1.
My father died when I was seven. Whenever I tell people that, those are the exact words I use. I never say “moved on,” or “passed away,” or any other kind of euphemism that could soften the blow. I say, died. I say it, because that’s what happened. I say it, because it’s bullshit to pretend it’s anything less or anything more. I say it because it hurts, and some words are meant to be felt.
At seven, I found the same vindictive pleasure in seeing people’s shocked faces as I did when I was seventeen, as I probably will at twenty-seven. Their mouths make little O’s as they bob their heads sympathetically. They all look the same, like it’s some kind of instantaneous neuron-based reaction to the word. You don’t expect the word dead to come out of the mouth of a child. Then, when the speaker gets older, you expect more tact from such a soft-spoken young woman. But words like dead aren’t about tact. They’re about accuracy. They’re about saying what you mean, exactly. They’re about getting as close to truth as anything can.
I have this aunt, my mother’s sister, who can only seem to say certain words under her breath. Like cancer. Especially cancer. She explained to me we say “passed away” when someone dies because people can be sensitive about death. As if it were a comment about weight gain or a toupee. I told her my father didn’t pass to another place. His body was still here, just dispersed between the Boston Harbor and this same aunt’s garden. He was dead. My mother gave me my book and had me sit in the other room, while she comforted her sister.
Seven years old was the first time I understood the importance of diction.
2.
I don’t remember learning how to read. Everything I know about it was told to me later, as a narrative, as a story I could pick apart. All hearsay.
I don’t really remember my father, either. Not the way he really was. I remember bones showing through skin, and the nasal cannula like a tentacled creature reaching in, crawling out of his body. I remember reading in the corner of what seemed like a hundred identical hospital rooms. I remember the rolling gurney they set up in the family room, so he could spend some time with us before he was gone.
My mother likes to tell me about how, when I was three, my father was convinced I could read because I had memorized all the books I owned. They couldn’t skip a page or even a word. My oddly adult fingers—long and thin even as a toddler—would point out even a skipped “the” or “and.” No, I couldn’t read quite yet, but I already loved books so much that I had essentially, accidentally, taught myself at least the base of it. Memorization of letters, words, I ate them up and asked for more. Or so my mother tells me.
I don’t remember learning to read, and I don’t remember my father or mother or anyone else ever reading with me, though, once upon a time, they must have. I only remember reading alone. In coffee shops while my mother talked with her friends, at recess on the farthest reaches of the field, late into the night, in the morning before school. I remember reading, alone, anywhere and everywhere, better than I can remember any person from that time in my life.
No one ever stopped me from reading, or encouraged it. It was just what I did. It’s all I can remember. There was never a time for me before it. The time before it is when my father was still alive, not just as a living skeleton, but as a man who took me fishing and danced with my standing on his toes. There are pictures, but they feel unconnected and unreal, like they couldn’t possibly be anything that belongs to me.
Everything I know seems to have been told to me by someone else. And I have always been the best listener, the most receptive audience. But my literacy is like a myth. It has always been a part of me, so it’s hard to understand that it must have an origin. It’s like my grief that way.
3.
That day, it was raining. I was reading a book under my desk, the way I always did, when Mrs. Bartlett told me to pack up all my things and head to the office. I want to remember what book, but I can’t even pretend to know. Mrs. Bartlett was elderly and kind and her hands were soft on my back. Her eyes, which I thought of as clear and sharp, looked rheumy for the first time, as if whatever the office aid had told her had aged her another five, ten years. That was when I began to know.
My mother was in the office, waiting for me. Mrs. Brown, the nurse who carefully picked lice out of my long hair and sent me home even when my temperature was only at 99, waited with her. She made a choking noise when she saw me. My mother didn’t say anything, just ushered me out the door. In the last two years, in the time my father had been sick, my mother had shrunk, grown smaller and smaller as if she were the one with cancer. She looked like another child, leading me through the drizzle to the car. When she drove, her knuckles were white against the steering wheel. That was when I was when I thought I knew.
We sat on the couch, these hideous couches we used to have that were rough and chintzy, a noxious swath of dusty pink. My mother was trying to talk, but no words came out. I remember having what felt like an amazingly poetic thought, watching my mother’s tears and the rain against the sliding glass doors behind her, the way they mirrored each other. I wanted to write it down, but her mouth was opening and closing like a fish so I waited for her to say something. But she couldn’t. She collapsed into her grief, it swallowed her fragile body whole.
That was when I knew for sure.
She didn’t say the words, I said them. “Dad’s dead.” I said them, and she might have nodded. I didn’t cry right away. I would, eventually, a lot, maybe I’ll never stop crying over my father. Not entirely. But it was me who pronounced it. Who took the words and made them real.
My mother would read all this, and probably tell you that this isn’t quite true. That it wasn’t raining, that we had a sub in class that day, that Mrs. Brown wasn’t there, that the couches were already the gold ones we’d have until we moved across the country when I was in college. She’d probably tell you that she told me, plainly and clearly, exactly what happened. That my father had been in a coma for a week, that the satellite colonies the lung cancer had spread throughout his body had finally shut down too many of his organs. That he had died two days earlier, but there had been so much to deal with, she hadn’t been able to tell me yet.
I will always remember the day my father died as being two days later than it really was. And I will always remember it just the way I’m telling it to you right now. Not because it’s unimpeachably correct. My mother may be right about any or all of the facts. But her facts aren’t mine. Her story isn’t my story.
In my story, I took those words and made them my words. Because language, because storytelling, is power. I took that power that day and I haven’t let go of it since.
4.
I don’t have a book that defines my childhood, the way so many people do. No, not one. I have all of them.
There are stories I could tell you about specific books. Like when my elementary school’s librarian, Mrs. Roach, handed my Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, winking. She let me have it before anyone else; I got to read it before she even affixed the barcode. I could tell you the way my heart broke open when I first read Catcher in the Rye at eleven, or the way I became obsessed with retellings when I discovered Wicked, or how I used to think it was possible I could have telekinetic powers because of Matilda. I could tell you about how the first time I read The Great Gatsby in high school. I had been assigned the first three chapters, but I finished it in one sitting and immediately started reading it again. I could tell you about my first encounter with Emily Dickinson, or the first time I understood Narnia as Christian allegory, or even about the books I hated—though they’ve always been few and far between.
They were all my favorite, even the ones I never finished, because all of them let me be somewhere else. Somewhere where my father hadn’t died. Somewhere where I couldn’t possibly feel alone.
Later, I’d recognize that no matter how far away I let the books take me, that I’d have to return to reality eventually. Later, I’d find that books could connect me with other, like-minded bibliophiles. Later, I’d find that I could assert my authority through words, the way I did with dead, and find myself.
But as a child, I didn’t know any of that yet. I only knew my make believe worlds and people. And I only knew that if I didn’t have books, I would have drowned in grief.
5.
Today, I am twenty-four. My father died 16 years, 7 months, and 7 days ago, which is about 866 weeks, 6,063 days, 145,512 hours, 8,730,720 minutes, or 523,843,200 seconds, depending on if you’re counting. I still am, even though those numbers mean little to me. They’ve never had the cogency of words.
They tell me I’m an adult now, but not much has changed. When I read, it feels necessary. It feels like my life depends on it. That it’s keeping me going, alive in some way. It’s the same with writing. I have always used words to create for myself, to create myself. I need the escape of reading, just as I need to claim myself through writing. It is through language I navigate the world. It is through words that I have learned to be a part of the world again and again.
I can’t divorce my love of literature from grief. Or love from grief and literature. They are all bound together for me. They are all so intrinsically a part of me that I can’t sort out where they begin or end, or where I am separate from them.
What I know is this: my father died when I was seven. Would I read and write the way I do if that hadn’t happened? Maybe. Maybe not. My father died when I was seven and now I am the way I am. That’s as accurate a story as I can write you. That’s as much of the truth as I know.