I didn’t know what to do as the anniversary of Simon’s death approached. I just knew it wasn’t a good idea to stay home alone when it was negative fourteen degrees on a night when the sun goes down at 4:30 in the afternoon. The only thing I would be able to think about was Simon alone in the woods one year earlier. Because it was all I had thought about for weeks, or really, the whole year. I figured it might be better to surround myself with other people trying to get away from that memory too.
Back then, I was working on an Anishinabe reservation in northern Minnesota. There was a feast held one year after the death of anyone in the community. Flyers were posted all over town. It was a small reservation, in a small town. It was hard to miss, but I didn’t need the reminder since I was usually working on the family’s probate case or helping with a custody issue after someone passed away. Growing up in the Midwest, it didn’t feel odd to have an event that the whole town was invited to, but I was also sure that this dinner, the one-year feast, was something I had never done growing up as a white kid in the Midwest. But it seemed like the only thing that made sense.
We picked a restaurant that reminded us all of Simon and one year from the day of Simon’s death, on the edge of Loring Park, just south of Downtown Minneapolis, the ex-girlfriends, some artsy punk kids, some gray-haired-co-workers from the bodega, and his two young children, filed into Jerusalem’s under a clear night sky on one of the coldest days of the year.
***
My love for Star Wars was only lukewarm in the years I watched it as a kid growing up in the 80s. There were Star Wars lunch boxes discarded in the corners of my cousin’s bedroom. Light Sabers in the basement no one played with anymore. My obsession really came when I was twelve and the films were back in the theaters in the mid-1990s. My best friend Sarah and I went as often as her mother would take us. Which was a lot because she was a stay-at-home mom and Sarah’s dad died in a plane crash when she was little, and it always felt like her mom wanted to make sure we were having a good time. She took us to the mall whenever we wanted, and there were curling irons and caboodles full of makeup and late-night movies for all of sixth and seventh grade.
I was a year or two away from joining a bad crowd and quietly disappearing from Sarah’s life forever. But before that could happen, we spent almost every weekend together from the time school got out on Friday to the time it started on Monday morning. We were avoiding dating and dances and spent most of our weekend babysitting her two little brothers. We were thrilled to watch Star Wars almost two decades after its original release in the mostly empty theater with our cheeks blushing. Not because we wanted Mark Hamill or Harrison Ford (okay maybe I wanted Harrison Ford a little bit) but because we wanted one of them to get together with Princess Leia. We wanted to watch people fall in love. And I think we wanted to see a Princess who could do anything and have anyone, get swept off her feet by someone from a lonely planet, someone who didn’t know where his father was, and who maybe couldn’t see, couldn’t even imagine, just how special he was.
***
Playing under the table at Jerusalem’s were the two young children Simon left behind. One of them was my son. Their chubby hands were wrapped around markers and matchbox cars. At the one-year anniversary, our son was just three going on four. He was a rambunctious preschooler, and his sister little older. The death of their father floated around them in the voices of his friends at the table. I tried to get my son to eat the soft pita. But he kept pushing it back, refusing to let go of the markers, racing out to the entryway to look at a red candy machine full of skittles and hoping someone would hand him a quarter.
Mark, one of Simon’s closest friends sat in the middle of the table. His silver hair was pushed back, his tall frame looming, his arms moving through air as fast as he could talk, flamboyant and loquacious –Mark was the distraction we all desperately needed. The pitch in Mark’s voice didn’t falter when he told us about the last evening he spent with Simon at The 19 Bar just around the corner from Jerusalem’s. How he thought Simon would pull out of the rough spot he was in, just like he had in the past. Plates of shawarma arrived at the table and our mouths filled with soft yellow rice. I wasn’t sure if the kids were listening. I wondered if they took it all in. I wasn’t sure that anything we told them, good, bad, or otherwise stuck much—but I was cautious all the same.
Then Mark started telling an old story. “You know I found him up in a tree in the park on a glorious summer afternoon. It must have been three years ago. He was throwing bread out for the ducks from 20 feet up!” Mark threw bits of bread across the table for emphasis. He was dramatic and honest—things I know drew Simon to him. Vibrant and quirky, he was known through the whole neighborhood for his stories and his gossip.
“I spent all afternoon getting him out of that tree,” Mark continued as if we were discussing the weather. The story sounds so innocent. The ducks and the bread. The two of them in the park. Simon up in a tree. Mark never actually said that Simon was contemplating suicide, or that on that day he was on the edge of one of many attempts. He didn’t need to say it, we all knew. Mark was the cavalier, sharp-as-tack neighborhood fixture, who could talk you out of a tree. Take the rope out of your hand.
What he was saying was that he didn’t know he needed to talk Simon out of a tree. Mark was saying what we were all thinking, a whole year of thinking. I wouldn’t have left him alone if thought he was going to do it.
***
I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Tatooine, the lonely planet in a galaxy far, far away where Luke Skywalker grew up. It was nearly uninhabitable due to the lack of water and difficult terrain—mostly dessert sands and hard to pass mountains. The inhabitants had to have moisture farms to sustain life, and most of the population had mainly arrived for mining or nefarious activities. It made sense that it was hot and dry and desolate—Tatooine was described as orbiting two scorching suns. Part of a binary star system, these two suns were stars gravitational bound to each other, making the orbit of Tatooine and life on the planet seem even more impossible.
Binary stars were first observed through telescopes in the 1600s by Galileo and Kepler, and other early telescope inventors and night sky-watchers. They could see that what appeared as one bright star in the night sky to the naked eye, was actually two stars next to each other in space. In the 1800s they began modeling what it would look like if two stars were in each other’s orbits, partly because it seemed so unlikely that two stars were that close, and in the process, astronomers found hundreds of binary star systems where the two stars were bound gravitationally together.
***
Someone called it ‘the deathiversary’ back in those first few years. The name stuck. That night and each year after quickly became something central to everything Simon. Central to my grief too, which seemed to balloon, instead of fade, in the first few years after he was gone. It was restaurants that reminded us of him, in the neighborhood he lived in and loved right off Loring Park.
The second anniversary was bright lights and spring rolls and little kids with chopsticks. Pho Tau Bay was just down the street from Jerusalem’s, another one of Simon’s favorites. That year someone also invited Simon’s old AA sponsor, a large Irish man, Donavan O’Donovan or something like that. Loud and infuriating. Because he believed in The Big Book, because he told Simon The Big Book could save him, because when he spoke at Simon’s funeral he talked about someone else’s death and I didn’t want to hear about anyone else’s death. The Sponsor told us he was in over-eaters anonymous now because he realized he had replaced one addiction for another. I wonder if he came to dinner because he wanted us to absolve him of something. But I didn’t want to give him anything. I was angry and selfish. I hated him because he couldn’t save Simon in the same way I hated myself because I couldn’t save Simon, and sometimes it felt good to share the blame.
A few years later, I would learn that the death anniversary dinner is a common custom in Korea, Japan, Nepal, Russian, Hong Kong, Cambodia, India, and many other cultures. The “death day” it was called in the Middle Ages. Yahrzeit in Yiddish. A yearday in Middle English, and in Swedish, dödsdag. For centuries really, the date of someone’s death was more often known than their birth. The deathiversary is by definition the opposite of the birthday—and until very recently, it was the more celebrated of the two. Birthdays were rarely remembered.
I would learn that most of those places, including the Anishinabe culture I was familiar with, all held the formal feast on the first year, but not necessarily after. For many, that dinner signaled the end of a traditional mourning period. Not that anyone is ever the same or okay a year after losing their loved ones, just that they don’t always continue to hold a ritual. But I didn’t know that until many years later.
It feels foolish to give a date so much power. Several years ago, I started taking immigration cases for Green Card holders. My job as a volunteer attorney was to help them fill out the paperwork to become US citizens. It was generally easy, as far as immigration cases go. They were legally in the states, and they passed the five-year mark required to apply for citizenship. But the paperwork could be intimidating, especially if English isn’t your native language. I quickly found that my African clients, most often from Somalia, had a similar birthday—January 1 of the year they were likely born in. It is a bit of a joke in East African community—as all men and women of middle age who worked so hard to get to the United States were gifted this fictional birthday by U.S. Immigration Services—an agency lacking the foresight to anticipate the difficulty of having dozens of men with the same common names and the exact same birthday.
The same was true for my Karenni clients. The Burmese ethnic group had built an enclave in the Twin Cities, and many of them had spent a decade in Thai refugee camps before making to America. They had children and married in the camps. A life held in limbo by war and persecution. When I asked the mother of two children, Pham, who I worked with on and off for many years, about her birthday she told me that she had three. The one that her culture marked—a traditional ceremony sometime when she was a baby—which I equated to a baptism for lack of reference. Another day that was likely the day she was born, in likely the year she was born, but that is entirely unknown to her because the village she lived in did not keep records of those things. And finally, the birthday that the workers in the refugee camp gave her, hastily, trying to build an identity for her that would allow her to someday, many years later, immigrate to the United States.
Theses dates were all some sort of fiction, and Pham, who had mental and emotional scars from the lives she lived in Myanmar and Thailand, couldn’t remember any of them anyway. Pham was lighthearted, gracious, and terribly anxious. Her children were her interpreters as she was illiterate in both her own language and English. The dates were a series of numbers on a piece of paper she kept in a blue folder full of government issued documents. On her green card—on all the green cards—January first.
Zero one, zero one.
***
After planning so many backyard parties and bowling alley birthdays and trampoline park extravaganzas for my young son, it was baffling to consider that the whole birthday celebration was a relatively new phenomenon. The American reverence for birthdays developed just over the last century. As affluence and smaller families left more time and attention to details—and more time to attend to small children. It is also when Americans started keeping track of the years passing, and age gained more relevance.
I remember my age was the size of my clothing and shoes. It was written on the box of Duplo Legos I coveted. The cake and the presents and the attention signaled the importance of these numbers, this day, in my young mind. I was obsessed with the numbers—the day I was born, the year, the month. All of these would be my favorite numbers.
Growing up in Northern Kentucky, Simon’s mother said he always asked to go to Red Lobster for his birthday. So that’s where we took his kids to celebrate his birthday after he was gone too. The kids would eat fish, and fried tentacles, and crab legs. They ask to play with the lobsters in the tank. (They didn’t get to.) They ordered brownie sundaes and Shirley Temples with too many cherries. We indulged them because their dad was dead. It didn’t feel like well-thought-out parenting, just instinct.
One year an older couple came over and asked, “Whose birthday is it?” They were smiling and the kids were having fun with crayons and tic-tac-toe. Maybe people only go to Red Lobster on birthdays? I was engrossed in conversation with L. We had done this many times—field a question on where the kids dad was, but this intrusion from these perfect strangers well into the 70s felt wildly awkward. Her young daughter made the announcement for us, “It’s our dad’s birthday. He’s dead!” She had a habit of saying this with perhaps too much enthusiasm. My son kept his head down. The awkwardness was just too much for him. The couple mumbled something, not really a condolence so much as shock, and then wandered off. L. and I laughed. Were we setting ourselves up for this by going out for their dad’s birthday? She poked the iceberg lettuce on her plate and said, “We should have asked them if they wanted to join our party.”
***
The variety of binary star systems is wide. They can be different sizes, different distances apart. Their orbit could be rapid, a few hours even, or it could take a millennium to complete an orbit. The two stars could be nearly a lightyear apart, or they can be so close that they exchange materials, passing stardust through space, affecting the overall mass and evolution of their partner.
This exchange between the stars doesn’t always happen, but the evolution of the binaries seems to suggest that they are linked regardless, as their birth is thought to come at the same time—through star formation in a molecular cloud. The molecular cloud is the parent to the protostars forming inside of it, where they gather mass, and sometimes form into a binary system. Which means that the two stars in the system start their orbit like two twins in the womb.
***
For the five year deathiversary we settled on Little T’s, the punk-rock Mexican place where Simon worked in his twenties, where he met his longtime girlfriend and most of his friends in the city. We had been out each year without fail, and as usually we stumbled over a snowbank five feet tall to get in the front door of the restaurant.
The owner of Little T’s appears to be frozen in time. The bandana holding her hair back, her punk rock pink skirt, a black t-shirt—she’s been wearing this uniform for twenty years. She shuttled the kids, now in grade school, around the restaurant, like an overzealous tour guide to a universe of her own design. She told them how their dad had his own roped-off section of the kitchen to keep people out of his space. I could picture him shouting out orders, furrowing his brow at the poorly made nachos. Friends wandered in. My brother showed up. The kids played handheld video games and ate tacos with soft Midwestern hamburger and yellow cheese. I ordered another margarita and looked out the picture window to a snowy sidewalk.
All these familiar places made me feel close to Simon. While some kids are cataloging the important information under the category of “Daddy” when they hear about a missing father—my son seemed to do it in much quieter way. There were times when he posed a question, “Did daddy like riding his bike?” Sometimes this would lead to a good chat. But often when his dad came up, especially around a crowd, he would wander off. He didn’t know where to look, he got pretty quiet, and I didn’t blame him. I wondered at times if the deathiversaries were helping him have a moment to celebrate his father or learn more about him—or if they were a painful reminder of what was missing in his life.
At Little T’s, my son was taciturn. He was hungry. He didn’t want to sit with the other children at their own table. He didn’t want to play with anyone’s new Nintendo Switch. He was not interested in tacos, even though I know he loves tacos. I did not know what was wrong with him. I don’t know if I built up the dinner too much, or if the “tour” of the restaurant bothered him. I don’t know if he’s coming down with the flu, or fighting off another cold, or if he’s angry that I refused to let him have any candy from the little red machine in the hallway out front. I don’t know where his moods come from and I don’t know how to fix them, and tonight is just another night. Except it isn’t. It is the night his father died five years ago. I realized that this means both everything and nothing. Perhaps these dinners aren’t what he needed after all—except I don’t know when we will remember his father if we don’t do something. It seemed as though there are times, after a person has been gone, that you forget to say their name out loud. Forget to tell their stories. I couldn’t remember how often Simon came up at five years, except that he did, but not as much as he used to. I had also heard you shouldn’t force conversation with kids about death, so I tried not to. But what were these dinners, if not forcing the conversation?
The bite of the salt on the margarita stung my lips, dry and cracked in the dead of January. It was just like the night that Simon walked down to the creek leaving everything behind. Headlights and brake lights bounced off the snowbanks outside. I wondered what he would think of all of us spread through those vinyl booths, taking up the front of this restaurant. His old restaurant. Talking about dance recitals and long nights at the office. Exchanging running tips over queso dip. All of us getting older, slogging through the snowy winters, taking the ups and downs of age without him, but always in his shadow.
***
Sometimes when one star in the binary star system has grown much larger than the other, and the two are close together, the smaller star merges into the larger star. As this is happening, sometimes they can see the gas transfer, the energy of one star flying through the space between them. The larger star is said to consume its partner. This is what they think happened to Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars we can see in the sky. Betelgeuse is the upper left shoulder of the constellation Orion, he is red or orange in color and he is huge. In Orion, he is part of a warrior. For the Lakota, he is part of a bison. For other ancient cultures Betelgeuse has been part of a tool, an archer, a dancer, and a hunter.
Astronomers think Betelgeuse may have been a binary start system and that he may have consumed his partner, which would explain his massive size—somewhere between ten and twenty times the size of our sun. It might also explain something astronomers couldn’t figure out—his speed. Betelgeuse is spinning much faster than he should be—he’s old. But if the theory is true, absorbing his smaller binary partner would have increased his energy and caused him to spin faster. All of this leaves Betelgeuse to be described as an intensely bright, rapidly aging, superfast, giant. The one in a pair left standing.
***
I think we kept going out for the deathiversary because it was a hard day. It seemed it would always be too cold and too familiar and too close to something tragic. For all the years, the week leading up to it has been torture. Each Monday a reminder of the day he got fired. Tuesday the day he went to detox. Wednesday when I waited for word from him. Thursday when I saw him last and he said he had a plan. Friday, the night he disappeared. Saturday when they found him. Each day is peppered with places and people who populated the map of that week. Each day was hectic, my anxiety rising, the urgency of saving him—or losing him—rushing through me. My therapist calls this a trauma response. But I know a lot of people who have an inevitably hard day on a deathiversary, and I don’t think it matters so much what you call it. The hot iron of grief carved that day into our heart the moment we answered the call. Found the body. Dialed 911. Watched their chest fall flat.
***
Growing up I didn’t know a lot of kids who had lost a parent, except for Sarah. Her father died in a plane crash just after taking off from the Air Force Base where they all lived in California. Her mom, with her new stepdad, moved them all back to the Midwest. We didn’t know what her real dad’s favorite bands were. We didn’t know what he would think of us with our Glamour Shots make-up and our bangs curled over our foreheads. We didn’t know what he would think of our desperate requests to return to the mall for the third day in a row. We knew what her stepdad thought, with his quiet eyerolls and firm “No.”
Sometimes at night when her stepdad was working late, when her mother was buttering our noodles and pouring the Kraft Parmesan cheese over our pasta, she would tell us all stories about meeting their father and falling in love when they were seniors in high school. Her mom was giddy and bustling when she told us about her prom dress, she was smiling and heart-felt when she talked about their wedding. But I still felt like Sarah got screwed out of something. That there weren’t enough memories for her, that all they had were the recreations her mother could make for them. That the talking and remaking of her father in those quick moments in the kitchen were precious, and never ever enough.
***
When my son was thirteen I took him to Red Lobster with his grandma, his dad’s mom, down in Northern Kentucky. The same one she went to when Simon was little. My son asked if his dad had been there, and I was able to say yes, many times with his parents and grandparents for birthdays and graduations. My son was smiling. He was finally at an age where he knew what happened to his dad, his beginning and his end. Where he knew enough about his dad to know that this was a place with physicality. He was here.
I would like to tell you I have learned something brilliant about parenting in the ten years after my son’s father died. I would like to tell you I have gained great insight into raising a child with the curse of early childhood loss and the package of grief that comes with it. I would like to tell you that I have made sense of the stars and the moon, my son and his father, my loss, and his loss. I haven’t. But I learned that Simon orbits us always, and in a special way each year. Never not there—but sometimes eclipsed by everything in the days and months in the between.
***
On the ten-year deathiversary, we went back to Pho Tau Bay. I wanted to think about this special anniversary more. Or come up with something to say or do. But I didn’t. It was a busy week in the same way so many weeks were busy with work and school and sports and piano lessons. The urgency of his death—now exactly ten years behind me—was whispery. There was still anxiety, but much of the urgency of the years when I tried to preserve his memory was gone. It wasn’t that the deathiversary could possibly come and go without being noticed, it was just quieter. It was cold, but not as cold as it usually was in the middle of January. It wasn’t rushed or hectic because all the kids were older now and could stay up later and talk and order for themselves and reach over plates to grab fresh spring rolls and cream cheese wontons. The table was soon littered with boba tea, seafoam pink with big black pearls in the bottom waiting to be sucked through wide straws. There was tiny round dishes of sauce and bun salad and skewers of shrimp with black edges. We were talking about school, college, teachers, soccer, politics. My son wasn’t shy, and he wasn’t hiding, and he wasn’t avoiding his food, or scouring the lobby for candy machines or begging to play a game on my phone. Finally for a few brief minutes someone turned the conversation to Simon— the reason we knew each other in the first place and were at this table now, on this day, in this place. Someone passed around photos of him with his son and daughter when they were little, the teens at the end of the table. We talked about him as if he was very far away, maybe not gone forever. And in a strange way, it felt like he was far away. But it also felt like we were calling him back, if only for just a moment.
I have spent ten years writing this essay, and there are days when I can’t not think about him, and there are days when he does feel closer, few, but some, and I decided that our empty plates and empty teacups would have to be enough. The booming voices of the kids laughing after dinner would have to be enough.
***
My parents live in a small town in New Hampshire in the middle of the White Mountains. The best place to see the stars in that tiny town is lying in the middle of a stretch of road that has no streetlights. The town center is too well lit and the trails going into the woods are dense with trees and besides, if you went down those paths, it would put you closer to the black bears looking for their nightly meals. When we are walking home from a friends house or after a night at the only pub, we lay on the empty road, the asphalt softer than we remember, the danger of a car coming in this tiny mountain town, remote. For a few decades now, there have been many summer nights like this, and it has never failed that a shooting star has appeared.
I’ve heard that most shooting stars are just astrological materials— rocks, dust, tiny meteors—
that burn up as they enter earth’s atmosphere. I think, whatever, these lights in the sky are pretty and magical all the same. But I have read that real shooting stars do exist. The theory is that when a binary star system moves too close to a black hole, the black hole pulls one star in and sends the other star flying through the universe. The image they use to explain this is two people holding hands and spinning in a circle and then letting go. The momentum of the dead star causes the other star to move through space faster than a normal star ever would. They call this shooting star a hypervelocity star. It is a newer theory, and although we can’t see them with our own eyes way off in the distance, they are out there: alone but also surrounded by stars, no longer paired, untethered, flung by the energy of the another, burning through space all the same.
