When Cohen was a couple weeks from being two, a young boy with light-blonde hair and sky-blue eyes, my father died.  A couple of months had passed since then.   It was getting late and well past Cohen’s bedtime, yet he refused to acknowledge it was time to go. His father had reminded him, to whom he angrily replied, “No.” His eyelids were getting heavy, and he slumbered towards me, still fighting the acceptance that would eventually come.

Cohen was the closest thing I had to a grandson, and towards me he threw up both arms and pleaded his favorite word, “Cows,” bargaining with an unrelenting world.  Fortunately for him, grandparents and pseudo-grandparents are more forgiving.  I hoisted him into my lap and opened the gallery of my phone.

He called his grandmother, “Mimi,” which was much to her pleasure.   His word for me was simply “Papa,” and I liked it a great deal.

He had met my mother and father on a couple of occasions, and so I used the terms he was familiar with to explain who they were to him. My mother was Mimi Mimi, and my father, Papa Papa. From somewhere, out of his abundance of bashfulness, he had repeated their names back8 to them softly. Each “mimi” was elongated as though an invitation, and each “papa” delivered in an urgent staccato.

He was a beautiful little boy.

“Papa, Cows,” reminded the boy in my lap.

The pictures were ones he’d seen before, going through them like a bedtime story with its corners worn.  There were pictures of young calves and old cows.  There were videos of bulls getting turned out into pastures and moving pairs onto new grass.  I had originally taken them for this little boy, and a boy that had grown too old to get out and see them.

The last of them was a very short video of my father the last time he would see the cows.  We had recieved permission to take him from the rehabilitation facility to a dentist appointment.  My sister and her husband took him on a detour going back.

My frame caught the back of his head, nestled low down in a car seat. He spoke softly, sometimes beyond the limits of volume and memory, and sometimes just loud enough that you could catch his pleasure of getting into June with calves without pinkeye.

As we watched, Cohen’s small hands tried to grab the flesh of my forearms, pinching the hairs. “Papa Papa,” he said, and looked up at me with those deep blue eyes, damp with tiredness and heavy with sleep. “Papa Papa,” I said in return.

I couldn’t believe he remembered my Dad here in a world I, too, found unrelenting. My chest swelled. I cracked a smile. “Papa Papa,” I said again.  I kissed him on the forehead, as he agreed to go to sleep.

II

“There were so many conversations only Dad and I could have.  Some were the only ones on that particular topic; some were the only in that particular way.  My family, the farm, the cows, what was going on in town, or around here. Sometimes I think about not having anyone to talk about those things like that again.”

“What do you think you’ll do about that?”

“I suppose I’ll learn to be someone else.

Maybe I feel like it hasn’t hit me. I haven’t broken down weeping. Work continues to get done. If anything, I suppose I feel a heightened sense of responsibility to see that it does.

I talk a little about it to the people I know.  Some I know well, some more casually. Probably more so the folks I know ask.   I almost feel like I have canned answers, methodically going through things matter of factly.  As I do, their eyes get damp, as I talk about how lucky we were with time, and how he met death on his terms, surrounded by his family, and how we all stuck it out over the roller coaster of those last two months, and how much we witnessed Dad grow, and how much I know not everyone gets that.

And in the back of your mind you wonder, ‘What the hell is wrong with me?'”

She laughed, “By all accounts, he lived a remarkable life. In a way, maybe you’re happy for him.”

“Goddamn, right I am,” I said, a stray tear marking my cheek.

“Well I talk to people a lot about grief, and I’d like to tell you for most it’s about struggling with the loss of someone they care about, and it certainly is, but frequently what I also hear about are people feeling like they should feel something different. Like there’s some manual we should all be going by.  And that just isn’t how it works.”

“I had seen some PBS documentary about home burials once. The gist was that funeral homes interrupted how families had historically grieved, depriving them of time spent with the deceased. I didn’t want to do that. I helped the hospice nurse get him ready.

Anyway, after all of that, I bet I went around for a couple weeks wondering how the fuck I was supposed to be in denial.”

“I assume you’re talking about The Stages of Grief.  They were really developed by studying folks more in your Dad’s situation than your own. I think the current consensus is there’s some good stuff there, but it isn’t gospel. If people find it helps them, that’s great, but I’m not going to tell you to read up on it.

Conditions are so varied, and the experience is so personal.  For someone that had been in a lot of pain, for instance, relief is commonly felt by family members, and then they just beat themselves up over it.  I just want to tell them, ‘Of course you feel that way. It’s all right. How you feel is all right.’ People are so hard on themselves.  Why they feel the way they do, how long they should feel it, why other people feel differently.”

“The world just keeps right on going.  Sometimes you want to scream that you just lost someone your cared about at the top of your fucking lungs.  Then there’s this other side, a side that suggests there are better ways to pay tribute in living your own life than going through it standing still like a silent martyr.”

“I think that’s a conflict everyone wrestles with.”

“There’s this guy that wrote an entire album about the loss of his father, Stephen Wilson Jr.  Great song after great song.  He’s got this one, though, ‘Grief is Only Love.’  The chorus says that grief is only love that’s got no place to go.  I kind of liked the song before Dad died, but I’m not so much of a fan of it now.”

“What is that?”

“I know exactly where that love is to go: back into my family, and the damn cows, and the farm. That’s where it goes. It’s that heightened sense of responsibility I was talking about.

I’ll tell you one thing, for his last two months I feel like I was the son I always wanted to be. I don’t know how that happened.”

“You’ve been talking and preparing for this almost since we first met.”

“Well that’s a helluva thing to say.”

“Why?”

“Shit, all this time, I thought I was just worrying.”

I suppose that’s what grief is like.

III

The cook at my father’s rehabilitation center was an immigrant.  Her English was a little broken, but she delivered it with a bit of an English accent to make up for it.  Joy seemed to be her base emotion, and her skin glowed as if it radiated.

Somehow, she quickly established a habit of stopping by my father’s room, wishing him a good morning, as if she simply couldn’t wait for breakfast.  Her name was, Helen, and my father enjoyed her.

My sister told me that on the day they brought him home to hospice care, Helen sat on my father’s bed and cried.  My father comforted her.

“Don’t worry, Helen,” he told her.  It will all be all right.”