This is adapted from a recent newsletter.

What can I tell you? I’ve been putting this off, writing this, for months. 

My father died in July, while I was in Morocco. It was sudden and unexpected. I didn’t get to say goodbye. My last text to him will forever be about how there is WiFi in the Sahara.

He died, in fact, while I was trying to reach him. My friend sat next to me as I called the hospital. The doctor began to explain my father’s condition, but stopped mid-sentence. “He just passed,” he said.

I didn’t hear him say it, but I could tell by the way my friend gasped that he was dead.

I didn’t hear him say it, but the message entered me as if through a blade.

There are some things not even hearing loss can take from you.

____

Later that night/morning, I wrote to myself in the third person, “He’s dead, Anna.” As if I were a god. As if the grammatical distance would change anything.

That only lasted one day though. My “I” returned—puny, familiar. I held it like a fire that could never warm me.

The next day, in Fez, I walked the windy maze of the medina, my heart a cut flower, existing in a state of dead-aliveness, uncomfortably occupying both realms.

And I cried until I forgot I was a child.

____

What can I tell you? That my birthday is tomorrow and he won’t get me a singing card. I played the one he got me in 2016 recently—it has a spinning hamster on it, its mouth wide as a canoe, arms raised in perpetual triumph.

“Not just happy…silly happy, crazy, giddy, dizzy happy,” the card says. “Be that kind of happy on your birthday!”

The hamster sings and my tears fall like blows, truer somehow than the bones that hold me upright.

____

My father never cried, except over dogs, and once, while telling me about the violence his alcoholic father inflicted on him, his mother, and siblings.

I remember he cried when our chow, Teddy, died. I walked into the house in Tucson, the stench of death thick as a tongue, and there was Teddy lying on the cold tile floor, his twitching paw saying inelegantly what my father could not.

His sobs were so swift and violent that they did not immediately register to me as human. Like his grief was a strange town that he rarely visited, its geography both familiar and frightening.

I didn’t know what to do with it, so I gathered it in my arms and held him as long as he would let me, which was not long enough.

____

He comes to me in dreams though, the most ordinary dreams, and says fantastical things.

What took you so long?

“The stars were blocking me.”

Is there a god?

“Yes, and she’s pissed.”

I take his arm as we walk through the desert. I rub his back. He tells me I was always good at basketball.

This is how we hold each other now, in this fantastic, unbearable place.

____

A lover told me this beautiful story recently about her grandmother passing. She said she realized she had a choice, that either her grandmother’s love for her, which was immense and beautiful and uncomplicated, was simply gone, or that she could take that love and gift it back to herself, to become her own champion, and let it live on inside of her.

I loved that message so much, I opened a Google Doc and titled it “How to be your own champion.” Then I wrote nothing because I don’t actually know how to do that. Each day I would open it and watch the cursor’s damning, relentless wink and then I would do something else.

____

But what can I tell you? That grief is a door that opens endlessly into the same, empty room. That this is where I live now. That it’s almost fall and the pomegranates are fat and red and I pop their seeds, bright-bursting, into my mouth, conjuring all the beauty I’ve ever known.

I let it coat my tongue.