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…