I turn back toward my teen daughter, who is fifty yards away in a crescent of parking lot light, heavy snow falling between us. Her shoulders are shaking with laughter.

We’ve just landed in Iceland for a late winter road trip together, and it’s off to a good start.

I’m flooded with tenderness, seeing her curled up in the passenger seat of our rental car with her headphones on. Though we mostly get along, I feel I’m always a half-second away from annoying her or hurting her feelings. Sometimes both. Our relationship is like a sensitive instrument that I don’t fully understand.

In the easy moments, we chat away, cracking each other up. Then she goes quiet, and I’m wary of tripwires, watching my step. In a flash, she’s upset with me, I get defensive, and we’re off again. I think of my friends, whose teen daughter slammed her bedroom door so often, they finally took it off the hinges. Everyone tells you how hard it is, how big the feelings will be, but it’s still so much. This is all normal, I tell myself: the pushing away, the distance.

“You can’t tell me what to do anymore,” she said to me, when she turned eighteen last month.

“When’s the last time I tried to tell you what to do?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but even if you wanted to, you can’t.”

“It’s basically illegal,” I said.

On our way to Iceland, we’d ended up stuck in the terminal, delayed for many hours. She was stirring her coffee drink with a small metal spoon, pinging the spoon against the glass constantly for I don’t know... a good three or four minutes. She stopped to slurp loudly (her headphones were on), then started with the stir-pinging again. It was driving me nuts, and if it had been anyone else but her, I probably would have said something. I felt a little surge of pride for not telling her, as if I’m some kind of saint for letting a person have their drink in peace, even if she was stirring it like a maniac. It’s so dumb, the things I can feel proud of, but it’s hard to feel like a decent parent when you have a teenager. You take what you can get.

“What?” she said, seeing me looking at her.

“Nothing,” I said. I love you, I thought, but didn’t say, as she’d get annoyed. I smiled, and she shook her head and went back to stirring and slurping.

I shield her from so much, or at least I try. You can’t possibly shield them from everything. The world is going to do its thing. The other week, I was out late on the ambulance, and she can always tell afterward when I’m rattled. She is a sensitive instrument.

It was a bad auto accident. A person around her age didn’t make it, and was lost to us. There was nothing we could do. She’d heard me come back in at 3am, taking my boots off, trying to be quiet on our creaky stairs.

“Was it a bad call?” she asked me over breakfast.

“Yes,” I said, and we were both quiet, not knowing how to continue.

“Just be very careful out there, okay?” I said. What else can I say?

“You know I’m careful,” she said.

When she was little, we would cuddle up and read Winnie the Pooh on the little couch in her room. She’d hold her sippy cup, slurping away while I read to her. Whatever was happening out in the world, I could make her feel safe.

Sometimes I’d invent stories, often with my eyes closed, and I’d draw from a familiar cast of characters: her stuffed animals, come to life. The setting was almost always the beach, as that’s where I’d spent a good chunk of my childhood. I’d have Henrietta the hippo surfing with Lenny the cat. More often than not, I’d fall into a half-dream while spinning these stories, on the edge of sleep but still speaking. The stories would get surreal.

“Wait, Daddy, where did the rooster come from?”

I’d snap awake again. Had I mentioned a rooster? “The rooster,” I said, “was there because... somebody invited him. He had never seen the ocean.”

I’d been obsessed with this idea as a kid: someone never having seen the ocean, what they might feel, seeing it for the first time, standing in front of something they couldn’t even imagine the end of. What would that be like?

When I was young, lying in bed at night, I would try to imagine vast distances between me and the people I loved. My grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins were all in Adelaide, Australia, and I was in Los Angeles. I tried to picture exactly what was between us, to feel what that distance was like. My mind would carry me over the rooftops, then out over the Pacific, trying to make sense of it.

If I ask you to imagine a city block, you can feel it. If I ask you to picture a thousand miles, it’s not possible. We can only imagine it as time: a two-hour flight or a two-day drive. The same goes for quantity. A million pennies becomes not quantity, but a volume in space: a refrigerator-sized pile. What happens, though, with time and space, when they’re beyond imagining?

She’s still so young, and yet has always been wise beyond her years. How much will I miss her? How much will I wonder if she’s okay when she’s off on her own?

“I don’t always feel like an adult,” she says.

“Me either,” I say. She laughs.

We stood under the aurora together on our first night in Iceland. My app had said we had a 3% chance of seeing it, but there it was, dancing, like musical notation writing itself in the sky, in greens and purples. We were quiet for a long time, except for the occasional “Oh, wow” or “Look.”

“What do you think people thought, long ago, when they saw this?” she asks.

“Probably that the world was ending,” I say. “Or that something amazing was about to happen.”

She says, “It’s hard to imagine seeing this and not believing in something.“

I feel too often these days how much calamity is upon us, and I’m grateful for any little thing that snaps me out of despairing, if only briefly. I worry about my kids, and everyone’s kids. All of us. What the hell is happening, I wonder. What will become of us all?

“How will I be ready?” she asks me, back in our rented cabin. “I don’t feel ready to be out in the world.”

“You’re ready,” I say, willing it to be true. And I think: You can always come back to us.

The next morning we have 200 miles of snowy landscape to drive. She’s made a mix, she tells me, for our long drive together. She wants to tell me about every song. She wants to tell me what she’s excited about lately. What she’s scared of, and worried about, heading out into the world. The things I got wrong, as a parent. Where I could’ve done so much better. How hard it is being a woman in the world. The things she’s wondering about. What her life might look like. Where will she live? What will she do?

She doesn’t want answers from me, not that I have any. I try to understand what it’s like for her, but more than anything, I want her to feel listened to. If I try to fix anything, as is my habit, she will call me out. She’s been the best teacher on that front. Just be quiet, I tell myself, and listen to her.

I feel like the rooster standing on the beach for the first time, looking out at the vast sea. Full of wonder, and worry, and pondering the immeasurable. How much, how much do I love you?

“That’s our old house, right there,” I said.

“That one?” Emma said. “It looks sweet.”

The last time I saw this house, it was a wreck: half of the roof caved in, a translucent plastic tarp stretched across a gaping hole, broken rafters visible through the tarp like bared teeth. A forty-foot Sycamore tree had toppled and smashed our house, tilting the facade so that our front door wouldn’t close properly. The front yard was a jumble of cut logs. We lived under that tarped roof for three years, finally moving out when I was thirteen. It felt like living in a ruin.

“It’s kind of adorable,” Emma said. “Look at the flowers, and the trellis.”

She was right; it looked happy and inviting, a flagstone path leading up to a pine green door, fringed by jasmine and roses. It was clean, bright, fixed up. So many skylights! I felt such a swirl of feelings about all of this, that someone had restored our former wreck into something so lovely.

Huge swaths of L.A. have been remodeled beyond recognition, of course. But I somehow imagined our little house by the freeway had escaped all of that. I wanted Emma to see what I’d come from, what I’d survived, but looking at this house, it was hard to imagine.

Even the 405 Freeway, a half-block up, was now hidden behind a thirty-foot wall covered with ivy, the wall itself obscured behind purple-flowered lantana and crepe myrtle trees.

“All of this was much shabbier before,” I said, waving a hand at the expensively landscaped houses, the lush citrus trees and fancy desertscapes. I could see that Emma was unable to picture it, nodding half-heartedly.

“I’m sure it was shabby,” she said, giving me an encouraging little pat on the arm. She was already thinking about our next stop: breakfast tacos, lattes, and meeting my mom for the first time.

A few months earlier, as a new couple, Emma and I lay in the dark in my Brooklyn bedroom. She had just told me a little about her childhood, going to Jesus camp and having to move to New Jersey as a shy British teen. She wanted to know how it was for me as a kid.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was pretty crazy.” She pressed further.

What could I even begin to say? I didn’t tell anyone about these things. Sometimes I’d meet another person who also came from chaos and violence, and we would recognize something between us, like a shared language. I always felt like I could just sense it in others. Across the room, I’d get a sort of recognition: Oh, you’re like me. Sometimes it’s something small, like the way I notice you’re quietly keeping tabs on everyone.

I’m still half-convinced I have this sense, though these days I’m less sure of everything. Of course, the more people I talk to, the more I see how no one had it as easy as I once imagined. We were all pretending so much of the time, hiding so much.

Lying in the dark, feeling like I was stepping off a ledge into a void, I told Emma about some of the violence that fell on our house like a heavy rain. How our kitchen walls were carved up, from one of my mom’s “bad nights.” How she dragged me out of bed in the middle of the night by the pajama collar and stood me in the corner, telling me I was worthless and rotten, and that everyone could see it. How she seemed almost possessed in these moments, her eyes wild. How I’d then go to school with no sleep, trying to pretend to be a regular kid.

I worried immediately that I’d said too much. “Go on,” Emma said, reaching for my hand. “Tell me more.”

The night before I met Emma, my mom was visiting me in Brooklyn, and I met her for dinner in Fort Greene, bringing my pal Laurie along for moral support. Laurie had just set me up on a blind date for the following night. Much to my dismay, she started telling my mom about it.

“I just know it, they’re going to fall in love and get married,” Laurie told my mom, who started clapping and making weird happy mom noises, as if this were actual news we were celebrating.

“Okay,” I said. “Maybe we could tone it down a notch. I haven’t even met this person.”

“Emma,” my mom said, luxuriating in the name, like she was wrapping herself in a warm scarf.

After the brief visit to my old street, Emma and I drove toward my family’s favorite Mexican breakfast spot. My mom was waiting just inside, looking beautiful and glamorous, as always. This petite Aussie woman with bright blue eyes. She hugged me, then Emma. I could see how nervous she was, how much she wanted Emma to like her.

We were seated at a small wrought iron table with dark red napkin rolls. My mom started up with her anxious little habit of pointing out things that were right in front of us.

“They have chips and salsa here,” she said, pointing at the basket of chips and salsa.

“They do,” I said.

This habit of hers always irked me, but I felt a great tenderness toward her in that moment, seeing how much she wanted everything to be okay. Hadn’t she always, in spite of everything, just wanted everything to be okay? There was always, without question, so much love in her heart, which was so flawed, and so tender at the same time. I know a little about what my mom went through back in Australia, and it’s just unthinkable. Whatever I went through, what she survived was far, far worse.

Emma excused herself to find the bathroom, and of course, of course, my mom had to say it.

“Well, this one’s a keeper,” she said.

“Yes, she is,” I said. “By the way, on our way here, we stopped by to see our old house.”

“Oh,” my mom said. She looked worried. Her greatest fear was always people knowing anything of those days. I wanted to tell her that I’d told Emma some things, that I’d been honest with her, and that she was still here.

“All of that was such a long, long time ago,” I said. “You wouldn’t even recognize the place.”

I pictured our old house again. Along with the tarped roof and the troubles, I had a flash memory of my little sister and me blasting music and dancing around the living room in our socks, seeing who could come up with the funniest dance move, flapping around and laughing while our mom made dinner. Nothing’s ever just one thing.

As Emma returned to the table, my mom was a little teary. I wanted to ease her worry, somehow send her a message that everything was okay—maybe beam it right across the table to her. She looked toward the window at the sidewalk beyond, then futzed with her napkin, wiping her mouth twice, and folding it again.

“Well,” she said.

“Well,” Emma said, smiling.

My mom looked over at Emma, then at me. Something in her shoulders relaxed a little. She was back, right here at the table with us. It wouldn’t last long, this brief spell between worries, but just then the whole day was before us, everything suddenly unencumbered. She reached out with both her hands, and patted Emma’s hand and mine at the same time, her face illuminated with relief.

“Isn’t this just lovely,” she said.

When my son was younger, he asked me, “Was everything black and white when you were a kid?” I asked if he meant movies and TV, assuring him we had color, but no, he said, “I mean the world.”

It’s a fair assumption. I like imagining that life before I was born in 1971 was actually black and white, just like everything in the 80’s was a little fuzzy, and the 90’s a bit pixelated. It does feel that way, seeing everything on replay.

I tell my kids that before mobile phones and voicemail, we had huge, clunky answering machines. My dad was always an early adopter, so he got one of the very first consumer models, in 1980 or so. It had faux wood panelling and two cassette tapes in it, and came with something that looked like a giant garage door clicker so you could call it from outside the house. He kept the answering machine on the carpet next to his nightstand, wires everywhere, one of those temporary conditions that becomes permanent.

Watching TV in the next room, I overheard my dad recording his very first outgoing message. He was reading from a script he’d written out for himself, based on the suggested script in the manual. He kept screwing up and starting over, which in those days meant rewinding the tape, clicking a button, then waiting five seconds or so for the beep. He must’ve done this a dozen times, each new attempt sounding increasingly unhinged.

I knew the script by heart after hearing it so many times. It ended with: “Don’t forget, wait for the beep-tone!” By the twentieth try, he’d adopted a deranged sing-song voice. He was tripping over his words. “Don’t forget to... for the… DAMMIT!” He rewound and started over, plonking the buttons so hard I thought he’d break the machine.

He might’ve been going off-script with the word “beep-tone.” He had a lot of words that were unique to him. He often just winged it with pronunciations, and he butchered everyone’s names. Most of the time, though, he just called everything a “deal.”

About my retainer: “Are you wearing your deal?!”

The TV remote: “Gimme that deal…”

The garage door clicker: “Don’t touch the deal.”

Sometimes it was unclear, like: “Frank bought one of those deals, you know, with the buttons?” Was this an electric razor, or maybe a cardigan? It was hard to tell all the deals apart.

His new answering machine, of course, was a deal. We’d come home, and he’d tell me, “Go check the deal.”

I remember sprinting into his bedroom to see if the red light was blinking. I flat-out dread anyone leaving me a voicemail today, but back then, this was the most exciting thing in the world. Somebody has left us a message! I’d see that red light blinking, and it felt like anything was possible. Who knows who might have called?

I’d press Play, and here was someone from my dad’s work, a gruff voice babbling in business-speak. What on earth were these people saying to each other? They all sounded annoyed about everything all the time. Next message.

Some unnamed person, uncertain. “Hello? Hellooooo?” then a sigh, and a loud click. Beep. End of messages. I ran back to the kitchen.

“Well, who was it?” my dad asked. I was already rummaging in the cupboard for a snack.

“I don’t know,” I said over my shoulder. “Nothing good.”

Back in those days, he’d pick us up after school every other Friday for his weekends, and we’d go to a bar on San Vicente called Bergen’s for happy hour. My sister and I were 8 and 10, respectively. We’d stay there an hour or two.

“Everyone’s so friendly here,” I told my sister. A woman with massive, teased red hair came up to us, “Well aren’t you two just adorable!” She smelled amazing. She booped my nose, and offered us a little plastic bowl of peanuts. My sister and I spun on barstools and threw peanuts at each other’s open mouths. We crawled around on the sticky floor looking for dropped change. We’d ask strangers for quarters for the tabletop version of Centipede in the corner, and people would just hand them over, shooing us away. I loved this place.

Off to one side was an antique-style red phone booth that was soundproof and had a column of red buttons inside that played background sounds. It was for making calls while pretending you weren’t in a bar. You could press a button and make it sound like you were calling from a busy highway, or better yet, a farm, with bleating goats and a rooster. With another button press, you were at the beach, with seagulls squawking. You could be anywhere.

It cost money to make a call, but not to play the sounds. My sister and I would press these buttons and come up with stories about what happened. “I’m going to be late. That’s right, I crashed my car near this farm. Yes, those are chickens! It’s a real mess!”

There are four voicemails I keep on my phone, all from my dad, who is now exactly three years gone. I stand and listen to them at our kitchen island, these messages from the past.

“Hi Rob,” he says. “Just trying to catch you, but I guess you’re busy. Hope you have a great day!”

I also have a couple screenshots of text threads. Once, he was texting me Palm Springs tram, over and over. I responded, Hi Dad, it’s me! Are you trying to do something with the tram?

Tram tickets, he texted back. Palm springs tram.

Dad! It’s me, Rob! Love you!

Rob? he texted back. I’m trying to reach the tram.

I open this screenshot sometimes when I miss him. It’s in a folder called “funny” on my laptop, and it invariably does the trick, though it makes me feel the loss, too.

These voicemails, these texts, they mean something to me, even though they’re just bundles of 0s and 1s, little clusters of electrons. Like my dad, and me, and everything else, they’re brief constellations, everything eventually unraveling. Patterns recognizing patterns. The where and when of it all doesn’t work remotely how we imagine. At the very least, it’s an open question.

I hadn’t really seen, when we got the first answering machine, that it was a form of time travel. A ripple on a pond, reverberating. How memories are like this, too. Ever wobbly, and maybe fading a bit in strength, but still going, running through me.

My sisters and I do this often, like we’re rewinding the tape, over and over. Remember when Dad tried to leave the house with his sweatshirt tucked into his jeans? This is a family favorite. My sister Nicole said, “Dad! You can’t come to my soccer game like that! Everyone will think you’re a dork.” His shrugged response: “Maybe I think they’re a dork.”

Sometimes these memories come to me unbidden. Like pushing a red button in the booth, there are squawking seagulls, a beach scene. There’s my dad standing in thigh-deep seawater behind his small catamaran sailboat, a beige canvas stretched across two orange pontoons. The halyard is flapping with a constant metal ping against the mast. I’m on the canvas, watching nervously as my dad pushes us out from shore. I’m still frightened, after the time we got turned by a big wave, then flipped in the surf, the mast snapping. I fell clear of the boat that time, tumbling in the whitewash, my hip scraping along the rocky ocean floor.

Now I worry: What if he doesn’t make it onto the boat in time? I’ll be left alone and won’t know what to do. With one great shove, we’re free from the wet sand, and he hops onto the back clumsily, with his gangly legs and red swim trunks, the canvas bouncing me a little when he lands on it. We’re heading into big surf, my stomach dropping as we crest a large wave, then land hard, aimed toward the unsteady horizon.

Beyond the break, I look back at the swells moving toward the beach, watching them curl and crash behind us harmlessly. The shore’s disappearing fast, the sail snapping into its fullness. My dad and I are in motion together, part of something I don’t have words for. Some kind of unknowable deal, maybe. We sail into this vast nothingness, the afternoon sun low in the cloudless sky.

“Okay,” he says, “okay!” I trail my hand in the warm green-black water next to the pontoon, resting a sandy, sunburned cheek against the canvas. The wind whips louder now, the boat cutting through the water like it knows where it’s going. Into this scene, my dad calls out, sounding far away to me then, and now, as I hear it across space and time, like it’s arriving through static.

“Here we go!” he says.

“Go on, give it a whirl,” our cave guide said in his Yorkshire accent.

“Helloooo!” I called out, with a thousand refrains. “Echoooo!” I shouted. I felt a little embarrassed by this and said, “Sorry, that was dumb,” which then echoed itself a few times, spiraling lamely into the void.

“Want to try?” I said to Emma.

“No thanks,” she said quietly.

“But there’s no one else here,” the guide said, motioning toward the dark cavern.

“I’m good,” Emma said.

We clambered our way up toward the exit, then back out into the light. Just outside the cave’s entrance, I asked Emma, “Would you have called something out if you’d been in there on your own?”

“No,” she said.

“Huh,” I said, wondering about this.

Emma and I walked a leafy mile on a shaded path from the cave entrance back to the village pub. We ate fish and chips and tried to pretend we weren’t anxious. Emma’s novel, the book she’d spent three years writing, then another two years rewriting at her agent’s behest, was out to publishers. We were awaiting news from New York.

“Maybe there’ll be a bidding war,” I said. I knew how risky this was, saying something so hopeful, but I wanted this for her, and it seemed plausible.

The waiting continued, for days. We were visiting the Yorkshire Dales on an uncharacteristically sunny week. Each morning, we started out on miles of green, hilly trails, surrounded by biblical views, rays of light casting dramatic shadows along ancient stone walls. The hikes were a good distraction, but arriving back at the B&B to no news each day, with quiet dinners at the pub afterward, the silence took its toll.

“There is absolutely nothing to worry about,” her agent said on the phone, which was, of course, very worrying. My band’s manager said the exact same thing to me years earlier, just before our record label dropped us.

I remember the first time Emma said it out loud, maybe a week after we came home to New York. All the big publishers had passed by then. “It’s not going to happen,” she said in our kitchen, tears spilling quietly down her cheeks. I just held her, unsure of what to say.

On top of her book not selling, I was dismayed that in this aftermath, she’d stopped writing. It had become my favorite thing, coming downstairs and seeing her writing by the fire, tucked into the yellow easy chair we’d dubbed the Golden Throne. Her writing chair.

At some point I broke my leg, and was laid up in the Golden Throne for many weeks. “Maybe we should just replace that chair after this,” Emma said, eyeing it unhappily.

My daughter laughed. “Are you saying Daddy ruined the chair just by being in it for so long?”

“No, of course not!” Emma said.

“I mean, you kind of are,” I said, noting my crutches stacked against the chair, both chair arms piled with the various trays, books, mugs, and random gear I’d piled around myself. It was like a mini man-cave, a sad little convalescent campground.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I think the chair will be okay, once I clear out.”

Soon I was upright and out of the way again, and Emma was back in the Golden Throne, writing. She came home every afternoon from her job as a middle school librarian, writing before and after dinner. On weekends, she was up for hours before me and the kids, writing away.

This new novel, No One You Know, with a new agent, took her two years to write, followed by eighteen months of rewrites. Emma was sending me revised chapters to read as soon she finished them; I couldn’t wait for more. These pages cracked me up and made me teary, many times over. “It’s so good and beautiful,” I told her. Novelist friends of ours provided wonderful blurbs. Her agent loved it, and sent it out to publishers with high hopes.

Once again, there was the waiting, interminable weeks of silence. At last, the emails from editors started coming in. One Big Five editor said she loved it, but: “I found myself struggling to envision how I could break this out in a big way… to help it make a lot of noise.” There were more emails, similarly disappointing.

Emma was quiet again that week. She sat in the Golden Throne, clicking through these passes from editors. She and her agent pasted the various rejection reasons into a spreadsheet, but there wasn’t a common theme to decipher, no big takeaway. The only commonality was: No.

“Nothing?” I said, hopefully, as she scanned her inbox for good news.

“Nothing,” she said back. Emma’s such a stoic, but I could see how devastated she was, going through this again.

“Well, what do you want for this book?” I said. “It’s far too good to just stay on your laptop.”

She thought about this for a while. “I want to have a book party with our friends,” she said finally. “And to be able to give a copy to my mom.”

“Surely we could do at least that,” I said.

Emma got back to work. She found a hybrid publisher called She Writes Press, signed with them, and we put together a plan of who to send her book to.

Here’s where something amazing happened. Emma started reaching out to other writers on Substack and Instagram—pretty much all women—and the response was overwhelming. It’s good to have things to be hopeful about right now, and these women elevating other women, amplifying each other’s voices, is one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.

, , , , : all these smart women building audiences and the next publishing empires. I’m so heartened by how uplifted Emma has felt by all these amazing writers who’ve gathered around her, some of whom she hasn’t even met (yet).

Last week, Emma went to sign some pre-orders at Oblong Books, our local bookshop, and there were stacks and stacks, waiting for her.

Our daughter and I then tagged along to NYC to watch Emma record Zibby Owen’s “Totally Booked” podcast at a pop-up bookshop. It was thirty minutes with a Q&A, two dozen people filling the small space.

“I think I blacked out the whole time,” Emma said to me after the interview.

“Really?” I said. “You were great! I love how you said you’re always writing about the heart.”

“Did I say that?” she said, amused and baffled. She didn’t remember any of it!

This shy, lovely Brit who won’t even call out an echo alone in a cave, is putting her words out into the world, and getting up on stage to promote it, nervousness be damned.

I could tell you that her novel is a wonder, and that you’ll love it (I really do think so), but I’m the unreliable narrator here, as biased as I am. So I’ll let Emma tell you what it’s all about, in this brief video she made, live from the Golden Throne, with our son playing video games in the background, and our dog Roxy snoring so loudly nearby that I had to edit out the end.

Happy pub day, you brave, inspiring, brilliant woman. It’s unbelievably good to see you making some noise. x

Buy No One You Know

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Oldster Magazine

This is 52: Emma Tourtelot Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

From the time I was 10, I’ve been obsessed with what it means to grow older. I’m curious about what it means to others, of all ages, and so I invite them to take “The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire…

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3 months ago · 78 likes · 8 comments · Sari Botton

Before the indictments, the conviction, and everything else, there was me and there was my little sister, standing in swimsuits and sneakers at the horseback riding booth, waiting our turn. She was 12 and I was 14, and we were completely feral.

We were not used to this sort of thing, a luxury vacation to a tropical island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. My mom had a new husband – number three of six – a banker named Dale who carried a fat money roll with a $500 bill in the middle, was missing a ring finger, and looked exactly like Kirk Douglas. My sister and I were watching him closely.

For now, though, we left Dale and our mom playing backgammon by the hotel pool. We wandered off to find something to do, rather than waste our vacation hunched over some dumb game, rolling dice.

“What kind of rider are you?” the man assigning horses asked me. He pointed to a sign strapped to the thatched ceiling above his head showing a spectrum from beginner to expert, each with its own illustrative graphic.

“Expert,” I told him, looking at the galloping person-horse combo. There was zero basis for this, other than having seen The Black Stallion many times.

“We’ll give you Domino,” he said. “Just a heads-up: he’ll want to run on the beach. You good with that, mate?”

“Of course,” I said, shrugging.

Most of the ride was on trails up and down Mt. Kootaloo, winding switchbacks through the rainforest. Domino was locked into a swaying amble as sulphur-crested cockatoos screeched and flapped in the trees around us, warning us off. I patted his sweaty, twitching neck. All muscle. I liked this horse.

Domino began snorting when we got toward the bottom of the hill, where the rainforest opened up to white sand and a turquoise bay. He started a sort of equine tapdance to get out from behind the lead horse. He was snorting and whinnying now, a full-body tremor overtaking him.

“You’re okay, boy,” I said, patting his neck again. Expert, I thought happily, settling into the saddle.

Domino didn’t agree. He stomped grumpily a few times, then muscled the horse in front of us aside and bolted for the open beach. I pulled the reins, but Domino lifted his head high, flinging it side to side. He then dropped his head slightly, ears perked, gave one final snort, and we were off. Flying.

We tore across the beach, through a pack of sunbathers, galloping and leaping over limbs, towels, people crying out in fear and shouting curses after us.

“Sorry!” I yelled helplessly into the wind. I was no longer the rider now, just the hanger-on. As this massive, chaotic beast thundered down toward the water’s edge then cut left along the break, we tore into a full Kentucky Derby gallop. We rode into a fierce wind, hoofbeats underneath, sprays of seawater, me chanting to myself quietly, “No no no no no....” I dropped the reins and grabbed the saddle horn, gripping with both hands. This is it, I thought. This is how I will die.

We thundered through ankle deep emerald water and seafoam. I felt sure Domino would trip, sending us end over end, but he only surged faster. A single, dumb thought entered my panicked mind: You need to jump.

Luckily I was frozen in fear, clutching the saddle horn and whimpering softly to myself. In the deafening rush and whistle of the wind, I became aware of some nearby sounds, hoofbeats behind me, off to the left. Someone is coming to save me, I thought. They pulled up next to us, this other horse and rider. I chanced a quick peek and saw my little sister, reins in hand, grinning like mad.

“Whoooo!” she yelled. I heard her laughing into the wind as they passed us.

We reached the end of the beach, our horses slowing to a canter, then a trot, then obediently parking themselves near the next trailhead, panting, as they’d done hundreds of times before.

“Oh my god, that was crazy!” she said. “Wait, are you crying?”

“What? No!” I said, wiping my face. “It’s just the salty air.”

My sister and I fought often and fiercely, unless anyone else criticized one of us, in which case we became a gang of two and turned on them. We shoplifted together. Threw things at cars. Made dinner for ourselves. We were completely lawless, always unsupervised.

In the past year alone, we’d gone from living in a tree-smashed house, with a plastic tarp over our buckled roof, to vacationing with this new banker stepdad on a tropical island. We still barely even knew him.

When it came to our mom’s boyfriends and husbands, my sister and I were like two meerkats watching a shadowy creature approaching. We lived on high alert, assessing every expression, every utterance, all in service of answering the most important question: Is this someone we need to worry about?

There had been a whole mess of difficult men, a few dangerous ones, the occasional decent one. I saw that Dale was, above all, good and sweet. Harmless. In assessing people, I was truly an expert—or at least felt myself to be.

I wasn’t wrong about Dale, exactly. In the darkest of my teen years, when my mom and I were in the course of a particularly vicious verbal exchange, I said something I can’t recall, some deep insult to her character that silenced the dinner table. Dale then came the closest I ever heard to him raising his voice.

“Oh for gosh darn sakes, Rob,” he said to me, barely above normal speaking volume.

My sister and I looked at each other and cracked up. I saw Dale’s unhappy surprise at our laughter and felt immediately ashamed. He is so good and kind, I thought, and I am neither.

Nonetheless, Dale stuck with us. He moved us into a big, beautiful house in Holmby Hills, down the street from Tori Spelling’s mansion, which had a zoo and a bowling alley. My sister went to birthday parties there.

In this new life, around this undeniably good man, I had a deep, unsettling sense: I deserve none of this. I am a liar, a thief, a bad person. I confirmed this daily by stealing from the massive coin jar Dale kept on his dresser, plunking stolen quarters into arcade games at Westworld.

In my junior year of high school, I was driving to the beach with friends when one of them mentioned seeing Dale in the L.A. Times. Something about the casino he was a partner in. My friend used the word RICO, which was new to me. I thought of the Spanish word, which just like in English, means both kinds of rich. Qué rico, I thought.

The feds seized our house and all of our assets, arresting Dale on our front lawn. How had I been wrong about him? If I was bad, what did this make Dale? Can someone who only ever treated me wonderfully be a bad person?

Either way, I knew this feeling: everything falling apart. Like going from a leisurely trail walk to utter chaos at full speed. I’d been on this out of control ride many times before. Like always, I wanted to jump, but at a certain speed, all you can do is hold on.

There was a trial, a conviction, another divorce. Federal prison. My mom would go on to marry Dale’s mob attorney, and then two more men after that. She was on her own wild ride.

Over decades, with seasons of loss, joy, chaos, and occasional calm, I began to remember differently, to see differently. We were all often just hanging on: Dale, my mom, my sister, and I. How could any of us be anything other than a person deserving of love?

This is the thing about going through things: it feels less lonely as you start to recognize it everywhere. Seeing what everyone endures, labels become meaningless: good, bad, victim, villain, beginner, expert. Each of us is both all and none of those things.

Somehow, here we are, all of us hanging on dearly while trying to remember how to be brave, how to become one with this galloping horse, how to laugh into the roaring wind.

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I was ten, listening in and trying to understand while I sipped a Coke with crushed ice. I rattled the ice in my tumbler and pictured Larry, the balding real estate agent, limbs akimbo, unable to get into a normal human sleeping position. This man could not figure out how to use a bed.

I never thought of Larry the same way after that. While my mom forgave him this no-show and many other failings, I would shake my head at him and think, What the hell’s wrong with you, man? Is anything easier than sleeping?

Like all scoffing everywhere, though, my scoffing at Larry was drenched in hypocrisy. I myself was, and always had been, a terrible sleeper. This was at least partially due to all the late night emergencies in our house. Between the Larrys and the Barrys, the Jeffs and the Sebastians, all of whom quickly vanished, I was the man of the house from the age of seven. Sleep happened in between keeping an eye on everything.

One time our mom went to Mexico with a new boyfriend and left us for three days. I was eleven then, my little sister just nine. It sounds crazy now, but we were thrilled with this arrangement. It was summer, so there was no school to worry about, no rules to follow. I made us scrambled eggs for dinner, and we stayed up late watching TV, scarfing entire sleeves of chocolate-chocolate chip cookies.

A little after midnight, while watching a movie, we heard something in the back yard. A snapped branch, possibly footsteps. I fetched my Crosman BB gun from behind the bookcase and stepped out onto the back patio, legs trembling, my sister inside behind the curtain. It felt like a movie. I cocked the slide back and into place, figuring this would show whomever that I meant business. There was nothing, just the chirping crickets and the low rumbles and whooshes from the nearby 405 freeway. I double-checked all the locks and slept on the couch in our living room that night, the BB gun within reach.

Sometimes, especially when there was no boyfriend around, our mom would turn a corner at night. She couldn’t take it, she’d tell us—“it” being everything: life, us kids, work, the whole mess. There were nights where she just cried a bit, and other times where something would completely overtake her. Once it was clear that this episode was going supernova, that she was in a barrel going over the falls, my sister and I would say to each other, “Here we go.”

I’ll spare you (and my late mom) the details of these nights, but rooms were destroyed. Things were said to us that I’ll never forget, and for a long time, I believed those things. I felt sure that I was responsible for all of it. She told me as much, many times during her spells, and it’s only now that I know it wasn’t true.

I don’t think any of these things were in her heart. They were just winds that whipped through her, something she was channeling from long before me, and—given her own parents—long before her, too, going back generations. None of these things are in my heart, either, though I can still feel the echoes sometimes. Occasionally, briefly, I can still convince myself of the old things: You’re no good, and you know it.

Eventually, after the troubles were over, my sister and I would help our mom into bed. We’d put the TV on for her, as she liked to sleep with it on, “for the company.” I’d go to bed and lie awake for a while, thinking about everything. It was in these late hours that my sister and I would knock on the wall between our two bedrooms, a simple knock, knock-knock-knock, which meant Are you-a-sleep? Two knocks in response meant no. It felt good to know she was there, too, awake in the dark like me.

Sometimes I’d snap to around 4am, hearing a steady tone coming from our mom’s room. Back then the local TV channels would broadcast a color bar with a tone after hours. I’d stand in my mom’s doorway, the TV’s glow illuminating her sleeping form. She looked so peaceful then. I’d quietly click the TV off, the sudden silence startling her. “I was listening to that,” she’d mumble, only half-stirring.

I still wake up on occasion, wondering if something has happened. I worried about my aging mom and dad for years, keeping the phone within reach at all hours, but they’re both gone now. Occasionally, something horrendous will flash through my half-sleep, something happening to Emma, or the kids. Nothing wakes me up like these brief imaginings, my heart thumping along. Everything’s okay, I tell myself, rolling back over. Everyone’s okay.

I’ve tried all the things everyone tries, and some of them really help. Chamomile tea, a weighted blanket, magnesium, sleeping cold, NSDR in the afternoons—all great. I could go on and on, but it would put any normal person right to sleep.

My wife, Emma, needs none of this. She’s one of those old school, no-frills sleepers. She slips into bed, reads a few pages, snaps off the light, and sleeps eight hours straight, without fail. “That’s the sign of a clear conscience,” my mother-in-law said to me once, when I was marveling at this.

These days, I mostly sleep just fine. Either way, I try not to stress about it anymore. If I stir, I’m usually able to convince myself of the reality, which is that there’s no actual problem, right here, right now. Just sensations, coming and going.

On the odd night when I’m struggling, I’ll put on a podcast at low volume, and eventually drift off into a twilight state. Emma might wake at some point if I forget the sleep timer. I sense her reaching over me, moving slowly and with great care, finding the pause button, then rubbing my arm. “I was listening to that,” I say dreamily, like an echo from long ago—which, like any echo, is softer and gentler with each return, finally, finally coming to rest.

I find myself standing in silver grass, the entire scene around me shades of gray and silver. A large commercial flatbed truck carrying several tons of graphite lost control at high speed and rolled several times. Now it’s resting, mangled, at the edge of the woods, everything rendered in silver tones like an Ansel Adams photograph. The bushes, the ground, our boots, everything is slick, metallic, shimmering.

A firefighter closer to the half-flattened cab of the truck catches my eye and shakes his head grimly. It’s just then that we see a silver hand waving from the smashed, compacted driver’s side window.

Into this scene of silver grays and blacks, like a splash of color arriving in a black & white film, we haul a bright yellow backboard, the firefighters operating day-glo orange hydraulic jacks, creating enough space for us to slide this silver man out and onto the stretcher, then into the ambulance.

The medic carefully pours bottled sterile water over the driver’s silver face, graphite rivulets running into surrounding towels, the patient now emerging in full color, his eyes clear and blinking.

A few minutes’ drive away, an awaiting medevac helicopter lifts off with this patient, circling north toward the Level 1 trauma center, 22 minutes by air.

Later, we learn the man was discharged, walking out of the hospital that very evening. Only then did I wonder who he went home to, who might have been missing him if he hadn’t made it back.

There’s been a string of lucky outcomes lately. I don’t actually believe in luck, but there’s no other way to describe it. After a car hits a utility pole at over 100mph, we arrive to find a vehicle that looks like wadded up aluminum foil, the driver out of the vehicle and walking around, with nothing but a few lacerations. It’s straight-up miraculous.

“How am I alive?” he asks us, over and over in the ambulance, en route to the trauma center.

“I don’t know,” I say, “but I’m glad you are.”

The patient shakes his head. “But how?” he asks. “How am I still alive, after that?” He begins to sob, his head bowed, his torso shaking.

“Maybe life isn’t done with you yet,” the medic riding with us tells him. “What do you think of that?”

This quiets our patient, and I’m grateful for this medic, the same one from the call with the graphite truck. He’s a long-time veteran, someone I used to think of as permanently grouchy, always annoyed with all of us, no matter what we did on calls.

We are all still learning, all volunteers, and this medic always used to have something to say about what we weren’t doing right. He’d tell us off right in front of patients. He’d complain about our patient care, about the bumpy roads en route to the hospital. Everything was wrong, even things we couldn’t control. I always felt on edge around him as a new EMT.

And now, it’s like something’s shifted. He’s different around us on calls. He seems completely changed, as a medic, maybe even as a person. I like this guy, and am always relieved to see him when I show up to a call. I want to ask him what happened, but I don’t.

I took nearly two years off from our volunteer fire department, as my parents declined with dementia, then died, back to back. I couldn’t bear to be on the ambulance, around all the injuries, illness, and death. After a while, feeling something was missing, I wanted to come back, but I didn’t know how.

I felt underconfident, unsure if I still knew what I was doing. Maybe, I thought, I’ll just stop altogether. The longer I waited, the worse I felt.

There are two firefighter/EMTs from my volunteer department, people I’ve known for many years, both of whom survived cancer in the past couple years. Now they’re both in remission, back in service after pausing for treatment. I was having coffee with them one morning, just down the street from our fire station.

“Whenever I’m worrying about myself, or what’s going to happen next,” one of them said, “going on calls helps me remember.”

It’s strange, but there are times I forget that my folks are both gone. It comes back to me suddenly, sometimes on a call, maybe the way a Parkinson’s patient moves with that little shuffle, just like my mom did. Other times, it arrives out of nowhere, in the midst of washing the dishes or walking. In the immediate aftermath of loss, these waves hit me with an overwhelming sadness. Now, it feels different. It’s still a sadness, but an oddly welcome one. There’s almost a sense that I’ve found something I’d been missing.

I arrive at another auto accident, a teen boy who’s driven into a stone wall, complaining of head pain. This formerly grouchy medic is already on scene in his flycar when our ambulance arrives.

The medic gives me a quick report, and says he’s handing the patient over to me. We help the young driver up and out of his car together, holding him under his arms, steadying him.

I’ve wondered about the shift in this medic, something that seemed to happen when I was away from the department for those two years. Was the transformation sudden or gradual? Maybe he lost someone close to him, or maybe he found new love. Or perhaps it’s just an accumulation, all these patients, all the loss and the near misses, illuminating something.

We all survive such unbelievable things. I haven’t been able to make sense of so much of it, but the more loss I encounter, the more I see how it connects all of us. And also: maybe life isn’t done with us yet.

The medic helps me get the patient onto our stretcher, then folds his EMS tablet into its cover and tucks it under his arm, ready to leave. I can’t be sure, but it’s possible that there’s almost a hint of a smile on his face. He thwacks the back of his hand against my chest.

“Tag—you’re it,” he says.

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My in-laws have been married for more than 53 years. They’re visiting from the UK, so I asked them over breakfast this morning what they think makes for a good marriage.

“I’m going to let her answer that,” my father-in-law said. “That is the secret to a good marriage!”

Exactly twenty years ago, their daughter Emma and I went on our first date. I was thirty-two at the time, just entering my late adolescent phase.

We were each breaking long-held rules we’d made about who we thought we should be with.

I had always said I could never be in a serious relationship with someone who wasn’t from a broken home. Brilliant, I know. But how else would my partner possibly understand me?

Emma had always held the contrary point: that she could never be serious with someone with divorced parents. She sure hit the reverse jackpot on that one. By our third date, she’d learned that my mom had been married—and divorced—six times. She let this minor detail slide.

What did we know, anyway?

I think of what Emma encountered in those early days. That version of me before therapy and meditation, skittish and prone to shutting down, or going into a tailspin. I was on the run from everything.

“I can’t do this,” I told her a few months in, as we stood in the living room of my Brooklyn apartment.

She actually laughed and sat me down on the futon.

“You,” she said, “are not going anywhere.”

When our kids were toddlers, they used to want to collect every rock on the beach. They’d fill brightly colored plastic pails to the brim with dull, gray, egg-shaped rocks. There was zero evaluation. If they came across any rock, it was going in the pail. When we tried to remove a single one, they’d wail, and say, “But those are my special rocks.”

I was like this when Emma met me, carrying around a heavy pail of unexamined rocks. Emma kicked my special rock bucket right over.

Apparently, I learned, people can get super annoyed with each other and not leave. They can argue, even fiercely, and find their way back. This was like learning, at thirty-two, that the Earth is round.

All these rocks were tumbling out at a clip, thanks to her.

You think deep down, everyone’s selfish? Here, I’ll show you otherwise.

Everybody leaves? What if we both stay?

You think you’re hopelessly fucked up? What if I see you differently?

It’s late afternoon now, and Emma and I are on the porch, enjoying the sun. She’s looking out into the yard, smiling a little. There’s a male cardinal hopping around, investigating the grass. I wonder about Emma: How is someone who’s never meditated so serene? There’s so much about her I’ll never know, even this many years in.

What makes for a good marriage? I have the same answer as my father-in-law:

You’ll have to ask her.

But Emma might say she doesn’t know, either.

There are all the pat answers like chemistry, and making each other laugh, and just being nice to each other. Of course. But there’s something underlying all that.

I think we get along better by letting go of our fixed ideas about who we are, and what makes a good marriage. Not knowing leaves open so much possibility and hope. Everything is changing, all the time, including us.

I hope I’m half the person she sees in me. I don’t know, but I’m trying. I like learning to be that person for her.

I see her learning to be more vocal about what she needs from me, and others. She’s English, so this doesn’t come naturally to her, but I notice her working on this, growing into it. This makes me happy.

Right now, she’s smiling in the sun, book in her lap, and I tell her the truest thing I can think of, one thing I do know about her for certain.

“You are absolutely adorable.”

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The best argument my wife Emma and I ever had was late at night, maybe twenty years ago, when we were visiting her family in England. I have no idea what it was about, but we were awake with jet lag, having a whisper fight. Back and forth, across the pillows we went, staccato whispers at each other.

Emma got out of bed, spun a robe around herself, and stormed out of the room, shutting the door crisply behind her. She then tried to come back to say something else, working the knob. It’s an old house, and she’d somehow locked herself out.

The knob jiggled more and more insistently. She whisper-shouted, “You open this door right now!”

“Not a chance!” I whisper-shouted back, from the bed.

On opposite sides of the door in the semi-dark, we simultaneously burst out laughing.

When I opened the door to find Emma wiping laugh-tears from her eyes, I felt a deep and sudden recognition. Oh, right—it’s you. How could I have forgotten?

II.

Just like Beethoven dreamt up symphonies away from the piano, I have a gift for conjuring entire imaginary arguments with people in my head. Chords, melodies, everything.

I just know when I go downstairs, Emma’s going to give me a hard time about that thing I didn’t do. She’ll say this. Then, I’ll come back with how busy I’ve been, how these things always fall on me, and how unappreciated I feel.

I trudge down the stairs, feeling like some kind of argument-predicting genius. I find Emma on the far side of the kitchen, holding the kettle.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m making tea. Want some?”

“Oh,” I say. “I’d love some, thank you.”

Seeing her there with two mugs, pouring tea for us, I feel dumb. I have to come clean.

“Just before I came downstairs,” I say, “I had a pretend argument with you in my head.”

She laughs. “Did I win?”

“Yeah,” I say. “No doubt about that.”

III.

My parents didn’t speak to each other for the better part of twenty years. Their divorce in the late seventies was so vicious, my dad wouldn’t even say my mom’s name—for years! He called her that woman. They’d sit on opposite sides of the room at my school sports banquets, never looking at each other, and I’d shuttle between their tables. What in the world is more ridiculous than mortal enemies at a JV volleyball dinner?

When the grandkids arrived, these bitter enemies suddenly turned civil. Almost friendly. Seeing them posing together in a group photo, smiling in close proximity, felt to me like seeing an optical illusion, or a pair of rare, exotic birds. There they were, willingly, just a few feet apart.

A few years into this new and very decent arrangement, I spotted them on their own, in my dad’s living room. I approached quietly, leaning against the doorframe, unnoticed. They sat opposite each other on plush sofas across a low coffee table.

I immediately discovered, though, that they were each talking about entirely different things. My mom was wondering aloud about how common the name “Johansson” is in Sweden. My dad was talking about how much money is in Star Wars merchandising rights. They were going back and forth in this surreal, clueless exchange.

“Johansson is basically like Smith over there,” my mom said.

My dad nodded. “Imagine having just half a percent stake,” he said. “It’d be millions—maybe even billions!”

“It has to be the top Swedish name,” my mom replied.

“Oh my god,” I said.

“What is it?” my mom asked, startled.

“What are you two doing?” I asked.

She frowned. “We are having a conversation.”

“This isn’t a conversation!” I said. “You’re just saying random things toward each other.”

“Well, who put you in charge?” she asked.

“Nobody,” I said.

“That’s right,” my mom said, with a satisfied nod. They went back to it.

Through a wall of French doors behind them, the sun was dipping behind a towering eugenia hedge. These two former enemies whiled away the late afternoon, each taking their turn. I was transfixed. It was like watching two people in a park, one throwing a baseball, the other punting a football back.

As I lingered in the doorway, watching these people who are now both gone, I realized that maybe I was witnessing some kind of miracle. I can still see them there, becoming silhouettes together in the fading light.

It has to be one of the smallest, most ridiculous miracles ever, but it fills me all the way up with hope, just the same.

“Look,” she says, nodding past my left shoulder. I turn to see a toddler in a high chair at the booth behind us, grinning madly. Evie and I start making faces at this little girl, cracking her up.

Turning back to Evie, I tell her, “I get such a pang seeing a kid that age, knowing that your childhood’s almost over.”

“Oh, it’s already over,” she says.

“I mean, not technically.”

“I’m seventeen,” she says. “I’m basically an adult.”

“Basically,” I say.

“Even my teenhood is almost over,” she says, sipping her chai latte, smiling as she does when she knows she’s got me spooked.

“Well,” I say to her, “I hope we did okay.”

We did our best, of course. Who doesn’t? A therapist told me, when I was in my early twenties, that my parents did their very best. Yeah, right, I thought, with a full-body scoff. It was one of those nagging ideas, though, that kept resurfacing over the years, like someone tugging on my sleeve.

Sometimes I’d fall into a spell of feeling generous toward them, but then snap out of it, like waking from a dream. It was hard to maintain, carrying as much resentment as I did.

At some point, instead of saying, They did their best, I refashioned this statement to: They couldn’t do any better. This felt true, and also the kind of thing one says from a higher moral perch, which I found pettily satisfying, like: They couldn’t do any better, the poor things.

Way back when I was a new dad, visiting my in-laws in England, I immediately noticed that they didn’t have a stair gate. I mentioned this to my wife, surreptitiously. I’m always wary, when I’m around her family, of being The American. I often feel like this cartoonish version of what Brits make fun of Americans for, over-worrying about germs, food expiration dates, and personal injury.

Encountering my in-laws’ (admittedly carpeted) staircase in the presence of two small children, I felt like one would regarding an oncoming truck. DANGER, this staircase called out to me. Nobody else seemed to care. Were they all crazy?

“I have an idea,” I said over breakfast. “Maybe I can just pop down to the Babies’R’Us in town and grab a stair gate.”

“You know,” my mother-in-law said, “every child has to fall down the stairs at some point.”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” I said to her. “Though maybe not my kids?”

She shrugged. “They’ve got to learn somehow.”

She had a point, as usual. I wondered, though, if my kids could learn by witnessing other kids’ inevitable falls down the stairs—terrible, of course, but perhaps necessary! Either way, I followed my toddler daughter and infant son around my in-laws’ house in Oxford for the rest of the trip, my parental helicopter blades chuppering.

After more than a decade of this kind of parenting, it started to happen: people sending me podcasts and articles about how we’d gotten it all wrong. All of us helicopters, snowplows, and other over-parenting vehicles, we hadn’t let our kids build enough resilience.

Resilience! I thought. Shit. I knew I’d missed something. This was, of course, my second biggest fear, after something happening to my kids: getting parenting wrong.

Now, my almost-no-longer-a-teen daughter informs me in a coffee shop booth: It’s over. Pencils down.

Did I hover too closely behind as she wobbled her way up the slide ladder? Did we help her change schools too quickly when the mean girls cut her out? What about everything in between? Too much? Not enough?

Well, whatever Emma and I did or didn’t do, we couldn’t have done any better. It’s a universal law.

I used to justify my helicoptering, telling myself it was because of my difficult childhood. Was it, though? I’m not sure. Maybe it was just in the ether, the way we all collectively decide to do things, however that happens. Like a murmuration of starlings.

Either way, I wanted to give my kids the opposite of what I went through. In some important ways, I guess I managed that. They’re older now, and they’ve heard stories from me, about the violence and the chaos I experienced, long ago. They wonder what all of that was like. “It was crazy,” I tell them. “But I wouldn’t change a thing, because all of that led to you.”

“Besides,” I say to them, “everyone really was doing their best.”

I’m a true believer in this now. Everyone, at all times, is by definition doing the best they can, given their genetics, their life experiences, the conditions arising around them, their nervous systems, and all the vast, unknowable currents that carry us along in every moment.

How could anything ever be otherwise? As with all important things, I forget sometimes, and then I remember again. I look back at everything now, and it’s much easier to see the love, more than anything else.

Evie and I leave the coffee shop, which is called Bread Alone. Bride Alone, she used to call it unwittingly, when she was little. I loved how she mispronounced everything. Something was “skomething.” She would lean in, whispering conspiratorially: “Daddy, I have to tell you skomething.”

We start back down the street, toward the public lot, where we’ve parked next to each other. She’s driving now, my little girl.

Strolling our town’s main street together, we pass a young dad wearing a baby carrier, a tiny bald head peeking out. I feel another pang. Oh no, I think. Am I going to turn into one of those older parents who calls out, “I remember when my kids were that age! Seems like yesterday!”

I resist this fleeting temptation, thank god.

Evie and I turn and stop at the crosswalk together. I remember teaching her to look both ways before crossing. It really does seem like yesterday. And here she is, about to head off in her own car, to meet friends across the river.

A truck lumbers past, laden with mulch. The road is still wet from a recent rain. Just as we step off the curb and start across the road, my daughter reaches over, like she did when she was tiny, and grabs my hand.

“I need to get out of Ireland, immediately,” she said when I answered.

I wasn’t supposed to take personal calls unless it was an emergency. It seemed back then that life for her was nothing but emergencies.

“Tell me what happened,” I said.

“So I was brushing my teeth this morning,” she said.

“Mom, can we skip to why you have to leave Ireland?”

“I’m getting to that,” she said. “I was brushing my teeth, and he walked in and said he’s leaving me for his assistant. He says they’re in love.”

“Oh mom,” I said.

“I can’t be in Dublin,” she said, street sounds in the background. “Maybe you could change your ticket, and we could meet somewhere? Anywhere in Europe.”

“Madrid,” I said, for no particular reason, other than never having been there.

I found her in a café in the Madrid airport, looking deflated. She was a petite, glamorous Aussie, sometimes mistaken for Priscilla Presley. Now, though, she was huddled over an espresso, quiet and sad. I hugged her, then sat down at the small metal table.

“So, what now?” I asked her.

“Yes, what will I do?” she said.

“No, I mean here in Spain.”

She thought for a few moments. “I wonder,” she said, “if maybe we could just see some beautiful things.”

We planned a road trip. This was in the late-nineties, pre-smartphones, so I bought a guide book at the airport. We sat together, dog-earing pages, plotting a course.

Before leaving Madrid, we stopped to see Picasso’s Guernica, standing in silence in front of it for a good twenty minutes. It’s such a difficult painting. It made me think of how hard my mom’s life had been. I wondered, standing there next to her, how she had endured everything.

Her parents gave her away when she was nine. I once asked her about this, and she said, “Well, they were obviously very busy with the new baby. And it was only for a few years.”

After that, she was a teen mom in an abusive relationship, and fled Australia for the States, leaving this man and their toddler daughter behind. She started a new life, a new family, telling no one for many years. She and my dad weren’t together for long, but he never knew about my older half-sister.

My mom’s life in the States continued to be chaotic and violent. There was one ex-husband in prison, other exes who should’ve been. She seemed always on the run, rarely living anywhere for more than two years. Before Dublin, it had been L.A., Bermuda, NYC, Vermont, Iowa, Colorado, then L.A. again. In each one of these places, yet another emergency.

I said to a therapist once that my mom was like a wounded bird, always drawing the worst kinds of attention. “That’s one way to see her,” the therapist said. “But she’s also like the phoenix.”

So, in the aftermath of this Dublin disaster, we set off from Madrid to see some beautiful things together. We traveled by train and bus, reading and napping as rows of olive trees whipped by. We walked through labyrinthine medieval streets in Toledo, and under orange trees in Sevilla. We watched flamenco in a tiny wine bar, and visited royal gardens. Finally, we took a bus east to Granada, to perhaps the most beautiful place I’ve ever been: Alhambra.

My mom stood at the reflection pool within this Islamic palace and one-time fortress, looking up at the endless rows of layered ornamentation and hand-carved script, marveling.

“Oh my,” she said. “It’s just…. oh my.”

The night she died, twenty years after that trip, my wife, Emma, invited a bunch of friends over, everyone gathering in our kitchen. At some point, I felt I should probably say something. This Spain trip kept popping up in my mind. The story seemed to want to be told, about traveling with my mom to see these beautiful things.

I clinked my glass with a cheese knife, and the room hushed. I could see her there, standing in front of Guernica, marveling at Alhambra. I wanted to say how all these difficult things and beautiful things seemed not just related, but intertwined. How maybe she and I learned together to find beauty, even among the wreckage.

I tried to speak, but the words caught in my throat. “To Maureen O’Dea,” I said, hoisting my glass, unable to say more.

We walked from our house together, down the hill toward the Hudson River. Some of my friends lit lanterns and floated them up into the night sky. I’d initially grumbled about the idea of the lanterns, but I went along with it, and they were gorgeous, actually, soaring up and to the north, finally winking out of sight in a distant bank of low-hanging clouds.

As we turned from the river, the wind picked up. The street before us was dark with the new moon, and I felt a pang of loneliness. What would I do now?

I felt ashamed for not telling the Spain story in our kitchen. I should’ve waited longer, collected myself, and told everyone about the beautiful things. I felt I’d failed my mom somehow.

On this march back up the hill in the darkness, my friends brought out their phones, illuminating the pavement beneath us, our steps slow and quiet. Though full of sorrow, I felt encircled, like being within a phalanx, walking in formation. There was the warm glow of our kitchen window up ahead. Just then, one of these people I love—I’m not even sure who—placed a steady hand on my back.

Into the Woods

Grief drove me into the woods. I’d been walking the dogs on country roads in the mornings, but after losing both parents in the space of fourteen months, I found my way to some nearby forest trails.

Emma, always the most thoughtful gift-giver, had given me for this post-parental loss birthday: a rotating antique hourglass, a framed line-drawing print of a skull, and a book called Japanese Death Poems.

“I’m sensing a theme,” I said.

In the following weeks, I’d be working at my desk, and Emma would stop by and flip the hourglass, the black sand now slipping away. In a mere five minutes, the top half would be drained.

“Are you trying to tell me something?” I asked her. I’d been avoiding the hourglass, already feeling like everything, everything was slipping away from me.

“No, I just love seeing the sand flow,” she said, and kissed the top of my head.

In those early days, I wandered the woods, mostly lost in thought. What was I to make of my mom’s life, or my dad’s? What did any of it mean? I felt unmoored.

One morning, I set the dogs up with bully sticks and climbed the fire tower, which looks out onto the entire valley, the Hudson River snaking through the distant haze. The tower creaked and swayed in the wind as I looked out over the singular canopy of treetops, an undulating green sea below.

I looked out to the western horizon, thinking of the Pacific Ocean on the other side of the continent. I remembered racing my mom across the beach. She was giggling, both of us running fast over the hot sand. At that same beach, my dad and I once got caught in big surf on his catamaran, flipping it and snapping the mast. All of that was out there, somewhere.

I clambered back down, careful on the hundred or so steep metal steps, until I was once again beneath the dense canopy.

The dogs and I hustled on the downhill trails. I was mostly blind to the nature around me, other than calling the dogs away from a chipmunk. Leave it, I told them.

As these forest hikes became a daily ritual, I started to see and hear more. A new fallen oak tree. A bird call that sounds like when Pacman dies. Over the weeks, I began to notice, everywhere: mushrooms. 

First, radiant clusters of golden oyster mushrooms. How had I walked right past them before, when they look like this?

A good friend and I began hiking together most mornings. I soon learned that his wife had a cancer diagnosis, with a long year of treatment ahead, including radiation and chemo (she’s in remission now, thank heavens). We walked together that year, wondering aloud about difficult things, telling stories, sometimes just cracking each other up. Other times we went for long stretches in silence, just us and the dogs moving over the trails.

Over the months, and then the seasons, we became foragers together, learning dozens of species of gourmet and medicinal mushrooms, discussing how to cook and store them, how to identify lookalikes. 

We learned to identify deadly mushrooms unfailingly: Destroying angel. Death cap. Funeral bell.1

For Father’s Day, Emma surprised me with a leather foraging satchel. It has a shoulder strap and rides on the hip. It’s basically a foraging purse. My teen daughter saw me trying it on, and, after confirming that I would actually be wearing it outside of the house, said, “Well, at least you’re confident in your masculinity.”

In all this time, I hadn’t yet cracked the book of Japanese death poems. I’d been too raw. These mushrooms, though, seemed to me like little death poems of their own. Compact, beautiful, nourishing things, springing from death. 

After each hike, my friend and I divide up the morning’s haul on the hood of his car: maitake, golden oysters, chicken of the woods, puffballs, shrimp of the woods, reishi. The next day: honey mushrooms, lion’s mane, pheasant back. These are fall mushrooms. In spring and summer: morels and chanterelles.

Wandering among all this old growth, new growth, decay, rebirth, noticing the trees, birds, seasons, everything in motion, I can feel what the biologist Merlin Sheldrake says in Entangled Life:

“All life-forms are in fact processes not things.”

Everything is both fleeting and inseparable. The woods remind me of this, all the time. Here’s life, death, the cycling seasons, the whole of it in continuous, interdependent flux: grief, joy, loss, love, friendship, father, mother, son, all of it. It’s hard to miss, once you look.

In time, I started turning the hourglass every so often, just to watch the sand flow. I began reading the Japanese death poems, too, lingering over them.

Two favorites:

The snow of yesterday

That fell like cherry petals

Is water once again

- Gozan

A journey of no return

A wanderer’s sack

Is bottomless

- Kyoshu

I did, often.

Now my fourteen-year-old son does the exact same thing. I don’t ask him who loses only one shoe, though, because I now know, it’s obviously genetic. He’s running around looking for his missing shoe, and I feel both kinship and frustration.

“Don’t worry,” I say, as his school bus chugs past our kitchen window. “I’ll drive you in.”

On the way, we listen to Kendrick, which makes us feel like people who always have both shoes on, ready for anything.

I tell him how mad his Nana, my mom, used to get when I’d lose something. We were broke, and I can see now how scared she was all the time, how costly it was to lose anything. But for him, these stories are about me being in trouble, which are his favorite kind.

“Would she get really mad?” he asks me.

“So mad,” I say.

He smiles at the thought.

My mom kept polaroids in every drawer in her house showing what belonged in that drawer. I’ve never met a person more meticulous with their things.

She married six times, one of those husbands finally pulling her out of lifelong dire financial straits. In her late forties, she went from crying at the dinner table over endless money troubles to never having to work again. Still, all of her marriages ended badly, and she never shook the feeling that the bottom might suddenly drop out at any moment. “We could lose everything,” she’d say.

That’s always true, of course, but she lived in constant terror of this, rather than just being aware of the possibility as a background hum. Growing up with her, I absorbed this fear, but I had the opposite takeaway. Why care about things, if it’s all so fleeting and unreliable?

Now, when my own son loses things, I appreciate his non-attachment in theory, but when it’s his Nike jacket or his expensive soccer cleats, I’d prefer a little more attachment.

“Where’s your jacket?” I ask him.

“Well, I saw it in the lost and found before recess,” he tells me, “but when I came back later it was gone.”

“Why didn’t you just take it when you saw it?”

“Because I was on my way out for recess,” he says, as if I’ve asked something dumb.

When my mom was in memory care, even after she’d forgotten my name, she asked me once, “Where is my private property?” I’d surrounded her with as many of her favorite things as I could. Her room was lovely and light-filled. There were photos and books, her favorite cherry red cashmere scarf. But she meant all of her things. The bulwark she’d built against loss.

We’d just spent a small fortune moving all of her possessions, an entire household, cross-country. I moved her into a sweet little condo just a mile away from us, overlooking a pond. It was here that I witnessed the spiraling disarray, things left everywhere, plates of half-eaten pancakes put back into the cupboard. It became obvious very quickly that she couldn’t live alone. She lasted only a week in this condo.

This lifetime of things she’d collected, winnowed down to a condo-full, would have to be slimmed down much further, to what we could fit into a 370-square-foot memory care unit. We gave away almost everything. My daughter wanted only a silver ladybug brooch and a wild-patterned 1970’s silk scarf. I knew someone in an undocumented community who brought a few friends in pickup trucks to haul away furniture, plates, kitchen gear. We didn’t have the space or need for any of it.

I felt, with both of my parents’ deaths, a strong compulsion not to take any of their things. It was a sort of self-imposed, aspirational non-attachment—not just to the things, but to them, too. Maybe I felt it would help me miss them less. I have, of course, regretted this on occasion.

I do have a few mementos: a photo my dad kept of me sitting on his lap under a Sycamore tree, both of us grinning madly. A little watercolor that my mom loved. More than reminding me of my parents, though, these things often simply remind me that I’ve lost them.

I call my sister, reeling with the idea of this loss. Confused by it.

“Can you actually believe it,” I ask her, “that they’re just gone?”

I can’t get my head around it. It doesn’t feel possible. In that way that you might lose some precious little bauble, and think, it was just right here. How can it be gone, when I can still imagine it so clearly?

I remember a time playing in a vacant lot down the road from my mom’s house, after a heavy rain. I had new Nikes on, but couldn’t resist playing in the mud. If I moved quickly enough, I found I could scamper across a little mud pond that had formed, scurrying across the surface before my feet sank. It was the most thrilling game–until I got snagged halfway, suddenly knee-deep in thick, sodden muck, unable to move.

This must be quicksand, I thought, having read something about this deadly stuff. I panicked, and pulled hard, my socked foot leaving one of the Nikes behind with a sklorp sound. I managed to reach solid ground, and turned to look just as the mud closed in and filled the leg hole, entombing my shoe. I never saw it again.

I ran back home in my single Nike and a muddy sock, the rain starting up again, pelting me. Our front door was locked, so I banged on it, urgently. My mom opened the door and looked down, noting this one-shoe situation.

“I know this looks bad,” I told her breathlessly, “but it’s good news.”

“It sure doesn’t look like good news,” she said.

“It is,” I told her. “There was quicksand, and I almost got pulled under.”

“Quicksand,” she said, with barely concealed amusement. “So tell me the good news.”

“I’m right here,” I said. “I made it back to you.”

“We highly recommend the extra liability coverage for only an additional $25 per day” the woman told me, again.

Moments earlier, I’d taken the call from my stepmom, who was a two-hour drive due east, out in the desert. “He’s gone, sweetie,” she’d said. I’d hoped to get to him in time, but it wasn’t to be.

Standing now at this stark white plastic counter, I felt overwhelmed in a way I hadn’t since I was young, when everything would slow down and become dreamlike, like being in the surf, ducking under a big wave.

“I really don’t need the insurance,” I said to the woman.

She started to explain how California isn’t a no-fault state, how I might be liable “if anything were to occur.”

I pinched between my eyebrows. A swell of irritation snapped me back into my body. She was just doing her job, but I wanted to shout—at her, at the whole place. Make a scene. I’ve never made a scene like that, but it felt like something big needed to happen.

“We also offer bumper-to-bumper scratch and glass protection for only $15 a day,” she said. “Just in case.”

Could I just tell everyone in Budget to fuck off? They’d surely understand, if they knew. Everyone in line was looking at their phones, oblivious. The counter rep was blinking at me, waiting for my answer.

“Can I just have the keys, please?” I said. “My dad is… really not doing well." This was all the truth I could muster, this absurd understatement.

She spun the tablet screen around for me to sign with my finger and plonked the key fob onto the counter. “Slot number twelve, out the door to the right,” she said. Then, staring right at me, she called out, “NEXT IN LINE!”

In the rental car, I spiraled down an onramp onto the 10 freeway, heading east through a sea of stucco and roadside retail, a blur of strip mall sushi, burritos, dry cleaners, karate studios, cash for gold. It would be over an hour of this until the first cactus.

I called my sister Adrienne. “I guess we’re orphans now,” she said, answering.

“Yeah,” I said. “Can you be an orphan at our age, though?”

“I sure feel like an orphan,” she said. I told her I loved her.

I called my wife, and a few close friends. I played some melancholy songs. The drive to the desert is good for processing things. Ninety minutes in, I spotted a massive sign announcing 80’s MTV favorites ZZ Top, playing at this remote casino, way out here, surrounded by acres of windmills and nothing. Life is never what we expect it to be.

I stood in the driveway in the desert, roller bag at my side, hugging my youngest sisters, Nicole and Kat. Kat, a designer, stepped back and braced my shoulders with her sleeve-tattooed arms.

“So, just to prepare you,” she said, “I decorated him.”

“You… what?” I asked.

“I decorated him,” she told me. “You’ll see.”

He was on his own in the back bedroom on a hospital bed, light bathing him through sheer curtains. Willie Nelson was warbling through a little bluetooth speaker. Kat had surrounded him with dozens of bright yellow and orange plastic flowers and put him in his cowboy hat. He was wearing multiple leis. I’ll never forget his face. It was him/not-him.

I put my hand on his chest, which was solid and unmoving, and knelt by his side. I wept quietly for a few minutes, intermittently saying I’m sorry, and thank you. I told him I loved him, and that was it for us, a father and son who spent many years far apart, some of them not speaking. At least we’d been in closer touch for decades now. I stood and left the room, Willie singing Blue Skies.

Needing to get out into nature for a bit before cooking dinner, I found a nearby trail, a half-mile of steep desert switchbacks with scrambles up boulders to a lookout view.

I had in my pocket a microdose of mushrooms someone had given me, and for some odd reason, this struck me as the perfect time to try it. I washed the mushrooms down with bottled water and began hiking up into the hills.

Half an hour later, tuning into the scrabble of my feet on the trail, feeling the warm scratchiness of the rocks as I clambered up to the next tier, it hit me: this dose had not exactly been micro. Who ever knows with these things? I hadn’t tried mushrooms since college.

I thought of my high school pal T. when we’d taken shrooms for the first time, and they were just kicking in. How will I know when it’s happening? I’d kept wondering. I’d asked T. how he felt, and he nodded slowly and said, “I’m feeling pretty wormy.”

I was, on this hike, starting to feel a little wormy.

Rounding the next bend, I felt something—someone regarding me. I froze, and though it took me a second, like defocusing with 3D art, right before me appeared in my visual field a giant… what was it? A mountain goat, I decided. Staring right at me.

My dad was a Capricorn, but I don’t go in for astrology or signs from the universe, or anything like that, so I told myself, this is just nature. It’s just a goat. Quite a large goat, actually, with impressive, curling horns. We stood staring at each other for a solid minute. He seemed to regard me casually, not a threat, so I felt the same toward him.

Do you exist? I wanted to ask him. He gave a little snort and ambled down the trail, a buddy appearing and following him.

I reached the top, sat, and watched the desert from my perch for a while. I glugged water, swishing it around my mouth. Everything felt delicious, the sun, the breeze on my skin. I could see planes banking toward the airport in the distance, coming in to land. Landing lights twinkled, even in the stark daylight.

They don’t know, I thought, thinking on all these people on the flights, buckling for landing, gathering their things, entirely unaware of my dad, and his departure. We’re all so oblivious to each other, wrapped up in our own little goings-on. I tried to imagine their lives, what they would go on to after landing.

He was a pretty amazing dude, I wanted to tell them. Hilarious, with a generous laugh. I’ve never met anyone more comfortable in their own skin. I loved that about him, and wished I could feel that way.

Here I was, at fifty, having done all these things that I’d thought would have made me feel okay. I’d survived so much, and built a good life. And yet, there was always a part of me that felt not enough, and worried all the time.

Now, with both parents gone in a one-two punch, too old to be an orphan, but an orphan nonetheless, what would I do?

On my way back down, I passed a trim and fit septuagenarian man in an Army Rangers cap, marching uphill with sinewy arms pumping.

“Just a heads-up,” I said, “there are some pretty big mountain goats on the trail up there.”

“There’s no goats around here,” he said, chuckling. “Those are bighorn sheep.” Definitely nothing to do with Capricorns and my dad, then. I was glad to have that permanently settled.

I remembered that after our long, quiet moment, I’d snapped a quick pic of these obviously-not-goats with my phone.

In the following days, people kept saying to me, You’re the head of the family now, like we were the Corleones. I didn’t feel like the head of anything. I was adrift.

Eighty-eight, people said to me. He had a good run. Sure, I thought, but I would’ve taken just another two hours, so I could’ve said goodbye properly. Sometimes we don’t get the chance.

I never asked him, though I would’ve liked to: How are you so comfortable being you? What’s your secret? There’s so much I never asked.

I walked, every day that week, through the desert. My sisters, stepmom, and I spent mornings and evenings hunkered down in the house. We’d cook together, and tell stories. Every afternoon, I’d head out on the trails, through paddle cactuses, white sage, and sword-like yucca plants, out into this moonlike desertscape.

Indoors, I was me: brother, stepson, husband, father—no longer anyone’s son, technically. But out here, I felt like nothing, in the best way. Nothing to hide, nothing to try to be. No idea of me or not-me. Walking through the desert, walking through my grief. Alone, and not alone, surrounded by inhospitable, deadly beauty. The desert looks like death when you first look upon it, but as you defocus, you see: there’s life everywhere. Nourishment in the most improbable places. I walked and walked.

How much had I missed about this man? We thought we had each other pegged, but my stories about him so often veered into caricature. How well did we see each other, really?

Arriving back at the house, I was reminded of a time when he had lost a big court case, by far the biggest setback in his long career as an attorney. He was devastated. My sister Nicole found him one evening, sitting at the patio table in the backyard, holding a cigar, and staring wistfully into the night sky.

This was a man of blunt certainty, not prone to pondering the unanswerable. Finding him staring up at the stars was highly unusual.

“Dad, are you okay?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, she said, “What are you doing?”

After a long pause, still looking up, he said, “It just never ends.” And then, he repeated himself for effect, like clichéd television writing, looking out through the Milky Way, at space, time, and everything:

“It just never ends.”

“Can you stop?” she asks me.

“Stop what?” I say.

“Making that face,” she says.

“What kind of face am I making?”

“A weird one.”

I try for a normal expression.

“That’s the weird face,” she says.

It’s probably the face I’ve seen when I accidentally hit the selfie/camera flip button, and I think, Good god, what is that?!

Either way, she’s going to have to live with it, at least until she’s out of the house in just over a year’s time. Which, of course, makes me unbelievably sad to think about. Maybe that’s what’s causing this weird face.

Nobody told me how fast this would go. Actually, that’s not true. Everybody told me how fast this would go. Every single parent I ever met with kids older than mine. They all told me this, again and again, for years. I didn’t listen. Nobody does. You can’t possibly know what it’s like until you see them nearing the end of the runway, take-off imminent. Don’t go, I think. It’s not enough time.

She and I visit colleges together. We visit a small liberal arts women’s college and I can see her here. It’s beautiful. And only a three-hour drive.

Three hours away. My baby.

We stroll through campus. “I love it,” she says softly. “Imagine, being in a classroom without dudes.” She’s beaming at the thought.

“Yes,” I say. “That would be amazing.” She could thrive here, in this dude-free learning paradise. The students here look artsy and happy. She has to get out of our small town, I know, but I’m equal parts thrilled and devastated by this whole enterprise.

How does anyone ever feel ready for something like this?

It doesn’t matter; teens help us get ready. She’s sweet with us much of the time, but every so often a fog of extreme annoyance will roll across the landscape. She’ll turn suddenly to me or Emma, and say, “Can you just go somewhere else?”

“Before I had my license,” I tell her when she’s in one of these moods, “I made Nana drop me off two blocks away from the school dance. She asked why and I said, ‘Because! Somebody might see you!’”

I see a tiny half-smile before she says, “Whatever, this is different.”

“It is,” I agree.

“Stop agreeing with me,” she says. “It’s really annoying.”

“I can see that,” I say.

“You’re therapizing me,” she says.

I smile and stay quiet. It’s the only way I don’t annoy her when she’s pushing away.

“You’re being boring,” she says. “I’m going upstairs.”

I adore this human, more than I can say, no matter what she thinks of the faces I make, my weirdness, the things I do, or don’t do. I feel her pushing away in this totally expected, 100% on-track way, and it reminds me, again and again, she’s leaving, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

“I feel like when we annoy them,” Emma says, “we’ve done something right.”

We were staying in a hotel over the holidays, and Chappell Roan came on in the elevator, just the four of us riding down to the lobby.

“No!” our daughter said, turning sharply toward Emma. “No!” our thirteen-year-old son joined in, but it was too late. Emma was already doing a little shimmy with her shoulders. She got the hips going, hands above her head like she was on a dance floor. Both the kids started freaking out. “Stop dancing!” they shouted. “You’re embarrassing yourself!”

“She doesn’t seem embarrassed,” I said.

With a ping, the doors opened to the ground floor, where the same song was playing throughout the restaurant lounge. The kids piled out, attempting a desperate escape as Emma danced behind them, past the low tables and banquettes, around monsteras and fig trees, all the way out into the lobby, right on their tails.

Our daughter will escape us, and not so long after that, our son, but not yet. They’re stuck with us for now. All we can do is dance and embarrass them, showering them with love and mortification, even—or especially—when they push us away.

I think happily on this as I trail all of them, heading out the lobby door toward tacos, out onto the moonlit sidewalk, definitely making some kind of weird face.

What on earth are HVAC filters, I wondered? Is that a thing? I did the math on how long we’d lived in this house, the second house Emma and I had owned together. Eleven years.

“Insane!” I responded.

“Theoretically,” I then texted my pal, “how bad would it be if he waited much, much longer?”

He just sent the crying laughing emoji in response, so I did some googling. Mold, bacteria, decreased lifespan of equipment, higher energy costs. Not good, I thought. But who tells people about these things? How do other folks just seem to know? I always feel like I’m behind, trying to catch up.

Back in 2006, Emma and I moved out of our rented Brooklyn apartment and relocated Upstate, homeowners for the first time. Things were great for a few weeks, until we woke up one February morning to a frosty bedroom, our breath visible when we spoke.

In the city, we’d just turn up the thermostat when we wanted it warmer. I located and tapped the thermostat, which looked tip-top to me. It was set at 68. I flicked it off and back on, but nothing happened.

“Maybe it’s the heater,” Emma said.

I plonked down to the basement, and found a large vertical cylinder against the wall. I rapped on it. No signs of life. There was a decal with a phone number for a heating guy, so I called him and told him our heat was broken. He was there in minutes.

“Hey buddy,” he called up from the basement, “You know you’re out of oil, right?” I could hear him chuckling to himself.

“Right… oil,” I said to Emma, who was shivering in her robe in the kitchen. “We need oil for heat. It’s not just the thermostat that heats the house, apparently.”

The guys at the contractor counter in our local hardware store sound like they’ve smoked for a million years. They talk in fractions that I don’t understand. I don’t know why, but I’m very keen for them to think I know what I’m talking about. I want to seem capable.

Whenever I’m in there, there’s often this one customer chatting at the counter, a bearish titan of a man who looks like he demos houses with his fists. It’s always in front of him that I’m called up to ask something dumb.

“Do you have HVAC filters?” I say. The counter guy comes back with the usual baffling question, something like: “You want the three-eight or the double-O?” I feel helpless.

I should just come clean here. Let them know I’m not a guy’s guy. I don’t watch football. I was raised by an Australian mom. Whatever men were around didn’t seem to know anything about fixing anything. They mostly just left things broken. I was basically raised by wolves. So, what actually is an HVAC filter, and how bad is it if you never replace it for eleven years?

I don’t say this though. Instead I say, “I think I need the three-eight?” The big dude next to me frowns and cocks his head, looking doubtful. “Or possibly the double-O could be good?”

They set me straight, and back at home, I figure out where the filter is: top of the stairs, in the hallway ceiling. I get a ladder from the basement, and after some wrangling, I get the old filter out, which is full of a dark green fuzzy funk that I will not be telling the guys about the next time I’m in the hardware store. I trot it out of the house, and chuck this foul situation into the trash, slamming the lid. It’s like it never happened.

I slide the fresh, clean filter in, and screw the vent cover back on. Standing at the bottom of the ladder, I feel absolutely handy. Look how unbelievably DIY I am. Then I notice I’ve screwed the vent cover on backwards. Not a problem. I climb back up and get it flipped and screwed back in. The ladder’s still up when Emma comes home.

“What’s with the ladder?” she asks, when I find her in the kitchen.

“Just replaced the HVAC filter,” I say casually.

“Nice,” she says, zero percent impressed.

“Yep. Super important thing to do, every few months,” I say.

I make a mental note to tell the kids this crucial bit of life wisdom. I don’t want them wandering the earth out there, unaware of basic things. That’s no way for a person to live.

“Well,” Emma says, pouring her tea, “I’m happy you’re on it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Almost every single song you listen to is depressing,” she said. 

Elliott Smith, Beck’s Sea Change, Nick Drake, Sigur Ros, Radiohead, The Smiths, Bowie’s Heathen. All in heavy rotation.

“It feels like the same song, over and over,” she said. “And it’s bringing me down.”

This felt similar to when, earlier that year, a creative director flipped through my design portfolio and said, “You sure do like blue, huh?” I hadn’t seen it until that moment. So much blue. How exposed I felt.

I wanted to defend myself in both cases, to say, Show me a better color than blue, which, like the sky, contains everything.

Wanting Emma to be happy, though, I asked her what she’d rather listen to. My brain went all staticky when she started answering. Somewhere in there I heard a sound that was something like “Clapton,” and another sound like “Dave Matthews Band.”

“Maybe I can wear headphones?” I suggested.  “Or maybe we both could?”

“Forever?” she asked. At least she was thinking long-term. We could make this work.

We settled into a happy common ground with The Beatles, Prince, David Bowie—more Heroes than Heathen. She sometimes let me get away with Radiohead for a song or two, until—

“It’s just relentlessly bleak,” she said. “Why does he always sound so sad?”

“Because he’s a genius,” I said.

“Doesn’t it make you sad, listening to all this?”

“A little. But in a good way.”

“What’s there to be so sad about?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I was happy to have her here, right in front of me. I then thought of my relationship failure rate thus far, which was a clean 100%. The combination of feeling madly in love and doomed to failure is actually the perfect time to listen to Elliott Smith.

I grabbed my headphones and went for a run. 

When our daughter Evie was born in 2008, I began immediately with The Beatles. We sang jaunty duets, accompanied by my ukulele, her early favorite being the one she called “Lellow Suffarine.”

She became fixated, even as a toddler, on John Lennon. She sang the haunting verses of “A Day in the Life,” and asked endless questions about him. I felt a surge of pride, with a small side of concern. Would it be better for our tiny girl, I wondered, if she was a bit more like her mom, more inclined toward McCartney’s sunshine?

It wasn’t until Covid, though, in Evie’s teen years, that I noticed a marked shift in her playlists toward the truly melancholy. Stuck in her room, watching her last year of middle school through a screen, she discovered The Cure, The Smiths, Joy Division, Elliott Smith, Radiohead, Mazzy Star. Yes, I thought. And also: Oh no.

What a barrage of sorrowful things around us then: the pandemic, losing both of my parents (her Nana and Papa), Evie’s best friend in the world moving far upstate, our best family friends relocating across the country. It felt relentless. 

In times like these, what’s more satisfying than dabbing the brush into the bluer end of the palette? What’s more comforting than the perfect moody song, sung by someone who’s also feeling a bit lost, lonely, and down? 

Evie and I spent many long drives together, in our car cocoon with snow swirling against the windshield, taking turns serving up two songs each, her then me. Just listen to this, we’d say. Oh, and this one. My god, this one.

She introduced me to some newer melancholy artists like Mitski and Cigarettes After Sex.

“Can we play The Bends, start to finish?” Evie asked me on one drive. She rolled the volume up to gloriously way-too-loud as the hypnotic drums and shimmering guitars kicked us into “Planet Telex.” We listened together, driving toward the sinking winter sun, and I was positively brimming with happy-sad.

 Everything is… broken. Everyone is…  broken.

—Radiohead, “Planet Telex”

I’m standing near our piano, waiting. Evie spends hours each day here, playing Debussy and Chopin. But now she wants to play me one of her own songs, the latest.

Her shoulders rise and fall with a full breath, and she starts in. It’s in 3/4. I hear influences of Elliott Smith and Bon Iver, but more than anything, I hear her. I’m awash in a confusing mix of feelings, listening to her play and sing. It’s so beautiful. But also, heartbreaking. The dad in me thinks: Please, please don’t let my sweet girl be so sad. 

“Well?” Evie asks me afterward.

I am choked. “It’s absolutely gorgeous,” I manage to say. “I love it so much.” 

“You know I don’t feel like that all the time, obviously,” she says. She plays a dark little chromatic bass run.

“Obviously,” I agree, failing to sound as breezy as I’d hoped. 

She laughs. “It’s just a song, Daddy.”

It’s just a song. And so much more than a song.

Everything can be so beautiful. And heartbreaking. And often hilarious. And more often, something indescribable that silences me completely. They all feel like facets of the same jewel, that I can hold and turn in the light, admiring different aspects. 

What is this life? How am I lucky enough to know these humans? And how short our time is together. It’s almost unbearable. And yet, here we are.

Emma steps into the room to listen, standing next to me now.

I say to Evie, “Will you play that one again, my love? Your mom will love it.” Evie shrugs and turns back to the piano. 

Of course I no longer believe that all love is doomed, or that everything’s broken, but those are still my favorite kinds of songs. Transforming all that blue into something beautiful is perhaps the most hopeful thing a person can do.

Evie sways a little, playing the intro to her melancholy waltz. My eyes fill with happy tears when, over a minor chord, she starts to sing.

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The very first patient I asked, a sixty-something woman with acute hypertension, said, “You want me to say that asshole’s name?” 

We’re supposed to try to keep patients calm, and I’d failed spectacularly. This woman, her blood pressure now stratospheric, took the opportunity to lecture me for most of the six-minute ride to the hospital. She wanted to explain to me all the things I didn’t know about politics and the world—which, to be fair, is a lot. There wasn’t nearly enough time.

At the emergency department, I helped her scooch from our stretcher over to a hospital bed. I got the nurse’s signature on our ambulance’s digital tablet, then said to the woman, “I hope you feel better soon.” She frowned at me.

“Yeah? Well I hope you feel better soon,” she said, unconvincingly. This is one of my wife’s biggest pet peeves, people saying polite phrases in a grumpy way.

It wasn’t her fault, though. I never asked a patient about the president again. 

I know an EMT who asks the more surreal question, “Is Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?” It makes me laugh, but it’s not helpful. We’re trying to assess the patient, not catch them out. 

Sure, the answer is a mouse. Sort of. It’s also just overlapping circles in a particular configuration, which is somehow the intellectual property of a corporate entity.

What we really want to know is if the patient is alert and oriented—to person, place, time, and event. Do they know who they are, where they are, roughly what time it is, and what’s going on?

From a relative standpoint, these are easy answers. I’m Rob, and I’m sitting in our living room. It’s early morning. There are high winds whistling around our house, seeping in through the window sashes. The branches outside are waving frantically in a diffuse amber light, and I hear a truck backing up somewhere, beeping away in the distance.

From an ultimate standpoint, though, these questions, like the one about Mickey Mouse, are more complicated. Who am I, really? Where is this place? When is it, right now? And what is it that’s happening? 

I’m reminded of my favorite Zen koan:

Emperor Wu asked the great teacher Bodhidharma,
“What is the first principle of the holy teaching?”
Bodhidharma said, “Vast emptiness, nothing holy.”
“Who are you, standing here in front of me?” asked the Emperor.
“I don’t know,” said Bodhidharma.
The Emperor didn’t understand.

— Blue Cliff Record Case 1, translated by John Tarrant & Joan Sutherland

I like noticing the unanswerability of even basic questions, from a certain standpoint. I find it even more helpful, though, to cultivate a deep unknowing about other people. To approach them as an open question.

Like these high winds, which have been whipping around us for days now, there are understandably so many intense emotions right now. I feel them, too.

So, I’m taking a cue from EMT training. We have two basic principles:

1. Deal with any immediate threats to life first.

2. Remain curious about the person in front of you, assuming nothing.

Assumptions can be deadly in EMS. Someone might appear to be drunk, but it could be hypoglycemia, or stroke, or any number of possibilities. I don’t know. I ask patients questions about their symptoms and history, and look at signs, trying to understand what’s happening. It’s helpful to stay open and curious. Whatever’s true in this moment might be completely different a minute from now, for better or for worse.

I’m trying to bring this to my regular life, too. I’d much rather hear your side of the story than make up my own story about you.

If someone says Mickey Mouse is a cat or a dog, I’ll have some questions, for sure. I’ll feel a strong sense that they’re wrong, or maybe just not a very good listener. But inside or outside the ambulance, there’s a deeper question I’m trying to understand about anyone I meet, which is: What’s it like to be you right now?

I might notice a lightness in that, feeling less certain, more like wide open space, awaiting an answer.

“There is no knowing for a fact. The only dependable things are humility and looking.”

― Richard Powers, The Overstory

We were not used to this sort of thing, a luxury vacation to a tropical island off the coast of Queensland, Australia. My mom had a new husband – number three of six – a banker named Dale who carried a fat money roll with a $500 bill in the middle, was missing a ring finger, and looked exactly like Kirk Douglas. My sister and I were watching him closely.

For now, though, we left Dale and our mom playing backgammon by the hotel pool. We wandered off to find something to do, rather than waste our vacation hunched over some dumb game, rolling dice.

“What kind of rider are you?” the man assigning horses asked me. He pointed to a sign strapped to the thatched ceiling above his head showing a spectrum from beginner to expert, each with its own illustrative graphic.

“Expert,” I told him, looking at the galloping person-horse combo. There was zero basis for this, other than having seen The Black Stallion many times.

“We’ll give you Domino,” he said. “Just a heads-up: he’ll want to run on the beach. You good with that, mate?”

“Of course,” I said, shrugging.

Most of the ride was on trails up and down Mt. Kootaloo, winding switchbacks through the rainforest. Domino was locked into a swaying amble as sulphur-crested cockatoos screeched and flapped in the trees around us, warning us off. I patted his sweaty, twitching neck. All muscle. I liked this horse.

Domino began snorting when we got toward the bottom of the hill, where the rainforest opened up to white sand and a turquoise bay. He started a sort of equine tapdance to get out from behind the lead horse. He was snorting and whinnying now, a full-body tremor overtaking him.

“You’re okay, boy,” I said, patting his neck again. Expert, I thought happily, settling into the saddle.

Domino didn’t agree. He stomped grumpily a few times, then muscled the horse in front of us aside and bolted for the open beach. I pulled the reins, but Domino lifted his head high, flinging it side to side. He then dropped his head slightly, ears perked, gave one final snort, and we were off. Flying.

We tore across the beach, through a pack of sunbathers, galloping and leaping over limbs, towels, people crying out in fear and shouting curses after us. 

“Sorry!” I yelled helplessly into the wind. I was no longer the rider now, just the hanger-on. As this massive, chaotic beast thundered down toward the water’s edge then cut left along the break, we tore into a full Kentucky Derby gallop. We rode into a fierce wind, hoofbeats underneath, sprays of seawater, me chanting to myself quietly, “No no no no no....” I dropped the reins and grabbed the saddle horn, gripping with both hands. This is it, I thought. This is how I will die.

We thundered through ankle deep emerald water and seafoam. I felt sure Domino would trip, sending us end over end, but he only surged faster. A single, dumb thought entered my panicked mind: You need to jump.

Luckily I was frozen in fear, clutching the saddle horn and whimpering softly to myself. In the deafening rush and whistle of the wind, I became aware of some nearby sounds, hoofbeats behind me, off to the left. Someone is coming to save me, I thought. They pulled up next to us, this other horse and rider. I chanced a quick peek and saw my little sister, reins in hand, grinning like mad.

“Whoooo!” she yelled. I heard her laughing into the wind as they passed us.

We reached the end of the beach, our horses slowing to a canter, then a trot, then obediently parking themselves near the next trailhead, panting, as they’d done hundreds of times before.

“Oh my god, that was crazy!” she said. “Wait, are you crying?”

“What? No!” I said, wiping my face. “It’s just the salty air.”

My sister and I fought often and fiercely, unless anyone else criticized one of us, in which case we became a gang of two and turned on them. We shoplifted together. Threw things at cars. Made dinner for ourselves. We were completely lawless, always unsupervised.

In the past year alone, we’d gone from living in a tree-smashed house, with a plastic tarp over our buckled roof, to vacationing with this new banker stepdad on a tropical island. We still barely even knew him.

When it came to our mom’s boyfriends and husbands, my sister and I were like two meerkats watching a shadowy creature approaching. We lived on high alert, assessing every expression, every utterance, all in service of answering the most important question: Is this someone we need to worry about?

There had been a whole mess of difficult men, a few dangerous ones, the occasional decent one. I saw that Dale was, above all, good and sweet. Harmless. In assessing people, I was truly an expert—or at least felt myself to be.

I wasn’t wrong about Dale, exactly. In the darkest of my teen years, when my mom and I were in the course of a particularly vicious verbal exchange, I said something I can’t recall, some deep insult to her character that silenced the dinner table. Dale then came the closest I ever heard to him raising his voice.

“Oh for gosh darn sakes, Rob” he said to me, barely above normal speaking volume.

My sister and I looked at each other and cracked up. I saw Dale’s unhappy surprise at our laughter and felt immediately ashamed. He is so good and kind, I thought, and I am neither.

Nonetheless, Dale stuck with us. He moved us into a big, beautiful house in Holmby Hills, down the street from Tori Spelling’s mansion, which had a zoo and a bowling alley. My sister went to birthday parties there.

In this new life, around this undeniably good man, I had a deep, unsettling sense: I deserve none of this. I am a liar, a thief, a bad person. I confirmed this daily by stealing from the massive coin jar Dale kept on his dresser, plunking stolen quarters into arcade games at Westworld.

In my junior year of high school, I was driving to the beach with friends when one of them mentioned seeing Dale in the L.A. Times. Something about the casino he was a partner in. My friend used the word RICO, which was new to me. I thought of the Spanish word, which just like in English, means both kinds of rich. Qué rico, I thought. 

The feds seized our house and all of our assets, arresting Dale on our front lawn. How had I been wrong about him? If I was bad, what did this make Dale? Can someone who only ever treated me wonderfully be a bad person? 

Either way, I knew this feeling: everything falling apart. Like going from a leisurely trail walk to utter chaos at full speed. I’d been on this out of control ride many times before. Like always, I wanted to jump, but at a certain speed, all you can do is hold on. 

There was a trial, a conviction, another divorce. Federal prison. My mom would go on to marry Dale’s mob attorney, and then two more men after that. She was on her own wild ride.

Over decades, with seasons of loss, joy, chaos, and occasional calm, I began to remember differently, to see differently. We were all often just hanging on: Dale, my mom, my sister, and I. How could any of us be anything other than a person deserving of love? 

This is the thing about going through things: it feels less lonely as you start to recognize it everywhere. Seeing what everyone endures, labels become meaningless: good, bad, victim, villain, beginner, expert. Each of us is both all and none of those things.

Somehow, here we are, all of us hanging on dearly while trying to remember how to be brave, how to become one with this galloping horse, how to laugh into the roaring wind.

Many thanks to of A Questionable Life for ultra-helpful feedback on an earlier draft.

There’s a slow dawning that I am this person. That I am a person. Tones and static come through the pager’s tinny speaker. A male dispatcher’s voice: “Dutchess 911 to [fire department name], priority 1, difficulty breathing, [location]... ”

I’m on my feet before fully waking, then down the stairs, stepping into my EMS pants and boots, jacket on, radio slung over my shoulder, out the door in just over a minute.

Ninety minutes later, the call’s over, and I’m back in our driveway. The dogs don’t stir. They somehow recognize my signature sounds, I think, my specific way of opening the back door. It’s possible they’re simply the world’s laziest watchdogs, but I imagine that if someone else was at the door, they’d be going apeshit, keeping everyone safe.

I walk past the kids’ rooms, then ease back into our bedroom, the sleeping shape of Emma on the left of our bed in the semi-dark. I make a neat little pile: EMS pants and shirt folded just in front of my nightstand, pager back in its place, then slide back under the duvet.

No matter the length of the call, Emma always mumbles sweetly in her half-sleep, “That was a long one. Everything okay?”

“Everything’s fine,” I say. I lie awake in the dark as her breathing slowly deepens.

I remember a 3am call for a lift assist, this sweet elderly woman who keeps apologizing for calling 911. She’s in her bathroom in a pink nightgown, seated on the floor with her back against the shower door.

“I’m sorry to trouble you, dear,” she says. “Sometimes this silly knee just gives out on me.”

“It’s no trouble at all,” I tell her. “I’m glad you called us.” 

My partner and I help her up and over to the couch, then check her vitals, which are fine. We walk her back to bed, and pull her flower print comforter back over her. She nods toward a black-and-white photo in a silver frame on her nightstand. There she is, young and beautiful in a lace wedding dress, beaming, what looks to be her husband next to her in a dark suit with a military-style crewcut.

“That’s William,” she says. “We were married over sixty years, until he passed last June. I miss him every minute.”

“I’m so sorry,” I say. We talk about him and their life together. She asks if I’m married, and I say yes, almost twenty years now. She asks if we have kids, and I say yes, two teens.

“Hold them all close,” the woman says. “Cherish them.”

I recall a night back in Brooklyn, Emma and I simmering in the aftermath of our first proper argument. We fumed in silence, going to bed after some angry, wordless toothbrushing. She turned away from me in the dark, the silhouette of her back rising and falling less than a foot away. Just reach out to her, I thought. All you have to do is put an arm around her, and everything will be okay.

I couldn’t move. The atmosphere pressed down on me with infinite weight, holding me in place. I felt sure: I will lose her. I stayed awake like that, drenched with a sense of hopelessness, until Emma’s breathing deepened, and my own breath eventually followed.

A few years later, when our daughter was born, I couldn’t bear when she and Emma were out driving somewhere, imagining our baby girl in her carseat, with Emma’s nervous driving. It’s true what they say: it feels like going around with your heart outside your body. This drove me back into therapy.

“What if something happens to them?” I asked the therapist.

“It might,” she said, nodding slowly. “Anything can happen at any time.” 

I’d wanted a different, easier answer. My previous therapist in the city would have smiled warmly and helped me to see that everything’s okay. “What is it that’s actually wrong or missing right now?” she would say.

Both of them are 100% right, of course. The early days of being in a relationship, and of being a dad, were surges of all-encompassing love, punctuated by the occasional panicked recognition of loss. How do I love, despite loss, I wondered? I worried over this like heads, then tails. Flip, flip, flip.

All these years later, love feels not just tinged, but fully colored with loss. I love you, and I know at any moment, we may lose each other. One side of the coin is never without the other. 

Again and again, I’m caught up in self-absorption, needless worry, entranced by stories. Then something awakens me, a thrum that pulls me up and out of walking slumber. This insistent pang of loss. Here they are, in front of me, these people I love. My son spooning in mouthfuls of yogurt at the kitchen island, Emma pouring her tea, my daughter mixing watercolors to capture last night’s aurora sky. It’s all right here, vibrating with everything, and I remember: Cherish them. Cherish this.

I feel this love/loss coin in my hand, both heads and tails pressing into my flesh. Like I’m reaching out for them in the dark, through a weighty atmosphere, across an imaginary divide, finding them right there, next to me, breathing in, breathing out.

Cover image aurora watercolor by Evie Tourtelot