It is hard to describe the sheer brutality of mourning, the distractedness: it will be a miracle if I hold onto my wallet & keys for a month; it’s as if half of my head isn’t there at all. I am astonished by how little I have to work with; I stop talking mid-sentence, mid-thought, and don’t even notice. And it’s not just memory, scenes of remembrance, it’s the emotions of them, too: how clear what it was like being taught to ride the yellow Schwinn I received for my 7th birthday; my dad was only 48 then and that seems miraculous, somehow, in retrospect. I wish my 42 year old self could talk to his 48 year old one. I recall so many moments, so many of them blurring together, like the numerous rides to my favorite record store when I was a teenager, which was called Slipped Disc but which he called Broken Back, and suddenly too the memory of which awful car we owned at the time, and the mismatched sneakers I was wearing, on purpose of course, and even what I had written on the thick white rubber wall of the right one. The tiniest details come back that I had wholly forgotten: how the fabric of one car’s interior had come undone and hung like some kind of harem tent.
It is astonishing how each detail opens up a hundred more, and so on & so on, until you’re lost in an ocean of it: not bad, not good, but absolutely overwhelming.
So if you see me looking around distractedly for something, or just standing stock still, it may be that I’m remembering some shirt my dad was wearing in 1979, or it may be that I’m looking for my wallet, or my keys, or maybe, even, I will just be remembering my own name or looking at my own hand & noticing, for the first time, how much my fingers are like his.