The day after her mother called, Tessa woke up with Julie on the mind.
It wasn’t nearly the first time she dreamt of her–or more aptly, that Julie had rudely interrupted her dreams and woken her up. It always happened when Tessa least expected it, as if her mind was rejecting any attempts to forget the other girl. Just when she thought (or rather, didn’t think) Julie was totally forgotten, Tessa’s mind wormed her back in.
When thinking about Julie, Tessa involuntarily clung to the last time the two of them had seen each other. It was the summer after high school, right before the two of them moved away for college. They met in The Golden Diner, in Chinatown, then proceeded upwards through Manhattan and ended in lower Central Park by late evening. Tessa remembered a feeling of powerful hunger, both physically and psychologically; she looked at Julie like she wanted to devour her. There was a sense of magic perpetuated by their surroundings, their own inner turmoil, and being there together. It made them bold.
“We’ll see each other again,” Tessa had said very firmly, as if she could ensure her words came true by making them sound convincing enough. She found that sounding uncertain would prevent an event from coming true. It was movie logic, through and through–when characters sounded certain in declarations, it typically meant the directors had no intention to treat the event (in this case, Tessa and Julie’s future meeting) as something up-in-the-air, and the announcement of this future event was done not to create drama but simply to establish its future occurrence.
Julie stared at the darkening sky. Lampposts like fairy lights illuminated her face in all the right ways.
“I’d probably die if I never got to see you again,” she responded. It sounded very earnest. Tessa vaguely believed it, in the way she vaguely believed everything Julie said—with a protective layer of apprehension.
That was five years ago. It was rawer back then, or more accurately, a few months later when Tessa woke up to realize she hadn’t talked to Julie in weeks. That day, she had messaged Julie something weak, shallow, and Julie responded in a similar manner. Afraid of themselves and one another, they put up their own respective barriers. Ironically, their fears of drifting apart expedited the process. The cruelest part was their shared hyper-awareness of what was happening but inability to stop it.
Tessa never told anyone else about her occasional Julie-centered dreams because it felt deeply shameful to admit her fixation on someone she hadn’t seen in so long. There was something desperate about it, and a bit delusional, and every time she imagined trying to explain it to somebody else, she could never do so without the irresistible rationalization of her hang-ups as something far more profound than they actually were. Besides, there was something deeply private about it, and it made her squirm to imagine opening up and being pathologized by someone else. Worse, she hated the inevitability of being stereotyped, typecast, placed in a mental box with all the other girls like her in the world, which was the cruel if natural result of toeing the line wherein people knew you but didn’t understand you. Since nobody understood her, she couldn’t have them knowing her, either.
Now, after five years, she was dragging herself out of bed to go through the daily motions—to make breakfast, to brush her teeth, get dressed and leave her Brooklyn studio apartment. It was summer and thus already bright outside, which made Tessa feel a bit ashamed for feeling so disoriented and half-asleep.
She was on edge for the entire morning, but it was with good reason.
The day before, her mother had called Tessa to let her know that, after months of uncertainty, her husband, Tessa’s father, had died.
In some strange way, she felt ashamed that the phantom troubling her was not her dead father. As though he had not deemed her worthy enough to return for, or, alternatively, that it was a failing on her part–a lack of a strong enough desire to see him again.
Maybe it was because Tessa had been deeply un-filial in her actions. It wasn’t fully her fault–her parents, unsentimental people, had told Tessa not to needlessly linger around the hospital room. That her physical presence while her father languished in his bed would do nothing for any of them. Before she was their daughter, she was an adult with her own life to lead. But it was unfair to blame her parents. She had, of her own volition, stayed away–she didn’t like the claustrophobic cleanliness of the hospital room, the faint, sickly smell, and the inevitability of her father’s death confronting her. His death becoming a question not of if but when disquieted her in a uniquely selfish way.
She supposed death, for everyone, was a question of when and not if. But for people like her, death was a purely abstract concept. It was the sort of thing which happened to other people. Other people like her father, so it seemed.
Staying away had been a double-edged sword. On the one hand, she was able to ignore reality in a way impossible to do when in front of her own two eyes—on the other hand, it meant a nagging voice constantly pursued her. It was guilt and potential regret. It told her that not only was it her moral duty to visit her father, but it was also what she had to do for herself. If she didn’t, it told her, she would regret it deeply when she was unable to. At some point, the moral imperative aspect had become totally overshadowed by fears of waking up a year, half a year later and thinking to herself if only I had spent those last months wisely…and now I’ll never get the chance again.
It meant that a few weeks ago she had seen her father for the last time. She entered the room while he was asleep, and felt bad about waking him, so she sat there and scrolled through Instagram, feeling stupid. What else was she supposed to do, in that moment?
“You’d rather pay attention to your phone than your dying father,” he accused, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. He had woken up without her noticing.
“You were asleep,” she responded, defensive.
“I’ll be gone, soon, and then you’ll regret it,” he said, and though she assumed he was half-joking it was hard to tell. She prickled up, even though she knew it was wrong to do. It took effort to suppress her natural urge to defend herself and move on.
“How are you feeling?” she gently asked, placing her hand on top of his. He coughed weakly and looked up at her with dull brown eyes.
“Terrible,” he candidly said.
“Would you like me to bring you anything?” she asked.
“Let me think.” He lapsed into silence, then, “well, if you think of anything, you can bring me it. Nothing in particular. I’m content here.”
The conversation felt very strange and out of place. It was what might transpire back at home, but transposed to this liminal space it felt intensely off-putting.
“Have you been keeping up with the news?” she asked.
“I don’t see much point!” he exclaimed, almost jovial. “Those are all things which are other people’s issues to deal with, now.”
“What have you been doing, then?”
“Your mother’s here most of the time. We talk. I read, when I can. And watch TV when I can’t. We got a month-long Netflix subscription, and I can’t imagine we’ll need it for any longer than that.”
She hesitated, at that. Throughout the conversation, she had become incredibly aware that, although he was the one dying, she was the one afraid to even touch upon the topic. Her fear stiffened their interaction as she asked stock questions. She didn’t really want to be here, talking to him. She didn’t feel all the better for it—in fact, she felt far, far worse.
“I’m afraid,” he said, and she jerked back to reality. Her grip on his hand tightened.
“Of what?” She didn’t want him to say it. This was her father. A display of vulnerability on his part would be too much to bear.
“Of starting new TV shows,” he admitted. “I’ve been watching shows I’ve already watched, mostly. If I start one, I’m constantly afraid of dying midway through. I’ll never get to know how it ends.”
Her grip loosened.
“It doesn’t matter much, anyways,” she said.
“Well, it’s hard to shake these worries,” he said.
It was a fear she had never considered. The flip side had always been more of a point of concern—that the writer or actors in a TV show would die before it got completed, leaving her on an eternal cliffhanger.
“I’m just watching the old shows, over and over again,” he said. “I forgot a lot of them. That, or episodic shows. A lot of Grey’s Anatomy.”
“Oh, you’ll never finish that,” she responded.
“That’s what you’d think. But I’m already on season 13. It makes me wonder if I should have spent that time watching something better. But like you said, it doesn’t matter much, anyways.”
“You still can switch,” she mumbled. “Watching something good. Don’t have regrets.”
He half-shrugged, a gesture which seemed monumental.
“I could,” he responded, but there was nothing definitive about it. His statement was incredibly uncertain. It wasn’t going to come true.
Tessa stayed a while longer, and they talked about nothing important until she felt that he wanted her to go. Only then, with some private relief, did she leave with vague promises to visit again soon. He didn’t believe her, but his distrust was not resentful. He didn’t want her to visit, she presumed, though that might have just been her way of making herself feel better.
In the end, people were dead the moment you saw them last. Once they exited your life, they might as well have died. Julie had indeed died for not having seen Tessa again; her father had died with their last meeting.
Her mother had called last night when her father had finally died to inform her that she would be cremating the body the next day. Tessa responded that she would be there, which should have gone without saying—at least from her mother’s perspective—but had required assertion on Tessa’s part to ensure she stuck to it.
The death of a parent had previously felt like a natural part of life, to her. Obviously, she hadn’t experienced it until now, but she had considered it to be a vague inevitability in every adult’s life, to be bereaved. She wondered if others treated it with the same disassociated callousness. She felt uncomfortable with the idea of people treating her like she was fragile and with the idea of them not acknowledging her suffering.
The former was another form of typecasting, she supposed. Of knowing and not understanding. On the other hand, she was weak and wanted sympathy. Sympathy she wasn’t even sure was earned, since it was hard to objectively assess how affected she was.
She just barely caught the F before it pulled out of the station. Be there soon she texted her mother, who responded with a thumbs up emoji.
Tessa got to see her father’s body one last time before the cremation. He looked impossibly frail. She felt the urge to kiss or hug him, but refrained, instead clinging tight to her mother’s hand.
In the three-hour period during which the cremation happened, Tessa and her mother got lunch at a crappy diner. Neither of them was very hungry and could only pick at their food. Their conversation, too, was idle and aimless. It was as though they were trying to relearn basic communication skills which had been robbed of them. It was a relief to return to the crematorium and pick up his urn.
“Where did he want his ashes scattered?” Tessa asked her mother, who really was holding up remarkably well, considering her husband of 30-odd years had just died. No stranger on the street would assume she was carrying such emotional baggage. Tessa was almost envious, and another, cruel part of her felt spiteful in her confusion. Why wasn’t her mother more upset? It felt unfair and seemed to point towards some larger conspiracy, as though her mother’s lack of grief was necessarily emblematic of something dark and shady. The thought made Tessa feel guilty.
“Coney Island,” said her mother. “Feeding the fish after he’d eaten so many of them himself.”
“Do fishes really eat ashes?” Tessa asked. Her mother shrugged. “I’ll google it.”
She searched it up and received unsatisfying responses which didn’t seem to even consider that one might want to purposefully feed fish using ashes. Google told her that ashes were bad for fish, and going down that rabbit hole she found a site detailing where exactly one was allowed to scatter ashes.
“I don’t think we’re allowed to scatter ashes at the beach, mom,” said Tessa. Her mother frowned. “Look, the EPA apparently says you need to be at least three miles out.”
“That’s nonsense,” her mother responded.
“It’s bad for the environment because they’re non-biodegradable,” Tessa read. “Well, what are we going to do?”
“What can we do?” asked her mother, kind of helplessly in a way which made Tessa feel guilty all over again. She suddenly regretted her implicit ways of placing all the pressure on her mother—perhaps she had semi-intentionally been pushing her just to get her seemingly infallible mother to crumble. She back-pedaled.
“I’m sure nobody will mind,” Tessa said.
“We can’t do it in summer, though,” her mother said. “Too many people. In winter, then.”
Tessa stared down at the urn cradled in her mother’s arms.
“So we’ll keep it around,” she blankly surmised.
“It’s fine,” her mother said. “I’ll just need to be very careful not to knock it over.”
Tessa frowned. Something felt very wrong about coexistence with the ashes of your dead husband, with being forced to constantly confront a metal container housing the very little which remained of him. She supposed it was normal. That didn’t mean she liked it.
“What if I keep the ashes?” she offered. Her mother stared at her before laughing.
“You would knock it over right away!” she exclaimed. “What kind of ashes-scattering is that?”
“I’m not that clumsy!” Tessa weakly protested. “Hey, I wouldn’t.”
“It’s fine, it doesn’t take up so much room,” her mother said. Tessa realized her mother hadn’t realized why exactly she had made the offer, which made her feel better about her mother taking the urn. If her mother hadn’t considered the tragedy of living side-by-side with the ashes, it implied her sensibilities were all different. Unlike Tessa, she might not assign any unnecessary emotional weight to inanimate objects.
They parted ways. Tessa missed the F and had to wait a good seven, sweltering minutes for the next one. When she got home, she opened Netflix, which still had a week left on the subscription. Her father hadn’t survived to use the whole month.
If she started a new show, the subscription would more-likely-than-not run out before she finished. But that was alright. She could always purchase Netflix for another month. She knew that. And still she fell back into her old ruts—rewatching Midsomer Murders, which she used to watch with her father. She wallowed in tragic nostalgia—even enjoyed the wallowing—until her mother called, at which point she got up to stretch her legs around the apartment.
“I just think it’s silly,” her mom said over the phone. “I understand, of course. I don’t disagree with the EPA. They have a job. But realistically, how awful can some ashes be for the beach?”
“It’s a problem if we’re all doing it, I guess,” said Tessa, nudging open the refrigerator with her elbow. “Ash beach.” Her mother laughed.
“Sure! But we’re not all doing it, are we? Most people spend ridiculous amounts of money on funerals, instead. And for us? I mean, where are we supposed to dispose of these ashes?”
“Three miles out in the ocean,” Tessa automatically, sardonically responded. “Or, uh, the parks, I think? We could always do that.”
Her mother went silent for a moment.
“I’d better hang up,” she finally said. “I don’t want to waste my minutes.”
“Mom, don’t be ridiculous, you never use your phone. Don’t hang up for that.”
“Just in case,” was the response she got. “I love you. I’ll see you soon.”
“I love you too,” Tessa begrudgingly said. “See you soon.”
She set the phone down on the countertop while pulling out bread and salami from the fridge. Having got up, she was suddenly incredibly aware of how hungry she was. She lingered on that, for a second. Being hungry meant she was alive. Her father would never feel hungry again. That depressed her, slightly. Of course, it wasn’t as though he would care. Rather than focusing on what he had lost, it was more tragic to think about what she had lost. He didn’t care, not anymore.
She considered calling a friend. But to do what, exactly? She couldn’t imagine venting to somebody else right now; she also couldn’t imagine a normal interaction which wasn’t explicitly haunted by her father.
Part of her problem was that she didn’t feel like she was grieving enough. Life was moving on at an absurd rate. She was sad, of course. She couldn’t imagine not being sad. But there was nothing heart-wrenching, at least not yet.
She ate her dinner. It was delicious, all the more so because she had eaten practically nothing else the whole day. Then she went outside for a walk. It was a balmy summer night. She suddenly felt appreciative of the smaller joys in life—joys which her father could never again experience. In light of that, she went to the Carvel near her and bought an ice cream cake. The guy at the counter barely gave her a glance.
“Do you want anything written on it?” he asked, dutifully.
“No, it’s alright,” she said, eagerly taking the cake in her arms. She almost wanted him to ask, what’s the occasion? But there was nothing intrinsically abnormal about a young woman buying a cake. It made her feel as though she were keeping some awful, conspiratorial secret, which vaguely excited her.
Afterwards, she headed to the 99-cent shop next door. She considered buying balloons—remaining on theme—but as she reached out to grab them, she suddenly felt incredibly pathetic and shallow. Instead, she bought a small pack of plastic green army men. At home, she lined them up on the table next to her bed, where they proudly and fiercely displayed their tiny bayonets. She shoved the cake into her fridge. She wasn’t in the mood for it. She had bought it as an indulgence—the kind of thing you only get on your birthday—because she had stupidly imagined that was what enjoying life to the fullest meant. Now she felt immature and impossibly hysterical. She had done something unnecessary because she thought that was what she ought to do.
For the first time since her father’s death, she cried. It was deeply cathartic and yet somehow completely useless—when she finished, she felt the very same as before, as though the tears had been a temporary hallucination conjured up by her tired, tired mind, as had been the brief sense of weightlessness she experienced. After that, she lay in bed sleepless, hoping to be visited by a ghost. But no one came, and when she finally fell asleep it was dreamless. As she slept, she was as dead to the world as her father, and her physical form might as well have been ashes in an urn.