‘Grief Passes, Absence Doesn’t’
In her memoir Lost & Found, Pulitzer Prize-winner Kathryn Schulz explores how our lives are shaped by loss and discovery.
There is a chair in my sister’s living room that my father used to claim as his own every November when our family descended on her house for Thanksgiving. He would settle into it shortly after arriving and occupy it more or less continuously until the time came to leave, give or take meals and the occasional stroll down the hall to his granddaughter’s room for bedtime stories and animated discussions about current affairs in the land of dolls and stuffed animals. This was toward the end of his life – in earlier years, my parents had hosted the holiday themselves – when, between poor balance, a bad back, and time served, my father had been permanently discharged from kitchen duties. “I have become,” he once declared, after the act of standing up from the chair to help out had triggered a chorus of voices ordering him to sit back down, “an adornment.”
Neither in the pejorative nor in the complimentary sense was my father ever what you would call ornamental. Still, he did improve every room he ever entered. At Thanksgiving, he would sit there all day in his chair, not exactly holding court and not exactly holding forth yet nonetheless seeming like our own private philosopher-king. When the rest of us were lounging around in the living room with him, he would play with great gusto his many overlapping roles: father, grandfather, scholar, wiseacre, fielder of questions, benevolent inquisitor, master of ceremonies. When we were busy cooking or working or out for a walk, he would push his glasses up onto his forehead and return to whichever book he was reading – “Hebrew for Ancient People,” he once joked when I asked him, an effortless double entendre.
“Where there was him, there is nothing,” I wrote of my father earlier, and that is true, with the caveat that “nothing” is not a neutral blankness. In the lane behind my house, there is a tree where I once saw an owl; now, every time I pass it, I look up automatically. That is something like the nothingness left behind after death: the place in the tree where the owl is not. From the first Thanksgiving after my father died, I have never once looked at that chair without remembering my father in it. And it is not just the chair. My father is not in my life in the same way he used to be in my life: everywhere and unmistakably. I imagine this is true for almost everyone who has lost someone they love. To be bereft is to live with the constant presence of absence.
““Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future.””
This sounds upsetting, and at first it is. From the moment he died, I understood that my father, who never wanted anything more than for his daughters to be happy, would not want me to remember him in sorrow. And yet for a long time afterward, my world turned into, in both senses, a negative space: a map of where my father was not. That map did not just include all those places, like the chair, where he had always been. It also included all the places where he would never be. Not long after his death, I fell to talking with an older friend, who told me that his own father was still alive, at 94. I can’t remember what I said in response, and I don’t know how I kept the conversation going, because all I could think was: 20 more years. I could have had my father in my life for another two decades, an unfathomably long extension, a literal generation of more time with him.
This kind of temporal reckoning is a common part of grieving. No matter when your loved ones die, there will always be a litany of things they did not live long enough to do: attend your graduation, dance at your wedding, see the house you bought, see the life you built, read the book you wrote, meet your children. Even if those future occurrences are wonderful in themselves, the thought of them after a death can be distressing. Grief confuses us by spinning us around to face backward, because memories are all we have left, but of course it isn’t the past we mourn when someone dies; it’s the future. That’s what I realised while taking with my friend, that everything that happened in my life from that point on would be something else my father would not see.
It takes a long time to be done grieving, and even longer to know it. The periodicity of grief is too unreliable and the overall condition too chameleon to track with any certainty. Are you still mourning or just in a lousy mood? Have you crossed that faint boundary that marks the end of bereavement and the beginning of sorrow, an emotion you may feel on and off for the rest of your days? It is very difficult to say, especially because even when the worst has passed, or seems to have passed, there is nothing to prevent its return. Grief has an appalling recidivism rate, and it is common to find yourself back in it long past the point when you thought you were truly, thoroughly done. Still, for almost everyone, it really does fade away eventually. At some point, always retroactively, you look around your life and realise that it is gone.
The same is not true, however, for all the absences left behind by the death of someone you love. These just start to feel different, filled up as they finally are with something other than grief. I still notice, almost daily, all the places where my father is missing. I come upon them in photographs and in books that I’m reading, in the sound of my own sentences and the shape of my thoughts, in my mother and my sister, in my own face in the mirror, in the familiar sight of his wallet – safe now, as it never was with him – in my top dresser drawer. Some of these absences make me grateful, for who my father was and for the excuse to pause and spend a moment thinking of him. Some still have a melancholy, twilight feel. Some, like that chair, are a kind of commonplace memorial, a candle I don’t have to light because it is always bright with him. Collectively, all of them serve to make the world a little less incomplete than it would otherwise be. They are still here, unlike him, and I assume they always will be, as enduring as the love that made them. This is the fundamental paradox of loss: it never disappears.
Edited excerpt from Lost & Found: A Memoir, by Kathryn Schulz, Pan Macmillan, $34.99.