Some Things Cannot be Fixed

A meditation about grief on the death of my father

My father died last Thursday, and I felt empty. No feelings. No response. His death was a fact, like the population of Estonia or the flash point of paper.

Death is the end of possibility. When the soul—or whatever it is that makes us us—slips its tether, and entropy comes to redeem its debts. It is the moment beyond repair.

Some things cannot be fixed.

I was unaware I could feel that much: joy, rage, love, or grief. When one uses the term “profound,” it is often a dramatic stand-in for “amazing” or “really deep.” But profound grief, like its sister profound depression, is not just the well where you can’t see the water from the opening; it is the well where you drop a coin and no sound emerges.

I lost my brother many years ago, in 1998, when he was just 25. He died in an auto accident on the way to ski north of Seattle. My brother was the best of us, funny, kind, a collector of lost, broken people who adored him and whom he granted respect and fellowship. His death was a cratering loss, the kind that reminds you that breathing is not always automatic. My response was convulsive, that is the only word that fits, heaving, heavy sobbing that overtook me and sometimes took me to the ground. I did not know I could feel that much.

Let me clarify. It was not that I was unaware that I could experience pain and grief at that level, though that is undoubtedly true.

I was unaware I could feel that much: joy, rage, love, or grief.

We use ‘profound’ as a stand-in for ‘really deep.’ But profound grief is different. It is the well where you drop a coin and no sound returns.

At first, I tried to suppress my emotions. They were embarrassing, even a bit shameful. Perhaps indulgent. Then I realized I could no more stop them than redecorate the night sky. I didn’t want them to stop. Grief became relief.

There is an old Gaelic term, “caoineadh” (pronounced “keen-oo”), for a high-pitched wail or lamentation among mourners. We call it “keening,” and it is undervalued. In some cultures and other times, ritualized keening is an integral part of mourning. Collective, improvisational and regular, grief as performance. Professional “keeners” exist because in some cultural contexts, the depth and length of lamentation is a measure of dignity and respect.

Lamentation is grief and loss and love. But the last part is the most important. When we are young, we are spoiled for emotion. We have an innate capacity to feel. When we fall in love as teenagers, we don’t starve for emotion; it comes unbidden and leaves when satisfied. We feel with such intensity that the absence can destroy us and our relationships. The couple that drifts apart because they want to feel again is victimized by the terrible irretrievability of youthful emotion. Lamentation taps into that well once more, releasing forces we no longer recognize that terrify and shame us.

But lamentation is love, because there is no lamentation without love. It is the pain of a love that cannot be repaired.

We, or the thing (ego?) we call ourselves, are a dense web of experience. Everything we do, every encounter, pinches and shapes this web, creating a connection here and a nexus there. When we drop a spoon from our tray as an infant and hear a noise, we tie another knot to remember. This web collects and selects, changing form trivially as we walk down the street and more profoundly when we contemplate the moon, our mother, and algebra. The web learns what is us, our fingers and lips and spleen, and learns what we care to hear about and what we are perfectly satisfied with ignoring.

The problem with the web is that while it is within us, and perhaps can be said to contain us, its edges are undisciplined. Those we interact with, especially those with whom we are close, intrude upon it, becoming part of the model that the web holds. Those that we love, and those that we hate or resent, become part of the web, like how a word gets captured in the mind or an AI model, in there, not literally, but essentially.

The assimilation, the swallowing of others by ourselves, makes us whole, human, and connected. The web is gracious and open, willing to accept our arm as part of ourselves, just as it is willing to invite Mom. Whether something is attached by skin, habit, or love is less consequential than the intensity and consistency of a connection. Family does “live rent-free in your head,” because we constantly reinforce the representation through memory and connection.

When we lose someone we love, we break the web. Like an amputated leg, that person becomes a “phantom limb” that leaves real-seeming sensations long after the physical loss. A lost loved one remains a presence of feeling and pain because their place in our web of self remains.

The web cannot tolerate the absence of its alter-ego. So we sob and scream, because we now have a missing part. Grief is the panicked grasping for something that is essential in ourselves and no longer there. Grief is love because without love you can have no grief.

When I lost my brother, I felt the paroxysms of grief for years. Over time, it faded, as the web healed itself and grew accustomed to the absence. The web is the world and ourselves, and as such it is always changing. Repair was possible with the tincture of time.

But some things cannot be fixed. I once believed there was no grief deeper than the one I felt when I lost my brother. I was wrong. There is another kind more corrosive for its ambiguity.

Thursday, my father died. He lay motionless on the bed, having sought rest from a walk and achieving it likely beyond his expectations. But I felt nothing. This is not true, as I felt an obligation to his wife and my family, so I attended his body while the police stood by for hours awaiting the coroner. But I felt no pain, not even relief, until morning when I felt it all.

Rage, sadness, self-pity. Spasms of sobbing. I am blessed to have friends and a fellowship that are a true gift, so I was not alone. Men and women hugged me simply because I needed a hug. Guys who rarely say a word offered their bulk and their safety.

As the days pass, I want to feel that again. I want to feel the sweet release that comes from grief and love and love and grief and the intertwining pain of loss and severance. But I feel only a simmering anger. I am not lamenting, I am seething; taut and angry.

I did not love my Dad, though I understand why others did. He was a charming man who made friends easily and was loved by his doctors and neighbors and those who were granted the grace of light connection. He was also loved by his wife. In many ways, his death became him, his final steps and the beats of his heart captured on his Apple Watch: a terminated collection of metrics. That was his life.

But one cannot, or at least should not, love someone who cannot love them. And my Dad could not love me. He would have stated until his end that he did love me, but he only loved an idea that was not me, because my Dad lacked the capacity to see, which is the foremost requirement for the capacity to love.

When I was in my 40s, suffering from depression that sought to claim my life before I found my escape, I was struggling to understand. I took my father to lunch, and I asked if he could tell me a little about my young life as I hoped to find clues that would illuminate my pain. He responded that he had no memories of me as a child. He knew I liked computers, but didn’t understand me.

I will be the first to admit that I am not conventional, though in many ways I present as such. I was very quiet as a child, but eventually developed into an athlete and student, tall and attractive enough to be socially “legible.” One saw me and “knew” what I was. That was the son my Dad had. Perhaps a little quirky, but passing. In reality, I was passionate about computers, complexity theory, and philosophy. I could not stand noise or light. I worked tirelessly to make friends because I was desperate not to be separate.

But I was separate. I experienced the world differently from other people. I now call it oversampling, but that may be a fancy word for oversensitive. I can’t ignore stimuli the way other people do, so I just feel and see and hear more. My father could never understand this. In fairness, most people can’t, but it didn’t even cross his mind. The me that is me did not exist for him, only the me he was willing to see.

Eventually, my father was diagnosed with narcissism.

The place in the web of me that holds my father is a tangle. I only have one father, and my childhood and the lives of my children had great moments with him. But that limb was amputated. What lives in my web is a charming but self-absorbed, aging man who had a ferocious temper when his priorities were challenged and an addiction to hierarchy, authority, and cruelty.

This cannot be repaired as he is now beyond repair.

Can I repair myself?

Right now, I am fighting my worst instincts to simmer and isolate. I am graced with friends who are not allowing me to do so and excellent relationships with my brothers. I don’t want to call people, but I am, and my friends are calling me out, “What is really happening?”

I am writing.

I feel deeply, but not grief and love; instead, I feel the desultory heat of helplessness and anger at never being seen, and losing any chance of that happening. I long for the keening.