Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 14. Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
I did not write this week.
Not the book. Not the journal. Not a single recipe.
I did paperwork.
That is not a sentence I expected to write in this journal. But this is a journal written in real time and this week the real time was estate documents and copyright applications and proving to the legal system that I am the heir to my father’s photographs.
Simple clerical tasks.
That is what I told myself when I sat down at my desk.
Simple. Clerical. Tasks.
The Documents
I was the executor of my father’s estate.
So I knew what I was requesting. I knew what the documents would say. Twenty-four years later I downloaded them and opened them and started to review them and I thought this will be straightforward.
It was not straightforward.
Grief comes in waves. That is what everyone says and it is true and you think you understand it until a wave arrives from a direction you were not watching.
I was not watching the paperwork.
I was reviewing estate documents. Legal language. Dates and names and the official record of a life reduced to the things that need to be transferred and signed and filed.
And then I saw his date of death.
Not on a gravestone. Not in an obituary. In a field on a form. Typed the way you type any other date. Just numbers in a box.
And that was the moment grief came in waves in a way I was not prepared for.
And then the ICU came back.
I am not going to describe that here. That is what the book is for.
What I will tell you is that grief comes in waves and sometimes the wave comes from the most unexpected places. Not from a slide held up to the light. Not from a recipe that brings someone back. From a downloaded PDF on a Tuesday afternoon.
From a date on a document.
From a name typed in a field that used to be a person.
“You never realize the true weight of something you are carrying until it moves.”
The Drives
I thought about the drives.
DC to Southern Maryland. An hour each way.
I have sat with a lot of things in my life. But those drives. The weight of what I was carrying on that road. The likelihood of losing him sitting in the passenger seat with me the whole way. Nothing I could do. Nowhere to put it. Just me and the road and the knowledge that was settling into me mile by mile whether I was ready for it or not.
Nothing I could do but be present.
That is what those drives were.
An hour of being present with something I could not fix and could not change and could not outrun.
I would have never thought I would lose my father at 58.
Grief comes in waves. And sometimes the wave is the memory of an hour on a highway when you understood for the first time that you were going to lose someone and there was nothing to do but keep driving.
I sat with it for a while this week.
I let it do what it needed to do.
What I Did Next
I set it aside.
Not forever. Not away. Just aside.
Because this week was not for that chapter. This week was for the paperwork. For the copyright. For the legal claiming of the right to tell this story.
And I did that.
I filed what needed to be filed. I proved what needed to be proved. I am the heir to these slides. I am the heir to these photographs. I am the heir to everything my father pointed his camera at and kept for me without ever telling me he was keeping it.
The documents say so now.
Officially.
But I knew it before the documents.
I knew it the moment I held the first slide up to the light and saw what he had kept.
He kept it for me.
The documents just made it official.
“Grief comes in waves. Sometimes the wave comes from the most unexpected places.”
What I Know Now
I did not write the book this week.
But I did something the book needed.
I went to the door of the hardest chapter. I looked through it. I let the wave come and do what waves do. And then I set it aside and I said not this week.
But soon.
I am ready for that chapter now in a way I was not before this week.
Grief comes in waves. And sometimes the wave is not the thing that breaks you. Sometimes it is the thing that prepares you. That reminds you what you are carrying and why it matters and what it will cost to put it into words.
I know what it will cost now.
I am ready to pay it.
I am writing it all down.
For Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte.
So they know about the documents.
So they know about the drives.
So they know that grief comes in waves and sometimes the wave comes from a downloaded PDF on a Tuesday afternoon.
And so they know that their grandfather was worth every single one of those waves.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 14 of Her Hands His Eyes, a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
Next week the chapter I have been preparing for. The one the documents got me ready to write.
