All That You Leave Behind: A Memoir(6)

My stepmom, one of the strongest, most stoic women I know, began to cry out over and over again for my dad, her partner of more than two decades. We sat with her. There was nothing else we could do. We talked about the day that had just transpired, hoping that retracing every single one of his steps could provide clues, but we found nothing solid.

Jasper and I spent the night at Monie’s. He held me as I cried myself to sleep. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to take off my clothes. They were what I was wearing when I hugged my dad for the last time.

I woke up the next morning certain that I was dying, too. The words “My dad is dead” beat like an awful drum inside my head.

Suddenly, a memory flashed. Christmas Eve, a few weeks before. We were all sitting around the living room. My dad had made a point to celebrate how life had worked out nearly perfectly for everyone in our family. Relationships, jobs, money, happiness. I remember thinking how right he was. “Everything has broken our way,” he’d concluded.

Now everything was just broken.





4


    The Ghost in You





My dad’s doctor called. It hadn’t even been a day since he’d died. Talking to the doctor seemed a little beside the point to me, but Meagan wanted answers. She’d emailed the good doctor to see if there was any sort of explanation behind our father’s unexpected death. I had Dr. Keen’s number in my phone from years past. I picked up immediately when she called, and she softly stated the obligatory words of condolence. I hit speakerphone and introduced Meagan as the brains of the operation.

My sister paced back and forth in the family dining room as she began the inquiry. I am sure the doc was nervous; she was my dad’s primary care physician, and he had seen her repeatedly in the last six months. It seemed like he was always headed to or from her office whenever we spoke. There were warning signs. His appearance had changed. He had lost his appetite and a fair amount of weight; he had frequent bouts of pneumonia; and his stamina, forever a staple in his life, was beginning to wane. They had been searching for a reason for his weight loss.

The shadow over his pancreas? The scan came back clean. His diabetes was acting up, but that could have been due to any number of reasons. His smoking was always a problem, but there was nothing anyone could do about that.

Meagan had a simple question: “What did he die of?” Dr. Keen was very careful and measured in her response. She told us that we would have to wait for the official autopsy report, but early signs looked like lung cancer. The scans he’d had just weeks before hadn’t yet revealed the mass on his lungs. He’d had a chest X-ray, but apparently it didn’t extend far enough, and they had missed it. My dad had an appointment with a pulmonologist scheduled for the week after he died. The doctor contended that they likely would have found the tumor then. The call solidified what we already knew—that he did not know he was dying.

Meagan hung up the phone. Then, after a long pause, she said, “Okay, so that’s good. He didn’t know.”

“Yeah, what a relief,” I said sarcastically. I knew the quest for information was an important one, but my fuse was short. Just about everything in the world made me angry at this point.

Right now, Jill was quiet and focused as she concentrated on the task ahead of her. She carefully arranged the hospital and insurance papers on the dining room table, which is what they used to do with their bills. She called my dad’s credit card companies and gave them our bad news. There were piles of newspapers stacked up at the house; he read four papers a day. How was he able to get through that amount of information in one day? No one had thought to cancel any of the subscriptions yet. I watched her silently as she went about the business of dealing with death.

She glanced up and said, “We still have a couple of things that we have to do today. Someone has to go identify the body.” I found myself volunteering for the job. I’d do anything to get outside the claustrophobic house.

“Are you sure?” Jill asked. The image of my father’s dead body at the hospital would never leave my skull. I could at least spare my sisters the same assault.

A few hours passed, and I began to lose my nerve. I started to panic about walking into the morgue alone. Jasper sat in the living room with his head down. He had been a staple around the house but was ever mindful of fading into the background. I asked him what book he was reading, and he told me it wasn’t important. No other information really matters in the days after a death. I think he knew what was about to come next. I asked if he would drive me into the city and help me identify the body. I couldn’t do it alone. He said of course, though I could sense he was deeply uncomfortable.

As I got into Jasper’s car I patted myself down for my phone, knowing I’d be unable to do anything without it. Unlike at the hospital, today the phone felt like armor, with its constant buzzing as friends and acquaintances reached out to tell me how much my dad meant to them. It felt like a slot machine; every time I unlocked it I got a small dose of dopamine. It was one of the only things keeping me intact. I was opting out of the present in favor of a digital realm where I didn’t have to call the doctor or figure out what I needed for the morgue. I could just be comforted.

We typed “NYC morgue” into Google Maps and I stifled a small laugh—how comedically awful our lives had become in a single day. We put on a Spotify playlist of my dad’s favorite songs, of which there were thousands. The day before, Jasper and I had shortened it to those we could remember: fifty-six songs, three hours and forty-five minutes’ worth.