The Dead Dads Club
Welcomes their brand new member, me
The China Star Buffet / Binghamton, NY // April 2025
I met a photographer at a photo shoot. Told her about my essay, “The Sick Moms Club.” Added the subtitle, in a bright ringing 60s sitcom voice, “Only one criteria for membership!”
Without skipping a beat, she quipped, “Only two criteria.”
And honestly, friend, it took me an embarrassingly full 30 seconds of suspended animation to get the joke… I awked at her, uncomprehending. She grimaced lightly, with chagrin…. And then, I got it! I got it, and I cracked up!
She did a verbal facepalm and said, “Why am I so autistic?”
But I thought it was clever! I wasn’t offended? (I give lots of leeway for clever!)
Because of course, you’ve got to have a Mom, and she’s got to be sick. So.
Sick Moms Club. Two criteria for membership.
My Mom, Sula, me, and the stuffed cats, Ember & Tigger / St. Petersburg, FL // March 2025
Are you a member of the Dead Dads Club?
Only two criteria for membership!
Any Dad will do. Stepdads, Granddads, Poor Dads, Rich Dads, Fun Dads, Un-Dads.
But for real.
I thought for sure my Mom would go first. I mean, I moved to Florida because she has dementia and she is dying.
“Plot twist,” somebody said.
That’s funny.
I actually mean that. I’m just too tired to laugh today. It takes too many muscles.
My mom is in an assisted living facility, on Hospice Care, can no longer stand up from a seated position on her own, and is worried about the stuffed cats we gave her possibly being dead because they ‘have a soul and they used to meow and now they stopped.’
The staff has been putting down food and water for them and every time I drop by the stuffed cats — and the food — are in a different place in the apartment. So that’s good. They’re still alive, you know. And the facility is still keeping her. Alive, you know. And putting down real food for her stuffed cats.
“What’s the harm?” they said.
No harm, I say. She wasn’t going to eat that, anyway.
Sleeps a lot these days, and doesn’t eat much, but at least she has a growing menagerie / St. Pete, FL // April 5th, 2025
So here’s a question.
My Dad is dead do I tell my demented mother, his ex-wife since 1995?
No, right?
30 years, wow. I just realized that. My parents have been divorced for 30 years.
Here was my timeline (Timeline, ha! I laugh in the face of timeline.): I thought once I dealt with my mom’s illness and death, which seems pretty likely to be within 6 months, then I’d take my gentleman and go to New York and, with his help, find a new way to relate with my Dad. You know. Reconcile. My gentleman wanted to do that for me. He wanted that for me. He said he would help me do it. I agreed that it would be good to have a better relationship with my Dad.
Excuse me, Lila?
Yes?
Terribly sorry, but, I would like to call your attention to the fact that, your dad’s dead?
He is?
Brain: Yes they said, found on his doorstep, dead, by the mailman.
(Dead by the mailman. My new emo band.)
my dad’s dead
Are you sure?
Brain: Yes.
That seems like fake news.
mydadsdead
mydadsdead
But he was just texting me about my immortal soul.
my dad is dead?
I’ll be doing something else — buying a rubber ducky, hugging my man, drinking a mocktail (all things I did today) and Brain politely, like a tall British man, or maybe more like a Canadian gentleman, so sorry, taps me on the shoulder.
So sorry, but— Do you recall what we discussed?
mydadsheadmydadsdead.
my dads head?
mydadsded
That’s weird. He doesn’t seem dead.
You haven’t seen him a few years, ducky.
The day we made an episode of my podcast together / Sidney, NY // January 2014
I don’t really want to see it with eyes. But I wonder how long the unreality will persist.
I feel like a Disney character arriving in a strange land saying they feel ‘peculiar’ or they never noticed these woods before what is this feeling I’m feeling inside have these trees always been here something funny I’m feeling inside am I in the wrong story?
It seems so strange. I keep vaguely picturing him falling on his front steps. Or not really falling. Just sort of on the steps, trying to enter his house. I see his back, kind of. A white undershirt like he always wore, his walking stick in his hand his keys in… the same hand? Did he slip? His upturned cowboy thick leather hat with feathers I think from the Museum of the American Indian to which he was a donor he would be very happy for you to know that he’s been a donor there for a long time. I’m not sure if he ever met an indigenous person or talked with an indigenous person but he sure was proud about the museum thing. His tub body in its black pants with a black belt slung under his Santa paunch and sensible black shoes. Probably there was a jacket though. It’s winter up there. 46 degrees when last I checked which I think was yesterday but who knows time amirite! So a jacket, coarse canvas like a ship sail, but black, with an inordinate amount of field-vest pockets. You know, like a birder. But not a vest. My Dad had sleeves.
My uncle won’t let me into my dead father’s house.
My aunt tells me not to go there because he will bar my entry and she doesn’t want him to CALL THE POLICE ON ME.
Call
the
POLICE?
The POLICE?!!!
This is my FATHER’S HOUSE. I am his ONLY CHILD.
Outside my father’s house on the first day of my second cross-country road trip / Sidney, NY // October 2017
I just don’t understand.
How can you be such an asshole?
How can you be such an asshole to your niece whose father has just died?
My uncle has been an asshole to me my entire life and now he is the executor of my father’s will and all of the assets have already been transferred to him prior to my Dad’s death “so that they are easier to distribute.”
Listen, I don’t envy him the job. My Dad was a hoarder.
But I don’t trust him. I don’t know him! And I don’t trust him. He never cared to get to know me!
How can someone be so unkind?
My father.
His house.
His plaid shirts.
His journals.
His glasses.
My Dad.
My inheritance.
His wishes to become a tree, or be buried in a mushroom suit. And they are EMBALMING him.
They are embalming him.
Nobody consulted me about anything, except my schedule. Apparently they can’t find the safe with the will in it. Apparently my “uncle” tore apart the living room looking for it. I mean. I remember it being the size of a 50s television, so, not sure how much tearing apart you need to do there, Peter. And grey. Apparently he’s been tearing his hair out looking for a black safe.
But, you know, nobody fucking asked me.
You piece of shit. You “uncle.” You cruel dickhead.
My Aunt Mary-Ann is relaying everything to me from her hospital bed in Nevada. A literal game of telephone, because nobody else has reached out to me at all. I’m the literal next of kin but their police department couldn’t provide the right forms (?!!!!???) for my police department here to show up and inform me??
Okay, fine, better to hear it from my aunt.
Still not a peep out of anyone else.
I haven’t reached out to them either. Fucking assholes.
I don’t picture my father’s face when I think about him on the threshold of his house because I don’t want to picture his face dead. He looked so much like my Grammy. Same Italian nose, same boufy jowels, same deep-set brown eyes. My eyes. Dad was shaped more like SpongeBob while she was shaped like a very huggable oversized pear.
Very lookalike, much Italian / L: Sweet 16 1998 Seminole, FL, R: Probably also late 90s likely at her assisted living in Brooklyn, NY
I saw my Grammy in her casket at the wake, I was 24? I think, her cheeks both whitegrey and pumped full of blue, a blue-ish tinge, not looking like her cherubic Italian grandma self at all. As you can see, in life she wasn’t blue in the slightest.
Because this is what Catholics do. Pump their blood out? Break their fingers? Pump them full of chemicals to leech into the earth? Put them in the ground but first pump them full of poison and pose them like life-size death dolls inside an extremely expensive lacquered box? A box that will take an egregiously long time to decompose? Thoroughly interrupting the natural order of things?
Am I going to look at my father like that?
On Dad’s land, “Spirit Haven” / Masonville, NY // June 2017
I feel like people pretty regularly ponder which is worse: a sudden unexpected death or a slow agonizing one. It’s a game of “would you rather.”
I am witnessing both. One each. A set.
And really I’m not sure.
My new friend Simone, who I met at the Death Cafe this week, said, “I don’t know; they’re both awful.”
They are.
My mom is dying slowly and yet! It seems, simultaneously, like her deterioration has been incredibly rapid. It’s reverse life. Reverse-baby-development. The Curious Case of Dementiaed, Incontinent Benjamin Button.
Every day a baby can do something new, and every day my mother can’t do something new.
The latest is this: she cannot stand up on her own. She tries. She tries to bear down with her chicken bone legs on her numb clobby feet and I see her deconditioned chickenskin thighs tremble with the effort and… she just can’t do it.
But she did get up from her bed yesterday, somehow, without me seeing it. Unwitnessed. There are many unwitnessed falls, but I suppose there are also unwitnessed triumphs. Or as my friend Fiona and I like to call them: Tiny Wins. TinyWins™
A clouds-part moment of joy at church, on an otherwise disgruntled day for mom / meeting our beautiful tenant for the very first time // St. Petersburg, FL /// April 6th, 2025
It seems like I’m going to lose both of my parents in the same year.
Last month I lost my brilliant, funny, compassionate, loving, delightful friend Craig, to bladder cancer at age 49. I’m scared every time my boyfriend drives when he’s tired. I’m low-key scared when he goes to work teaching art in a public magnet school for developmentally, behaviorally, and cognitively-challenged kids. I worry about something happening.
I’m terrified that he’ll be taken away from me, too, just when we’ve found each other again.
That poor mailman.
As if they don’t have a hard enough time, with the sleet, the hail, the snow, the rain. The dogs.
I hardly talked to my father for the past 4.4 years.
One day, after I accidentally moved to Bali (two months prior to the pandemic, January 2020) my Dad randomly decided to call me to inform me that he disapproved of my abortion. The abortion I had in 2018 and which my whole entire heart unequivocally wanted.
I pretty much stopped speaking to him. It wasn’t just the abortion thing. It was that, for a year or so prior, he could not manage a single conversation with me without preaching. I started calling him an evangelical Catholic.
Wait, what? Catholics have evangelicals now?
No. No they don’t.
Catholics rely on the legacy of guilt. And it works for them.
Ever heard how 12-step groups rely on “attraction, not promotion”? That part. The Catholic Church is an institution that needs no recruiters. Why hire, when parents will indoctrinate FOR FREE?!
I still don’t understand what happened. I always thought I had a nice, kind, liberal father. And then all of a sudden, in 2020, I learned he voted for Trump, believed conspiracy theories about celebrities drinking baby’s blood, and disagreed with my gay uncle’s “lifestyle” but “hate the sin, not the sinner”…
Who is this guy?
Did he change? Did I somehow neglect to notice that my father was a conservative conspiracy theorist? Was this always who he was?
This guy? / Masonville, NY // June 2017
Where is the man who saw all my plays in college — including the second-year project during which I was at one point nude and covered in gold paint? The guy who laughingly, twinklingly said to my teachers and friends, “Nude is not lewd!” I was so proud of him? My Dad gets it, I thought.
Where’s the guy who joined us for family-friendly, G-rated Christmas potluck dinner at my sex-positive intentional community and got along with everyone, except for that one mean French girl (I didn’t get along with her either)? Where is my liberal father? Was that not my father? Did he change? Was he radicalized in the face of his mortality? Can it be that simple?
He once told me that he needed to “get right with God.” I wondered what did you do that was so wrong that you think you are wrong with your God?
What did he do?!
Every conversation ended with him preaching at me. You know why? Because that’s when I stopped responding. I thought he might get the hint. He used to be a psychologist, after all. He used to be intelligent. What happened to him.
And now… Now he won’t get to see me get married, something he always wanted.
He told me he didn’t think I would find a real partner until I left that community, and correlation not causation or not . . . I did not. Now I have it, and he will never get to see it.
During middle school and high school, fresh after the divorce in 1995, I would forget, I mean truly forget, for long stretches of time, that I even had a father.
Oh.
I see now.
That’s when I learned about forgetting. I have long stretches of memory I cannot access. Most of my childhood is wiped from my internal hard drive. But 1995? That must be when I learned how to do it.
I called up my friend Joe McCue from high school a few years ago. A great human and a great visual artist. He’s a D.O. now, a Doctor of Osteopathy, up in Maine.
I said, “I think my vice is avoidance.”
And he said, “I think your vice is forgetting.”
Numb / taking mom to see the sunset, with my love // Gulfport, FL /// April 5th, 2025
I’m in mourning but I’m okay.
That’s weird, isn’t it?
I mean, I still don’t wear mascara anymore. Just in case. A cry is never far from reach.
The truth is that my parents haven’t been parents to me in a long time. They’ve been the people who raised me, who were now aging, ailing.
As Stephen Jenkinson says, we have very few elders in this world. We have mostly olders.
I have no idea what it’s like to admire your father, to go to him for advice on things that matter. I’m grieving and also, I didn’t have the finest relationship with my father.
There’s actually a term for this. It’s called complicated grief. That’s the technical term. Complicated grief. When you are grieving someone you had mixed feelings towards. Complicated grief.
This is what I was wearing when I got the call / The Bathroom Portraits // Sōl St. Pete Bistro /// April 4th, 2025
Adam just happened to be walking by.
He happened.
To be walking
by.
Happened.
To be.
Walking by.
On that very street.
At that very moment.
I had just gotten the call from my Aunt Mary-Ann.
Let me back up a little.
I had just visited Mom, with Zach’s company. We were in two separate cars. I saw that my Aunt had texted me urgently but then the text completely disappeared. I mean I could not find it. I looked in my texts, in WhatsApp, in Facebook messenger, in email. Poof! Gone.
I told Zach about this as we walked out to the parking lot. He figured it was probably a Scam, told me not to click anything, suggested I call my Dad but not worry about it. I tried calling Dad on the way to the restaurant.
“The Magic Jack customer you are trying to call is not available.” (No he is not.)
Okay. I figured he was probably dead. My Aunt Mary-Ann never calls me. And even though the text and the phone notification had oddly evaporated into the either I was 98% sure that I saw it. And if she called, that meant my Dad was dead. But might as well stay calm. Drive. I tried texting my Aunt but it didn’t go through (voice to text, don’t worry, I know I was driving). And then she called me. Halfway through the 15 minute drive to the restaurant.
I finished the drive crying and parked across the street from the bistro in the grass dirt lot and tried to call Zach. He should have been there at the restaurant already because we left from the same place at the same time. (He was but my call didn’t go through.) I called him but it went to voicemail. I was a powder keg.
And then I looked through my windshield and saw Adam’s Banana Records t-shirt in St. Pete colors and knew it was him, and I shouted, “Adam! Adam!” But he didn’t hear me. So I’m screaming now, “Adam! ADAM!”
He heard, he turned, he registered, one second after another, It’s someone who knows me, it’s Lila, she needs help. I started sobbing and he started running to me and scooped me up.
“Your Mom?” He said.
“No, my Dad!” Sobbing.
“Oh, Lila!”
The day Adam got the call about his sister’s suicide I was living in his guest room. I had been living there for nearly 6 months. I don’t know what state I’d be in now if he hadn’t invited me to live in his guest room.
His guest room was right across the way from his office, so I would hear him conducting all his business. I am not a fan of corporate business or its talk, but in a way it was comforting, like how you’d go to sleep in your bedroom while your parents had a party in the other room and you could hear the faint strains of the laughter and the music and the tinkling of glasses (I mean, I don’t have any memories of this, but, you know, it seems very comforting). Like when I was on Clubhouse and I would fall asleep with my phone next to me on the pillow, in a ‘room’ with people talking, just so I could hear them, just so I wouldn’t fall asleep alone.
Comforting. People are there. They are talking, so they are there. They are talking, so they are alive. I can hear them, so I am alive.
Adam is businessing, so he is there.
One day— no, not one day. January 6th, 2025 day.
On January 6th, 2025, Adam loaned his car to go to one doctor or another. I had just gotten back. His office door was closed, which meant he was in a meeting. I was in the guest room when I heard his Dad’s voice. Now, I know Papa Bear’s voice because he has been more of a dad-in-practice to me in the past year than my biological Dad had been for many, many years.
Papa Bear said, in a broken voice on speakerphone, “Well. She finally did it.”
And I knew because you know. I burst, I barreled into Adam’s office and grabbed hold of him from the side, as much as I could get my arms around him while he was in his fancy office chair, as he said “I’m so sorry Dad” over and over while crying and I was leaking tears too but quiet sympathetic ones because that’s the right thing to do in that moment. I wanted to drive him to his Dad’s house but he wanted to drive himself. I made sure he took his Emotional Support Water bottle, and that it was full. He doesn’t like the tap water here. I don’t either.
I can’t get over this:
I was there when he got the call about his sister.
But that makes sense, because I was living with him.
Yet somehow, improbably, inexplicably, unexpectedly, directly outside the restaurant where I was going to dinner but he was not, he was going to an art gallery opening… Adam was there right there, then, when I couldn’t get through to my gentleman, 15 minutes after I got the call about my Dad. Maybe 7 minutes.
The Writer?
The writer Helena Fitzgerald and her friends have a joke about The Writer. The cosmic writer of the movie of our lives. Things happen, which, if we wrote them in a screenplay, our screenwriting teachers would call it lazy writing. They’d be like, “That’s too convenient.”
And when something, some absurdly pat-seeming coincidence happens in the films we watch we go, Shahhh. Things don’t happen that way in real life.
And when something, some absurdly pat-seeming coincidence happens in our lives, Helena the writer and her friends comically shake their loose fists at the sky and go, “The WRITER!!!” with great chagrin.
Because really bro. Who is writing this movie?! I mean, real life isn’t like that.
Is it?
The day before my father dropped dead I went to what was billed as a Death Cafe.
Funny, when I tell people about it I keep wanting to say that I went to a Grief Cafe. I just wanted to talk with people about grief, theirs and mine. That’s why I keep thinking of it as a Grief Cafe. Apparently the subtitle was actually “Coffin Talk.” (Maybe I’ll host one of my own, and Grief Cafe is what I will call it.)
I went because, two days prior to that, the neighboring cafe disappointed me by not having any pink lemonade and they encouraged me over to Rabbit Rabbit, where they make mocktails called elixirs. They are tasty. I like them. I was having some friction with my boyfriend, and my Dad texted because he wanted to get ahold of my mother, to save her immortal soul, and mine, and I was feeling pretty grumpy.
The lovely lady pouring elixirs for me told me that they were going to have a Grie— Death Cafe on Thursday (which was in a couple days) and encouraged me to come. I came because mom’s Hospice Nurse called last week to tell me she shows signs of imminence (a euphemism for imminently dying, which I had never heard before — had you?) …and because I buried my friend a few weeks ago.
I was disgruntled with the facilitator, because I thought we were there to have a conversation, and she talked 80% more than she listened. As a longtime facilitator myself, honey flip that. When you lead, listen 80% more than you talk. People want to feel heard. It’s not a want; it’s a need. People need to feel heard. It’s not that she didn’t have useful things to say — she did. It’s that: I did not go for a lecture on death.
I went to speak with people who understand.
She interrupted us constantly to offer her feedback and perspective, often saying, “That’s just my opinion,” with one hand up as though to ward off imaginary criticism, as though a little gnome would pop up with a rubber mallet and bonk her on the head for being so Bold as to proclaim her Ideas. She’s one of those people who leads with her throat, her chin permanently tilted slightly up, as if her voice is begging you to be heard.
Everybody leads from somewhere in their body. I learned this in theatre school. Go to a park one day and watch people walk by. Ask yourself what part of their body is leading. The tips of their toes? Their tits? Their outer shoulders? Go home and try a few of those walks on, really try leading from that part of your body. Then you can figure out where you lead from. And then you can decide if you want to lead from that place, or if you’d like to change that. Because you can, you know. You can change that.
The two other women there were lovely — one young, one old. The young one reminded me of one of my all-time favorite artists, Sabrina Ward Harrison. She was beautiful and green-eyed and guileless and open. I liked her instantly. The older woman was in her 60s with snazzy fuschia animal-print cat-eye glasses and a pink shawl. She was queer and fabulous and a straight shooter. Though the facilitator did not ask us to introduce ourselves and share why we were there (which seems to me, to be a very good place to start), the older woman eventually shared that she has terminal cancer, and doesn’t want any chemo or radiation or aggressive treatment that makes you feel sicker than the cancer does, wants to die in her home with her things and her friends and her partner.
I waited a full 10-15 minutes for the death doula to take a breath from her monologue so I could turn to this woman and ask: “Can I share with you?” She said a warm yes, and I told her about Craig, how he was in the hospital with a prognosis of “days, maybe hours,” and then when Shannon pulled off that Herculean GoFundMe to pay for round-the-clock skilled nursing care so that the hospital would discharge him, and he got home to his apartment in Brooklyn, which he loves, with his wife, who he loves, dimmed his lights and turned on his music, which he loves, and put on his oil diffuser! then he lived for three months or so more.
I think he got to see almost all of the people on his list.
I was blessed enough to see him twice, and then to be able to easily change my travel plans to attend his burial ceremony.
I said to the lady, “I think it’s beautiful that you want to die at home.”
The death doula’s monologue was starting to deplete me, and I noticed. I’m trying to pay attention to how I feel while being with people — and beforehand, when I know I’m going to be with them, and afterwards, after I’ve been with them.
As inspired by my first horizontal episode with Kelsey Grant (episode 116. planet friendship).
Past-me would have been so stressed at the thought of hurting the facilitator’s feelings that I would have sat through the rest of it just to not-hurt-her-feeings while I got increasingly agitated and nauseated. But I have been in and out of a support group for codependency, and I am tired, and… I just don’t have to do that. I do not owe her sitting through her monologue.
I made move to leave and she did not make indication she would pause, so I gently picked up my things, as inconspicuously as I could which is really not at all because I carry many things and most of them are shiny. I wanted to talk to the young woman, but I didn’t want to be that disruptive (not codependence, just courtesy) so I was going to slip out with as little ceremony or disruption as possible.
But the lovely young Simone wanted to talk to me and sprang up from her chair to bashfully tell me so.
Simone’s dad died two years ago.
She came home from film school in Chicago to celebrate his remission from cancer, and he took a sudden turn, and… she hasn’t yet gone back to school. She told me that she did a tarot spread that morning and it advised her: leave the house today, you’re going to meet someone.
She said “I think you’re that someone,” and I said “I think so too.”
I told her about Sabrina Ward Harrison and how I’ve been carrying her books through something like 14 moves (maybe 17 now) and that I wanted to give her one of them. I wrote this essay inspired by Sabrina’s second book, brave on the rocks.
brave on the rocks
horizontal in Baltimore, Maryland on the sidewalk outside The Charmery in Hampden / October 2017
Simone gave me three of the best hugs.
The next day, my dad dropped dead. {The Writer?} I knew Simone and I were supposed to meet, I felt that also, but I didn’t know just how much we were supposed to, or exactly why. I thought we were going to make a movie together maybe. And we still may.
But I could not know I was just about to join her club.
The night I found out, I still went to dinner. Girl’s gotta eat, right. While at dinner, which I did eat hungrily but forgot to ask for the dairy-free garlic bread and so ingested dairy at a pretty inopportune time, so in between going to the bathroom to cry and taking Bathroom Portraits and shitting my brains out, I texted some of my closest friends.
After shitting brains out, before? texting friends / St. Pete, FL // April 4th, 2025
I tend to process by committee. I’m a Person person. I texted people I’ve been friends with for a decade, or more, for 8 years, for 6 years. But I also texted Simone. Because I trust her. Because she understands. Because nobody should have to go through that so young. And in many ways, I feel just as young. Probably because I only became an adult in 2024, under duress.
After dinner, after I got home, but before my boyfriend came over to cuddle me, Simone talked me through. She stayed on the phone with me for an hour or more (“What even is time?” she said, multiple times) — with such wide compassion and deep insight that I thought about Tracey Anne Duncan’s Facebook post some years back, about finding a younger person and making them your mentor.
Simone said “How are you?” then stopped herself.
“That’s not a good question,” she said, almost to herself.
“What do you want to share with me?” she revised. “What do you want me to know?”
Want to say something when someone lost someone? Say what Simone said.
What do you want to share with me? What do you want me to know?
When I returned to the states from Bali after the height of the pandemic, I visited my Dad in upstate New York. We went, as usual, to the China Star Chinese buffet.
China Star Chinese buffet, but pre-pandemic / Binghamton, NY // Father’s Day 2019
He had been preaching in the comments on every one of my Facebook posts (and even commenting with religious talk on the posts of my friend Margherita!) long after I (and she!) asked him to stop, and did not cease until I removed him from my digital world.
It was strange to click, Yes, I want to unfriend my Dad.
I was doing an experiment at the Chinese buffet. I wanted to see how long it would take (in person) before he started preaching.
10 minutes. Maybe 5.
We had barely sat down and ordered beverages before he launched in with how he regrets not instilling the Catholic religion in me, and how I should get on my knees and say God I don’t know you because my father didn’t teach me, but I want to know you, etc. please come into my heart, and so forth.
I calmly said (I had rehearsed it in my head), “Dad. I really want to feel closer to you, but every time you talk about religion I feel further away. Could we not talk about that?”
He said pleasantly, “Well if you want to feel closer to me this is the way.”
This is the way.
That’s the main issue I have with most organized religion. “This is the way.”
That’s why I’m a UU.
There are ways and there are ways. I mean. I’m half Brazilian. Brazilians even have a special word for making things happen, finding a “little way.” This can refer to a duplicitous or less-than-legal way, but as far as I understand, it doesn’t have to. It can be a hack or a trick or a clever perspective. A little way. A jeitinho. jeito (way) + inho (the diminutive) = jeitinho, a little way.
The preaching-at-me thing has always felt disrespectful to me. I tried to express that without saying it bluntly. I gave it my best euphemistic shot, utilizing my best communication tools — appealing to the common purpose of feeling closer, and so on. But. This was an impasse, I felt. After that, we mostly stopped talking. I once told my therapist I felt guilty for not reaching out and she asked, “Has he reached out?”
He didn’t reach out much either, so. It takes two right.
Hindsight says: Why not let him preach at me? Nod and smile? Lie, even. I mean so what! It’s coming from a place of care. He believes this stuff so fervently that he’s worried about me. He wants me to “at least arrive in purgatory.”
The finest pamphlet of them all / St. Pete, FL // January 2025
I got this palm-sized pamphlet at my friend’s sister’s funeral. I was feeling some ancillary? grief. The grief of a person who wasn’t close to a person but is close to people who were close to them. Empathetic grief? A neighbor grief? Grief-adjacent grief? A wee bit of grief shrapnel?
I thought I picked up the little pamphlet to prepare for my mom’s death in advance. I actually even felt a twinge of guilt taking it, like there were people who might have needed it more than me. So I only took it towards the end of the memorial, after most people who were close to Shay had taken things from the table with the prayer cards I suggested (and laminated! laminating is soothing…)…
I put it in my purse and promised myself I’d share it with others, to justify taking it to myself. (I justify a lot of things to myself. I’d really like to turn down the volume on the inner critic who incessantly interrogates my motivations and demands that I defend myself.)
The people who brought the pamphlets — really more like booklets, about the size of a credit card, but square — were in their 40s I wager. Hard to tell because grief blurs age. They lost their 23 year-old son. They said the pamphlet really helped. Because it’s not too much. It’s not too much to focus on. It’s just a few true things bound together. Short sentences. A pamphlet seems like such a paltry thing, and yet, I remember another time in my life when a pamphlet really made a profound difference to me.
So I took it before I “needed it.”
Then my friend Craig died.
Then my Dad died.
I read it a few times after Shay’s funeral. I took a picture of each page and sent it to someone (who was it?) who I thought could use it. For the past week it has been set aside, alongside other cards and gifts awaiting the post office, with a greeting card I am planning to send to Shannon, my friend Craig’s widow.
Yesterday, when I found out about my Dad, I was carrying it in my purse.
Adam said he saw it and was glad I had it. I couldn’t recall why I was carrying it in my purse… and then I remembered. Two days ago, when I went to the Death Cafe, I put it in my bag thinking Someone might need this. I forgot to show it at the Death Cafe, because the doula was talking so much.
But, as it turns out, I was carrying it for someone who needed it… and that someone was me.
If we want to be woo woo about it and if we believe that my calling is intimacy, which, I am at the very least woo woo-adjacent, and I do, then I was born to the parents I was born to in order to give me the precise wounding that I needed to turn to my calling.
I would not have sought intimacy in all the places and cultivated it in communities and one-on-ones all over the world, everywhere I go if I had been happy in my biological family.
Annie Lalla calls this “the superpowers born on the back of your parent’s crazy.”
My parents and I at my Sweet 16, 4 years after they divorced / It was a black & white party // Seminole, FL /// Oct. 1998
A Brief Timeline of Lila’s Series of Unfortunate Events
(TL; DR: it’s been a lot):
January 6th: Adam’s sister Shay died by suicide
January 12th: Mom falls on her face at church, take her to the ER
January 14th: Fly to NY
January 15th: Dinner with Craig & Shannon on Craig’s deathbed
January 16th: Fly back to FL, move into my mom’s house my house
January 18th: Cookiepalooza (well it’s not all bad!)
January 19th-20th: Sick
January 21st: Baby’s first colonoscopy (no cancer tho whoohoo!)
January 23rd: Dental fillings / make prayer cards for Shay’s memorial
January 25th: Shay’s memorial
January 27th: Buy fiddle leaf fig plant from Wild Roots, call her Artemis
January 31st: Fly to NY
February 1st: Record audio with Craig & friends (An afternoon with Craig on his deathbed), gather all of my possessions with Kenneth & Deniz’s help
February 2nd-5th: Drive 12” yellow box truck from Queens, NY to Gulfport, FL with friend Jon
February 7th: Kenneth arrives, unload and return box truck
February 8th: Forgot to fill gas tank before returning truck, go buy gasoline and container at gas station and try to pump it into gas tank of Penske truck — guy comes out to stop us, then realizes we were trying to put gas IN, gives me keys so I can fill up tank at gas station and avoid exorbitant fee. His name is Kenny. Thanks Kenny!
February 9th: The first day my mother called me “Mãe” (Mom.)
February 12th: Framer frames out bathroom in garage apartment I’m gut renovating (baby’s first gut reno)
February 13th: Kenneth goes back to NY
February 19th: Fly to Los Angeles, and as I’m flying, Mom enters hospital with 3 broken ribs
February 22nd-23rd: Pack up the rest of my possessions & FedEx them
February 24th: Fly back to FL (on a friend’s frequent flyer miles)
February 25th: Visit mom in hospital, initial Hospice meeting, sign DNR
February 27th: Hospice intro meeting at Mom’s Assisted Living facility
February 28th: Margherita visits, “Marghe does St. Pete”
March 1st: FloridaRAMA with Marghe, fell in love with Latonya Hicks’ mixed media collage work exhibition (though to call them this does not do them justice)
March 2nd: Mermaid photo shoot on the beach (BALANCE)
March 3rd: Marghe leaves
March 4th: Roof replacement post-Hurricane Milton damage (5 MONTHS LATER)
March 8th: International Women’s March protest, Latonya Hicks’ art exhibit opening at FloridaRAMA, met the love of my life
March 10th: Received the news from Shannon that Craig died
March 11th: Electrician consultation
March 12th: Fly to NY, co-create ritual with Shannon to release Craig’s soul from the apartment so he can be free to roam free in the Brooklyn he so loved
March 13th: Therapy
March 14th: Craig’s burial ceremony in Rhinebeck, NY (we buried him ourselves with the shovels and the dirt and the flower petals… it was achingly beautiful)
March 15th-17th: Love weekend in NYC
March 18th: Fly to Dallas, drive the Hondalorian (on loan from Jon) as long as I could before it was too dangerous to keep going, which turned out to be Little Rock
March 19th: Drive Little Rock to Memphis to Louisville
March 20th-22nd: Art Teacher conference with my love in Louisville, also, terrible head cold
March 23rd: Drive from Lousiville to Nashville (hi Dawn! Thank you for talking ailing parents while stretching with me! So good to see you!) to Atlanta (thanks Jon & Christina for the supremely comfy couch and Navi the perfect cat for the perfect snuggles)
March 24th: Drive to Florida
March 25th: Unpack my life
March 31st: Love goes into the ER (kidney stones)
April 1st: Sick
April 2nd: Raging UTI, drive self to urgent care, also likely kidney stones because a weird grey rock came out of me with my urine, twice
April 3rd: Death Cafe
April 4th: Dad drops dead
“It’s so much all at once,” I’ve said, to nearly a dozen people in the 12 hours since I found out.
“You can handle it,” and “You are strong” say the people trying to be kind.
“It’s so so much,” say the kind people.
Headline:
Woman’s father drops dead: Everyone tells her how strong she is
At some point, I rode a pony, and both of us seem pretty happy about it / circa 1989
People like to say “I can’t imagine how you’re feeling.”
As I write in my piece:
STOP ASKING GRIEVING PEOPLE if there's "anything you can do."
The Red Lantern / A place I loved, that is no longer // Greenpoint, Brooklyn /// circa 2012
Yes you can.
You can imagine.
You just don’t want to, because it’s painful.
Because imagination is powerful.
And then you might feel what I feel.
And you don’t want to feel that.
I get it.
I get it.
I do.
But a friend whom I’ve spent very little in-person time with messaged me today and said, “I can imagine how you’re feeling.”
I can imagine how you’re feeling.
He can imagine.
And he’s willing to.
Say that. I’m not even sure if that was a typo, but it doesn’t matter. Say that!
Say that instead of “I can’t imagine, I just Can’t Imagine.”
Here are some other things you can say, which I find to be beautiful and compassionate:
What to say when someone dies
Oh, hunny!
I love you.
My heart!
My heart is beating with yours. (Missa)
I can imagine how you are feeling. (Chris)
May their memory be a blessing. (Judaism)
May the soil be light on them. (Eastern Europe)
What do you want me to know? What would you like to share with me? (Simone)
Please accept my sincerest condolences. If there is something, no matter how small, that I can help you with, please let me know. (Ken)
May I do x, y, or z thing for you? (If they don’t offer things but ask if they can do something, you can always replay with an insouciant: Can I get a multiple choice?)
My Dad in the place he loved the most / his land, “Spirit Haven” // Masonville, NY /// 2019
I wrote a note to: Add an hour-by-hour of the first 24 hours after getting the news of my dad’s death. But I’m too tired to do that part. Maybe later. Right now
My eyes hurt.
I can only breathe through my nostrils 80%.
My temples are — I went through a rotating Vanna White letter thing in my mind: throbbing? burning? clamped? I don’t know. Present. I am aware of my temples in a way that I usually am not.
It’s all up in my face.
I’m so tired.
I’m so so tired.
I finally fell asleep at 5am and slept until 8am.
This is not atypical.
I reached out to the Reverend Micah Bucey of Judson Church, he of the glitter fingernail polish, queer joy, heartrending wisdom, and resplendent plaid.
I have a pin from his minister-swearing-in ceremony (not the technical term) which was very beautiful and full of music and poetry, that reads:
Be the Glitter You Wish to See in the World
If you really know me, you would know that I try to do this every day.
I reached out to Micah because I wanted his wisdom. He wrote a year’s worth of Tiny Prayers that he made into a book, and they were always incisive and moving and gut… gut something. Not wrenching that’s too aggressive. Gut-touching? Gut-stirring? No that sounds like being sick. I don’t know. Don’t have the right word for that one right now. I dislike not having the precise right word for the right thing.
I asked if he had ever written about sudden death, and he said not sudden death per se, but death yes, specifically in the wake of Morgan Jenness’s death. Morgan Jenness was one of the great dramaturges, and I knew her only a little, from Young Playwrights Inc., when I won their competition in 2000, or maybe later on, when I evaluated plays for them, or even later when I acted in their staged readings, but I admired her and her clearblueeyed truth and ferocious puppet activism, from Facebook afar.
He sent me the Tiny Prayer he wrote for her, or for the people post-her:
A Tiny Prayer (for those who are missing a lost loved one):
May you feast on memories, giving yourself more space than your hurried timeline typically allows, may you remember that we are not only the attendants of our own experiences but also the keepers of one another’s histories, that our own lives become what they are only because of the ways we interact and absorb our encounters with others, may you have patience for your own process, balancing celebration and sadness, and may you deeply know that this bittersweet feeling that is engulfing you right now is proof that you are not only human but that you are a human who holds the offerings of others just as lovingly as you hope your own are held in return, and that this collaborative story-stewarding is the most lasting way that we keep ourselves and one another alive.
Amen
- The GoodGlorious Reverend Micah Bucey
One of the last things Simone said to me before we got off the phone last night was “I’m so glad you’re a writer. Writing will save your life,” she said.
“It has, and it does,” I said.
It has and it does.
And so it will.
I love you,
Lila
I like how your brain works 🌝 Thanks for this great read in the parking lot at Value Village while I wait to attend to my friend’s grief. After hitting Costco for 7 boxes of crackers.
Thank you.