goodbye

We had glorious, long vacations when I was studying abroad in college, four or five weeks. I was studying at the University of Exeter in England, and we hopped hovercrafts or hydroplanes or regular old ferries for the continent as soon as the calendar permitted. Both at Christmas and Easter I started out with friends, and then chafed at having to negotiate destinations and timetables, and struck out on my own. I would pick a place and hop a train.

The train was safe. Not necessarily physically, although in my case it was that, too. (We heard and repeated urban legends: “You’ll be sleeping in your compartment, and someone will insert a tube under the door and fill your compartment with ether and rob you blind while you sleep.” It didn’t stop us from opening multiple 12-franc bottles of Bordeaux, usually by shoving the cork in with a pen, since none of us had thought to bring a corkscrew.)

But psychically, the train was safe because it demanded no decisions. I chose a destination, found an empty seat in a second-class car, read a book or looked out the window or slept. Once I was lucky and woke up at the right time and was amazed to see the Dolomites, moonlit. I hadn’t even known they existed. And then I returned to sleep and let the engineer follow the rails.

And then I arrived in Vienna. I suppose it’s a beautiful city, but outside the Hauptbanhof I saw gray streets framed by gray stone buildings under a gray sky. I had set off adventurous from sunny and clement Ravenna, and arrived in Austria cold and alone. I suppose Vienna is beautiful, but I felt small, lost, and illiterate in German. I returned to the train station and used my railpass to hop a train going anywhere, to look out the window at the Danube.

Monday I drove across Pennsylvania. Somewhere in a drafts folder I have a blog post about crossing Pennsylvania. In 29 years of living in New York I’ve done that crossing at least one hundred times. Almost everyone I know on both sides of the Alleghenies curses Pennsylvania; 300 miles of wooded mountains interrupted by small towns time has forgotten, places like Clarion and Clearfield and other places beginning with C. Pleasant enough for the first fifty miles. A drag before long.

I will not say, in that hundred journeys, I have grown to love it. But I have grown to appreciate it. More than that, and to wrap up the throat-clearing here, on certain trips - Monday’s - the four to five hours navigating curves and hills that I know like the back of my hand have provided a space between.

Pennsylvania, this week, was safe.

On Saturday, we said goodbye to our friend Captain Jack Sparrow. It has been a long time coming, as I have worried about here before. And then it was sudden. I wasn’t sure, and then I knew. They told me it would be like that; “He’ll tell you,” they said. In his way, he did. He told me; I knew; I wailed about it, talked to people about it, talked to Pink. Found hours worth of tasks to do, washing dishes, sorting papers. And then I was ready, or if not ready then able.

Before Dad died, I talked to Glenn about grief. I had bought the book on grieving, the one everyone knows. I want to prepare for the moment, I said. He said, “I don’t think it’s possible to prepare for grief.” He was right about that. All you can do - all I can do - is make my way through it and feel the feels.

So, I drove across Pennsylvania. On one side was home, my real home, always tearing away a little piece of me when I set out for the place on the other side, the place I’ve now lived nearly half my life, the place that ought to be home but never quite is. On this side, the home-for-now side, home-for-now for 29 years, lay too many memories, too many reminders. I knew that instinctively. I couldn’t bear the idea that I wasn’t going to pull up and double-park in front of the building so I could unload Jack, take a quick walk, bring him and his bed up to the apartment so he wouldn’t have to wait for me to unload bags of clothes and Christmas gifts and new sneakers from the outlet mall. So he wouldn’t have to ride around for half an hour looking for a parking place with me. I wasn’t ready to walk in alone. After my grandmother died, Dad and I were in her house for the first time. “I’ve been in this house by myself a million times,” he said. “It never felt empty before.”

So: I drove across Pennsylvania, not slowly, but deliberately. To stay in the place between. Not that it wasn’t full of reminders. For once I didn’t have to eat Wendy’s or Panera in the car so Jack wouldn’t be sitting there in the cold or heat. Instead I had a dinner of pancakes at Perkin’s, the perfect place to grieve, a place where they’ll bring you unremarkable food and pour as much coffee as you need and leave you alone. In the rest area, I didn’t have to park near the pets section, always the worst and most inconvenient corner of Pennsylvania’s rest areas, as if they want to punish you for traveling with a friend.

The reminders hurt. I wanted to feel those hurts. The cuchillazos al corazon, as my sister-in-law told me. This obviously contradicts the idea that I didn’t want to feel the pains of arriving at my home alone, and yet, such is the nature of grief. It doesn’t exactly follow a straightforward path through its own forests and mountains.

Ugh, how trite is that metaphor? The writer Michael Harrington, writing his memoir, said that at the end of his life, he was disappointed to discover that everything he was learning was trite. Maybe everything here is trite. These notes aren’t for anybody but myself; it’s your fault if you’re reading them.

I wanted to feel those stabs, because they were - they are - my way of holding on to Jack. Arriving at home would mean - has meant - going back to real life, to work, to making dinner, to drinks with friends, eventually to sweeping away the reminders of Jack that at the moment are everywhere, on the floor, in the closet, in the stained rugs, in the sweatshirt I’ve been wearing for five days now.

I’m writing this possibly trite post because sooner or later I will forget how this feels. This is a way of remembering.

Beyond not pretending that any of this makes sense, I don’t pretend that any of it is healthy. You feel the feels. As another book on grief says, one you probably don’t know, there are no rules to this, and if there are nobody tells you what they are, and they may not apply to you anyway.

Eventually I got to New Jersey. The great thing about New Jersey is, it’s a place where it’s easy to move on to the anger phase, as every fucking driver pulls some idiotic move; passes you going 85 on the right or bogs you down going 45 on the left or crosses six lanes to get to the EZ-Pass tollbooth. Then I got home. I made lunch, I guess; I got back to work. Life started to go on.

I can’t stop that. But right now I want to miss my friend forever.

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