A Visitor in Quarantine
By: Jessica James
Tags: Grief, Dads, Quarantine, Covid Diaries

My dad, about sixty years before he came to visit me.

The other day at dawn as I was giving my baby a bottle, my dead dad came to visit me. This hadn’t happened before in the 22 years since his death, so it took me a minute to understand what was going on. Maybe I was just losing my mind after nearly 10 weeks in quarantine. Maybe I was just so desperate to talk to someone other than my husband that it wasn’t as much him coming to me as me inventing him.

I was looking at a picture of him as a young man, in his Army uniform, and wondering if he looked like my older son as people have remarked.

And then suddenly tears were in my eyes and I said quietly, “Dad?”

Even before his death we hadn’t been close. He was an emotionally unavailable man, beset with demons from his childhood. He died of complications related to alcoholism when I was 15, years after my parents had divorced. I had stopped talking about him in therapy; I was pretty sure that the grief, as complicated as it had been, was over.

“This is one hell of a time to be alive, ain’t it?” he said.

Pearce, the baby I had just been feeding, toddled off and tumped over a case of markers, picking up and looking at each one carefully before flinging it across the room.

I had wondered before what my dad would have thought of Trump. The day after he got elected I called my older half brother and said through sobs, “Do you think he would have voted for him?” and he said, “Oh no, he was way too smart for that.”

And he was smart — smart and creative. Open minded and excited about the future. He was a beloved marketing genius, an “ad man” — Don Draper of the 80s. He was the life of the party, twirling women around to “Graceland,” cheers-ing a whiskey on the rocks with a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his mouth, friends draped around him blissfully. After the good old days, when he drank he was maudlin, sentimental and self-pitying.

But now, the Dad that visited me, was sober and with it and fascinated by the way things had panned out.

He taught me how to ride a bike by pushing me down the hill of a church parking lot and telling me to pedal.

As my five year old bikes circles around me in our driveway, one of the dozen or so activities we’ve been rotating through for the past three months, he asks me about numbers.

Is a hundred thousand more than a hundred million? How much is a billion plus a billion? What’s the biggest number in the world?

The death count today was 93,111. I saw it on a scroll on the muted TV that I turn on when I wake up with the baby at dawn.

I don’t know how much 93,000 is. I barely understand 100. But I can wrap my head around 11. I know 11 people, I love 11 people. I think about 11 people I know and love dying, unable to breathe, with no one there to hold their hands.

I think about my dad dying in the shower. If his heart attack hurt or if it just surprised him. If he had wished things were differently then, or if he was ready for the next part.

I didn’t ask him any of this the other day. We didn’t really get into it — he just sat in the grey chair, his hands on the armrests, looking around at my house, amused and content with it all.

He had big dreams and was an early adopter of technologies that now seem antiquated. After he got laid off his job at First American Bank and sunk deeper into his addiction, he became obsessed with Y2K. He had vague ideas for consulting companies to help corporations manage the inevitable catastrophe that the new millennia would bring. But he spent more time creating the business cards and coming up with a fancy name and logo than creating an actual business model.

I think about my dreams. They all seem so small now that I can hold them like pebbles in my hand. This one — my work. This one — travel. These — dinners, my friends, going to bars, taking cabs at night with my headphones on and the windows open. I toss them one by one into a still lake to see if one will finally skip, but my dad never taught me how to do that.

All that really happened when he came to visit was that he sat over there, and I sat here. And I cried and wondered what life would have been like if he had lived. If he had lived, and stayed addicted to booze. If he had lived, and recovered. If he had met my children, my husband, seen my own business cards.

I guess my grief isn’t over, I thought as I looked at him in the grey chair. Or maybe my grief for him unlocked a way to grieve for 93,111. I can understand one.

He didn’t say goodbye but after he was gone I answered his question.

Yes, Dad. It really is.