When He Thinks of Me
Maybe he's under the bright windows of his gorgeous university of souls.
From the passenger seat, I am looking out over the steeples of New Jersey, the new apartment blocks and warehouses. I am thinking about psychics. I am thinking about what I would ask a psychic if I could ask one question. Yesterday, before we left New York, my friend Larry offered to introduce me to one.
No one has ever recommended a psychic to me before. All I’ve ever heard are cautionary tales. But I respect Larry’s judgement. So, when he asked me if I wanted to meet his friend, the psychic, I told him yes. Immediately, yes. Of course, yes. When we get back from this trip to Utah, I said, I would like to meet her.
And then we left town, and now I have thousands of miles in which to wonder: what would I ask? If I had one thing I could ask a psychic, what would it be?
I considered asking her about my ex-husband. We are angling across New Jersey today, approaching Pennsylvania, en route to Utah to deal with more of his things. And, even three years after the divorce, I haven’t found an end for that story. I weighed my ex-husband briefly in my mind—would I ask about him? But then I quickly set him down. He isn’t the one I want to know about. He isn’t the one who came to mind when Larry asked me. And he isn’t the one I think of now, as we cross over the Delaware Water Gap.
I am thinking about my dad.
My dad had a vision of the afterlife that I always liked. It’s where I imagine him, when I think of him now, almost fifteen years after his death. I can easily summon an image of him, younger and different than I ever knew him, taking confident steps along a long, sunlit hallway. He told me once how he wanted to spend eternity in a great university. The greatest university. I can see him now stopping briefly before a classroom, thumbing quickly through the course catalog again to confirm to himself that this was the right door to enter. Inside the door, the beginning of the next adventure. Another life. Behind him, an endless transcript of classes already taken, innumerable lives wasted in ruin or painfully redeemed, his soul refining itself again and again toward some kind of greater enlightenment.
He taught me to love the act of learning. The potentials of uncertainty. He would read aloud from the articles in Popular Science magazine. He listened intently to the quiet, earnest voices on NPR. He couldn’t ever get enough information. When he was in his fifties, he and my mom bought a set of CD’s to learn French together. They listened to them every day in the car, repeating restaurant orders and pronouns and greetings. When they were done with the CD’s, they went to Switzerland to take more classes. They went to France. They went to Quebec.
In his early sixties, he bought a beautiful antique Steinway piano for my mom and for me to play. Then he began to teach himself to play too. I remember studying at the dining room table while he practiced his scales in the living room. I would have been in high school at that point. Painfully aware of myself, serious-minded, and terrified to be caught in any mistake. I listened from the other room as he picked his way through my old playbooks. He began with the easiest ones, the pages with comically large notes and drawings of nursery animals. Night after night, he practiced the same way he’d always made me practice. Twice through every piece. He progressed through the playbooks, levels 3, 4, 5. I remember his first stumbling night with Beethoven’s Fur Elise. And Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. A whole book of Chopin preludes, one page at a time. I sat in the other room with my notebooks while he played, unable to focus on my studies. I was so nervous for him. My expert of everything, sitting down at the keys like a child. I tried not to hear his mistakes. I thought he might be embarrassed about them. I felt each of the faltering seconds between notes as though they were my own.
I look back now and it pains me to see how little I understood.
Once, years earlier, he and I were at the dining table together, looking through my science homework. It was around Christmas time, and there was a popcorn and cranberry garland half-constructed at the other end of the table. I was in the 5th or 6th grade. As we went through the pages of my homework, question by question, he kept pushing me to add little funny alternative answers in the margins of the worksheet. “List the heavenly bodies,” he read from the sheet. “Did they really say ‘heavenly bodies?’” His face was pink when he laughed. He offered me five dollars to write down “Claudia Schiffer.”
I laughed with him, but I wouldn’t write it down. Not even for five bucks, which was a lot of money to me at that age.
I was taking this way too seriously, he told me.
Did he have fun with his homework when he was a kid? I asked. No, he said. That’s the point. He had worried over it just like I did, and now he wished he hadn’t.
You need to play more, he said. Play with your homework. Play with everything.
“Do you know what I have always wished?” He asked me.
No, I didn’t.
“I wish that I had learned to tap dance.”
My mom and I drove up to dad’s grave this past March. We do this most times when I visit. We drove up the highest hill in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Oakland, California. A beautiful old Catholic cemetery, with big eucalyptus trees and ancient mausoleums. We left flowers with him, and then we sat on the stone retaining wall beside his grave.
“Tony would’ve hated this weather,” my mom said. The sun baked straight through us, scorching the stone wall. “You couldn’t have buried me under one of those trees over there?” She said to herself.
Behind our backs, the big Oleander bushes were beginning to bloom. We looked out from the hill, across Oakland to the water. On clear days, you can see each distinct angle of the San Francisco skyline.
“I don’t think of him staying here all the time,” I said. “Just sometimes. He probably only stops by on cooler days.”
I revisited in my mind a hundred different trips I’d taken up to this cemetery. The day we buried his ashes. I remembered bending down to throw in a handful of dirt. Other days. Other bouquets of flowers, bought from the same florist on Piedmont Avenue, placed into the little flower holder. The couple of times I brought my ex-husband here, and we sat together silently on a bench nearby. I remembered all the times my parents’ dog Cooper was here with us. I thought of Cooper, who was young then, in those years before he hurt his leg, before he grew old and died. All the times he lay stretched out in the grass by dad’s grave. The times he rolled around under the bushes.
“Maybe Dad only comes here when he wants to think about us,” I said.
I could feel my grief, a thick wave of it, threatening to surface, and it stopped me from saying more. I feel it less often now, but when it comes, it’s still as fresh. Just as wrenching as ever. I can withstand it if I just hold myself a little apart and wait for it to pass.
Everyone learns about grief, at different times and in different ways. I learned at twenty-two, late one night at Christmastime. I learned about time, the thick, unspooling rope of time. How easily the world absorbs your apocalypse. Even though your life has been torn utterly to the ground, and even though you hate it for what it’s done to you. Despite everything, the next day, your eyes open again, and you’re expected to shower and answer your mail. You have to keep doing the expected things, even from the new side of the veil, where they are clearly ridiculous. You have to write checks and keep appointments. You have to pretend to have survived, until eventually you forget the need to pretend. Given whatever tools you have—prayer, sex, psychotherapy, dissociation—you figure out how to stop crying all the time. You don’t recover, exactly, but you also don’t die of your wounds.
After I lost him, I dreamed about my dad every night for six months. He came to me as different, younger versions of himself. He came to me with the faces of other people, only to reveal himself as I fell against him and sobbed into him with relief. He was alive again, and he died again and again. He stood at the top of stairways, and walked out of sight into hallways and through doorways that vanished behind him. And, once or twice, he stopped and sat, and talked with me. Once, he said to me, “I was right about all of this,” meaning wherever he was. And I woke up feeling peaceful that day, for once.
What is my dad teaching himself now? I can imagine him living anywhere in the world, doing anything. Studying medicine. Spinning with the dervishes in India. Fighting for freedom in some oppressed place. Maybe he has just returned to his long hallway from another class. Maybe he is lying again on the green grass, looking up at the bright windows of his gorgeous university of souls.
If I stop to think of eternity—which I do, more often than I should—and if I was given a mind that is capable of considering something as impossible as eternity, then… why couldn’t my dad be right? I don’t understand why such an extraordinary thing, a human mind, would be wasted on a single lifespan. In the face of eternity, even a long, healthy human life is nothing. It’s a rounding error at the far tail end of one of those unknowable numbers, way out beyond the sight of a decimal point. We’re less than sand. And we may only be sand. Maybe there is, in fact, such a thing as an ending. But it isn’t what I believe.
I’ve never seen an ending—not to a story. Not to a thought or an idea. I can hear a breath sometimes, a brief clearing of air between acts, and then it just goes on. Nothing that happens ever seems to begin or end. I find I’m always telling the same story. I am always gesturing to the same ghosts.
When my dad died, I learned what anger was. I’d never been angry like that before. I was twenty-two, and until that point, I had always been fairly placid and possibly too understanding of others. But his death was beyond understanding. For weeks, I was completely, screaming furious at everyone. I was angry with his doctors, who hadn’t seen the time bomb in his heart. I was angry with the priest who gave the mass. I was angry with the funeral director, who kept suggesting songs and prayers my dad would’ve hated. I was especially angry with the people who came around the house to be supportive of my mom and my sister and me. None of them were destroyed like I was. None of them were angry. Not with the intolerable clock that kept ticking forward, and every unasked-for day when he wouldn’t return.
I was angry with my dad, too, for having lived such a private life. It was his fault I couldn’t surround myself now with people who had known and loved him. He had preferred the company of our little family—my mom, my sister, and me. And now we were the only ones who knew him well enough to know how truly special he was. The others didn’t understand. They didn’t know how delicately he spoke, allowing himself only the right words for each moment, correcting himself, editing his words mid-sentence, until he had said precisely what he meant. They hadn’t ever called him, the way I had, to ask what to do when their car was towed, when their ex-boyfriend kept texting, when their landlord hadn’t turned on the heat. They didn’t know how many desperately-needed answers had been lost, now that he couldn’t answer his phone. This curious, witty man, my dad, who was kind and ever so quietly vulnerable. He was special—he was supposed to stay alive. Him, of all people.
As soon as Larry mentioned the psychic to me, I knew exactly what I wanted from her. I wanted to know about my dad. If such a thing were possible, if such a psychic exists, I would want to know how he’s doing, whether he’s happy, whether I’ll get to see him again. It’s the only question I really want answered—was he right about his great university? Is he out there somewhere?
Except I already know that I won’t ask her. Why would I invite another person, a stranger, into our relationship? Why would I ask anything, when I can still feel him—even if it’s only sometimes, as I pass from one room into another. A catch, a little tug in the chest. When I can still feel his mind at work somewhere. And even his delight, the same pink-faced delight, passing just near me, against my skin, like a breeze.
Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.
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He probably visits often and follows you around, tapping on your shoulder occasionally. I'd be interested in what your psychic would say if you just sat before her and waited for her to see something about you that needs to be said. Questions are kind of a giveaway and help the psychic give answers they think you'll like. My daughter gifted me a reading with her psychic and it was weird. She said she saw faeries around me. Hmmmmm. Maybe. Maybe not. Faeries.
I so loved this piece. your Dad sounds like a wonderful person and father. beautiful writing as always, Tonya.