Now That You're Gone

On being alone, and not alone

I was standing at the LAX Budget rental car counter, trying in vain to decline the additional insurance, when my dad died.

“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.”