Seven Days in August

August is the month of my parents, and the ending of the garden. 

This is the time when the light begins to shift, and the garden browns. There is a moment that seems to happen while we sleep, when the perennial bed in front of my house begins to fade to yellow. We step outside in the morning to walk the dog, and the world is vaguely drained of its color. The astilbe is brown; there is not a drop of fuchsia or ruby visible anymore. The echinacea has collapsed under the weight of its own purple flowers. The pink yarrow is dead, and the foxglove reduced to straight seed sticks too poisonous to be touched with bare hands. It takes seven late August days for a garden to begin to fade, and seven more for the autumn seed I planted at the beginning of the month to sprout. 

The universe was made in seven days, if you are a believer. It takes seven days to mourn a loss in both Jewish and Muslim traditions. Substance detox takes seven days, the first step in beginning a different kind of life; by day five, Marie Howe writes in her poem “Recovery,” you have decided to live. Lung infections take seven days to change course; I know this because, as I write this, I am just beginning to heal. 

* * *

Every breath I take in whistles like a tea kettle; every breath I exhale rattles like a snake. I’m awakened in the middle of the night by some vague and far-off sound of weeping; I open my eyes, and my wife is asleep next to me, silent. The dog is snoring softly on the floor, and the cats are in the other room. I begin to fall back asleep and I hear it again, and I realize that it is the sound of my own wheezing. 

A friend who practices traditional Chinese medicine told me to expect this; they warned me it was likely coming, but I disregarded their messages imploring me to pay attention, slow down, and take care of my body, especially during this month.  

This month. I have managed to ignore it. I tuck the fact of it into the recesses of my brain and cover it with the mundanity of daily life—the chores, the deadlines—where I don’t have to think about it. We need to have the gutters cleaned before the leaves drop. We need to fix the collapsing deck after twenty-two years. We have to make flu shot appointments. But it is the last week in August as I write this, in the month of my parents’ loss, of withering gardens, of floating in chilly Atlantic seas hoping to stave off sorrow. It is the month of “grief’s particles suffusing the air,” as Donald Hall wrote. 

* * *

I dreamt of my mother last night, for only the second time in a year. I was leaving her apartment building in Manhattan and she was coming in, and we passed each other in the lobby, where I found her talking to a neighbor whose face I could not see. It was cold; my mother was wearing a vintage fur jacket and her massive glasses. She looked fifteen years younger than she was when she died. She grabbed my arm and pulled me over to introduce me to her neighbor.

“This is my daughter,” she said.

I smiled at the neighbor.

“Where are you going,” my mother asked, looking at my hair.

“To get something to eat,” I said.

“I’ll come,” she said, linking arms with me, and together we walked up to the bagel place on 72nd Street. She walked well, with no cane; there was no Parkinson’s. We sat down and waited for my wife to join us. 

“I’m not hungry,” my mother said. 

I ordered a pumpernickel bagel with cream cheese; she looked across the table at me, annoyed, flared her nostrils, and patted her belly, as if to say, You really shouldn’t be eating bagels, honey. 

This is your message from the great beyond, I thought in the dream. Are you still going to complain about my weight even though you’re dead?

* * *

A year ago, at the end of a week of teaching in Truro, Massachusetts, I got the call that my mother had fallen; I was driving east along Route 6 to the bay in Provincetown, to attempt a last dip of the season. All week, I had been skittish, and the cold water frightened me; I longed to be one of those robust healthy women who plunge into the water even in the depths of winter, proclaiming its benefits both physical and mental. A friend in Maine had someone film her breaking through winter lake ice with a hammer and lowering herself into the freezing hole in nothing but a bikini; it seemed to me that in having someone film it, you missed the point of what it means to experience a moment of private transformation, as if it was all just for show. Still, I wanted to be that brave and healthy person, but whenever I got to the bay, I’d go in just as far as my thighs, stand there shivering for a few minutes, and then meekly leave. I was going to the beach to try one last time when I got the call, made a u-turn, and my yearly date with the narcissism of personal transformation was over, taken away by the requirements of being a caregiver.

My mother’s fall last August was not unexpected; she was nearing ninety and living alone in Manhattan with the Parkinson’s that killed her father and most of his family, and that she steadfastly refused to believe she had. Three months later, after surgery, rehab, skilled nursing, and finally, hospice, she was gone. Twenty-three years earlier to the day of my mother’s fall, on a beautiful August morning in 2002, my father and stepmother, running a routine errand, were in a car accident that took his life seven days later. The coincidence of the date was just that, and despite their divorce when I was a teenager, and residual rage keeping them from ever sharing the same room together, I still considered them a unit: my parents. They came into my life together; they left together.

I was naturally drawn to the water right after my father died, so we rented a cottage on a lake in northern Vermont. I sat out on the dock every day for hours with Susan and our dog, willing myself to jump in and be baptized and cleansed by it, as if it were a singular cure for sorrow. But I was afraid of dying, and never went in.

* * *

After my father’s accident in 2002, there was grief everywhere: in my drinking water, in my toothbrush, in the whisk I used to beat egg whites for a meringue. Eating a pastrami sandwich could turn me inside out, because it was his favorite; listening to his beloved Chopin would paralyze me. There was grief in a blinding hangover after I decided to drink gin Gibsons in his honor, grief in a haircut when I did not recognize my own face staring back at me in the salon mirror, grief when I found my picture in his wallet, along with my phone number to call in an emergency. When we returned from Vermont, I became chronically ill with a series of mysterious lung infections—“of unknown etiology,” the doctors said—that each lasted a week. It is the Chinese who believe grief is held in the lungs, and if ignored and unresolved, it festers and burbles like a stew until the life-breath of the sorrowful is spirited away, little by little, into a sea of despair. 

Ten years before my father died, I had been introduced to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. It was the time of AIDS, and assigning a name and logic to the ineffable helped those of us who were left behind to organize and map our losses. But when I lost my father, I learned that this is not how grief works: It can’t be organized, arranged, planned for. It is an ambiguous swirl of sorrow that invades our lives at the cellular level. It defies taxonomy. It lives and lurks everywhere, like Woolf’s “vulturous pecking at the spine,” and we either learn to exist with this ambiguity, or we don’t. After twenty-four years, I learned to take my hands off the grief steering wheel, and to know that it could hit me anytime, anywhere, and would. Grief is out of our control. 

* * *

My mother and I never spoke of illness, or old age, or death. She lied about her age until she was no longer conscious, believing that she successfully convinced everyone around her that she was twenty years younger than she was. 

“Ma,” I’d say, “you look fabulous for eighty-nine, but you look like shit for seventy.” 

“You’re just waiting for me to go,” she’d say. “I just know it.” 

Saying those words to a daughter, even one you’re emotionally estranged from, is manipulative and cruel, but in part, she was right: I had no sense of her fate, given the horrific way she’d treated her body over the years. My presence in her life was as an appendage, a prop. I was there to clean up after her, to patch the holes as if she were a sinking boat. I had been her primary caregiver for most of my life, even when she was married a second time. She lived with profound and untreated mental illness, so I managed everything to keep her safe and her head above water. Unlike my father, she carried no emergency information in her wallet, by design, and her lies were so masterful and intricate that no one, myself included, knew what was real and what wasn’t. She created messes; I cleaned them up. She fell, she lingered, she was gone. I buried her; I imagined my life without her; I filed the state and federal paperwork; I wept; I felt nothing. 

* * *

We finished cleaning out her apartment in early July, filling dozens of boxes and bags with ancient, disorganized papers—phone bills from 1967; irate letters to attorneys; receipts for extravagances, like a $700 pair of Christian Dior sunglasses encrusted with Swarovski crystals that she bought on the sly while we were supporting her—which now cluttered the entryway to my home in Connecticut. I turned over her apartment keys to her landlord, said goodbye, and a few weeks later, my wife and I drove back to Truro to teach again for a week, where I was when I received the call that she had fallen a year earlier.

Halfway through our stay there, we visited a quiet bayside beach in Truro. I walked into the water, as I always did; this time, I kept going until I was fully submerged, embraced by the cold saltwater. I was no longer afraid.

Seven days after we returned home, the garden began to fade. I dreamt of my mother and a bagel last night, and her chronic disappointment, even in death. I woke up coughing, wheezing, gasping for breath, my chest aching; grief had settled itself into my body and took up residence again in my lungs. I stepped outside this morning, thinking that the fresh air would do me good, and although the roses have been eaten by deer and the peony leaves are mottled with brown spots, the lilacs are blooming again, and the dead foxglove has produced new, pink flowers like trumpets, the last of the season, even though the bees are long gone.