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In a way, while the sale was open, while the cello remained unsold, part of my father remained alive. Far from view, over the crest of the horizon, but alive.
“Hey boychik,” the refined voice on the other side of the world says. “How’s school? How’s soccer? How’s the cello?”
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Introducing The Joy Menu, a narrative newsletter exploring death, loss, grief, art, and creativity.
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Perhaps there was comfort in the constriction, a perverse safety in the pressure. Perhaps the door served as a weighted blanket – protection from failure, from fear.
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That was the drug, I think. That liminality, that escape, that floating, etherial disconnection — or re-connection. I wonder: how many lives did he live…
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Tears, too, like any precipitation, find their way out of one sea and into another. It all gets washed away.
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This is a memory. But it is also a thousand memories. It can be repeated so many times, only the fruit changes, the game we play, the location where we…
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Somewhere, a dog barks. Another responds. Chickens, twenty yards to the right, shake and pluck and cluck in their open pen. Or maybe I’ve just added…
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If he had lived a fabulously long life, my grandfather would have turned 95 fifteen days later.
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But there is also a masculinity of fear. There is also a masculinity of curdled intimacy.
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My beloved, horrendous asthma—granting me access to him, to his attention, to his tenderness, his softest love.
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Maybe it’s here that I attach mythology to his life as an artist — a counterpoint to this tension, to this heaviness, to the darkness which blows in…
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The Joy Menu

writing grief, grieving writing; or, a life in 100 emails.

The Joy Menu

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© 2022 Joey Rubin
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