Karen Salyer McElmurray

Essay: In the Wayback

The virus count, the CDC says, is 984. That’s 774 cases more than the night a week ago when my father died, not of the Coronavirus, but of a massive heart attack. Your dad, John said that night he was sitting up late and got the call. He opened the door and light spilled across our bed. Your dad has passed. Now, in case I’m crying, I’m grateful for my protective mask, something none of the few people at Gate A12 are wearing. I am huddled next the tall windows overlooking the airfield, hoping the plane to Kentucky is on time. I tried to cry that night as John as he lay next to me. I know, he said as his hands stroked my hair. I know. It’s March 12th, a quarter of eight, and those with special needs are boarding. I am in zone four, but that hardly counts with only twelve passengers. I think about taking two seats to stretch out in, how tired I am, almost enough to sleep. On the plane, a tall man is across the aisle from me, and he is up, down, up, down, wiping the arms of his seat and the let-down tray. He coughs and I move to another seat in the almost empty plane and sit staring at the blue palms my rubber gloves make. A week ago, it was four-thirty, when I woke with a dream of my father standing beside my bed. He leaned over me, whispering. It was born in the caves of Asia, and soon it will be where we are. Now as I sit staring at the blue palms my surgical gloves make, I realize that my father’s spirit was in the cool air traveling across the room and settling in my hands.

When I was in my thirties, I wandered in Asia with George, my then-boyfriend—Thailand, India, Nepal. Once, in a cheap and good guest house in Nepal, we were arguing, as we did often on that two-year world tour—arguments about lost shoes, the cost of bus tickets, the taste of water purified with iodine. I drank a pinkish tea, then stood on a balcony overlooking a narrow alleyway as my stomach rumbled, a precursor to food poisoning. From the alleyway came the sounds of Nepali voices, throats hawking, the heave of wash water thrown out. Then came the sound of a high-pitched voice keening, the wail raising and lowering, strong in its weeping. As I looked down, I saw a young woman, feet bare, her black hair streaming down her back and her hands beating against a metal pan and I remembered my dream from the night before. I’d dreamed the creosote covered bridge in front of my grandmother’s house thousands of miles away back in Eastern Kentucky. The woman vanished down the alleyway, her grief trailing after her.

My plane lands and I make my way to the gate for the connecting flight to Louisville, finding the terminals not quite as empty in Atlanta as they were in Baltimore. People give one another wide berths, and I think of the phrase from last night’s news. Social distancing. A woman hurries by me, tugging her suitcase along, looking not so much socially distanced as furtive. My mask fogs my glasses and I adjust it, keep walking along a conveyor belt to the next terminal. What I feel is a sensitivity, to the averted eyes of this person, the way that person walks straight toward me, then veers away. Is that how it feels? Pandemic. I’ve looked pandemics up on several sites. Flu, 1918. Third Cholera Pandemic. Pandemic. A thing that is everywhere. The word feels hot in my mouth. It tingles on the surface of my skin. On the next plane, the air from the vent is suspicious, of an unknown origin, and I close my eyes to pass the hour of this flight’s time. I am myself furtive as we land, as I make my way to ground transportation, where my step-mother will pick me up. Ruth has been in my life since I was fifteen, the year my parents divorced. That same year I myself married and fell subject to terrors I couldn’t overcome, one of them my inability to be a mother to the son I placed for adoption. In these last years, Ruth has fallen in love with a guy from her Chevrolet dealership and has told my father she no longer loves him. I tuck this hurt inside myself as I see Ruth standing beside her red car. I’m so glad to see you, she says, her chin trembling as she begins to cry.

My first encounter with grief was Joe’s, my great-grandfather’s, funeral. I was little enough my feet dangled from the pew as I sat up straight to see Het, who I had never known until then, running up and back the length of the church aisle. I was summer and the windows were open to scent of pink blossoms from the trees. Het was my great-aunt and she ran with her hands raised and waving, praising Jesus and weeping. Pappy, Pappy, she shouted as she reached the end of the aisle and threw herself across Joe’s body, his black suit and the caves of his cheeks. Lord, take me instead of him. Most of my other early experiences with grief are also sounds. My cousin Jenny’s sobbing as friends on either side of her led her up the aisle at the funeral home on the day of her mother’s, my Aunt Ruby’s, burial. Some voices are quieter. My mother’s crying on a Thanksgiving when my father stayed at the office all day. The way my father and I had our assigned seats, my child’s chair next to his recliner, in the living room my whole childhood and how once he reached his hand out to me as if I would know what to do to assuage his marriage’s sadness.

Our first night together, Ruth and I watch golf, one of her favorite shows, and I feel lulled by the tiny balls sailing distances, their perfect landings. Before I arrived, we’d made a general plan for a Celebration of Life. I sent her photographs—my father, myself, our visits—and she has made a slide show. I have brought a poem to read at the service, and she has picked hymns to be sung, conferred with the pastor at their Baptist Church. We go back and forth over what is safe. Foods scooped from the same bowls will mean contact, and we no longer know what contact is contagious and what is not. I am exhausted as I make my way upstairs to the guest room, which is at the start of a hall with my father’s room at its end, his room long separate from Ruth. I toss and turn. When I finally sleep, I dream I am one of several children and we are coloring eggs we take out of a large metal bucket. Ruth comes into the kitchen and looks disapproving. You’ll know when there’s enough grief, she says. We decorate one last egg for her, cover it in construction paper to make it look like a blue bird. As I wake, I remember how Ruth gently touched the paper bird, the egg inside spoiled. My father is dead, I say aloud, wishing these words were something I could see or touch. Instead I lie in bed, reading the daily news. The virus count has gone up to 1264.

I get up that first Kentucky morning and go down the hall to his room. I stand for a long while in the doorway, looking in at the neatly made bed, the desk with its envelopes and ink pens and black and white composition notebooks. The room is uncluttered, but there are signs of his ancestors and their propensity to keep things. In the upstairs room at his mother’s house there would have been all everything from photo albums to empty egg cartons to boxes of deeds, property maps and marriage certificates. Back at home in Maryland in the days following my father’s death, I found traces of my father everywhere. I looked through boxes to find for photos for the Celebration of Life and there he was. A boy swimming in a river beside his boy-brother. A young man riding a bicycle through the streets in a city in North Africa, his Air Force days. On my cell phone in the deleted messages I found his voice, asking me why I haven’t heard from him in so long, whether I was I was still among the land of the living. I am not in the land of the living as I open his desk drawer and find a small tin of rubber bands, an envelope full of news clippings, rolls of dimes and pennies. On a shelf near the bed are books with paper-clipped pages, bookmarks, and in a copy of Thoreau’s Walden, his neat handwriting. God’s glory is great, he has written. Last, next to the shelf is a mat with his shoes. The shoes are tan, unlaced, their toes scuffed. I can hear him walking up the steps to this room, step-stop, step-stop, his feet hurting him. The abandoned shoes have mouths, and I seem to hear a sound come from inside them, as if my father is mourning his own absence.

In French the word is douleur, and in its Proto-Indo-European origins it is derived from the root, delh, which means to divide. French mourning customs may include the six working days taken to make the decision of whether the deceased should have a cremation or a burial. In Ancient Greek, the word is penthos and it generally means uncountable and those mourning customs mean that Orthodox widows may wear black for up to two years, while a memorial service is held on the Sunday closest to the fortieth day after the death. Thailand’s word is khwām ṣ̄er̂ā ṣ̄ok, and a traditional custom of mourning means white dress and the shaving of hair. Nepali uses the word soka, and its definitions include the flame of fire or burning grief, the fire of sorrow. It was in Nepal that I trekked to Muktinath, and on that trek followed for several days a group of Sherpas who were carrying the funeral bier of an elderly woman. At the end of each mile, they left red grains of corn beside the trail. The truth is, the language I was born with gives me no one word that suits the grief hovering over the world these weeks. My father’s death is a hole in the center of my chest, but I feel no particular sorrow, no specific pain I can name. The world itself is grieving numbers. Today the CDC count of those lost to the virus is 1678, and when I read that number, my mouth goes dry. Can the lost be counted? Do souls take flight?

***

The truth is I don’t know which part of my father to mourn. His body no longer exists, having been reduced to the ashes by the 1500-degree temperatures of cremation. I remember most his hands, how he had the same nervous habit I do of nail biting. I think about his round belly, a blanket draped across his lap. His feet, smallish, like mine. I am most mourning, I tell myself, the role he’s always played, the parent closest to me, since my mother left when I was fifteen. I sit with the stack of stories he wrote, the note on top: By Clarence Salyer and kept for his daughter—short stories. I take out a story called “Suwan, Korea—October 27, 1952” and try to read it, but end up staring into empty space and then look at a photo I found yesterday in a box. The two of us are standing at a kitchen counter, me wearing a striped sweater and he a suit and tie. We both look uncomfortable and not at one another at all. It is better to marry than to burn, my father always said. At sixteen, at my father’s insistence, I did marry, and I lived in a rented attic room with the father of a baby we relinquished for adoption. Is it that what my father and I are thinking about in the kitchen photo? I am in my late twenties by then, and I am on the verge of leaving to travel the world with George, my then boyfriend. My father doesn’t want me to go, fears the foreign worlds I’ll see, distrusts the man I’ll be traveling with. Would it mean anything if I told you not to go, he said, and I didn’t answer. In the kitchen-photo there is so much distance, space filled with so much that has happened and will happen, it took us years and years to begin to talk about it.

On my first afternoon in Kentucky, Ruth and I run errands. Six feet is the recommended distance between people, but in Kroger’s we find ourselves weaving in and out of laden grocery carts and dodging people hurrying to stock up on hand sanitizer and toilet paper, the shelves for both nearly empty. We stop at a restaurant for a quick lunch with her friend Linda, where we exchange ideas about how to make our own disinfectants, then we drive by the condos where Ruth might move. Nothing for at least a year, Linda says as she pats Ruth’s arm. At last we drive to the funeral home to pick up my father’s ashes, in a cardboard box which rides with us as we drive across town. Graefenburg is where their church is, and where the Celebration of Life will be. No one is there, but the church door is unlocked and Ruth and I go in, check out the sanctuary. We have no idea how many will come to honor my father, but we imagine the pews filled with mourners. Will a distance between families keep everyone safe? I ask this as we head out to the car. Behind the church a field is filled with waving grasses. The wind is chilly as I stand there for a little, holding the ashes box, which I find comfortingly heavy.

I did not become the Baptist I was raised to be. I was not Catholic or Quaker or Episcopalian or Buddhist or any of the other faiths I’d sampled, but in all the churches in all the places George and I traveled, I lit candles. It is better, my father has often said, to let the past be the past, and this past included my baby boy, who existed nowhere I could imagineIn a story of his titled “Baptist Men’s Day,” he says this: A Baptist man will lead, both in his church and in his home, for our children and our future as a nation as God-committed Christian men. The closest I ever came to imagining God was images of the Holy Mother, Mary’s face somber with its knowledge of her son’s death inside her since the day he was born. In the Nepali city where we stayed for a week as we prepared to trek north, there were temples and courtyards where barefoot people knelt to Ganesh, to Krishna, and, incredibly, there was a small shrine to the Virgin Mary. There I lit another candle and then I knelt in the packed dirt of the road. Head in my hands, I prayed, as I always did. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. I was not any of the holy things I’d tried and discarded, no song of the spirit truly entering my heart. That day at the shrine, by some chance there was a group of Nepali nuns. They, too, lit candles, and then their voices rose into one voice and traveled out into the crowded streets of Kathmandu. I reached for the sound as if I could catch it, hold on.

On my second day in Kentucky, Ruth and I continue to discuss my father’s remembrance service.  I tell her that I will read two poems, one written by my father and it is about his wish to have his ashes scattered at Dewey Lake. I would favor some early morning / with only a slight breeze / but if this is not agreeable / decide according to the mood / of your strained heart. I will also read, I tell her, a blessing that a friend who is a minister in central Georgia sent me. The blessing is a poem by John O’Donohue. Though your days here were brief, / Your spirit was live, awake, complete. Neither the idea of a poems nor a blessing is comfortable for Ruth. Poems, she has said many times, leave her feeling strange, out of place, like she is once again the girl she was in high school, being asked to talk about a story she didn’t understand in class. Now the wordblessing becomes a sticking point. I am not, she says, speaking to an auditorium full of people like at one of my readings. The church, she says, must know what is going to be sent out from its pulpit. I need, she says, to submit the poems I’ll read to the pastor for approval. The word approval bites hard, and I refuse. I want to lash out at her with how-dare-you’s and a reminder of how much she hurt him in those last years of their marriage. Upstairs, I sit on the edge of the bed while anger and grief collide inside me. I want to cry, but I can’t.

Though I often doubted what he believed and how that manifested itself in his life, my father knew how to cry, and he had cried with me, often. On the day my granddaddy passed, what I remember most are quarrel words on either side of me as we traveled from Harlan to Johnson County, trying to get to the hospital in time. My granddaddy had had a stroke, and the message was to come quick, but my mother lingered, first in bathroom at our trailer as she tried on this dress, that blouse, made up her face. I was nine and the place my mother assigned me was between them in the front seat of our Pontiac as we headed through Neon and Jenkins and all the little towns toward Paintsville. My mother lamented the late hour, how we’d had no lunch. You don’t think about us a bit, she said as I felt my body sway toward her, then toward him. What I’m thinking about is my daddy, he said. We stopped for a blue-plate special in a restaurant with a phone booth where my father called the hospital. My granddaddy was at death’s door and my father knelt in the parking lot by our car, face in his hands as he wept. By the time we got to the hospital that day, my grandfather was in a coma and I remember my father leading me to the bedside. Touch him, he said. That’s what alive feels like. Later, the funeral was held in the living room at my grandparent’s house. I was eight, maybe nine, and I was frightened of the crowd of people, the air smelling like sweet cake. I held my father’s hand until he stood near the coffin and picked me up, showed me the body, the hands folded across the chest. This is how it looks to die, he said. Touch him. I did, and then I touched my father, the salt tears on his face.

I was with George nine years, and he was someone as much unlike my father as possible—upper-middle class, already world-traveled when I met him and, as a good friend described him, taciturn. By the second summer, that time of our travels, we were 7,795 miles from Kentucky, near Agra, on the banks of the Yamuna River in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. Cheap and good, the tour guides insisted as George and I were rowed across the murky waters to a hotel that had once been a palace. By midnight, George was under a sheet he’d wet so the fan would cool him to sleep. Sadness settled over me as I sat out on the balcony in the humid air, watching bats dive and arc up toward the moonlight. Sadnesses were always settling over me, and I struggled to name them. A practical decision, George and I had terminated a pregnancy so we could travel, and I had acquiesced to his arguments. Neither of us made above minimum wage, he said, and when would there be another chance to travel like this? The truth was I had long feared being pregnant, a shadow of my relinquished child that hovered over my life. I hated George for all of it. Hated how he kissed me or didn’t kiss me, hated that my love of writing was a hobby he told me I should reconsider. A call to prayer traveled across the water from a distant muezzin as I lay down on the smooth stone, my cheek against the cool marble. The prayer was another sadness. It was god-hands that could have scooped me, carrying me those thousands of miles back to where I came from, the place that haunted me.

On my third night in Kentucky, the night before my father’s service, I slip downstairs after I hear Ruth go to bed. Her room is nearby, so I ease an outside door as quietly as I can, tiptoe in my sock feet out onto the deck. I want to be alone, and I want the sky above me. That sky has clouds drifting across the half moon, and the March air is cold. I circle my own self with my bare arms and send up what I hope is a demanding prayer. The blessing is a poem about love, you know that, don’t you? I loved my father and you know that, don’t you? And today. The count of the dead today is 3503. I say those numbers slowly. Say them twice, and then a third time, as if I am invoking a charm. And I know some of the faces of the dead, too. They were on national news just this morning, some of those lost faces. An old man in a nursing home. A registered nurse at a hospital in Cleveland. A young man whose picture showed him standing on his driveway, a basketball in his hands, the whole world on the verge. On the verge of what? Jumping. Falling. Ashes, ashes, we all fall down. That children’s rhyme catches hold inside me and my heart thrums with it. The wisps of clouds in the cold sky aren’t clouds after all, I suddenly see. They are spirits. The souls those lost so far to a virus none of us can see. Others are my ancestors—my father, my grandfather, my aunts, my mother. They are all seeking a world too suddenly lost. I stretch myself up as high as I can on my tiptoes, wishing I could make that leap, up and up and up. If I could reach the edge of the sky, just where they are floating past, I could touch them, the souls of the dead, and then, then I might know how to cry, or just exactly why.

In the mountains, ghosts are called haints. There are the wind down a hollow in the wintertime, howling like a woman who is mourning, I have a bottle tree in my front yard and, yes, I put it there to catch spirits. Why, the son I relinquished for adoption has followed me for years, lost boy like a lost limb. My father’s spirit is there on the eve of his service. I have been in Kentucky for four days, time to plan the memorial and to talk about the will my father has left, one that leaves me nothing. We have needed this time, she has said, an acknowledgement that we share an uneasy relationship, all possessions aside. I am uneasy in general in this house, with its sparkling floors, its intimate momentous of their lives, that dark hall leading from the bedroom where I’m sleeping. These nights I’ve been in Kentucky, I have been uncertain whether to leave my bedroom door open or shut, since that hall seems darker and longer each night I’m there. Sometimes my father’s ghost is standing in his open bedroom door, and he’s waving at me. Come listen to the story I just wrote, he’s saying. This night before his memorial, he’s standing by the window in the hall, looking at the dark yard, and I know he’s mourning, not just his own passing from the earth, but all the other things. Ruth’s lost love. The grandson I located some years back, a young man who doesn’t seem to want either of us in his life all that much. Or maybe my father’s ghost is doing nothing very ghostly. He is sitting on the white and blue chair in the alcove in the hall. His ghost-hands are holding a flashlight and he’s waiting for me to use the bathroom first.

The fingers of my ancestors have long drummed a memory-song. Have you forgotten where you came from? I have heard this music wherever I’ve been. On a night train from Agra to Rajasthan, was it a dream or ghost who crept through the car, bending above each of us to unzip our bags? George and I lay on the filthy floor amongst a dozen other travelers with their sacks and backpacks. It was mid-summer and the air was thick enough to cut, so I slept in fits and starts between stations. I raised my head and watched a thin ghost-man vanish into the humid air of the next station. Other ghosts haunted us. On a boat crossing the tepid waters of the Ganges, the air was gray as ash and I seemed to taste the ghosts of the dead. Or in that temple in Kathmandu, was it the spirit of the gods who flew over the mountain tops, whipping the prayer flags in the sharp wind? Other ghosts were small and sneaky. They crept from the mouths of strangers whose languages I did not understand except for the word that hovered in front of us. Buy hashish. Trade money. Sad ghost, greedy ghosts, ghosts of gods whose faces I could not imagine. Don’t get above your raising, my father whispered across the oceans. Don’t forget who made you.

The Monday morning of the memorial, Ruth and I sip coffee and watch the home and garden network. She is relieved, she says, that we have planned a memorial that will not go on too long. We are quiet, she and I, with things both of us want to talk about but have so far avoided. She wants to know if I have agreed to have the blessing I’ll read at the memorial approved by the pastor. I want to know what loving or not loving my father meant. She wants to know what he wrote me about those two years of their relationship’s dissolution. We both want to know, after all these years, what the definition of mother is, the definition of daughter, but we have no language between us for any of it. Of course, the not-said is nothing new in my family, a ghost in its own right that has haunted us for generations. A great-aunt named Sadie lived out her days in an attic room, and the whispers were that she was odd-turned, not quite right. My maternal grandfather spent six weeks in a psychiatric ward, and we never talked about it. Never talked about the aunt who took a bottle of pills. Just don’t you mind, my mother said, when I asked why they were feeding her coffee and walking her through the rooms of my grandmother’s house. The list of Things Not Discussed was long. A cousin’s drug abuse.  Another cousin’s girlfriend, rumored to have given birth to her own father’s child. And my own pregnancy, something that happened, but as if to another person not me. What was the date of my son’s birth, I asked once asked my father. He said he could hardly remember the date of his own birth. Ghosts of hurt, secrets, surrender, inhaled like smoke, hiding in our bones and blood.

At the memorial, vials of hand sanitizer have been placed in the spot in each pew where the tiny glasses go after communion. We should sit, we are told, with at least six feet of distance between family groups. There is a slide show—my father’s boyhood, his Air Force years, a couple of photos of his marriage to my mother, my birth, glimpses of his forty-some years with Ruth. While I’m watching the photos, the preacher sits in the pew ahead of me. He is young, black-haired, given to blushing. He offers his condolences, and then goes right to his point. He must approve the poems I’ll read for the service. The church must know what words are going out from their pulpit. He reaches to pat my hand and I flinch, a cold fury pouring down my back, circling around my waist and back up to my chest, then filling my mouth. His approval, he says, is part of the policy of the Southern Baptist Convention, and nothing personal at all. I say this, that. I say that offering a blessing for my father isn’t about conventions, but I can’t find the word to substitute when I take those conventions away. The slide show of my father ends, starts again, I am so full of the personal I can hardly see. A woman I used to know when I was a child in this church stops beside me, offers condolences, but I can barely hear her. Yes, I say. I say, it’s hard. Yes. I don’t believe it yet. I scan room full of faces of people I have known from years back, but I can’t find the one thing, the right thing to make this afternoon better. I can’t find it. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but I know it isn’t in the crowd of well-wishers, nor in the lilies on the pulpit, nor in the preacher’s boyish face. I tell myself this service is not about me, but about my father, and I acquiesce. I hand the poems over, but can hardly hear what he says, the roar in my ears is so loud. The it I want is silence. Instead there are hymns. Words from the deacons, a solo about Jesus from a blonde-headed child. The poems, which I read slowly and with a power that mystifies me. Then the pastor offers a prayer for my father’s soul and for the end of the Coronavirus. After, as we ride the miles back to the house, I look at the palms of my hands.  I check Google on my phone and look up the names of some of the lines. Life. Marriage. Health. Heart. I am not sure which is the palm line for grieving.

Women in my family have held onto grief. My paternal grandmother, once my grandfather passed away, held her grieving close and never married again. He always said there’s all kinds of men out there, and that I’d be better to be to myself, she told me. My mother, once my parents divorced, moved back in with her own parents and lived there for good. The refrain she repeated again and again: You know your father should have treated us better, you and me both. Closets in my mother’s house held letters, clothes, knickknacks, photos of the dead. The loss of my son traveled with me everywhere I went until I wrote a memoir, named my own grief. My father’s sorrows went unnamed for the most part. Did he mourn the marriage he couldn’t sustain with my mother? The grandson he never got to know? I remember his hands, the bitten nails and cuticles, the signs of hurt he carried wherever he went.

I traveled with George for over a year and a half, sleeping on golf courses and park benches, in hostels. My furtive sleep entwined with his as we lay next to one another in a beat-up tent with vinyl ponchos for a covering against the rain that fell in Ireland and England, Switzerland and France. Via not sleeping, we learned we no longer loved one another, no longer wanted touch or share breath or histories. I resented him for not listening, and he resented me for telling the same stories about unresolved hurt again and again. Still, we traveled. Overland via bus through Yugoslavia, on to Greece, our tent set up on beach after beach as we bathed in the sea, lay in the sun, still not touching. In Australia we slept in a walk-in closet in a friend’s apartment for over a month, working days at a sporting towel factory. In Alice Springs, we climbed Ayers Rock and looked out over a sea of red earth, our arms draped across one another’s shoulders. My father wrote me letters about our plans to travel on to India. When we think of Asia, we think of bad places. I sent postcards back home, ones with photos of elephants with hennaed bhindi between their eyes. In Delhi we half-slept beneath wet sheets, praying for a breeze to cool our separate bodies in the pre-monsoon listlessness. Which grief to write about and send back home—this one, this one, this?

On the Tuesday after the memorial service, Ruth and Chris, my cousin, and I drive to Eastern Kentucky to scatter my father’s ashes at Dewey Lake, near Prestonsburg. I sit in the back seat, holding on to the box that held my father’s ashes. We are quiet for our ride, listening to soft rock form the radio in Ruth’s car, with me offering up bits and pieces of this day’s news to Chris, who I have not seen in years. The administration has known about this virus since January, I say. Today’s count, I then say, is 7,087. Atop my knees the box for the ashes is surprisingly heavy, but I hold it close as we take Route 302 into Jenny Wiley State Park. We pass the cottages and then May Lodge, where we stop at the information desk. Where, we ask, would the best place be to sit and then scatter these ashes? Arrow Head Point, we’re told, is a ten-minute drive around the lake, and then a quick walk out to spot that would be just right. We head east alongside the lake, then find ourselves at a rocky projection of land. I hold tightly to the box as we leave the car and make our way down a gradual incline to the trail to the point. Or it had a certain mass in my lap, a solidness I was aware of as I laid my hands on top of the box and thought about just that. Laying on hands. In some of the churches I remember from when I was small, laying on hands meant feeling the Holy Spirit as it coursed beneath someone else’s skin. It meant healing. As I place my palms atop the box with my father’s ashes, I imagine him walking with us. We’re saying nothing much. Maybe the rain will hold off. I thought there’d be an observation deck.Ruth is following me, picking her way gingerly on flat stones slick with mud, my cousin, Chris right behind her as we descend a last rocky incline. The water overlooking is late-winter muddy, a dull surface with no visible bottom. It’s hard to see the reason we picked this spot—the photos we’ve all seen of my father as a boy, swimming at Dewey Lake with his brother. Ruth and I hold the box between us, picking at the packing tape, arriving at the plastic sack inside. One after the other, Ruth, Chris and I open the sack over the muddy waters, a cloud of pale ashes following the last words each of us has to offer.

Because we cannot safely gather to grieve the deaths from the pandemic, a Washington Post article from late April, 2020 says, we must find new ways to mourn. By May, the virus will have claimed over eighty thousand lives in the United States, and well over four million globally. The ways of mourning are various. The Caribbean Nine Nights of feasting, singing and storytelling. The Muslim three-day remembrance period. The week-long Jewish practice of sitting shiva. My own people’s custom of visitation and a funeral in the home. But as well as how to grieve, I say, the question we must ask is about what it is we are grieving. The faces are ones I continue to m mourn as weeks turn to months of the pandemic. On the front page of a local paper, I see the face of a mother who has contracted the virus and cannot see her newborn. I see the face of a ninety-year-old man who has miraculously survived contagion, but can see his family only through a glass wall. Are we grieving the six feet of distance between ourselves and all of the friends and strangers, both, in our lives? Am I grieving the kind of fear I feel as I walk up the sidewalk past a group of men working, fearing not their catcalls, but their lack of masks? All of us are grieving. Grieving this house, this house, this house, houses infinitum, connected by virtual images, not lives. Or are we grieving the new divides? The fortunates. The remotes. The essential workers. All the rest. We are grieving a world that used to be, a world of intimacies, ones both careless and kind. If we wear them, our masks cover our mouths, leaving our words muffled, our eyes saying what we mean. And what is it we do mean in these fragile days? Does the word death taste sweet in your mouth?

After our two years of traveling and the nine years of our relationship, George left me. I grieved fiercely, and wanted it all back again, him and our travels, our beat-up tent and all the nights of rain. I visited a knave in a chapel in North Carolina to see a painting of the Holy Mother, her son in her arms, the wounds to his side and hands and head spilling blood on her white robes. Pleasepleaseplease, I prayed, staring into Mary’s blue-painted eyes. After a while, I didn’t know what it was I was praying to get. George, magically returned, voila, my savior from deeper hurts I myself scarcely understood. My son, descending from the sky, a baby all over again. Some days I was scarcely able to get out of bed. One night I had a dream, myself lying flat on my stomach on the sofa, head hanging over the floor. A map of the world was below me, one made of tears turned to ice. Finally, the sadness passed. I traveled again, this time to graduate school, then on to years of teaching in Georgia, West Virginia, Maryland, South Dakota, state upon state. Don’t wait too long to get you a home, my father said as I moved again and again. At last I stayed put, put down roots, planted a garden in my yard, wrote a book. I suppose I’d say you’re unethical, my father said when he read the memoir I’d written about the surrender of my son to adoption. Then he gave the book to friends, underlined passages as he read it over and over. You got that wrong, he’d say. I was in Morocco in 1954, not in Korea.On my many visits home, we sat with each other, both of us fumbling for the right thing to say, the one thing to absolve both of us from wounds for which we had no words.

I remember walking once across a huge plain, holding the hand of a boy who was a goatherd. George and I had met him one of the days of our trek to Northern Nepal, near Tibet. The boy looked at me, strange, raggedy-haired white woman from another world, as if I were some skewed vision of God. I remember going to church with my paternal grandmother, her off-key soprano as she sang “How Great Thou Art,” her veiny hand and mine holding the hymnal. Other memories are harder, but no less holy. There’s the morning after my parents fought all night long, their voices raw. I was six. As my father drove me to school, his face was flushed, and he pushed the gas pedal down, raced us along the one-lane until I began to cry. Then he pulled over at a grassy place. Forgive me, he said. None of it will ever happen again. Of course, he was wrong. There were other times they argued, long and fiercely. There were other other cars and other highways, even if the driver was not my father. And there are so many other times and gestures and actions I have regretted. The children I’ve never had. The towns I’ve left behind, taking road after road. The search for this place, that one, seeking resolution. How far I’ve travelled, looking for the ability to trust, openness to love. My father had his own journeys. What he’d have thought of this time of the pandemic, I can guess. Fear. Faith. A mixture of the two he’d have drunk like a cure. In the year before he died, he wrote me again and again, long emails about aging, about decisions he could never change. There are vows we take, he said, and he wrote me about his marriages, the grandson he’d never known, the absolute belief he professed in God. I think of the dust his bones made, how cool wind took up the trail of ashes as we scattered them. There’s no telling where the waters took him, nor how far.