The Replica Therapy Couch

The fact that my father was here on earth, and then not, was preposterous. So I kept looking for him. The hellish year that preceded his passing, in early 2024, did not prepare me, really, for the ongoing quiet of our discussions, the fact that they were now just one way. The fact that he died at age 93 made it seem even more impossible, not less—he rallied, saying, “We'll beat this!” with the authority he used his whole life, raising a defiant fist even as his body slowly shut down over a year. At a certain point, it seemed hard to believe it would even happen. Maybe it just wouldn't!

And then I sat in my parents' kitchen after his death and waited for him to walk in to sit at the table, flipping through the Los Angeles Times, eating his concoction of oatmeal, blueberries, soymilk, orange juice, and a slice of avocado. I tried to hear his raucous laugh, a pure expression of delight when I told him something funny—his laugh was also an endorsement of the world's absurdity. I imagined him saying, fiercely, “I hate him more!” when we discussed Trump during his first term, which somehow lifted the load of my anger. And I imagined him telling me, “Trust your keppy”—his support on most endeavors would pour down like a bucket of light.

He passed, and suddenly when I wanted to talk to him, there was air.

I liked to think of myself as a rational person, one who believed in science, evidence, verifiable facts, but when he died I went full Ouija board, trying to locate signs of him. There was the spooky fact that the nurse who came to declare his death was named Rose—the same name as his oldest sibling, who had died as an infant, over 100 years before. I saw a truck in my neighborhood that said Sara Lee Moving, the name (spelled the same way!) of another sibling. Of course, I thought—his siblings were helping him along to some other place. I wasn't sure how the logic of this worked, but my brain, in this new reality, was determined to construct any logic, no matter how loopy.