Philosophy is an Ambulance

His ashes curled through the water in a pattern that conjured nebulae and galaxies, a reassuring image that I keep pinned to my mind.

When I rejoined Facebook last month, its algorithms immediately encouraged me to befriend my father. There he is with seven mutual friends, wearing his fishing hat, sunglasses, and rugged grin — a snapshot I took on the bayou one Sunday afternoon when we ate sandwiches and puttered around Lake Salvador while he pretended to fish. Last week I clicked his name and saw strangers wishing him a happy birthday even though he’s been dead for nine months. His digital life continues, a ghost in the machine. For a moment I considered becoming friends with him, perhaps the most tragic of digital gestures. There are probably ways to alert Facebook to his death and shutter his account, but I do not want to remove the traces of him that remain.

Then it comes. The sighing and lip-biting, the hollow gut feeling like I might float away or fade to black. The impulse to run although there is nowhere to go. I pace. I wait, trusting this will pass. They say grief comes in waves, a cliché that sounds benign until you’ve slid into its troughs. In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion describes these waves as “paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.”

Waves have rhythm. Grief does not. Its currents oscillate at random, triggered not only by photographs, memories, and empty rooms but the mysterious and unseen machinations of the subconscious mind. Grief can arrive on a gust of wind, a glimpse at a calendar, or a half-heard snippet of conversation on the street. The way somebody pronounces February. And the paroxysms begin, the fear of tipping over. The flutter in the belly as if something vital is coming unbound, an untethering from the world. Sometimes people notice. Usually they do not. If somebody asks what is the matter, I shake my head and smile. Shrug it off. Change the subject.

Nobody wants to hear about dead parents, about my failings as a caregiver, or my encounter with the void, how it must feel like the monitor flat-lining at the hospital, an endless dial tone. Didion again: “People in grief think a great deal about…