Plus One

45: What's next?

45: What’s next?

“I think he liked lilies. Lilies are pretty, right? Cassie, what do you think?”

My dad’s house was clean—not just clean, pristine. Gone were the work files and documents and manila folders that covered his living room like paper skin; gone were the ringed coffee stains on the mahogany table, the ghost of a footprint stamped into the rug, the half-consumed boxes of take-out leaning precariously over the kitchen counter—like they were suicidal, almost, driven mad by the rotten leftovers no one had bothered to save. Growing up, save for the illusive holiday gathering or important home-office meeting, our house was never clean.

Before she left, my mom used to beg him to sterilize the house each spring. He used to shake his head, salt-and-pepper hair flopping over his eyes, uncombed because it was a weekend, and say “Over my dead body.” 

Ha.

“Lilies, Cassie. For the funeral. Is that fine?” 

There were eight of us in the house, gathered around the kitchen table: Ellie, her husband, her sister-in-law, our two aunts, their husbands, and me. I wondered if my dad had had this many people over in the entirety of last year. Even when I came to visit, there was always this presence there—not so much a presence, actually, as it was an absence. It was the knowledge that something was missing, or perhaps hiding in a corner no one remembered to check because it was just out of our lines of sight. Sometimes I had assumed it was a hole left by mom, but that never quite seemed to fit. I liked to think that my dad had been happy while he was alive, but that emptiness had always hugged him like an itchy winter coat, infecting his occasional smiles with sadness until they became just a little bit too hard to believe. 

Maybe he was happier now. 

“Will you please answer me?” 

Was there relief in death? I’d spent so many weeks writing it off as the ultimate last resort, as if life always possessed some constant upper hand over its counterpart. Surely, not every single prophet in history had been a fraud or a madman: what if there was some ambiguous, eternal, impossible to define realm of peace after death? What if we were all wasting our time on Earth, chasing after things like science and art and music when everything we could dream of was waiting on the other side of a gunshot or a car accident? For something so revered and cherished, life was ugly. It was unfair and complicated and its malignant passions drove people insane.

“Cassie, come on.” 

Should I have just let Taylor die? 

“Can you even hear me at all?” 

After a loud exhale, I stood up. “Ellie? Fuck the flowers.” 

I didn’t give myself time to judge the reactions of my audience: I was out of the kitchen and into my father’s bedroom before the whisper of a gasp could slip into my ear. And then, for the first time since I’d heard the wretched news—after a day of packing, a pathetically mangled excuse to Adrian about why I had to leave, and a nightmarish plane ride where all I could hear was Taylor’s voice in that god-forsaken field—I cried. 

I sobbed and heaved into the pillows that smelled like old cologne, until my throat was all but scarred by coughing fits. Each time my shoulders shook, the grief slammed through my bones until my whole body throbbed with missing my dad. I missed his sarcastic, fleeting humor, the dismissive toss of his head when my selfless teenage self begged him for money to go shopping. 

I’d had grandparents and even distant cousins pass away during my childhood, but nothing was like this: a gnawing, growing, horrific sensation that my life would never, ever be the same. That no matter how many cookies I ate, how many charities I donated to, how many times I visited my father’s grave with an armful of flowers, I would never quite be okay. Time doesn’t heal everything, it just adds distraction after distraction until every once in awhile it’s possible to forget. Is that how anyone should have to live?