Day for night jet lag with two young children is extremely strange. It’s as though I’ve fallen outside of time and my body feels like it’s constantly being woken up mid-dream at three a.m. I occupy a liminal space in which I seem to always be folding laundry or fixing my children food. It’s like an Ayahuasca weekend in Scarsdale; boring and bad. It doesn’t come with hallucinations, just countless clean toddler shirts and confusing meals.Three a.m. French toast? Sure! Four a.m. Tuna salad? Why not!
Last weekend, in the dark, we munched and folded and watched How To Train Your Dragon until the sun came up on Easter Sunday.
I love folding my children’s clothes. As I angle the sleeves in and crease the vertical length of a shirt I often find myself marveling at how long their limbs are getting; how quickly my time with them is moving. Every night when they are asleep and before I go to bed, I lean down, kiss the tops of their heads, and inhale the smell of their hair. It is a smell distinctly of childhood, that clean but sleepy mixture of shampoo and sweat, and when I breathe it in I am memorizing them now for myself later on when they are farther from me. I am also remembering my dad. It was his only advice when he met my daughter nearly eight years ago.
“Smell the top of her head while she is small, Darling, it is absolute perfection.” Then he inhaled, closed his eyes, and shook his head lightly, perhaps conjuring the smell of my head when I was small and perfect and sleeping.
My dad was at his best with us when my brother and I were small and for several years when during that time, Easter was his day. Dad’s Easter celebrations came with fabulous outfits and Michelin-starred meals during which we all made napkin hats and caused such a ruckus they almost kicked us out before dessert. They came with carriage rides through Central Park and unapologetically fabulous wide-brimmed Easter bonnets to block the sun from our eyes. Even in the final years of his life— when we were rarely in touch— Easter Sunday squeezed my heart and I always called or texted to acknowledge the day.
This year—the first without him—it came and went without fanfare. The kids opened predawn baskets and a few dozen plastic eggs were hidden by me and found by their small hands before noon. The three of us ate leftover chili at 2:30, then we drew the curtains and were in a jet lagged slumber by 4 pm.
The next day, when our bleary-eyed life resumed; when I’d dropped my daughter off at school and deposited my son with his babysitter and opened my computer to write, I realized what I’d done; or more, what I didn’t do.
I didn’t think of him.
The grief that comes with the marking of important events the first time they happen without someone you love is a meaningful kind of pain; it is an active way of keeping that person close, keeping your love for them in the present tense. The grief that comes the first time you forget to mark an occasion; in fact forget the person entirely is something different. It is the ache of distance; and it brings with it the knowledge that love, like grief, like everything else, changes with time.
It’s tempting to build a memorial around it all and try to keep each person place and thing safe and safely in its place with the memories curated to contain only the best of who and how we were. When I reach toward a future in which my kids are bigger and my father is more permanently a part of my past, I feel an ache in my chest and a desire to keep this moment—in all its imperfections—tightly held in the palm of my hand.
Maybe this is why I feel such a need to create tiny sacred rituals out of the ordinary moments of daily life (witness the nightly sniffing of my children’s heads). The sleeves I fold get longer and the time since Dad has died gets longer, too and I am afraid of what it means to forget.
“Mama,” my daughter said, a few days after my father died, “will you remember Opa when time goes by? Like, years and years. When he is really all the way an ancestor.”
“Of course,” I said, without really thinking about it, “I will never forget him. That is not how love works. Some of the things I remember may get stronger and some may fade with time, but Opa is a part of me.”
And so, I am learning to feel the moment without grasping for it, to allow my grief— like my love, like my life— to ebb and flow and change, and to remember that every breath sends this shining moment into the past as memory and that no one, but no one, can stop it.
And so, I crease the edge of an ever lengthening sleeve, and kiss my children on the head as they sleep.
I mark the forgetting and the memory; the darkness and the light.
I open my hand.
I learn, one breath at a time, that the only way to love anyone is to release them.
And I learn, slowly, to let go.