My father went into the kitchen for a cookie, then disappeared into his home office for a phone call. He was arranging a surprise for my mother – hired waitstaff for Christmas Eve dinner, one of the biggest our family would have hosted. Then he died. It took 15 seconds. We found him within minutes.
The waitstaff called back 11 times over the next two days. I thought they were debt collectors. Finally, I went into his office, where we had found him, picked up his phone, and yelled, “He’s gone! Stop calling!” That’s how I learned what he’d been doing. They were trying to confirm. And in the corner of my eye, on his bookshelf: Irish Folk and Fairy Tales by W.B. Yeats.
When I looked out at his funeral, to all the people who loved him, I wished he could join me in my pride
The Saturday before, I had woken at 3 a.m in a cold sweat. A woman was weeping right beside me, close enough that I could feel the air move. I thought: this is a bean sídhe, a banshee. Before me, as though projected on the dark, the words: your uncle has passed away. So the next morning I called my uncle and invited him to breakfast. He was fine – confused by the sudden hospitality, but fine. He couldn’t come. My dad joined me instead. We had breakfast. My son was falling asleep in his stroller. I ordered all sorts of food nobody liked. But it was nice.
And then Sunday came, and Monday, and Tuesday. My father was gone. I had heard the wrong message. The bean sídhe hadn’t come for my uncle. She had come for my father. Every night I dream about him. In one he hands me a Wendy’s Frosty. I tell him: “I knew you weren’t really dead. You’re here – I just didn’t see you.” He tells me: “No. I’m gone. And I won’t visit you again if you can’t accept it.” The next night, the same: you’re not dead, are you? No, he can’t be. But I saw his body. Who was that, then, if he’s here, with me, alive? I hear him call my name – Katya, Katya – I wake at three, at four, to a whisper: “Come here, quickly, Katya!” And there is crying. Constantly, from somewhere, this wailing.
It’s been hard to write. I write for a living, mostly on the internet, and it feels silly now to care about the things I usually care about and surely will care about again soon – racing to have whatever take before anyone else, the cloying desire to be original (to me, a proxy for being popular), playing fence-sitter so convincingly no side wants to claim me, not even myself. I have been reading, though. More than I have in a long time. My favorite so far has been The Moviegoer.
The night before my dad died, he said, apropos of nothing, “I know what Katya’s going to say in my eulogy.” Of course, my rejoinder was, “Fuck you, what if I die first?”
He countered he’s older. I said nice try, old man, because I’m going to kill myself. And in fact, because of this conversation, blood’s on your hands. What are you going to say in my eulogy? Master poker player that he was, my dad called my bluff. They say the best humor is honest – I think that’s why he was so funny, because he was so honest. Sometimes the honesty was brutal. He told me I’d never get into Georgetown or the University of Chicago. My grades were never that good. He wasn’t mean about it, just – nah. You won’t do it. You can’t. But I had other talents, and he always believed that, even when I didn’t. For years I hid behind a pseudonym, hedging. I believed in myself but not enough. Then, a week or two before he died, I was published in the New York Times – under the name he gave me. Katya Ungerman. I couldn’t believe it. But my dad did. He always had.
He gave me the internet. He was a programmer, then a security executive, and because of him I’ve dedicated my life to this thing he loved first. He taught me to love the computer. Later we’d butt heads on this – “Dad, you play too many games, Dad, stop playing games, Dad, get off the computer” – but I also lived in front of the screen, within the screen. We were the same that way. He loved to gamble, loved the casino, the weird people you meet, the randomness of who you end up talking to. Everyone was worth talking to. He worked in India for years, and his colleagues there loved him. I was looking through his old things and found messages from them, art they’d given him, herbs, little ephemera he’d saved from his trips.
My dad had a big laugh – a bellowing laugh that shook the house. It reflected everything he believed: that nobody knows why things are the way they are, that there are no answers, so you might as well laugh. Why is life the way that it is? Nobody knows. He’d say that all the time.
“That’s Life” was our first dance song – twice. The first time, because I was marrying a weirdo I’d met on the internet. That’s life; the heart wants what it wants. The second time, because I’d found real love, but with somebody else. That’s life. Sometimes you get married twice. He danced with me both times. He was proud of me both times.
It can be very hard for me to show emotion. At some point my internal alarm system broke. I couldn’t get in touch with how I felt – I was numb to it, protected from it. But when my dad died, something broke open and I saw our whole life pass before me like a deluge. In 2022, he wrote to me: “Katya, I am so proud of everything you are. Please join me in that pride.”
What breaks my heart is that he never quite believed how loved he was. He worried people didn’t like him, that he wasn’t doing a good enough job. But he wasn’t just liked – he was so loved. When I looked out at his funeral, to all the people who loved him, I thought about how I wished he could join me in my pride. What I left out, in that conversation the night before he died, is that he did tell me what he thought I’d say in his eulogy. He said I’d mention his favorite song, “On the Road Again” by Willie Nelson. That I’d say, “Well, my dad’s on the road again – just, this time, to heaven.” I had a dream that he was happy. At peace. Walking around, doing nothing in particular, eating Mike and Ikes, his favorite candy. He didn’t linger on Earth. He didn’t suffer. He’s not on the road again. He is, as Yeats wrote, among the silver apples of the moon; the golden apples of the sun.
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