Propositions on Light and the Management of Estates

1. I have been thinking, with whatever I have left that still thinks, about the light in his study the morning after.

2. It was not remarkable light. This seems important to say.

3. In Danish, there is a word, hjemve, which means homesickness, but which contains the word for home inside the word for longing in a way English refuses to do. I have been unable to determine whether this is a failure of English or a mercy.

4. The estate lawyer used the word effects, as in: his effects. I wrote it in my notebook as though it were evidence.

5. What I mean is: every object in that study had been touched more often than I had. The fountain pen. The brass letter opener with initials that were not mine—though we shared them— a coincidence no one believed. The books he read instead of calling. Fifty-four Jacobsens, listed on a single sheet of legal paper as though they were furniture. I am not making an accusation. I am trying to describe distance: a man and his son, and the evidence of a life that preceded the son, continued during the son, and completed itself without the son’s witness. I held the letter opener for a long time. It was heavier than I expected. I do not know what I expected.

6. Cort Jacobsen painted the harbor at Skagen twenty-two times. I counted once, in a catalog I no longer own. The harbor did not change. What changed was what he needed the light to hold.

7. I am not sure grief is the right word. Grief implies a before.

8. The desk was mahogany. This is the kind of fact I have instead of others.

9. Someone—I do not know who—had left a glass of water on the windowsill. It had evaporated down to a ring. This struck me as a kind of trespass, but I left the ring anyway. I told myself this was respect. I am no longer certain.

9a. I did not recognize my hands while I was in that room.

I mean this literally. I have my father’s hands—this was noted often when I was young, noted as though it were a gift, as though the body were a form of inheritance one could be grateful for. In that room, going through his desk, I kept encountering my own hands doing things he had done: opening drawers, lifting papers, pressing a thumb against the spine of a book to hold the page. At some point, I stopped and looked at them the way you look at a word you have written too many times until it stops being a word. These hands, instruments I did not choose, cannot return, and have been carrying since before I was old enough to know they were not entirely mine. He is dead, and his hands are not. They are here, at the ends of my arms, opening his mail. It did not feel metaphorical. It felt like a problem I could not locate the edges of, the way certain griefs refuse to be about what they are about and instead become about the specific weight of a brass letter opener, the specific behavior of water on glass, the particular architecture of a hand that belongs, in ways no estate lawyer has language for, to more than one person.

10. In the last painting, the light comes from the left. In the first painting, the light comes from the left. Between them: forty years of harbor. Forty years of the same decision.

11. The estate lawyer asked if I wanted to keep anything.

12. What I wanted was to be the kind of person who knew what to keep. There are people like this. I have met them. They walk into a room full of the dead, and they choose correctly—they take the thing that will matter in twenty years, the thing that contains the whole person rather than just the evidence of a person. I took the pillowcase. I took the ring-stained glass from the windowsill, which I later dropped in the Hamburg airport, which shattered in several more pieces than it should have, and I stood there looking at it on the floor, and a woman from the cleaning staff came with a small broom, and she was efficient and not unkind, and she swept my father into a bin and I thanked her. This is what I mean when I say I do not know if I am grieving correctly, or grieving at all, or simply accumulating events that feel like they should mean something and then watching them get swept up before I can decide what they mean.

13. There is a Jacobsen—a small one, unframed when I found it, wrapped in a pillowcase—where the boat in the harbor is empty, and the water around it is the exact color of stopped time. It was not on the legal paper. I have not been able to look at it directly. I keep it in a closet in the room where I sleep. This is either grief or superstition. I am told these are different things.

14. His effects. I wrote it twice.

15. The ring on the windowsill is still there. I know this because I have not told anyone to clean it. Somewhere in Hamburg, in a room I no longer have the right to enter, water I cannot account for continues to not exist.