My father died in May of 2014. I gave the eulogy in two languages. I helped my mother with the death certificate. I made the calls to the relatives who had to know, and I made them in the right order, oldest first, which my father would have approved of. I did not cry at the funeral. I cried in the car afterwards, briefly, the way you might sneeze. Then I drove my mother home and made her dinner and went back to work the following Monday, because my father was the kind of man who would have considered a second day off an indulgence.
For the next ten years, I considered myself a person who had handled it.
I told this to people, in those exact words. I handled it. I would say it with a small, rueful smile that I now understand was a kind of armor. Friends would ask, gently, in the early years, how I was doing with the loss, and I would say: I handled it. I had a good father. I had time with him. I am not one of those people with regrets. I am fine.
I was not fine. I was very far from fine. I was so far from fine that I could not see fine from where I was standing. But I had built, around the unfine place, an entire architecture — a job, a marriage, two children, a house with a lawn — and the architecture was so convincing that even I believed it.
The grief found me anyway. Not in the first year, when it would have been welcome. Not on the anniversaries. It found me ten years and four months after his death, in the spice aisle of a Kroger in Houston, on a Saturday afternoon in September, when a song came on the overhead speakers.
It was a Mehdi Hassan ghazal. It was not even his favorite. It was just a song he used to hum, sometimes, while shaving. I had not heard it in maybe fifteen years. The opening notes started, and my legs stopped working, and I sat down on the floor of the grocery store, between the cumin and the cardamom, and I cried in a way I had not known my body knew how to cry. A teenage stocker came over and asked if I was okay. I could not answer him. He brought me water. I sat there for, I think, twenty minutes.
Late grief is not a metaphor. It is a real, observed phenomenon. The grief that gets postponed because there was no time, no permission, no language, no community willing to sit with you long enough — that grief does not evaporate. It waits. I have come to believe that men in our communities are particularly vulnerable to it, because we are particularly trained to be useful in the immediate aftermath. There is a script. The script is: you are the eldest son, you take care of your mother, you make the arrangements, you do not collapse. The script is admirable. The script is also a way of making sure that you, specifically, do not get to grieve.
I performed it beautifully. My mother told relatives that I had been a rock. I was proud of being a rock. Rocks, however, are not metabolizing anything. Rocks are just sitting there with the weight on top of them, and underneath, slowly, something is being crushed.
The grocery store thing was not the bottom. The bottom was a few weeks later, when I realized I could not remember the sound of my father's laugh. I had spent ten years not letting myself think about him in any sustained way, on the theory that thinking about him would unlock something I could not afford to unlock. The cost of that strategy was that I had also locked away the good parts. I had locked away his laugh.
I went looking for it. I called my brother, who had a recording on an old phone of our father telling a story at a wedding. I listened to it, alone, in my car, parked outside my office. I let it play through. I let it end. I played it again. The grief came in waves and the laughter came in waves and I sat there for an hour not getting out of the car, and what I noticed, somewhere in the middle, was that the laughter was louder than I remembered, and the grief was not as terminal as I had feared.
I am not done. I do not think I will be done. I have come to suspect that you are never done with a parent who shaped you, you are only at different points of the conversation. Some weeks I think about him every day. Some weeks I forget for a while. The forgetting used to feel like a betrayal. I am beginning to understand that the forgetting is part of how the love survives — that you cannot hold something at the front of your mind for ten years and have any of it left.
If you are someone who handled it, who gave the eulogy and went back to work, who is congratulating yourself, ten years on, for having gotten through — I am not warning you. I am just telling you that the song is still out there, in some grocery store, on some Saturday. It is going to play. You do not have to be afraid of it. You only have to know, when your legs stop working, that this is not a relapse. This is not a failure. This is the grief, finally, finding a place to land.