78–The only home I’d known.
Somehow, when my father died, I also lost our past.
Less than 6 months after my father’s diagnosis, my parents packed up the house, sold it, and left California.
I’d moved away (and returned) and moved away (again) years before, as had my sister and brother. It made sense for them to live there; they had for over 30 years. But it made less sense for him to die there.
And so, on top of grieving my father, I also spent the year and a half of his illness grieving the only place I’d ever known as “home.”
I’m not the first person to say it: when we grieve we don’t just hurt for the loss of a loved one, but also for the future we’ve lost with them.
Somehow, when my father died, I also lost our past.
This poem, full of the music my father loved, and of his wanting to share that music with my nephew, captures the moment I first felt the weight of that other loss. I felt it, not as an abstract force like nostalgia, but as a rupture as real and final as death.
California
You made a soundtrack for Bunky
with your favorite songs
& for months he toddles up
to your phone
presses you to cue
Miriam Makeba, Norah Jones
Georges Moustaki, dances wild
like we once did
small bodies in audience
to your wide smile
/
Now,
I hold your phone to your
working ear
play it lightly and you
list from side to side,
a small dance
though no less wild
/
(the social worker, visiting,
says: “It speaks to his soul, not
his head”)
/
Then,
Joni Mitchell sings: “California,
California, I’m coming home.”
&
Woody Guthrie sings:
“I’m going to California
where we’ll sleep out
every night.”
And I crack.
/
We will never go
back
to California, will we Pops.
/
It is not
going to be possible
unless I carry you there
in a box.
