Doc Z's graduation speech--based on my independent reading for this semester

On February 8 of this year, just as I was finishing up a yoga class, my husband burst into the studio with three words, “Sarah. Your dad.” Thus began a furious drive to the emergency room at a hospital in Westminster, where I arrived a half hour after he was gone, greeted by my mom and brother, and the three of us “clung to each other, crying for dad, the man we loved” as Helen Macdonald described a similar scene in her book H is for Hawk, a memoir about the sudden loss of her own father.

Since that evening, grief has been my new constant companion. It has affected my cognitive ability, as Joan Didion describes in The Year of Magical Thinking. There have been days where thinking anything of substance has been impossible. It has left me swimming in memories in photographs--my own version of Didion’s “vortex effect.” I spent the first few weeks after his death going through literally every single photo of my father that I could find and wove them--all 1000 of them--into a photo slide show for family and friends. In this way, I think I was doing what Elizabeth Alexander described as her purpose for writing about her husband in The Light of the World: “And so I write to fix him in place, to pass time in his company, to make sure I remember, even though I know I will never forget.” Looking at the photos kept Dad close, made memories salient, allowed me to hold on to him though he was just so suddenly gone.

I sought to make sense of the hole. In my world, my dad had always been terra firma as Elizabeth Alexander describes the role parents play-- "terra firma, to stand, to be planted in the earth” like a 100-year-old oak tree that stands through storms that knock down most other trees. Though Dad’s presence had changed in recent years due to his Parkinson's-related condition, the fact that he was there was resolute. Though a lot of things in my life have shifted in my nearly 43 years, the existence of my father was constant, assured, reliable. I am Sarah and my father is Ted Zerwin. This was a truth never to be questioned. Terra firma.

Until it wasn't anymore.

The loss was “obliterative,” as Didion describes, “dislocating to both body and mind.” She explains that “grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” And that has been true for me. Following the shock of the loss, and long after the funeral is over, Didion describes an “unending absence that follows, a void.” That’s where I am right now, trying to understand it, trying to wrap my head around what it means that my father is gone. How do I move forward carrying such loss?

Macdonald explains what she learned in the wake of her father’s death: “You see that life will become a thing made of holes. Absences. Losses. Things that were there and are no longer. And you realise, too, that you have to grow around and between the gaps.” Yes--holes, absences, losses. These are part of human life. We love and then there is loss. How do we grow around and between the gaps? Love. More of it. Kindness. Patience with ourselves and others. Gratitude. For Macdonald, this lesson came in training Mabel, the hawk she adopted following her father’s death. Only through love, patience, kindness, and gratitude was she able to forge an authentic connection with the hawk. This helped her to grow around and between the gaps of her loss.

Alexander said of her husband’s death: “I could not have kept [his] death from happening, and from happening to us. It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.” We love and then there is loss. And what I glean from my loss are the lessons my father taught me: love boldly, give unsparingly, seek to make a difference in the lives of others. And though the grief will never leave, people tell me it will get easier to carry.

Blog Carnival #2: My First Car

This is my first car, a 1982 Oldsmobile Firenza that I named "Burner." 

Don't laugh. 

It was as stick shift so I felt like a race car driver. 

It had a little orange light on the dash that would light up and say "shift" when it was time to shift to the next gear. I hated that light. I covered it with an "Abolish Apartheid" sticker so that instead of telling me to shift all the time, my car would light up to make a political statement instead. (South Africa officially abolished apartheid in 1991, btw--I'm sure it was all because of my car). 

And even though I never would have chosen the color, or the family four-door styling, I loved this car. It was my freedom. 

My wheels. 

It's decorated here for homecoming of my senior year at Northglenn High School (not sure why I wrote "NGHS" on my car when Northglenn is clearly one word, so NHS?). 

This is the car that terrified me until I figured out the clutch. All it took was my brother John taking me for one driving lesson after my mom had tried to explain to me how the clutch worked. Her explanation did not work. John's did. 

This is the car that used to take me on afternoon adventures where I would point at the mountains and just drive west from Westminster until I hit them (ended up in Eldorado Canyon one day doing that). 

This is the car that went on Slurpee runs and through the drive through at Taco Bell umpteen times for taco salads and bean burritos. 

This is the car that used to drive too fast through the abandoned drive-in movie theater, catching air on the little hills that you would park your car on so your seats would be appropriately reclined for viewing the screen (don't tell my parents I did that, k?). 

This is the car I got my one and only speeding ticket in. The car I wrecked (totaled actually, but we fixed it anyhow--see you can't even tell in this picture, can you?). (Okay, so maybe 16 was my worst year of driving--totally safe since then). 

This is the car that Jeremy borrowed on homecoming afternoon so he could pick me up to take me to dinner and to the dance (after he spread rumors that I said I didn't want to go to homecoming with him anymore because he didn't have a car himself) (I DID NOT say that). 

This is the car that lost its muffler when I went over train tracks too fast trying to find Paris on the Platte (again, the year of 16). 

This is the car I sat in after my junior year spring band concert where I found out I had been selected as drum major for senior year--I turned on the radio and "I wish It Would Rain" by Phil Collins came on, and I knew it was a sign from the universe that my senior band season was going to rock (we had taken state sophomore year in the rain, so the rain had kind of become this thing for us). (see the photo below for evidence of how we did indeed rock our senior season)

This is the car the trumpet section blocked in totally--like completely surrounded with cars on all sides--after marching band practice one day while the color guard captain and I were talking with the band director. They blocked in her car too, and none of the perpetrators were anywhere to be seen to move their cars. We were stuck. So we pushed Paul Teddy's Jeep onto the baseball field and I think somehow locked it behind a gate? How did we do that?

This is the car that I drove in with the windows down and the music blasting on summer nights--cool night air my companion as I drove home by curfew. 

This is the car that stalled out on me at the Quebec street exit off of 270 one frigid below zero December night. The heat wasn't working either, and I had just driven from Boulder, and I was dressed for the ballet that I was going to with Becca (no boots, no warm socks...). I thought I was going to freeze there on the shoulder of the exit ramp, but somehow I got it to start again and limp along for another couple of miles, which was far enough to get me where I was going. 

This is the car that took me to college. 

This is the car I sadly had to say goodbye to in 1994, replaced by a white Ford Escort named "Snoopy." What an annoying car--but I won't complain. My parents handed me the title when I graduated from college. It never once broke down on me (not even when the tires were horribly worn and Snoopy was loaded down with all my worldly possessions as I moved from Missoula to Seattle in 1996--not sure how the tires didn't explode on me on that drive). 

I miss that car. 

color guard captains Keri and Beth, drum major me, drum captain Eric, holding our state championship swag

doing my drum major thing

The Bad Dot

I don’t want to tell you how embarrassed I was.

When they parked their car (a small, orange hatchback) about a half a block away and walked up behind us, I was mortified when my mom turned around and asked them what they were doing. Any high school age kid was by definition way cooler than I felt as an awkward 8th grader. Please mom, don’t embarrass me in front of these two unknown teenage boys who appeared on the sidewalk right behind us.

I don’t want to tell you about how they walked through us (my grandfather, my aunt, my mom and I on a walk around the block after Thanksgiving dinner, 1986), walked ahead of us a few paces, then turned around and came back.

I don’t want to tell you about how the force of his hand on my face knocked me to the ground.

I wouldn’t tell you if I was screaming, but I can’t remember if I was. But I think somebody was.

I don’t want to tell you about the glimpses I got of my mom on the ground behind me, kicks coming at her ribs, or my aunt pushed up against the fence, fists coming at her face.

I don’t want to tell you about my grandfather unsure of what to do and unable to stop it.

I don’t want to tell you about the drops of blood on my jean jacket and how my first thought was that I hoped they would wash out because how would I explain that to people at school?

I don’t want to tell you about how I kept ice on my cheek all evening to ward off any possible bruise, about how the police told me that the statement I wrote was so detailed and specific, about my aunt’s broken nose, my mom’s bruised ribs, about how when we took my aunt and grandparents to the airport the next day people looked sideways at us, drawing their own conclusions about my father’s bandaged hand (from a recent surgery) and my aunt’s horribly bruised face.

I don’t want to tell you about how because my face didn’t bruise and the blood washed out of my jacket I didn’t have to deal with any questions from the kids at school, but Chuckie Griffey stopped me in the hall, “I heard about what happened to you, and I’m really sorry.” I am still grateful for his kindness that day.

Then, I didn’t understand why these two boys weren’t with their families on Thanksgiving and instead made us unwilling participants in what the police told us was likely a gang initiation.

Now, I know that the gang they were trying to get into was the most stable family they had.

Being a victim isn’t a bad thing, but maybe I didn’t want to tell you about this because I have never considered myself a victim after this. Not then, not now.

The whole thing has always just made me sad. Sad for my relatives visiting from rural Ohio for who had to confront big city violence. Sad for the two boys whose lives gave them no other choices. Sad for what we heard about in the news, that a few weeks later these gang initiations started including golf clubs.

I didn't want to tell you all of this.

But now I'm glad that I did. 

P: Pepperoni

Urbana, Illinois, 2003

I didn't want to see the movie Old School.

Amy and I and our husbands and a bunch of their running group buddies went to the movies. When we got there, the men all wanted to see Old School. I didn't. Amy didn't care. So I ended up going to see Old School instead of something I thought would be more redeeming.

The University of Illinois is home to one of the largest greek systems in the entire country. And when we walked into the theatre, every single fraternity brother from the university was there, filling all of the rows except for the very first one. That's where we sat.

I was terrified. I remembered years ago at a CU football game how there were fraternity brothers throwing pepperoni at people. I never knew why. But they thought it was really funny.

So there at Old School, I worried and waited for the pepperoni slices to start flying. How long until there would be one landing on my forehead or in my hair or on my shoulder or slapping me on the cheek?

There were no pepperoni slices in the theatre. Those fraternity brothers never even threw popcorn at us. But they certainly howled with laughter at all of the funny moments in the movie.

Except for the one where Will Farrell says that he's too busy to party because of the big day at Home Depot the next day. WE (the old people in the front row) laughed at that line. That was our world at the time.

Connected by memories (rough draft for in-class feedback)

I walked into the funeral home--a thing I knew nothing about because at age nine, I had never been to one before. No none had died before. I don't remember any other room in the building, or the building from the outside, or even the drive to get there, or the flight from Denver to Detroit, or the drive to Stapleton, or packing for the trip--only the morning my brother had woken me up a few days before to tell me that our grandfather had passed in his sleep.

From the door to the room where the casket was, I remember looking tentatively toward the big box surrounded by flowers and, in my memory, illuminated by light. I could see his profile. His chest--not moving up and down as it would if he were sleeping. His skin looked pink, not cold and dead. His eyes resting closed. I had never seen a casket before or a dead person, and this dead person was my grandfather.

I can't remember when I had seen him before that--I think it may have been a while, but the vision I had of him at that moment did not align with the memories I held of him. Galloping down the sidewalk to the park with him walking behind me, pretending my pony tails were reins. How when he visited Denver, he retrieved donuts for us every morning from the donut shop a few blocks away--a shop we rarely went to when he wasn't in town. Silver dollars from him pockets. The two-step shuffling dance he did in our foyer, humming and smiling. The joyful glint in his eyes. How he said he was only resting his eyes when we caught him asleep in his chair.

At this moment in that coffin, he was not only resting his eyes. And that was a very difficult thing for me to understand.

That morning I had woken up on a scratchy green sofa in the living room of my grandparents' apartment. My grandmother no longer stayed there; both she and my grandfather had been moved to the nursing home where he died. But that is where my brother and my parents and I stayed while we were in Dearborn for the funeral.

My brother and I camped out in the living room on the olive green sofa, much too narrow to really sleep comfortably on. My parents slept in the two twin beds in my grandparents' room, separated by a nightstand. I had only ever seen that on "I love Lucy." Lucy and Ricky's bedroom kept their beds at a safe distance from one another, something I thought was only about television land rules of marriages or something, since a queen-sized bed dominated my parents' bedroom and I thought that was how it was everywhere except for on TV.

All of it was weird, the narrow sofa, the twin beds, the kitchen without Grandma standing in it putting cookies back in the oven for just five more minutes, the table without Grandpa sitting at it reading the paper. Even the shower in their bathroom--the shower curtain leaned in toward me as I washed, a phenomenon I had never witnessed before. The shower curtain at home had magnets in it to attach to the side of the tub to keep the curtain from attacking a person while showering. But here the steam billowed freely behind the curtain making it reach out toward me, sucking all the space out of the shower. Grandpa was dead, and my nine year old mind imagined he had something to do with the shower curtain encroaching on my shower.

My mom led me slowly to the casket. She told me I could walk right up, touch him even. I kept a safe distance of at least six feet. From there I could crane my neck to see him, to see the suit and tie he wore, to see his motionless hands folded one over the other on his belly. His hair was combed, his skin I could see from here was kind of powdery, his chest did not rise and fall slowly, though I watched and waited for it to. My vantage point from the doorway of the room made it seem he was peacefully sleeping. From the vantage point of six feet away, I could see that was not the case.

My grandmother suffered a brain aneurysm in her forties that left her paralyzed on her left side. Her left hand always sat still in her lap, but she still played pinochle using a special half-moon contraption that sat on a table and held her hand of cards for her. She wore a brace on her lower leg to keep the ankle straight, and that along with a four-legged cane allowed her to walk. Her gait required her to step with her right foot, then use her entire body to propel the left foot forward, leaning on the cane for support.

By the time my grandfather passed, Grandma got around in a wheel chair mostly, but that day she insisted on walking to the coffin to say goodbye. We all watched as she slowly approached, supported by my dad. She held a handkerchief in her right hand to catch the tears she could not hold back. When she got to him, she touched his chest, grasped his hands, kissed his forehead. She sobbed loudly, repeated his name over and over, bent her head over the casket. I watched but didn't, feeling as if I was intruding on one of the most sacred moments of a human life.

Our vigil at the funeral home took hours that day. The family--my parents, brother, and I, my dad's two sisters and their husbands and my ten cousins (I the youngest of my grandfather's twelve grandchildren)--we stayed there as people came by to see us, to see him, to say how sorry they were, to sign the visitors' book. My young adult cousins seemed to get it all a bit more than I; they escaped to the basement of the funeral home to smoke cigarettes and would come back upstairs to murmur quietly with the visitors, whom they knew and I did not since they all lived there in Dearborn and I was only visiting.

At one point. I found myself sitting next to my aunt Barbara, my dad's older sister. She would pass away herself only a few months later; I know now looking back that she was already that day ravaged by lung cancer. And again a similar scene played out in that same funeral home, even the young adults escaping to the basement to smoke cigarettes while their mother reclined silently in a coffin upstairs due to her own years of smoking. I wasn't at that funeral, but my dad told me about it. So the day I sat next to her was the last time I saw her, and we both had our shoes and socks off, looking at our toes.

Look at that, she said.

Our second and third toes, both of us on both feet, are almost webbed together, connected by flesh at a spot much farther up on the toes than where the flesh connects between the other toes on our feet.

Until that moment, I had always thought my toes were kind of weird and they even embarrassed me.

But my toes, like my memories, they connect me to these moments and these people. I, the youngest of my grandfather's grandchildren, am married and have a kid and a 17-year career and a few college degrees. I'm turning 40 this year. The oldest of us, my cousin John, is now in his 60s and his four children are all married. When I see my cousins now we are all adults together. I'm no longer the nine-year-old child, confused by death, terrified by a shower curtain, looking to them to see something about how I was supposed to act with a dead grandfather in the room.

We share these memories. We are family.