BENEATH THE SKYLINE

SO WHAT DO YOU DO?

Deborah Good

"My prayers are with you." The man had approached me from across the restaurant where I sat with a good friend. He looked me straight in the eyes and put his hand on my shoulder. "My prayers are with you," he repeated.

Did I know this man? I quickly sifted through the files in my brain. This sort of thing had happened to me several times recently. I was in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, where just about every third person, it seemed, went to church with some relative of mine and, as a result, knew the hard news about my dad: He was gone, taken by cancer on July 13, 2005.

"What is wrong with you?" the man asked me. "Are you ill?" He placed the palm of his hand against my forehead, checking for a fever.

I was quite sure by this point that I did not recognize him at all. And his smile told me that he probably did not know about my father’s recent death and that he was joking about something else entirely. I looked helplessly at Rus who sat across the table from me, laughing.

The middle-aged man, as it turned out, was someone Rus knew. The man was implying that I needed prayer only because I was spending my time with the likes of his younger friend who sat across from me. He slid into the booth next to me, chatting with Rus about baseball and the coming football season.

Simple interactions with acquaintances and complete strangers have become challenging in a new way since my dad’s death. Over and over again, when I meet someone at a wedding or soccer game, I have to decide whether they already know, and if not, whether I am going to tell them.

The other day, I met someone at a party and our conversation was not unlike many I’ve had before. I asked her about her life, her work, her plans to go to school. She asked me about myself:

"So what do you do?"

"Well, I’m actually between jobs at the moment, but I’m looking for work here in Philadelphia." I pause. The truth is, I am still living in Washington, D.C., with my mom, helping with the myriad transitions and tasks that one faces after losing a loved one to cancer. I haven’t lived in Philadelphia for six months. I hope to move back soon and am interviewing for jobs there, but without mentioning my dad’s death, I am saying very little about my life. "I’ve actually been in D.C. for about six months," I tell her, "helping out with . . . some family stuff."

Some family stuff? Huh. The conversation moved on and this new acquaintance did not pry. Our interaction was, overall, light-hearted and enjoyable, but—partly because of my choice to keep my huge weight hidden—shallow.

Other times I have chosen to share the hard news, even with strangers. Death is a part of life, after all, and the experience of losing a family member is almost universal. I get different reactions. Everyone, of course, is very sorry. Some have their own stories to tell. One young man I met while waiting for our carryout orders in a local restaurant actually looked to be blinking back tears.

Others, however, shift their weight slightly and pause uncomfortably. Oh, they seem to say awkwardly. She just said something very personal and very sad. I immediately feel like I’ve done something inappropriate, as though I’ve yelled profanity in church and should have kept my mouth shut.

I am observing that there are certain things most people do not often throw into small talk. Apparently, one of these is death. I’m guessing heartbreak, money problems, and mental illness fall into the same category.

And yet I am not completely satisfied with this rulebook for interaction (a book, by the way, that I never received). It seems ridiculous that we are expected to keep some of the most common and most significant experiences of our lives so private, when perhaps what we most need is the support and wisdom of everyone we meet—enough to fill the gaps in our own portfolio, enough to spill over into our loneliest and most helpless moments.

I am usually a very open person, yet I have started to err on the side of privacy, sharing my huge, weighty experience only when it seems most appropriate. In so doing, I spare my conversation partners the discomfort and burden of helping me navigate my way through this fog of grief and gratitude.

Maybe what I’m really doing is letting our culture’s great denial of death limit me and my conversations. We seem to think, If we don’t talk about it, maybe it doesn’t exist.

Well, my friends, I am here to remind us all that death does exist. I now know death more intimately than I ever have before. I have reached my hands in under my dad’s back to where I could still feel warmth, even after his hands and feet were going cold. I have walked down a church aisle with my mother, both of us dressed in black. I have missed him every day since.

I am also here to say that talking about death actually makes it easier to bear. My dad lived with its looming reality for the five and a half months between his diagnosis and his final breath, and his openness through the whole experience changed us all. "It just helps to talk through these things," he would often say, "to get them out of my head."

This morning I woke up on the couch my parents bought together two years ago, in my childhood home. I got on my bike and headed down the wooded path where Dad once taught me to ride. The path led to a grassy area between the Jefferson and Korean War memorials, and there a group of us played a soccer game. I met some new people and told them I was moving to Philly in two weeks. I did not tell anyone what had brought me back to the D.C. area six months ago.

Four of us biked back together, nearly soaked in the humidity. We talked about this and that, laughed, then went our separate ways. I parked my bike in the basement and went upstairs, happy with my morning, and knowing that, when I reached the top of the stairs, Dad would not be there to hear all about it.

—Deborah Good, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, plans to spend much of her next year writing and working part-time, though she now understands life is not as predictable as she once thought. She can be reached at deborahagood@gmail.com.