverbial feet in the clammy, cold sand. I woke up one morning at my parent’s house (which was already quickly becoming “my mother’s house” in my mind) and walked into the kitchen. I lit a cigarette and opened the fridge. Everything seemed like a momentous effort, the decisions embedded in the most familiar routine suddenly becoming weighted with strange significance. I tried to make a three-egg provolone omelette on the kitchen gas range, as I had a hundred times before. I accidentally left the metal handle of the frying pan over the gas flame as I waited for the olive oil in the pan to warm. When I grabbed the handle, the skin on my right palm sizzled. After the initial shock and yelp of pain, I wrapped an ice pack around my right hand, learning on the fly to smoke with the remaining functioning fingers on my right hand and cook left-handed. It was just as well: everything had already felt awkward before that moment, like I had started the day trying to do everything left-handed.

One way Wendy distinguished herself from of my father’s other friends was she didn’t stop speaking to me in the months following his death. Communication with everyone else who was not part of my extended family tapered off quickly: people did not seem to know what to say. And because they did not know what to say, they did not want to talk to me.

I have spent many hours discussing this phenomenon with other people as the years have continued to pass since my father’s death. I am not the only person who has experienced the sudden cessation of communication after the loss of someone like a father. People worry about not being able to say “the right thing” to someone who has experienced a loss, so they often elect to say nothing at all. But because my father and I were so close, this extra loss of his friends turning away was difficult to bear. I was hungry for people I could share his memory with who had known him in life.

Wendy and I traded e-mails. And in these e-mails I learned things about my father I  had never known while he was alive. Some information was inconsequential: Wendy introduced him to Motown music in the ’70s. He, in turn, introduced her to Dylan.

Other things were more significant: I learned during my father’s time at ASU, my parents came the closest they ever did to divorcing/splitting up for good. (They seemed to teeter on the verge of divorce for my entire childhood. Was it better or worse knowing they had teetered on that same edge decades before?) My parents lived apart for a while–long enough, according to Wendy, it seemed plausible it was really over between them, although I have never learned how many weeks/days/months that meant. During part of this time (all of this time?–I am still not sure), my father lived with Wendy. They were lovers. Although my father had never told me this while he was alive, I had already connected enough of the dots since meeting Wendy that it was not a surprise when Wendy told me.

Wendy shared letters he had sent her over the years. Wendy sent me audio tape recordings he had recorded for her in the late 70s and early 80s. I stood in my kitchen in Pasadena when my roommates were at work and played the tapes to myself. I felt stupid, like I was at some kind of reverse séance. What I was hoping to accomplish by listening to these tapes? I could not say. I didn’t even think it would necessarily be good to hear my father’s voice again–I knew he wasn’t talking to me–but I felt like I should give it a try. I would sit at the table with a cup of coffee, wiping occasional tears on my sleeve. When I felt like I couldn’t take any more, which was typically 15 to 20 minutes a session, I would stop the cassette.

The tapes didn’t contain any hidden wisdom or any other things which made me feel better about my father’s life or death. Most of the stuff Dad talked about on the tape was pedestrian, the every day goings on of his life, which Wendy was missing at that point as she lived with a girlfriend in Hawaii. It helped me realize it is the every day, mundane tasks we undertake with our loved ones which can bring an unexpected level of richness to our lives. This had already been demonstrated to me in my own grieving: it took the passage of six year’s time before I could perform an entire Costco shopping trip without crying. I had not realized how much I had enjoyed going to Costco on Saturday morning shopping trips with my father until he was gone.

Wendy and I still keep in touch, and visit occasionally. In the initial years of our friendship, I was absorbed when I talked to Wendy in learning things about my father’s life and her life that I had not known before. A few more years into our relationship, I felt resentful. For a while, our relationship seemed pointless and dysfunctional to me: we were talking to each other mostly because neither of us could talk to my dad any more. But as the years have continued to march by, my feelings have evened out to acceptance and familiar kindnesses. We send each other our new addresses when we move, keep up on major life events, and occasionally send a card or two. I know it is what my father would have wanted me to do.

I figure Wendy and I see enough of Dad reflected in each other that we keep carrying on these conversations, perhaps hoping in some replies we hear him answer back.