Really Good Grief
When my father died, grief took on its own life.
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The Last Gift

1/30/2014

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It's hard for me to choose a gift for a dying person. My mother-in-law, Mar, was dying of pancreatic cancer when the family assembled on Christmas Eve 2000, and I had tied myself in knots beforehand thinking through all angles and implications of what she might need, or want, or be able to use, and what it would feel like to look at the new thing I'd carefully chosen once she was gone. 

So I wrote Mar a letter, the first and last one I ever wrote her. And whatever else was wrapped in paper under the tree, the gift she gave us was to get out of bed one more time, and laugh and smile with us.

I wrote Dad a letter for my last gift to him. I reprint it here in its entirety.


December 23, 2012

Dear Dad
--

To paraphrase Amanda, the difference between taking care of you and taking care of a baby is that the baby doesn't say “Thank you” when you say goodbye.

I don't know when I'll have to say goodbye to you for good, so I wanted to say thank YOU now for taking care of ME.

Thank you for picking me up when I was little. I forgive you for stopping when I got too big.

Thank you for singing to me, for reading to me, and for playing the recorder. Thank you for taking me to movies, plays, concerts, and dances. Your deep love of the arts inspires me.

Thank you for taking wonderful photos of me and other family members.

Thank you for trying to get me to stop eating lettuce and grapes to support farm workers' rights. Thank you for joining the March on Washington. Your liberal values have helped guide me through life.

Thank you for supporting me, emotionally and financially, even when you saw little of me. All around, of the all the divorces I've heard of, yours seems to have done the best at maintaining civility and love amongst a family divided.

Thank you for your good humor and tolerance for change, and your amazing adaptability. You have helped me understand how to communicate the important things better. You've taught me how to age with grace.

Thank you for letting me take care of you during this amazing time, this gift of days and hours. I will always treasure the relationship we've created out of what the Dalai Lama calls “the daily experience of hardship.”

I feel there is no way to say what I need to say completely enough, so I'm grateful I can share yet more time and love with you.

Love, Pearl



Postscript: After Christmas Adam, I noticed the letter lying around, unopened. I didn't know what to say to Dad about that, and there were a lot of other pressing matters (like hydration, and positioning, and bed-bath scheduling and hospice personnel visits). Eventually, Carol and Amanda mentioned that he was nervous about what was in the letter, and that he wanted me to read it to him. I did, and he smiled and thanked me.

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Symptom, or Personality?

1/23/2014

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When — despite the radical contingencies, the happenstances, that you know have determined so many aspects of your life, beginning with your very conception — you start trying to shore up its fragments into some kind of organization and meaning, your memory, despite its notorious unreliability, provides the most important information. It has already verified and falsified and winnowed the past in a way that begins to form, for you, patterns and through-lines.  — Daniel Menaker, My Mistake 
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The question arises: Did my father act the way he did because of his symptoms or his personality? He died of a rare genetic disorder called Adult-onset Polyglucosan Body Disease (APBD). Symptoms of APBD include "gait difficulties" and "sensory loss predominantly in the distal lower extremities" as well as "mild difficulties in cognition (often executive dysfunction)." By the time he received this diagnosis last fall, it hardly mattered. He'd begun to have strokes after a year of other, often mysterious reasons for hospitalizations, and it seemed most likely he would die of a stroke. 

The ABPD diagnosis followed 20 years of "no-diagnosis-means-no-prognosis" uncertainty. The only thing that seemed certain about his disease was that it was a progressive neuropathy, meaning that over time, more and more nerves died off, and he became less and less capable of moving his lower extremities. 

What seemed less certain was how much of the Dad's behavior was due to his disease. Dad was a renowned slow talker, and before he got a wheelchair, a painfully slow walker. I referred to him as "Our father who walketh ten paces behind us." Would I have mocked him if I'd known his nerves were degenerating for a long time before he displayed more dangerous symptoms, like falling off his bike? 


His speech could be so deliberate that at times I forgot what question he was answering. During his year of repeat hospital admissions, medical personnel would remark his slow speech, and I'd respond that he always talked that way. He was a mathematician, and enjoyed logical, precise, specific speech. Once he complained about people using "numeral," "number," and "digit" interchangeably. He maintained that he was truly confused by the colloquial blurring of definitions.

In the rehab center he went to after a storm of strokes, he had exercises where he was asked to name a set of objects. I held my breath as he stared at a pen, willing him to name it. After a long pause, he came up with, "Papermate ball-point pen." We laughed, his audience, in relief that he got it, understanding that he needed to show complete mastering of naming. Today, I thought, we have the naming of parts.

There were times when I wasn't sure if he was having trouble hearing, mentally processing, or being serious. He had a habit of repeating back nonsensical mishearings, and I told him firmly that it was important to me to know whether he was having trouble hearing or thinking. He persisted in what seemed like perverse cuteness until I asked the speech therapist in his rehab facility for help, and she suggested he use the prompt, "Say it again, please." Mostly, he did this. Mostly, I do it with my kids--except when I think it would be hilarious to repeat back the weird thing I thought I heard them say.

Symptom, or personality?


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Jew-ish Yahrzeit

1/16/2014

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Pearl: Were the Olsens Jewish? 
Steve: Is, is Naomi Jewish? 
Pearl: I’ll have to ask Naomi. 
Steve: You’ll have to ask Naomi? 
Pearl: Yeah, if she’s Jewish, but, uh... 
Steve: Well, you’ll have to explain what it means.

Some members of my family consider themselves Jewish, or secular Jews, others not. Some of us prefer the term "Jew-ish." We've had many conversations around the Passover table about who among us consider ourselves Jews. (When I had to miss a Hanukkah dinner because of work, my then 8-year-old daughter said to me, "Well, you're only half Jewess.")

The person who had the best claim for Judaism was the one who was always clearest about not being Jewish: my father. Which makes it extra-interesting to me that all of his children and his wife decided to burn yahrzeit candles on the anniversary of his death.

Being secular Jews, we had to discover for ourselves what the candles meant. You're supposed to light the candle at sunset on the day before the actual anniversary and burn it for 24 hours. Optionally, you can recite the mourner's prayer, the Kaddish. I don't know the Kaddish so I read A.A. Milne's poem "The Three Foxes" while my children embraced me. (I chose that poem because it was NOT one that Dad recorded for me in the last month of his life and I thought it's lightheartedness would keep me from crying. It didn't.)

While I thought of the candle as a little bit sacred (is that like being a little bit pregnant?), when I discovered in the morning that mine had burned out leaving a hollow core in the center of the beeswax, I added a tealight so I could use up all the original wax. That seemed somehow important.

In the afternoon, my sister and stepmother and I gathered for an hour of remembrance. We had been like a three-legged stool during Dad's last months, relying on each other for support, and it seemed fitting to have time to ourselves. Later, we were joined by my brother-in-law and Dad's friends, the Princes, from up the street. We talked and cried and ate cake and drank whiskey and wine. (One source my sister consulted said that while cakes and drinks were appropriate, the gathering was not to be a party. No worry there.)

The yahrzeit candle has, of course, symbolic meaning: "like a human soul, flames must breathe, change, grow, strive against the darkness and, ultimately, fade away. Thus, the flickering flame of the Yahrzeit candle helps to remind us of the departed soul of our loved one and of the precious fragility of our life and the lives of our loved ones, life that must be embraced and cherished at all times."

When I got home, I started to get a little worried about the symbolism I was creating. My daughter told me the candle had gone out a couple times, so she'd added more tealights. I like I was creating something of a mess, and I was a little lost. Should I keep adding to the candle? Should I just allow it to stop on its own? Should I put the candle away when it was still messy?

How very like my relationship with Dad: a little bit confusing, a little bit unknown, made up on the fly, full of questions about the past and the future. Untidy and real.

My younger brother left his yahrzeit candle burning on his bedside table and woke up a couple times to see it still alight. "I think they know something, those Jews," he said.
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One Year Later

1/9/2014

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PictureJust try it.
In a conversation I had with Dad a month before he died, I decided it was time to start asking him the questions I wanted answered, rather than simply following his thought patterns. 

I'd spent several months following his commentary on the mathematician Alfred Tarski (whom Dad saw speak on the day I was born), the director Alexander Korda (whose family was given family names by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as presumably ours was), and Clara Schumann, among other luminaries in his mind. Now I was getting impatient and a bit fearful: I could see him dying before I got all my questions answered, and then I'd carry around unfinished business for the rest of my life.


So I started asking the question only he could answer: What's it like being my dad? The addresses he'd lived at, the names of the institutions he'd attended and been employed by, the dates of a certain plane trip and the location of the refueling stop for the DC-6 on that trip--these, I began to feel, were topics that maybe could be answered through online research; the kind of research I wanted to do concerned what only Dad knew. The kind of knowledge that would die with him.

That conversation failed spectacularly. The problem was, my sister pointed out recently, that "What's it like being my dad?" is a hard question to answer. If somebody asked me what it was like being the mother of my children, I'd be in trouble. I love my children, but I don't know what loving them is "like." Had I simply asked Dad to tell me a story about when I was a baby, I might have gotten closer to where I wanted to be.

And when I really listen closely to the things he did say, I can capture what I seek. Dad often said he didn't feel competent taking care of babies--that to have some way of interacting with his kids, he took photographs of them. He saw the photos as collaborations between himself and the subjects. If I need to know more about those relationships, I can look at his body of artistic work.

That, and my memories, and others' memories, and a whole bunch of letters. These are the only relics I have to go on. And they will have to do.

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The Hero's Journey

1/3/2014

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More than one person called me heroic for taking care of my father in home hospice. My whole family was heroic; my sister, Amanda, and my stepmother, Carol, and I were particularly heroic in our close and daily attention. 


Being something of a literalist, and having encountered versions of the "Hero's Journey" in more than one context last year, I decided to look closely at the ways in which my own journey resembled that described in the directing course I completed last year. (My very basic understanding of the hero's journey is due to my teacher John Jacobsen, and any gaps in understanding are my own.) I can't speak for the others in my family, but if I am at all heroic, it is because my journey followed this pattern:

  1. The hero starts out in the Old World, the place where expectations are already known and perhaps already burdensome. 

    I always found it challenging to spend time talking with my father. Dad's sentences and stories could be exasperatingly drawn-out and detailed. He enjoyed what we called the "thought-you-said" game, in which his mishearing was repeated back to the listener as nonsensical syllables. I've described my father's attitude toward me as more avuncular than invested. I wanted more but I never knew how to create it.

  2. There is a Call to Action, which the hero disregards repeatedly until 
  3. a Compelling Action, often instigated by 
  4. a Mentor, makes staying comfortably in the Old World no longer possible, and 
  5. the hero chooses to cross the Threshold.

    Dad once mentioned that although he'd gone through a period of unhappiness, he was a happy person, and furthermore, that his marriage to my mother, though it had ended in divorce, represented a significant time of his life. He was open, he said then, to talking about what happened between him and my mother. 

    I took more than 25 years to take up his offer. After two hospitalizations in 2011, when I decided he might be going to die soon and I didn't want to lose any of his stories, I decided I didn't want to die wishing I'd asked him difficult questions. I started the conversation I wanted to have.

    After further hospitalizations, culminating with the stroke we'd been looking out for and its subsequent rehab, my family consulted with Tony Back, a doctor my family relies on. Tony wasn't treating Dad; he just offered to help us out with a conference call and a family meeting, both of which were instrumental in preparing us for home hospice.

    That's how I became one of Dad's caregivers when he came home to die. And from there, I started recording his stories, some of his phone conversations, and several readings of poems that meant a lot to him.

  6. Now the hero is in the New World, 
  7. where there are tests and challenges that culminate 
  8. in the depth and darkness of the Cave, where the hero encounters the challenge that can make or break her.

    I couldn't do my work because I couldn't sit without thinking about Dad and crying, so I told my writing clients good-bye for a while. I took on a new job: Dad's memoirist (a position I shared and continue to share with Amanda). The New World meant spending about 20 hours a week in the house with Dad, helping him stay hydrated and well-turned and entertained as needed. It meant meeting with hospice personnel and hunting down lost relatives and joining Carol and Amanda in the kitchen for tears and whispers. It meant asking Dad questions and helping him chase down his elusive yet repetitious memories. It meant reading to him, loudly and slowly, from the book Charmed Lives by Michael Korda. It meant searching through his photos for the one elusive shot of Aunt Gert that I never found.

    The New World was that Dad was going to die, sooner rather than later, yet if he lived long enough and didn't seem close enough to death, we'd lose hospice care. Damned if you die, damned if you don't.

    The Cave was chock-full of challenges. I was challenged to be present with Dad's wandering mind. I was challenged to be honest, clear and firm with him and others—and myself—about how near his death was. I was challenged to take care of myself, and in lieu of taking care of my kids and husband, to at least not deliberately try to make them feel as sad as I did by lashing out.

    One foot in front of the other, every day, whether I needed it or not.

    Mostly, my challenge was to confront my biggest, oldest fear, the fear of death. In a way, it was easy, since the family had talked Dad into reinstating his Do Not Resuscitate order, believing it would be better for him to die at home soon rather than in a hospital with his ribs broken hooked up to machines so we could get a few more days or weeks. There are worse things than death, and lingering, painful, technologically mediated death is one of them. Yet it still seems like a miracle that one night I looked in the mirror and told myself, "No more fear of death," and it worked.

  9. At times, especially in the Cave, the Hero will consider turning back to the Old World without completing her mission.

    There was no turning back. I mean, I could have quit taking care of Dad, and thereby taking care of Carol and Amanda, and hunkered down unmoving in the Cave. But there was no way to stop him from dying, and my mission was to be with him a lot before he died.

  10. The Hero finds the strength to find the Road Back and bring her journey to an end.

    My strength was that every time I met with somebody, I told them the truth about what I was going through, and I cried, and nobody ran away screaming. People were loving and supportive and humane. 

    In my return to the Old World, I bring the New World values of vulnerability, endurance, and patience. I bring the ability to speak the unspeakable and to let go of the things that died with my father, the leftover stories and memories that didn't get recorded.

There are other details and versions of the Hero's Journey out there. As you can see, not all the elements map perfectly. I haven't figured out the Elixir in my story, and I haven't named all the Advocates, who were plentiful. I include the grocery baggers who asked if I needed help out. I always said yes, because when you're trying to get out of the cave, you take all the help you can get. 

Asking for help is the most heroic action I know.

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Silent Night

12/26/2013

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The Christmas season for my family includes 3 days of celebration. My mom has dibs on Christmas, my in-laws get Christmas Eve, and my dad and stepmother--a non-Jew and a non-Christian--have hosted "Christmas Adam" every December 23rd for 30 years. 

Last year was Dad's last Christmas Adam, and it was the first year that my sister Amanda and I happened to tell Carol, our stepmother, that it was our favorite holiday event. Christmas Adam was always mellow, low-key, delicious, warm. The year before, when Dad was not very well, Amanda and I made it clear that we needed Christmas Adam to happen, and we'd be happy to do all the preparations. That was a sad year because Dad was exhausted from multiple hospitalizations in the months before and from the compounded problems those hospitalizations both discovered and created.

Last year might have been a little sad, but it was more truly a celebration. Per the Latin root of celebration, it was "numerous, thronged, and renowned." Everyone was present who could be, and we took a series of family photos centered on Dad in his hospital bed in the dining room. He was happy. And he was dying. He lived nineteen more days.

This year, we "bravely" went forward by recreating all the necessary elements of Christmas Adam: an evening gathering, multiple orders of our favorite antipasto plate from a local restaurant, cookies galore, a big pile of presents for the children and tokens passed between their parents. The antipasto was augmented by simple dinner items. As in years past but not last year, we sat at the table and ate too much.

What we didn't do is acknowledge the big hole, the space Dad filled. We didn't do or say anything special or formal or ritual or spontaneous. Carol did buy some of the almond bark Dad liked. She made sure to put it on a separate plate from the peppermint bark because Dad wouldn't have liked them to mingle. She mentioned him a couple other times, and I heard her, and I nodded, and I said nothing more. None of us took the opportunity to toast or tell stories or cry in the corner. I hugged Carol and Adam, my half-brother and the namesake of the event, longer than usual, trying to silently communicate something I couldn't figure out how to say.

So in a way, we succeeded, and in a way, we blew it. Amanda and I--especially Amanda--put a lot of energy into other ritual moments in the past year, and it felt to me like celebrating Christmas Adam was a triumph of joy over sorrow. Actually, in the weeks leading up to the 23rd, I envisioned a sad and subdued version, and after indulging my imagination for a while, I decided that I would just live in the present and not anticipate what sadness might come. While I ended up feeling pretty good about the evening, I also ended up feeling the loss of moment, the lack of a decisive, overt marking of the first year without Dad.

We'll have another chance, though, lots of other chances. Amanda read something in a grief resource that pointed out that just because we didn't figure out a special ritual this year, or this day, doesn't mean we couldn't recover from that in the future. It doesn't mean we couldn't say to each other and to Carol that we wished it had been different. It doesn't mean that next Christmas Adam can't be different, more attended to and aware and ritualistic. 

It means there was a silence, and there will be another chance to make our noise joyfully. 

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It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Crisis

12/19/2013

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There have been moments in the past couple weeks when I think everything is current, copacetic, under control — and then there are moments when I'm re-living every Christmas from the past 47 years and I go completely infantile. 

Luckily, I have my family to keep me going. Sometimes I just keep on going and sometimes I go too far. They help keep me from going off the edge though as I find myself going blank or going mad I can't help wondering if I'm the source of all problems. I am the mother, after all.

Let me introduce my cast of characters, my supporting cast, my support system.
PictureCharismatic megafauna
The seventeen-year-old whose motto is, "I can live with that." Once we got past his Thanksgiving birthday, he turned to me and said, "Mom, what can I do to help you get through the stress of Christmas?" 

That's about all I need. That and the occasional full-body crushing. 

PictureShiva, the Creator and Destroyer
I keep the Charismatic megafauna in mind when I start to blame myself for my twelve-year-old's anxiety. Yesterday that she was experiencing failure in advance, and I told her she might be better off if she tried to wait for actual failure to feel it. 

I could have been talking to myself. Even the cashier at the drugstore knew from looking across the store that she was the daughter I was trying to find. "Unless you and your husband look alike, she's your duplicate," he said.

Oh, my child. Do not fear others will not admire your gifts. Your gifts are too extensive and varied to be neglected.

PictureThe rock of Gibraltar
Our love is here to stay. Gibraltar will not crumble.

When I told Steve in October that I was going to continue grieving for as long as I needed and that I wouldn't be able to work any time soon, he said that from his perspective I was already working hard.

Nobody was suggesting it was time for me to do anything different. Nobody but my own anxious self. 

Steve knows how lucky I was to take care of Dad during the last months of his life. He says, rightly so, that if I'm truly lucky, I'll get to do the same for someone else sometime. He says that dealing with Dad's death is not a problem, it's a fact. I love this man and I think I'll keep him.

This Tuesday, while we were decorating the Christmas tree, Steve asked, "Where were things with your father this time last year?" I think he thought I needed to go from tense to crying, to burst the dam. It worked.

Just that day I'd listened to the last of the recordings I made of Dad's conversations. He was talking on the phone to Aunt Manci, the last of the living Hungarian immigrant Kleins. 

"Mediocre. No, I'm not getting better. I'm staying the same. That's good if I can stay the same." This was just after New Year's Day. 

On January 11, Dad died. That's what I said to Steve when I stopped crying long enough to speak.

And then the three of them finished decorating the tree.

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What Dad Liked

12/12/2013

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Dear Dad,

Last week I performed a solo piece about you. And about me. And about memory, and writing, and how once you commit something to the page, it becomes “the truth,” the way a photograph becomes “the truth.”

I don't know if you would have liked my performance. It may have been too personal, or too “out there,” or too focused on the way you were at the end of your life. As I said in the piece, “How the hell do I know?”

It's not really my job to know what you think. I do think it is my job to be a responsible steward of your memory, and I think I did that. That was what I was doing with you throughout 2012. That was my job last year, and has been my job this year too. You are my job. Bet you didn't know that.

For a job, it's pretty engaging. I take care of myself through taking care of your legacy, the body of work you left behind, the impressions I take of you through my day, the genetic and historical material I pass along to my kids.

My kids didn't really “know” you, but then, I didn't either. When I hear other people talk about things you loved or did regularly, I am often surprised – not by the content, but by the predictability of your taste. I'm reminded of when Leo was born, and I was in Group Health Central Hospital on 15th. (One way I try to honor your memory is by naming places clearly, but I can't say I actually know the correct historical or current title of all the buildings in my life.) Amanda and I were taking a walk with my tiny, sleeping package of baby, and we stopped in front of an aquarium.

“He likes the fish,” Amanda said, absurdly.

“Leo likes dogs,” I said, just as absurdly. How the hell did we know?

But I do know what you liked. I do. I do. You liked Woody Allen movies, and Yasujiro Ozu movies. You liked opera. You liked Italian subs. You liked Island Spring Delicious Steamed Tofu, and you liked to say the complete names of things. You liked taking photographs of your children and other people because it was an easier way to interact with them than many more open-ended possibilities.

You liked the 1967 BBC TV series “The Forsyte Saga.” You liked the films and the life of Alexander Korda. You liked telling stories about your family.

You liked silliness, and silly hats, so when I performed last week, I put on my silliest hat, and one of your old navy blue Smartwool pullovers, and took off my shoes so people could see my orange-toed black socks, and I tried as hard as I could to be you and be me from moment to moment. I even tried to be Nancy Behr, who I knew only through her letters and your stories, and I'm afraid I may have reduced her to a cliché.

But I never reduced you, and I hope you would have liked that.


Love, Pearl

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The Relic Creates Its Own Memory

12/5/2013

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My blog has been silent for a few months. I've been working on a solo performance piece about my father which I performed last night for an audience including both strangers and three of my dearest supporters/critics. I share with you the text of the piece. 

A bed with a figure covered in a sheet is rolled onstage; the tip of a festive stocking cap sticks out at the top. The voice of STEVE KLEIN can be heard. He is reading a poem, "The Old Sailor." 
On the bed, PEARL KLEIN begins to move: throwing off a sheet, moving intently to a sitting position without using leg or abdominal muscles, taking off the hat a navy-blue pullover shirt that seems to get stuck a couple times. The sense is of effort and imbalance: will she fall?

The reading ends in mid-verse. Pearl's demeanor shifts, and she springs up from the bed. She lays the blue pullover carefully across the bed, arms spread wide.


PEARL
(to audience)

Relics. Photographs, letters, voicemails, birthday cards. Manila folder tabs. Pencil lines spidering across miniature lined notebooks.

When my father was dying, I was afraid he wouldn't leave enough relics. I recorded our conversations, and his conversations with visitors, and one side of his phone conversations. I recorded him reading his favorite poems: "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Walrus and the Carpenter," and "The Old Sailor."

Dad spent the last months of his life revisiting the relics he had kept for decades: photographs of his beloved Aunt Gert, letters from his first girlfriend, Nancy Behr, books, movies and TV shows he treasured.

Today, nearly a year after his death, I locate Dad in relics. When I hear his voice reading a poem, or read a letter he wrote to his brother in the '70s, his inflections and sentence structures become more firmly lodged in my memory, replacing the time we spent together with a document of time together. Each relic begins to gather its own dust.

Last fall I invented Stand-up Tragedy. I was unable to focus on work, so I started to wonder if I could make money from what I did easiest: crying. In Stand-Up Tragedy, those people who can't cry, those who marvel at how easily I can cry, might benefit from watching me cry. Or by crying themselves. So I had to decide: Would I tell the stories that made me cry or made the audience cry?

While I was working this out, I practiced by going home from a day with Dad and telling my son the saddest things I'd heard that day.

PEARL returns to the bed and sits on the edge. As she becomes STEVE, she retakes his posture.

(to Steve)
How long were you and Mom separated?

STEVE
Let's say April.

And Amanda, who was two, sometimes stood at the window and said, "Daddy, come home." Which had a, a profound effect on me. I was in the car. Driving, about to drive off. She doesn't know when it was. She doesn't remember it.

PEARL
(to audience)

This relic belongs to my sister, Amanda. She may remember it or she may not, but no one alive remembers the funeral of Pearl Klein, my father's mother, my namesake. We asked,

(to Steve)
Do you remember anything about your mother's funeral?

STEVE
Of course. I mean, one thing: Aunt Gert broke down and leaned on her tombstone and cried, and my sister Laura com-for-ted her.

PEARL
(to audience)
Something similar occurred at my father's father's funeral:

STEVE
My stepmother Anne was crying, and Tante Rose told her not to cry, and, I thought that Anne should be given the freedom to cry. And I don't know, I don't know whether I defended her or, you know, or stuck up for her.

(responding to a question)
Becauss it wasn't dignified.

Pearl rises from the bed and returns fully to her own embodiment.

PEARL
(to audience)

Now that Dad is dead, I decide for him what he would or wouldn't want. Dad wouldn't want me to cry over money. Dad would want me to read his letters. Dad wants me to be happy when I think of him. The truth is, how the hell do I know? I'm looking for answers in the conversations I recorded with him, recordings which share a quality of photographs: What is recorded narrows down what is remembered, moments that endure while unrecorded moments dissipate.

The unrecorded moments dissipate. That's why I used to prefer movies over live performance. You could see the same thing again and again, and while your memory might shift, the images and sounds would maintain integrity. But you can't see the same thing twice, whether looking at a recording or not. The thing you see is different when you see it a second time. Except when you have dementia. Dementia makes everything old new again.

Dad is dead. I still have a lot of important questions. Though as Dad would say when he declared a question important, "Why is it important?"

Pearl moves back to the bed and takes Steve's position.

STEVE
So, we, we're, we're uh trying to date things. '52, ah. Now, don't forget to note it's an American Airlines DC-6, uh, direct to LaGuardia, with stops in... hah... at Dallas-Ft. Worth and Cincinnati.

PEARL
(to audience)
Some questions can be answered through research. "Where did the DC-6 to Long Beach refuel?" or "What's the address of the Hebrew Home and Hospital for the Chronic Ill?" These things are in the historical record. Somewhere. Somebody else can remember them.

Dad and I talked about who would "actually" know and about who can tell you the truth and about fact-checking, but, the truth is, to me, what's true is that in the story of our lives, the perception is really significant.

STEVE
Ah, I was talking about that to Nancy Behr! In 1957. About the photogra - ph-photographs. I told her that, it wasn't necessary to take uh, photographs. Don't, you don't take photographs for documentation, you take photographs for art.

Pearl lies on her stomach as a teenaged Nancy Behr.

NANCY BEHR
As soon as I wrote you about the taking of pictures, I convinced myself that you were all wrong. I brought my camera the next day but I did not have a chance to take any pictures. But I will.

Pearl returns to her feet, addresses the audience.

PEARL
I have Nancy Behr's letters and I have a recording of me reading the letters to Dad; he recalled this argument -- "you were all wrong" -- from when he was a teenager. Instead of a relic, we only have the reconstruction of the conversation that was obsessing Dad, not the letter Nancy received from him. But I know Dad's philosophy of photography: Once you frame a moment in words or images, the pieces left outside of the frame tend to disappear, or at least become less bright and clear, fading as the image replaces them.

Dad took photos of his kids as a way of engaging with us. He saw his photographs as collaborations between himself and the subjects. I am still collaborating with him. I am capturing pieces of him in the frame, and soon the pieces will become Dad and Dad will be in pieces.

And committing myself to paper makes that come sooner, though it also acts as a fixative on the images I do have. If I commit everything I remember to the page or perform it here for you, then Dad will live. Once I commit everything I remember to the page or the stage, Dad will only live there, and in that way.

And I will be responsible.

And the responsibility paralyzes me.

And no matter my responsibility, Dad will always be dead. And Dad will always live.
"The Old Sailor" begins again. Pearl moves to the bed, picks up the pullover, and puts it on. She crawls into place and pulls the sheet up over her face, leaving the tip of the hat sticking out.

Lights out.
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Committal

9/30/2013

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Picture
It rained a lot. Rain made sense. Even in August, the driest month we get. Good mise-en-scene. 

We hiked down to Second Beach. I could tell I was hyped; Amanda had to hush my obscenities at the start of the hike. (I don't have Tourette's, though when I'm on edge, my boundaries get a bit soft.)

I found myself in front of the pack, and started rehearsing in my head what I was going to say. I cried and kept it to myself. 

There's a tree near the beach end of the trail that people have turned into a sort of shrine, with stones and shells and feathers and flowers and bottle caps and coins draped and stuck and stabbed everywhere. I found myself wanting to clean up beer bottles and leave rocks behind, then realized I had no business interfering with others' prayers.

We took off our shoes and socks and put our lunches in our shoes. We lined up for a silent procession: Carol holding Adam's arm, followed by the rest of us: Danny, Amanda, Bryan, Mara and me. When Carol reached the spot she had in mind, we drew into a circle. 

Amanda and I started, or I did. Sometimes I think our planning puts us in the same mind, and it's hard to remember where one of us starts and the other ends. 

I talked about why we came to LaPush: Dad loved it, Dad died, and the one thing he was explicit about was being scattered here. I asked if others had things to say, and they did, and we held each other in a circle and cried.

We all sang Dona Nobis Pacem. Mara had learned the words the night before; Adam had learned the tune when studying cello.

Carol carried the box of Dad's ashes in a silk backpack inside her regular backpack. We all took turns wading into the surf and rinsing handfuls into the water. I was delighted at the beauty of the grey cloud, and at the way after the waves pulled back, I could see little grains of Dad join the grains of sand. It all made sense to me and I decided on the spot I wanted the same done with my mortal remains. 

After we'd all taken turns, there was still a lot of ash, so we took more turns. Carol asked me and Amanda to join her; we'd been like three points on a triangle while caring for Dad and acknowledging that is important for her.

Then there was the walk back to the shoes, which Amanda and I had planned to be silent (protect the ritual), though when I asked her if she was okay with the crosstalk, she said yes.

Our coats and sweaters and hair were so wet nobody wanted to hang around. We worked the damp sand from our shoes, each with a different method, and turned to go back to the cars.

On the way back up the hill, I stopped at the tree shrine and added shards of blue glass from the beach. 
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    Pearl Klein

    I'm a theater artist and poet living in Seattle, where my father lived the last and best part of his life.

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