Mirage of memory

Words & Photos by Barbara Athanasoulas Illustration by Amie Leung

I remember blankets of snow when my father died. But now, fourteen years later, I wonder how much of that memory has been filled in from bleak movie scenes. Does it matter if it snowed? I’ve lived with that memory long enough that the cold air and precipitation on my face weigh just as heavily as the grief I still don’t know how to put down.

Describing my grief inaccurately felt like a greater sin than the lie of I’m fine. Maybe that’s why I preferred the comfort of other people’s words. My metaphors are always lacking, just short of truth. Explanations of grief come second-hand, never fully encapsulating the way the world shifted. Loss is universal, but grief is personal.

Grief is like remembering, it’s like forgetting.

When the tea towels are in the wash, I still reach for them on the hanger below my kitchen sink only to grab at air. I feel kind of stupid. I knew the towels were in the wash, but still I reached for the hanger. Grief is like the muscle memory of the mind.

I’ve had fourteen years to process, filter, and review every memory of my father. But my recollections have become more muddled than anything else. I mostly blocked the memories of his absence. His long nights at the office or extended business trips. A few fond moments crystallized—jumping into his arms from the stair landing, lying on the couch with my head on his Santa Claus-stomach, how he flipped pancakes without a spatula.

A few worse ones, too. Dragging over a chair, a coffee table, and a deck of cards when he was too weak to

get up from the couch. Orange pill bottles that seemed to take up half the kitchen counter. Telling my mom, I’ll see him when he comes home, when she asked me to visit him at Princess Margaret after school. The shadows and fluorescent lights distorting my

memory of his nearly unrecognizable body on the night he died.

Cancer’s a real bitch, you see.

In the years after, I tried not to ask about him unless someone else brought him up first. You can only hear “you have his smile” so many times before you start avoiding mirrors because it’s the only thing you see in your reflection. No matter how much anyone tells me about my father, it’s only what they remember, what they feel they can speak of when it comes to the dead. I was a seven year-old who knew him as baba, and then as a dying man. People can tell me what he was like, and I can fill in the rest with comparisons. I’ll always remember him, but I’ll never know him.

I’ve always liked a good story, though.

I used others’ stories, personal and fictional, to inform how I should remember that period in my life. People cry at funerals, so I must have cried at his. The dead are buried on bleak winter days or stormy nights, the sky held aloft with aesthetically cohesive black umbrellas. Mourners are wrapped up in sadness between layers of scarves and black coats. Children stand stoically at their parents’ sides, fat tears running down red faces.

Only, I don’t remember wet cheeks. I do remember my cousin daring me

to eat packets of sugar from the coffee station in the basement of the funeral home. I don’t know if there was snow. I remember wondering why they have to bury a coffin so deep.

I don’t think it matters whether or not it snowed. I made these memories, if not in real life then in my own mind. I fed my mirage until it solidified into a story that I could tell myself on many sleepless nights. The other option was to live off scraps of incomplete memory. The next morning, the guilt of letting mirages guide me through

the night was pushed aside for the continued necessity of living life.

When you’re a child hurtling headfirst into loss, you soften the landing with stories. You watch A Little Princess and imagine you’re Sara Crewe, your father detained by the most extraordinary circumstances. You read Percy Jackson and imagine he left for some greater, more godly purpose. You stand in the front pew of the same church you’ll return to every Sunday until you’re eighteen years old. You wear the black hairband your mother wrestled you into instead of the red one that you like, and you wonder when your father will sit up from the open casket and say gotcha.

That last one was a real memory, I think.

On the tenth anniversary of my father’s death, my grandfather died. That sounds like a cinematic coincidence, doesn’t it? He was my maternal grandfather, but still— uncanny. He seemed invincible. We

used to say, Pappou never gets sick, because the germs are afraid of him. At eighty years old, he was still shovelling snow for every house between ours and his. And then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t. A lifetime of neglecting doctors visits, then it’s all over in a year of inpatient wards and a nursing home.

I think people asked me if he was like a father. He wasn’t like anything, he just was my grandfather. That’s what we were, and I never intended to demean my relationship with him by using him as a replacement. I never wanted to misshape what I had left of my father by trying to fit my grandfather into his place, forcing pappou into baba’s empty chair at the kitchen table when I knew he preferred to sit next to me. I remember him so well, I can almost always catch when sentimental mirages cloud over the hard details.

After ten years, I could recognize the mirage-to-memory pipeline before the facts slipped down the drain. I didn’t need to find ways to soften that grief anymore. When it comes to my grandfather, I know that he would say my name like he was always excited to see me. I know his hugs smelled of cigarettes, that he chewed with his mouth open. He taught me how to eat my vegetables, forking them together with the foods I liked. I know he used to swear under his breath in frustration at law-abiding drivers. He drove like a maniac, and nearly cried when he had to sell his beloved Buick as scrap metal. I know that when dementia set in, he started calling me by his sister’s name.

Pappou is definite, unchanging. I welcome others’ stories of him, because I don’t fear them taking up the empty seats where my own recollections should be. I knew my grandfather. For my father, my foremost memory will always be grief, and then. Grief, and then his full head of grey hair rubbing against the roof of his car. Loss, and then his face behind a video camera. The sweeping sense of displacement his presence would have in my life today, and then the way he called me koukla in a voice my head can’t recreate anymore. Baba is clouded, a few details making their way through the fog.

Grief might be a mirage. Every time you think you’ve found its end, the light shifts, the image changes. No matter how you devote your attention elsewhere, it’s always on your horizon, in the corner of your eye. I won’t define grief. It’s not feasible. It changes. It’s fluid, like memory. It’s a reflection of yourself, of how you decide to deal with it. It’s your mirage, showing you exactly what you want to see, only to fall apart when you reach for it. You look back years later and wonder how you ever fell for such an obvious illusion, only to realize you’ve just been building new, equally confining definitions of grief every day since.

WORDS Baba, Dad Pappou, Grandfather Koukla, Doll