“I believe he is my father,” Carol responded.

Carol was probably at least in her 50s, maybe older. I had never heard of her before or of anyone with her last name. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about a woman who must have gone through most of her life not knowing exactly who her father was and only now finding out. I wasn’t sure how helpful I could be to her, other than to confirm my relation to great Uncle Max. I told my dad about Carol’s message and asked what he thought of it. “Well,” he said, with a resigned sigh, “that sort of thing would be in Max’s wheelhouse.”

Carol was obviously not the first person to experience what is called paternity discrepancy, or having the person identified as one’s father not actually be the biological father. With the advent of home DNA tests, many people have discovered the existence of half-siblings or a surprise father. There are a lot of reasons such things can happen, such as the previously undisclosed use of donor sperm. Back in the day, people certainly didn’t like to talk about that sort of thing or even tell children that they were adopted. While that’s thankfully improved in recent years, it still leaves plenty of adults to uncover the secrets of previous generations. A CNBC article I read stated, not especially helpfully, that paternity discrepancy can exist for “0.8 to 30%” of the population. That could be anything from a “Wow! What a strange occurrence!” to “Oh yeah? Me too!”

What does it mean to be genetically related to someone else, anyway? Obviously I know what the biological definition is, but what is the deeper meaning and importance of being genetically connected to someone and knowing it? Most people care. Most of us want to know where we come from and where we belong, who we belong to. The concept of chosen family is a powerful one, but there is something to be said for at least being knowledgeable about one’s biological and cultural lineage.

In his final years, my dad spent a great deal of time and effort researching our family history and writing a book about the family from the early 1600s to the late 20th century. When he finished writing it, he and my mom went on a “book tour,” which instead of signing it at the local bookstore, in this case meant that they drove around the Northeast handing out books to all the relatives and other interested parties. It was a triumph for my dad, and it was a major source of family history information for the rest of us. One thing that my dad had learned fairly early on in his research was that previous researchers on our family (surprisingly, there were several) had been “pedigree hunters” and had connected our family to English aristocracy. No such luck, as it turns out. My dad was thrilled to describe himself as a Carey family iconoclast.

What does it matter if we’re descended from aristocrats or not? My claim to the family castle would have almost certainly been rejected, even if the relation was real. The aristocracy or commonness of my ancestors has relatively little bearing on my life as a modern American, especially since all those people were generations ago. Still, it was extremely satisfying to find out a more accurate picture of the ancestors (middle of the road merchants, for what it’s worth). It has been important to be able to have a better perspective on where we come from.

It’s definitely fun to be able to identify about 15 or so generations on my dad’s side. On the other hand, my mom’s family history is a lot less clear. After about three generations back, the trail gets lost in a haze of untranslated Eastern European documents or perhaps untranslated Eastern European documents that no longer exist due to war, pogroms, and all other manner of strife that those relatives were trying to get away from in the first place. I feel a bit wistful about it. I’d like to know. Not knowing about my distant maternal relatives is not the same thing as not knowing my father, who I was fortunate to know and love for these many years.

So many of us are looking for our roots. I hope Carol was able to find the answers she was seeking

Discuss...

George Carlin said, “After you die, your stuff becomes your ‘personal effects.’” And what about those personal effects? Is a person’s estate carefully planned out so that each descendent will receive an appropriate amount of stuff? Both professionally and personally, I have seen families erupt in all-out war over the stuff that a parent or grandparent left behind. And not even the cash, but the stuff! Siblings never speaking to one another again because one claimed that chair from mom’s living room!

What about when the death was not anticipated? There are families who leave a loved one’s room exactly the way it was on the day the person died, allowing a portion of their house to become a silent museum of the decedent. On the other hand, there are families who rush to organize and clear out the person’s stuff as soon as possible. Both of these strategies make sense in their own way. In the former, the family is trying to hold on to the person by holding onto their stuff, and in the latter, the family can’t bear to look at the person’s stuff because of its connection to the one who’s no longer here.

When my brother died, the rest of us went to his dorm room to pack everything up and bring it home. It was an agonizing task. Some of his belongings made me laugh, such as the mint condition Whitney Houston vinyl. Some of the things in his room made my heart hurt, like the sizable collection of beer bottles (Christ, how much had he been drinking?). If you die suddenly, the people who survive will see all your stuff. Read your diary. Check the back of your sock drawer. Make sure you have a good friend to clear your browser history for you.

Most of us have too many belongings in general, even those of us who aren’t technically hoarders. Someday, someone will have to sort them out. Or have them sold in an estate sale. Or just throw the damn things out already, I don’t know why you’re hanging on to them anyway! Having so much stuff could be a call to live more simply, but it’s also a way of defining what mattered to someone. My dad had many books on his bookshelves that he had loved, and after he died, I sat in his office, reading their titles and thinking of the conversations he and I had had about them. He had also been a big fan of his cell phone, some sort of Samsung situation. While my mom quickly packed up and donated some of his clothes, his phone remains at home, powered on and with the bill still paid. I guess you never know when my dad will receive an important call.

As for my own stuff? Good luck with all the books, everyone. And the clothes from multiple decades. And so many journals! Yikes, what will happen when my secrets are out? However, don’t worry, as I’m not planning on going anywhere anytime soon. I’m still using this stuff. Most of it. What will all of this stuff say about me, when I’m no longer here to speak for myself? I still have a china tea set that was my grandmother’s. I have tshirts that belonged to my brother. These things have no monetary value, but they are treasures.

Archaeology is an entire discipline devoted to the things people leave behind. The things, and putting together stories that go with them. Future archaeologists may analyze my stuff and say, “Boy howdy, this one loved a cardigan!” Provided that my sweater collection isn’t rotting in some landfill by then.

Perhaps no one will want my stuff. About 99% of it is mostly useless. But I have saved unassuming things from the people in my life who are no longer here, and I would venture that they wouldn’t have guessed which things I chose to keep. Our stuff says a lot about us, but we can never really be sure of which stuff is telling what story.

I have the feeling less often and less drastically since my dad died six weeks ago, but there are still plenty of times I wish I could ask him a question or tell him about what is happening in my life. I wish I again had his advice on all things financial, technical, and workplace related. I wish I could even talk about topics as mundane as the weather (it’s been quite nice here lately, thanks for asking). I want to tell him about the Cooper’s hawk in my backyard that’s been terrorizing all the songbirds. I want to still be able to share all the little details that make up the texture of my life.

I love the idea of a wind phone, though I don’t know what I would say if I picked one up. What would I tell my dad? My brother? My grandparents, my friends who are no longer here? I’d want to tell them I’m doing ok, that my family is doing ok. I’d want to give updates about my daughter (her latest shenanigan: telling us she couldn’t listen to her preschool teacher because she was so tired she was sleepwalking). I would tell them I miss them, of course, and that I hope they would be proud of what I’m making of my life.

Maybe they do hear us, somehow. I couldn’t say, and I’m not about to speculate too much on that point. For now though, it remains a one way conversation, fundamentally different than if we were all on the same side of the great divide. I can’t simply pick up my phone and send a message, and even if I did, there would be no reply. Imagine if there were a reply, though! As much as I’d like to hear from any of my people, I would likely also start questioning my sanity. I’m not much for mystical beliefs, though sometimes I wish I were. I completely understand how Spiritualism became such a big movement, and how there are so many people that still seek out ways to contact the dead. It leaves so much room for fraudsters and grifters, but the instinct to connect with someone who isn’t here anymore is incredibly powerful.

One of the fundamental questions grief leaves is “Where are they?” Intellectually, we know that our person is dead, that they are no longer breathing, animated, thinking, feeling. But a deeper part asks, “Where did you go? Why are you no longer here?” There is the rational answer: I once witnessed an exchange between a woo-woo classmate and someone who had experienced the death of their young child. “Where do you think your daughter is now?” asked the classmate, in a self-serious way. And the reply, with a matter-of-factness that lacked an edge but was still devastating: “In the ground.”

If my phone call would go through, I would like to continue sharing my experience of life on the earth. Simple things. The way the sunlight looks in the autumn. The ever-growing list of new aches and pains I experience as I traverse middle age. Breathing. Of course we take these things for granted, but I often wonder what my dad or my brother would do with one more day to participate in this life. When asked what his “goals” were toward the end of his illness, my dad told his doctor, “I want to see my grandchildren grow up.” It was obvious at the time that this would be out of the question, and the doctor had certainly been probing for an answer more along the lines of “pain management.”

We never do find out the rest of the story, as we always have to leave before the end. If I could talk to the people I’m missing, I would describe the things that add up to a human life. Wonderful things and awful things. I would want to share as many funny things as I could think of. I’d let them know that we still miss them but we’re getting by. And I’d hope they’d share with me how things are going over there, too.

Discuss...

It raises the point for me that it approaches the absurd that I am even worrying about this. Of course, I worry about most things, generally speaking, so why not this? Yet, even when going through the process of my dad’s dying and burial and everything that goes with those, I was also incredibly anxious about the time I was missing at work. Work-life balance seems to be a complete farce. Don’t get sick, and don’t have any relatives die, and definitely don’t have any friends die. Don’t think about a mental health day and don’t ever, ever take a vacation. Has this message been directly given to me? No, I don’t work for some sort of Silicon Valley startup. The message is given in far more subtle ways: Show up or shut up.

My dad was an incredibly hard worker. He worked more than anyone else I can think of. It served him well, and it certainly allowed us to have many nice things and opportunities and healthcare that I know others did not have. Still, he was always gone. Always at the office. Maybe the office in another state. Maybe in Asia or Europe. When I was about ten years old, an adult at Girl Scouts asked me where my dad lived. “In my house,” I replied, mildly confused. My father was so busy with work that there was an assumption that my mom was a single parent. In some ways, at some times, I guess she was.

In his later years, my dad was proud of what he had accomplished in his career, as he should have been, but he also wished he and my mom had traveled more together. They say that no one on their deathbed wishes they had worked more. This was certainly true for my dad. Work is important and hopefully meaningful, but there has to be more to life.

I suppose a lot of people make work the meaning and purpose of their lives. And without being meaningful, work is a soul-sucking nightmare. I do find my work meaningful, and this particular job is not too demanding of my personal time. Long gone are the days when I was on call for a month straight, 24 hours a day. Work-life balance was nonexistent at that point in my career. While it’s better than it had been, worrying about losing a chunk of a paycheck after also losing my father was adding insult to injury. I know I’m not the only person in such a situation, and a lot of workers in this country have things even worse. No ability whatsoever to take sick time, or to take time to care for family members, and no ability to mourn properly when someone dies. So many people are walking right on the edge of absolute disaster, and yet amazingly, we wonder why mental health is such a struggle in this country.

I think I’m getting old enough that while work is important, I’m not going to give in to the temptation to become obsessive about it. Work will be there. It’s a part of my life, but not my whole life. I’m grateful to have a job. I’m equally grateful for the many aspects of my life outside of work, and my goal is to keep everything in the ideal proportion.

Discuss...

Ok, here goes a most trite cliche: the dictionary (Merriam-Webster, in this case) defines deserve  as “to be worthy of; merit; to be worthy, fit, or suitable for some reward or requital.” Given that, who then deserves to be happy or safe or loved? And who doesn’t? Who deserves a small rock to always be in their shoe and to never be able to find the cool side of the pillow? Now, I’m certainly not the first person to ever consider these sorts of ideas, and finer philosophers and theologians than me have thought about reward and punishment for centuries. I’d like to skip the theology altogether, and honestly I doubt what I’m writing rises to the level of philosophy as such. But here it is: how does the average rando understand sweeping ideas like the deserving of goodness or ill, reward and punishment? 

My instinct here is that human beings deserve a certain level of happiness or contentedness simply for the fact that we are human. I don’t mean that everything in life will be perfect or that there will be no suffering because that’s simply not reality. And after all, some adversity can push us to do more, learn more, reach a different level. I think everyone deserves to have moments of enjoyment, creativity, and safety, as much as is possible. Yes, even that guy. And her. And them. I don’t think there is anyone inherently unworthy of positive experiences, though I often sit with people who feel this way about themselves. 

Less often do I sit with people who feel that there are others who don’t deserve positivity. However, there is certainly a lot of discussion about this in our broader culture. From all sides, there are people blathering about why this certain individual or group of folks are The Problem. And being The Problem, these people deserve any awful thing that comes their way. It’s a bit simplistic, and it brings up simplistic solutions. If The Problem is eliminated, we will all be happy again. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work this way. I also wonder if The Problem gets to experience contentedness, perhaps they will be less, well, problematic. 

Who deals out all this contentedness and suffering, anyway? God? Great. (I said I was going to veer away from theology. This was a lie.) Humans can also reward and punish other humans, and this can happen intentionally or not. Is there some other mechanism at play? Maybe karma, which doesn’t work the way most Western people think it does, but it provides a mechanism for determining who deserves what. All of these ideas about cosmological reward and punishment assume that if we all just behave ourselves, good things will happen, but everyone I know has pondered why bad things happen to good people. I also frequently ask the opposite: why do good things happen to bad people? There is no simple formula for this. 

I’m therefore back to my original premise, which is that everyone deserves and should be able to experience joy, safety, love, simply because they are human. No behavioral requirements, no gifts from the universe or a deity. No need to earn good experiences. There are other reasons to be a good person and act the right way, but the idea that you might be rewarded with the feeling of joy or peace shouldn’t be one of them. It’s enough to be human. Being human is hard enough, anyway, so why not embrace the idea that all of us should have a baseline of security and at least some measure of happiness? 

Can we want this for ourselves and for others, even for the people we really can’t stand? What makes any individual happy will vary, of course. Still, what would it be like to start from the assumption that people can seek the things that bring them joy, and that that can be the foundation of life rather than its end goal? I’m not even sure that I allow myself to feel deserving of happiness. I wonder if I can embrace the idea of happiness as a baseline. I wonder what might be different in my life if I did.

Discuss...

I think the idea of neat and orderly phases of grieving sounds amazing, but I am also certain that I don’t know anyone who has ever experienced it. As I walk my own path of grief, I’m also noticing periods of time that have included exhaustion, numbness, sarcasm, and the darkest of humor. The most recent experience has been anger, though.

I have not been especially good at the emotion of anger in the course of my life. As a moody, eating disordered teenager, my treatment providers gently suggested that I was burning with rage, an idea I shot down immediately. They were, of course, correct, but it has been hard for me to accept anger and express it in a productive way, not being destructive to myself or my relationships. I have gotten better at managing anger over the years, now that I am a less moody, less eating disordered middle-aged woman. Still, it often catches me by surprise.

When my younger brother died by suicide in 2010, all of my emotions seemed like they were turned up to full blast, including anger. I was angry at him, I was angry at myself, I was angry at the whole universe. In the wake of his death, we were all left picking up the pieces, the way forensic investigators gather every minute piece of an aircraft after a plane crash. During the process, I felt waves of rage overtake me, and I was left baffled and exhausted after they passed.

The death of my father has been a much different experience. For one thing, his death came at the end of a debilitating illness that he found frustrating and depressing. He was able to stay at home, and I was with him when he died. I was grateful for the opportunity to be with him at home, and he had gotten excellent care while he was ill. There seemed to be little to be angry about. And yet, almost a month later the anger seems to working its way into the tiny spaces in my life, subtle but unable to be ignored.

This is not the same rage I’ve felt before. It’s not annoyance or irritation. Anger comes in so many different flavors. I find myself feeling angry at people for things they couldn’t have helped. I’m angry at circumstances. I feel a particular fury at the time-off policies of my job, as they do not include bereavement leave of any sort. (’Merica!) Mostly though, my anger is looking for a target, rather than being driven by actual, rational reasons for frustration.

I am not alone in this experience. Sitting with many grieving people in my work, as well as friends and others in my life who are also on this path, I see the different ways anger can present itself. Someone feels angry at the people who were more interested in her daughter’s funeral than visiting her daughter when she was still alive. Another person feels angry at God for letting their spouse get ill and die at such a young age. Yet a third is angry at his family member who died because she wasn’t able to stop drinking. Their anger is not my anger, but I recognize it and can help my clients gently hold this energy.

What does one do about this sort of anger? In my case, there aren’t any steps I can take to ameliorate the situation. I can’t sit down with my dad and ask him why he decided to get cancer. I am highly unlikely to change major policies at my job to be kinder to people with recent losses, although it’s certainly something to consider trying. It seems that I need to do what I can with the anger, the frustration, the sadness, and that is to sit with the feeling, be kind to myself, and know that emotions never last forever, even if they feel like they will. Anger is a source of energy, and I am hoping to figure out what to do with it. Blow some stuff up? Or maybe try to make a positive change around me? For now, I think I’ll just try to combat the overwhelming fatigue I feel by allowing the energy of my anger to push me forward.

Discuss...

The day after telling my daughter about her grandfather’s death, she sincerely asked me, “Is Grandpa still dead?” I answered that he was, and reminded her that death is a permanent condition. Developmentally, it makes sense for her not to understand this seemingly obvious fact. On the other hand, do I really understand the idea of someone being gone forever? I know my dad is dead; I was there when he died. But there is still a part of me that wonders where he went. That part of me might still be looking for him, even though I know better.

My dad was not religious, or spiritual, and had no belief in any sort of afterlife. In line with his understanding of such matters, I cannot really allow myself to take comfort in the idea that he is out there somewhere, waiting for us. It would be nice to be able to, but it seems incongruent, somehow. I like to pretend that I am totally fine with the concept of death, that I simply accept that everything is finite, and I have a zenlike relationship with loss. This is, of course, a convenient lie that I enjoy telling myself. I’m like a preteen trying to convince the older kids that the movie we’re watching is totally fine, not too scary at all. I don’t even really believe myself, but I’ll put on a brave face no matter what.

The day of my father’s funeral, my daughter met a lot of extended family members. Living across the country, we don’t see them very often, and it was her first time meeting many of them. My aunt introduced herself to my daughter, saying “Your grandpa was my brother.” My daughter calmly replied to her, in the absolutely devastatingly nonchalant way of young children, “Well, your brother’s dead now.” If she had been older, or if she had been a more devious person, I would have wanted to shrivel up from embarrassment. But my sweet, kindhearted little girl was not trying to wound the great aunt whom she had met only moments earlier. Instead, it seemed that repeatedly pronouncing the factual state of her grandfather’s absence was how she was making sense of it for herself. Grandpa was here, I used to be able to talk to him, now I can’t because he’s dead.

Last year, our dog died. Ruby had been 13 years old and had also had cancer. I think this introduction to the world of grief and loss was helpful for my daughter, as she was able to begin to wrap her head around the concept of death, of someone being here one moment and not here the next. She never asked where Ruby had gone or any of the logistics of what one does with a dead dog. My daughter was sad, but accepted the information with a placidity beyond her years. However, a few months later, she found Ruby’s unicorn-festooned dog pajamas, a way we kept her warm in her old lady era. With true distress, my daughter cried, “Ruby left her pajamas here!” I explained that Ruby didn’t need the pajamas anymore, but my daughter remained concerned.

Do all dogs go to heaven? Do any dogs go to heaven? Is there a heaven to go to, anyway? While I don’t spend much time pondering the immortal soul of my late, beloved mutt, I do wonder if there is any way that the energy of those we have loved remains intact, somehow. Could I ever someday be reunited with a dog? Or a dad? Even in an abstract way? Are our loved ones gone, absolutely gone, when they die? Thousands of generations of theologians and philosophers and dudes on the internet have pondered the possibilities far longer than I have. The truth is that nobody knows, and the people who say they know are lying. So I’m left with tolerating ambiguity, something I don’t do particularly well.

I do believe that there is a wisdom to the frank acceptance with which my four-year-old approaches the subject of death. There is sadness, sure, but beyond that, loss is simply something to be taken in stride. We are here for now, and later we won’t be. We can talk about the people we’ve lost and the losses themselves without censoring ourselves too much. I can move forward after a loss without extensive, painful existential pondering. That can be good enough.