April 4, 2017

My father, David Ethan Stein, passed away on April 4, 2017 in Malestroit, France.
He was 69 years old.

in the after

Before, it will feel like this: a watchfulness, a worrying, the shiver against time, a deepening
groove of the third eye, the body pulling itself through doorways and days, a bottomless
cup of coffee raised and lowered in a metronomic cadence that fails to keep your sadness
from advancing, the mirror revealing more shadows than light, and everything -
a cul-de-sac, a broken wine bottle, a pair of shoes flung across a highway median -
convulsing with metaphor. It will seem as if you’ve never been more alone or further away
from home, so when the call comes, you’ll first mistake it for another wrongness, another wound,
the world broken from the spine of its axis. And it’s true, it may be like that for a long while,
but in the after, swimming in the ether of your grief, a softness will graze at the back of your neck,
like the hand you placed at the back of his those last days, and where you know it will rest forever.