Missing Persons

On love across the distance

It’s amazing how far away someone can suddenly feel to us. When my wife’s grandmother died, our then-four-year-old daughter was quiet for a long time, then said, “It’s like she lives in Australia now.” 

Our daughter knew I had family in South Australia, people she hadn’t yet met. Down Under and the dearly departed both seemed so out of reach.

I.

A few months into third grade, I came home to find my mom packing a suitcase. She told my sister and me, “Call one friend to let them know you won’t be back to school. We’re moving to Australia tonight.” 

She was out of money, a single mom with two kids in the midst of some sort of post-divorce breakdown. She had no family in the States, so she took us back to her hometown, Adelaide.

We left LAX late at night, my little sister and I sleeping on the plane floor, with stops in Fiji, Sydney, then Adelaide. I felt somehow teleported to my Nana’s sofa, dazed and sipping a glass of lime cordial, surrounded by boisterous uncles, aunts, and cousins. Everything felt dreamlike. 

That night, wide awake with jet lag, I lay in bed wondering how far this place was from home. I wanted to feel the distance between Adelaide and Los Angeles, not conceptually, but really feel it. The distance between this house here and that house there. What was in between?

I couldn’t hold onto the real sense of distance for more than maybe a quarter mile or so. Out my grandparents’ front door and up the sidewalk to the right was the sweet shop, then a park, then eucalyptus-lined gullies. 

After that, it became purely abstract as felt distance. I knew it as it looked on a map. The Adelaide Hills, then “the bush,” followed by the outback, the Blue Mountains, Sydney, and finally the Pacific: horizon after horizon of blue nothing. I felt queasy trying to imagine how far it was. It could only be truly understood—actually felt in the body—as time, not distance.

This is how grief feels to me. The distance from here to the people I’ve lost is now too big to be felt, or understood. I can’t measure it. There’s surely something between me and them now, but it’s indivisible.

Time is no longer a way of imagining how to traverse what’s between us. Time’s just a marker now, unfurling from a stationary endpoint: the time since. 

II. 

After only three months in Adelaide, my mom announced to everyone over dinner one night that we were heading back to Los Angeles. Had the adults not been getting along? I wasn’t sure. Grandpa stopped eating and looked at my mom, then at us kids, for the longest time, quietly stricken. He knew that once she’d decided anything, there was no talking to her.

Each time we left, starting the morning of our departure, Grandpa would fall into fits of great, melodious weeping. 

“Goodbye, Robert, goodbye,” he said through sobs, as we moved our luggage to the trunk of the car. He pulled me in, with the smell of beer and cologne, his whiskers against my cheek. 

“This is the last time you’ll see your old grandpa,” he said, as he told me every single visit.

“Jesus, Dad. Will you get a grip?” my mom said.

Seeing him like this, my little sister and I started crying, too.

“Grandpa’s just a bit emotional,” my mom assured us. “Nobody’s going anywhere.”

We waved at Nana and Grandpa out the back window of the car as we drove away, leaving them in the driveway. Nana waved madly at us, slinging her other arm around Grandpa as he hung his head, unable to look. We rounded the bend, and they disappeared to us, as we did to them.

III.

In between trips, we’d call Adelaide once in a while, but there was such a long delay on both sides, a conversation wasn’t really feasible. 

My “Happy birthday!” would be met with ten seconds of static, like I was talking into a white noise machine. Grandpa’s long-delayed “Thank you, darling” would get buried under my half-shouted “Are you there?” 

Meanwhile, my mom would be flapping at me in the background to wrap it up, as it was four bucks a minute to call Australia back then. That was all we got, these brief, confusing exchanges across the vast distance. They left me feeling farther away. 

When it finally was my last trip to see Grandpa, I was a freshman in college. He’d had a stroke, so I flew from Nashville to Adelaide, on many flights, a day and a night of travel. At his bedside, our conversations were similarly delayed. I could feel the growing chasm between us, something filling in quickly. We were becoming remote to each other.

I hugged him as I left, feeling his stubble on my cheek. This was the last time, I knew. For once, he didn’t mention it.

“Goodbye, Grandpa,” I said. 

He was smoking a filterless cigarette in his one good hand, pinched between his index finger and thumb as always. On the tray in front of him was watered-down whiskey in a baby bottle. He put the cigarette down and raised the baby bottle at me, like a silent toast.

IV.

Decades later, in the midst of her own decline, my mom had gone mute in her deepening confusion. I brought her a coffee table book called Vintage Adelaide, dozens of photos of her hometown, many taken during her youth.

We often turned through these glossy pages together. She tapped meaningfully on the pictures she liked, her eyes widening at buildings and places she’d known in her long ago childhood, on the literal other side of the world from where we sat together, in a memory care facility in Connecticut.

By then, she’d forgotten my name, and perhaps even who I was. And yet we could still reach each other, across this unbearable distance. I knew exactly what she meant, tapping on these photos. She wanted to get to this faraway place. She wanted to go home.

V.

I flew with Emma and our two kids from New York to Adelaide. We hiked up to Morialta Falls in the Adelaide Hills with my aunt and cousins. It’s not far from my grandparents’ old neighborhood.

I doubt Grandpa ever made it up there. He was more of an easy chair guy than a hit-the-trail guy, but I always feel closer to him and Nana when I’m in Adelaide. 

At the foot of the waterfall, we took turns telling little stories about my mom, over the rushing white noise of the cascade. As we did this, we each tipped some ashes into the plunge pool, which turned briefly milky, then slowly back to clear.

VI.

The death of anyone close to us is always a form of salutation, a simultaneous good-bye to their physical presence and a deep hello to a more intimate imaginal relationship now beginning to form in their absence.

—David Whyte

There’s now only the time since, for Grandpa, Nana, my mom, my dad. I spent the majority of our time together living thousands of miles away from all of them. There was always so much distance between us. 

For a while after each one of them died, I felt only loss, which is really just love with nowhere to land.

Over time, I noticed that I think about each one of them now more often than I did when they were alive. I see Grandpa in his easy chair watching the cricket, Nana in the kitchen making tea, my mom in the garden, cutting herbs. Somehow my love for them seems to be growing.

I see them more clearly as the people they were. I’m learning to be more forgiving—of them, and myself—rethinking so much of what I knew about these complicated humans, trying to understand better what their lives were like.

It would have been something to see them through this more generous lens while they were alive, and yet that’s a gift that only loss has delivered. Their absence has brought them closer to me, in this new and unexpected way.

They’re here in the ways that I miss them. They’re here in memories, and stories, and the way the morning light catches my daughter’s blue eyes. What’s between us is continuous, even in the empty spaces. Something vast, sustaining, and completely indivisible.

The Temple of Engakuji was destroyed by fire in 1374. The entire library was consumed and the rare books which the founder, Bukko, had brought from China were reduced to ashes. Priests of the Hachiman shrine came to Enkakuji, concerned about the tragic loss of these ancient texts.

Fumon, the master, said, “None of the texts has been burnt.”

“Then where are they?” asked a priest doubtfully.

The teacher drew a circle and said, “They are in here.”

–John Tarrant

---

Many thanks to

Emma

and

Michael Dean

of

Dean's List

for feedback on an earlier draft.

Thank you for reading This Very Moment. Subscribe for free to receive new posts in your inbox, weekly-ish.