November 17, 2020

sadness is a radical act
for Stef

What I remember of my father in the final months of his life was the sound of him sobbing 
at the memory of his own mother, gone more than 50 years. We were on the footpath
toward town. I was, as they say, putting on a brave face. But my father saw through 
the artifice of that mild March afternoon. His face dropped to his hands and we stood, 
inches away, as he wept. After he died, each time I fell apart I would be carried back 
to that day, to that feeling of a curtain coming down and the truth coming out,
and loss pinching us close at the seams. So when my friend writes, “I’m just 
so sad today,” I find myself traveling to the front stoop of a house on St. Charles Street, 
to the stoops of houses in Detroit and Sioux Falls and Iowa City, and it’s as if we’re all
standing on the same footpath in a place we don’t recognize, but understand completely.