25 Years

My father has been dead for twenty-five years.

I have now spent considerably more of my life without him than I ever spent with him. I have been an adult without a father longer than I was a child with one.

I was eighteen when my father died. An age at which one is technically permitted to vote, enlist in the military, and purchase cigarettes, but is still largely incapable of understanding how the world works, and certainly lacking a fully developed frontal lobe.

 

I was also an eighteen-year-old girl with enormous promise. People reminded me of this constantly (except, of course, my grandparents, who detested me, but that's another essay). Teachers, directors, mentors, friends. I was going to “be somebody.” I was going to “do extraordinary things.” My life stretched before me like a great illuminated boulevard, and somewhere at the end of it, presumably, stood Sutton Foster-level validation, Tony Awards, provable achievements that would make all these adults proud, hopefully a tasteful apartment with incredible natural light, and, of course, happiness?

Then my father died. After more than a decade of battling cancer.
And somewhere in the wreckage, without quite realizing it, I made a terrible bargain:

I would “make it worth it.”
I would become so extraordinary, so accomplished, so undeniably successful that the terrible thing that had happened to us would somehow be redeemed. I would take all that potential, all that promise, all the love and encouragement he had poured into me, and transform it into something magnificent.
Something worthy of him.
Something worthy of the loss.
Something that justified the size of this tragedy.

Which, when you think about it, is an absolutely insane assignment to give an eighteen-year-old (but after all, I was a “gifted” student, and I took it very seriously because almost all gifted and talented kids are totally deranged...)

 

For twenty-five years.
___

Now, there is an important distinction to make here.
My father never asked this of me.
Not once.
My father thought I hung the moon.
He delighted in me. He was astonished by me. He celebrated my ambitions, my peculiarities, my successes, and even my failures with a generosity I have spent much of my adult life struggling (and frankly, failing) to extend to myself.
He was not a man sitting at the breakfast table demanding to know why his teenage daughter had not yet secured a Broadway contract.
He was…my dad.
He loved me. I could viscerally feel that love.
And yet, after his death, I somehow transformed this loving, imperfect, deeply human man into the chairman of a celestial awards committee. I imagined him watching from the afterlife, arms folded, quietly disappointed.

 

Meanwhile, some of the brilliant kids I went to high school with were winning the giant awards, and I was watching their extraordinary careers unfold while privately conducting the sort of comparison exercise that ought to require protective eyewear and a licensed therapist.

I was truly happy for them. Their brilliance was undeniable.
I was also profoundly ashamed. And I assumed they were ashamed of me, embarrassed for me.
Not because I hadn't accomplished anything (I had accomplished quite a lot?) But because I had failed to become the version of myself I had promised I'd become at seventeen, back when I still believed life proceeded in a straight line, and tragedy was something that happened in Russian literature.
I had mistaken a possible future for a contractual obligation.
And worse, I had made my father its guarantor.

 

Of course, life had other plans.

There were extraordinary artistic experiences of the highest possible calibre, yes.
There was also my own terrible illness. Years of a screaming body demanding my attention with a ferocity that made artistic ambition seem, at times, like a quaint extracurricular activity.
There was grief, depression, and the long, unglamorous work of excavating childhood trauma that began long before Dad actually left this earth. There were years when merely remaining alive and continuing to participate in the world constituted a rather astonishing achievement.
But, of course, I didn't count those.
My internal awards committee did not recognize "survival" as an eligible category.
Nor did it recognize recovery, resilience, learning to trust, building a beautiful marriage, making a home, or becoming someone who could experience happiness without immediately checking whether she'd earned it.
These were apparently supporting achievements.
The principal award remained outstanding.

And so I kept going. Striving, measuring, imagining that somewhere, just beyond the next visible achievement, was the moment when I could finally look toward heaven and say:

There. Papa. Please. Tell me. Is it enough?

____ 

When I wrote White Hot Grief Parade in 2018, I was honoring my father, the enormous absence he had left behind, and the resilient, remarkable people who helped my mother and me survive it. 

I am proud of that book. It's where the world learns about Mike's love of Frisbee and pie-for-one and typewriters and What About Bob? And summer rainstorms and my mother, Catherine.
But the woman who wrote White Hot Grief Parade was still living inside so much pain. She had not yet completed her own harrowing journey through illness. She had not yet met Alec. She had not yet discovered so much of the life that awaited her.
She was still trying, in ways she could not entirely recognize, to make something beautiful enough to justify something terrible.
Now, twenty-five years after my father's death, I find myself wanting to remember him as a man, not a monument. And I want to remember myself as his daughter, not the executor of some impossible unfinished business.
Because the truth is that nothing I accomplish can make his death “worthwhile.”
And my life is not its compensation.
My life is my life.
It is not a memorial project. It is not an apology. It is not a twenty-five-year campaign to demonstrate that tragedy produces sufficiently impressive people.
It is simply the life I have been given, and the life I have made.
______

About two weeks ago, something changed.
Not dramatically. There was no ghostly visitation accompanied by the tasteful swell of an orchestra. Nothing announced itself. The world went on about its business, as it always does when a human life is quietly being altered. Somewhere a kettle boiled. A train arrived late. The sun rose over the same indifferent rooftops. But within me, a truth that had waited twenty-five years for an audience finally found me willing to listen. It was this: 

My father was never disappointed in me.
I was disappointed in me.
My father had never looked upon the woman I had—or had not—become with disgust.
I had.

And because I could not bear to acknowledge the full savagery of my own judgment, I gave it a face I loved. I took the likeness of Michael Silber and draped it over the crooked scaffolding of my own self-loathing. I fashioned an effigy from shame and longing, then used that monstrous creation to justify indenturing myself for a quarter of a century.

That is a very difficult thing to admit.
It is also, strangely, one of the most liberating things I have ever understood.

It is a terrible thing to discover that the voice which has condemned you all your life was your own. I had made myself both prisoner and jailer, and called the sentence love.
And it is a stranger, more merciful thing to discover that you may, at any moment, stop obeying it.
Because if my father was not the one demanding that I become extraordinary, then perhaps there was no demand at all. Perhaps the contract had never existed. Perhaps I had been working for twenty-five years to repay a debt nobody had incurred. No celestial ledger waiting to be balanced. No interest accruing with every passing year.

Only a frightened girl who had mistaken grief for obligation, and a woman who had grown so accustomed to paying that she had forgotten to ask whom, precisely, she owed.
And then came the thought that frightened me almost as much as it freed me:
Perhaps I no longer needed to imagine my father being proud of me.
Not because his pride had ceased to matter. 

Not because I loved him any less. 

But because somewhere in the long and difficult business of becoming myself, I had acquired something I once believed could only be bestowed upon me by another.
 

I was proud of myself.

 
Not in the frantic, feverish way I once understood pride. Not the brittle pride that must be earned again each morning, as though yesterday's living had left no evidence.
Something quieter. Something with roots. I was proud of the woman who had survived, and of the woman who had softened. Proud of what I had made and what I had mended. Proud of the dreams that had flowered and the ones that had died, and of the life that had continued growing around them.
Proud not because I had become everything I once promised I would be, but because I had become someone I could love.

And for the first time in twenty-five years, that love did not arrive as a verdict.
It arrived as peace.
I looked at my life and saw it: 

A body restored to health after years of suffering.
A mind learning to live without perpetual punishment.
A husband I adore, who adores me.
Work that challenges and delights me.
Dreams still unfolding.
Friendships.
Beauty.
Possibility.

I am happy.

Not every moment, obviously. I remain a human woman with an inbox, a nervous system, and a working knowledge of the New York City subway...But beneath the ordinary indignities of existence, there is something new:

A sense that I have arrived in my own life.
And that I do not have to keep proving my right to simply inhabit it.

 

_____ 

 

Lately, I have noticed my shoulders dropping. Not metaphorically. As though some ancient muscular instruction—hold this, carry this, don't you dare put this down—has finally been rescinded.

I think of the eighteen-year-old girl who lost her father and, standing in the wreckage of a world that had offered no explanation for its cruelty, decided she must spend the rest of her life "becoming extraordinary." 

She would make something of the suffering. 

Something enormous. 

Something worthy of the terrible price that had been paid.
She would take the senselessness of death and force it to yield a meaning.

Oh, Little Al. 

 

I understand why she did it. She was frightened. She was grieving. She was a child with a great and ravenous need to believe that the world possessed some hidden architecture of fairness; that if a thing was taken, something must be given in its place. That suffering, properly endured, might be exchanged for greatness. That the universe could be reasoned with, if only one brought sufficient evidence of one's worth.

And so she made her vile bargain with the silence.
She must be remarkable. She vowed to be worthy. She would make her father's death mean something.
 

And when the heavens offered no reply, she mistook the silence for agreement.

God, how tenderly I regard that girl now.

How fiercely I wish I could reach across those twenty-five years and take her face in my hands. Tell her that there are losses which cannot be redeemed, only lived beside. That no amount of beauty made afterward can make the destruction beautiful. That the world is not a just accountant, keeping careful books of what it takes and what it owes...

And that love, real love, has never been entered into such a ledger.

She was wrong about one great and terrible thing: she believed she had to earn what had already been given. Her father's love was not a loan. His death did not make it a debt. And the life that followed was not collateral against the loss.

Twenty-five years is a long time to carry a stone.

Long enough for the shoulders to grow crooked around it. Long enough for the spine to bend and call its bending strength. Long enough to forget the shape of the body before the burden, until the weight seems no longer something carried, but something you are. And what a strange, quiet terror there is in laying down a thing that has helped define you. Even a cruel thing. Even a thing that has worn the flesh raw. For when you have carried a burden long enough, its absence can feel, at first, like another kind of loss.
 

I think this is what I am learning now. That putting down the stone is not putting down my father.
That I may relinquish the punishment without relinquishing the devotion. That I may dismiss the stern and sorrowful ghost I fashioned in his likeness and make room, at last, for the man himself: beautiful and flawed, tender and human, a father who loved his daughter without requiring her to become a monument to his memory.

I may grieve him without making my life an extension of his death.
I may remember what was taken without surrendering what was given.

And I may go on into the years that remain—making art, loving fiercely, wanting things, losing things, daring greatly and sometimes foolishly, succeeding where I never expected, failing where I was certain I would triumph. I may live among the small and ordinary miracles: a warm bed, a hand reaching for mine, the sound of laughter in another room, a morning in which nothing remarkable happens except that I am alive to see it.

For there is no shame in an ordinary life.
There is no disgrace in a life that does not fulfill every promise made on its behalf.
And there is no human achievement great enough to purchase back the dead.
This is the ruthless truth of it.

My father died. 

I lived. 

Neither fact can be made to justify the other.
But one need not justify the other.

The years are not a debt to be settled. 

They are mine to inhabit. 

And after so long mistaking endurance for devotion, I find that I want to live them—not as proof of anything, not as payment for anything, 

but simply because they are here, 

     and I am here, 

          and there is still so much of the world left to love.

 

I know he would've liked that. 

 

 

May we all, on earth and beyond, be free.