At his father’s graveside, overlooking Lake Washington, Frank stood to give the eulogy he’d carefully written but found he couldn’t read the words on the page. Grief turned him into an illiterate. He tried to remember what he’d written so he could recite his eulogy by memory, but he discovered he couldn’t speak at all. Grief turned him into a mute. Finally, after five minutes of silence, as the assembled mourners shook with collective embarrassment, Frank finally remembered how to say four words: “I love my father.”
Afterward, Frank shook the hands and accepted the hugs of dozens of his father’s friends and family. He couldn’t remember any of their names. Grief turned him into a stranger in his own tribe. Finally, Frank recognized an older woman, his mother’s aunt Margaret Marie, who kissed him hard on the lips. She tasted like salt.
“Your father was a ballplayer,” she said. “He could have played in college, you know? You should have said something about that.”
Frank laughed. What kind of person offered constructive criticism at a funeral? What kind of literate mourner had the nerve to deconstruct a eulogy?
Harrison had been a very good basketball player, but he’d never been good enough to play college hoops, not even at the community-college level. He’d been a great shooter but was never much of an athlete — too short and slow and tentative — but Frank, a genetic freak at six feet six (making him the seventeenth tallest Spokane Indian in tribal history), had always been a truly supernatural baller, the kind of jumper and runner who ignored physics when he played. He’d averaged forty-one points a game during his senior year at Seattle’s Garfield High School and had received 114 scholarship offers from colleges all over the country. He’d signed a letter of intent with the University of Washington and had planned to major in environmental science. But then his mother died. To honor her and keep her memory sacred, Frank knew he had to give up something valuable. He had to bury with her one of his most important treasures. So he buried his basketball dreams. On the morning of her funeral, Frank walked to the local park and shot one hundred jump shots and made eighty-five of them. He left the ball at the park, helped bury his mother that afternoon, and had not played the game since. For the first few years, Frank had almost died whenever he thought about basketball, but the acute pain turned chronic, and then it was a dull and distant ache, and then it was the phantom itch of an amputated limb, and then it was gone.
Now he was forty years old, and his life could be divided into two almost equal halves: He’d been a star basketball player for eighteen years — he was a hooper right out of the womb — and a non-basketball player for twenty-two years.
After his father’s burial, Frank went home alone and stood in the quiet house. He had not yet cried for his father, and he wondered if he would ever cry, but his grief grew so suddenly huge that it pushed him to the floor. He lay on the living room carpet and wept huge and gasping tears. He screamed and wailed for ten minutes or more. He didn’t know how to sing and drum, but he pounded the floor and wailed tribal vocals: Father, way, ya, way, ha, Father, way, ya, way, ha, Father, way, ya, way, ha. He sang himself hoarse and fell asleep on the carpet. When he woke, he crawled upstairs to his father’s bedroom and lay in his father’s bed. The sheets still smelled like Harrison. Frank pressed his face into the pillow and breathed in his father’s scent. And then Frank gathered his father’s hair, so different than Frank’s graying crew cut. His father’s hair was still black and two feet long on the day he died. Frank found long black hair on the pillow, in the sheets, tangled in a comb, stuck to the bathtub porcelain, clumped into a wet ball in the drain stops, and scattered in every corner of the house. Frank gathered all of the hair, rolled it into a ball, and ate it. He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father’s life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy.
Frank howled. He slept. Woke and howled again. Slept again. Woke and howled until his lips and tongue were bloody. Slept again. Woke and wondered if his grief would ever end. He didn’t know what to do, but he needed to love and be loved, so he opened his father’s closet and stared at the basketball waiting inside. A couple times a week for many years, Harrison had gone alone to the neighborhood park to shoot baskets, so the ball was worn and comfortable, low on air. Trying to move exactly like his father, to honor his father through muscle memory, Frank picked up the ball, dribbled it around his back, between his legs, bobbled it, and knocked over a chair. Clumsy and stupid with grief, he grabbed the ball, left the house, and walked then ran to the neighborhood park. Once there, he stood at the free-throw line on the northern end of the basketball court. He stared at the iron rim with its chain net. He had not taken a shot in over two decades. He’d given up this game to honor his mother, and now he was reclaiming it to honor his father. He wanted both of them to rise from the dead. Frank dribbled the ball once, twice, three times, stepped back to the three-point line, and rose into the air for a jump shot. He missed the basket completely. Frank watched the sacrilegious air ball bounce away from him and roll quickly across the manicured grass, until it finally slowed to a stop at the tennis court on the other side of the park.
A week after he buried his father, Frank quit his job as a forest ranger. He’d saved tens of thousands of dollars over the years, and the house was completely paid for, so he wasn’t worried about money. But he was worried about being alone. For most of his life, he’d loved solitude. Walking through the deep woods, he often imagined he was the only person left in the world, the only survivor of a nuclear war or a smallpox epidemic. During these fantasies, Frank lived alone for fifty years until the day when he curled into a ball at the base of a beautiful pine and died like an old dog, whereby the human race ceased to exist. Inside and outside of this fantasy, Frank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants. He didn’t have any close friends and had probably shared more conversations with the redheaded clerk at the university bookstore and the blond cashier at the QFC supermarket than he did with anyone other than his father. As for romance, Frank had dated a few women over the years but found them to be too inconsistent and illogical, so he dated a few men and found them to be even more random and frightening. For a while, he had paid for sex with men and women, then women only, but he eventually grew disgusted with the desperation of such acts and, for many years, had lived as chastely as his father had lived. All along, Frank understood that he was suffering from a quiet sickness, a sort of emotional tumor that never grew or diminished but prevented him from living a full and messy life. At the end of every day, Frank thoroughly washed away the human funk of the world, but now, with his father’s death, he worried that he would never feel clean again. He needed to take control of his life. He needed to organize his grief; he needed to compose a mournful to-do list: Bury your father, visit your mother’s grave, cry, eat hair, play basketball again, lose weight. Of course he felt banal. In a time of extraordinary pain, why was he worried about something as ordinary as his body-fat percentage? He only knew for sure that he needed to keep moving, get stronger, build, and connect.