Grieving in America

Big spaces. Broken hearts.

“He who plays his lazy cheer in my ear does my woes wrong.

Our mother is dead. Her hearse mustn’t be led to some pop song.”

(Gyula Illyés: Bartók)

Last year I came to understand something I had never before even considered. I had lost my father, and for the first time in my life I suddenly craved distinctive clothing. Black veil. The ashes. I suddenly realized why people in most cultures used to — or still — wear differentiating colors to signal that they are in mourning. That this person here clad in black or in white is in an altered state, is in a different space, temporarily tethered to the dead, dangling mid-realm, untouchable. I wanted to wear black but in New York what difference would it have made? (One more neurotic blonde in black, quoi de neuf?) I wanted people to know that I couldn’t be expected to be fun for a while. That I was closed for business.

When a woman is pregnant or she’s just had a baby, it is so clear to all, so visible: her situation has changed, she’s in a new place, adjusting. We all know she needs courtesy, kindness. But dying is negative space, it is something lacking, not there, and thus by default invisible. People don’t know because you can’t tell them. Because how? That lingua franca of symbols is gone. I craved to be able to demand respectful distance from others, to be left alone, or approached gently, for it to be OK, to be allowed to. My dead was offended, through my person, when I wasn’t. All the dead were somehow disturbed. I wanted to signal that I was open to be with others who had also lost loved ones. That I could now be shared that way among them like a thing, that I was now part of that story. I wanted people to know that if they loved me, now was the time to show.

Instead I hosted festivals and events, and relocated to America. I cried to a friend over lunch by mistake, and I never ever saw her again. I started crying at home alone. I ran my company, led my team, oversaw our budget, and bit by bit grew the prestige that widens doors for startups like mine. I went to DC and SF and Boston and Austin and Miami and San Diego and to Yale, and then all over again. I stressed every day about money and visa, and access and leases, and travel and health. To get press. To be able to pay. To stay. I struggled to sleep. I smoked and I drank, and I cried and I walked, and I couldn’t write my book and I felt ashamed. I worked a lot. I complained a lot. I cried so much, and so deeply and unstoppably, that eventually my eyelids developed an allergy. I reached out to the one person who meant security and stability to me — who originally made me come to America — and I was rejected, hands washed, and designated to be some kind of party entertainment. So I entertained. I always entertain. I cried some more. I felt like my life was a complete joke, that I was a painted clown, a fool, the Verdi singer who sings her aria with the knife sticking out of her chest. I started living with a broken heart as an unofficial disability. I briefly considered dying, or whether I was already dead. I hoped love would win. Somehow. That it must win. Right? Because people are good. I knew I was becoming stronger but I did not like the person I was becoming. I don’t know this new person that 2024 made me.

Grief and America are very similar places, they change your body, your biochemistry, your physiognomy. My hair is different. I smell different. Grief took the tastes from my mouth, made the corners of my lips pull down, made my eyes sad. America gives me intellectual vigor, pleasures, friends, adventures, and pride, but also true terror for the first time in my life, abject fear, exposure, loneliness, justified feelings of disposability and replaceability, a walls-wrecking desire for safety that I feel at all times in my sinews and bones and muscles and joints, and it is not going away, I wonder what could ever make it. That grip around the throat that it’s hard to catch your breath.

I travel with my father’s bracelets, the chain he always wore, a gift from my grandmother; I keep them in my New York apartment. America is harder than grief even in a family like ours. I hadn’t spoken to my father for years before he died, for good reasons I have discussed elsewhere, and only found out by accident that he was dying so I could rush back just in time to Budapest and see him curled up in a coma.

Nobody tells you the pity you will feel when your parents become babies. Beep, beep the monitor says hanging over your father in a diaper. The pity, and the smallness, and the care, when you realize that you’re now an orphan but that he was too. Little orphans. Poor him! Poor baby! … Poor me! … Poor us! He was just as rejected, just as cruel. Cutting, and hurting, and abandoning all of his life, and for what? We all kill our parents. All parents eat their children. Animals growl at each other across the fence. You look at the flailing heartbeat on the screen, the swollen head on the hard hospital pillow, the swollen head full of blood. There goes my DNA! One day this will be me and I don’t even have a forgiving, soft-hearted, gullible daughter to fly over and stand there like an idiot and caress my wet forehead, to recognize my swollen fingers, and to weep.

You walk in there like a ghost on a floor full of soon-to-be ghosts, tubes in mouths like fish on hooks waiting to be chopped up and put in the oven — you’re wearing the distinctive clothing of disgust: the plastic masks, the scrubs. The famous doctor’s hand on the small of my back, up my arm, what can I say in here, in his Necropolis, to this necrophiliac, what crazy woman would object to what exactly now, what here in front of all these nurses? This is why this guy has this job, this is why he wanted it, I conclude, and my little girl brain thinks Daddy can’t even come and help me now (!), because I always imagined him like that, you know, that he would come running and defend me, and I remind myself where I am, and that when my Dad still could he tried to sell me off to an 80-year-old friend of his to finance my London studies. Like I did back then, I step away from the doctor and we both pretend that nothing is happening. And a year, and all that money and time and paperwork and learning and improving and stressing and fundraising and world-building and mountains-moving and all that work work work work work work work work work work work later, I sit at a party in America, my job seems to be to just sit there, be pretty I guess (I’m not even that pretty), and I wonder what the hell?, if this is Hell, what have I done. Whom have I trusted. Why have I come. Should I have come.

I am being trained and groomed for what is allowed to say. Don’t people know I can’t be put back into my place because I don’t have a place?

I can’t write this properly, I am so sorry, grief is nonlinear, it’s all a staccato in my head, an arpeggio, an Armageddon. I am fine and then I am not fine, I go and cry in the toilet of this airplane. Do other people cry over me on airplanes the way I do? Do other people love? Do other people care? Do other people grieve? If I died, would they mourn me and long for black attire? Maybe I’ll be able to write about this better in a few decades, but by then I’ll be grieving for even more people, and what will happen to me anyway when they’re all gone?

Ondaatje wrote: “We are the real countries.” Show me a better sentence. I’ll wait. I am always waiting. The map feels surreal now, just blotches underneath me, spacetime is broken, I leave, I go back, time stops in one place and speeds up in another. My face grows older and bitter. I worry I wear my sorrows in my face. My mind is always moving, faster than these vehicles, faster than my mercy; it’s always not just exploring but imploring, the tongue searching for where you bit your lip. And I keep coming back to the same thought, the certainty, that somehow nothing else matters. It is not nihilism, I think it’s my morality.

Only friends can assuage your grief and give you America. Only friendship can. Everything else is prostitution, cold fears and colder fingers, Selektion, the Kingdom of the Dead. We will not remember the years and the flights, you know, the lies and the hopes and the waiting. We will only remember the people and who they made us.