Begin Again

My dad's watch finally died. I hadn't pulled his old Timex out of my bathroom vanity drawer for months, fearful that the battery had conked out since I last checked. But in a moment of nerviness last week, I fished it out and looked at the simple, analog face. The white hands were halted forever at 4:31—am or pm, the watch wasn't telling.

Dad's Timex had been in overtime for years. That it kept ticking even after he died, more than three years ago, always seemed a little surreal to me, like the ghostly twitch of a limb you can still feel after it's been amputated. My father was wearing the watch the night he died on his farm in Virginia, and the next day, at the funeral home in Front Royal, the mortician presented it to my stepmother and my sister and me, along with his wedding ring, in a small white bowl. It was a grey, brittle December afternoon—all the skeletal trees had finally shrugged off their leaves, dead weight—a harbinger of the long, bleak winter that was to come.

In the beige mortuary parlor, my stepmother, Lesley, asked if one of us might like the watch. It was too soon to think about wanting anything—except for Dad, still alive, all the horrid cancer scrubbed from his body, the last three months a do-over—but as soon as I saw his watch, I knew I did. When I put it on, the black leather band was soft and water-cracked in places, permanently arced in a semi-circle, molded to his wrist, and much too big for me. But through the curve of it, I could almost feel Dad's wrist, the size and heft of it, the heat, even. A kind of negative space, the absence a presence.

Just moments before, the Timex had been strapped to his freckled wrist. Just yesterday,  his wrist had been alive, veins and pulse chugging weakly, their last hours on the job. But it was now December 10, and Dad was in the next room, sticking out from under a maroon blanket on a metal gurney. His skin was colorless and cold, but for the second time in two days, I surprised myself by stroking his face, kissing him. It was so much easier than I thought, to touch him. He was still familiar, intimate, my father.

After we said goodbye to Dad, we went grocery shopping. Dad and Lesley's close friends were bringing dinner to the farm, and we'd put ourselves in charge of providing dessert. It was a ridiculous assignment, prowling the aisles of Martin's for sugary treats none of use felt like eating. We couldn't decide: devil's food cake or coconut cake. Some kind of weird jiggly flan in a plastic container, or ice cream. Did we want to bake something from a mix? The longer we stumbled through the aisles, the more terrible we felt, as though we were somehow tarnishing Dad's memory by shopping for cheap, store-bought desserts, in a horrible, fluorescent grocery store next to the K-Mart where Dad used to buy his pajamas, probably the black-and-grey checkered pair he'd been wearing when he died. Our grief and shock were so raw, nothing else seemed real.

In a silent, mutual rage, we settled on a fruit tart. The raspberries on top glistened in a sinister, unnatural way. I knew I'd never take a bite. I pushed my infant daughter in her car seat stroller out through the automatic doors and into the pewter glare of the sun trying to press through clouds, insistent but somehow futile. These were the flat winter days I remembered from childhood.

I wore the watch through the winter, even though it was too big for me, and spun around so that the buckle was where the face should be, and the face was where the buckle should be, rubbing on tables and rough surfaces, the kitchen sink. It was getting scratched, and I worried about the band—the old arc, the memory of Dad's wrist—breaking. One day I replaced the band and had the jeweler punch extra holes in the end so that it would fit properly. But once in its rightful place, the grey, moony face was too large for my narrow wrist, and it rubbed my knobby bones in an uncomfortable way. I was grieving my father and my own mortality and my babies getting bigger, all at the same time, and I didn't need any more reminders that time was passing. I took it off and tucked it carefully in a drawer.

Every so often, I would retrieve the watch and check that it was still ticking. Sometimes I held it to my wrist, imagining it wound around Dad's, remembering his skin with its freckly age spots, and sometimes even hearing his voice, deep and affectionate. I came to view the watch as an extension of my father, and an arbiter of my grief. As long as the Timex was still ticking, his death was still fresh and in some intangible form, he was still close, and my grief was still acceptable, reasonable. I began to fear that when it stopped, Dad would be gone altogether, all over again, for good, and I might not be ready to say goodbye. Even as I fingered the watch and put it to my ear to hear its steady ticking, like a heartbeat, I knew this was arbitrary, the kind of fanciful logic that takes over in the spinning, upside-down aftermath of death. The same magical grief-thinking that convinced me I had cancer, too, a sneaky, sympathetic pain that morphed and migrated all over my body for more than a year.

How do we measure grief? In seconds, minutes, hours? Days, months, years? Like love, it can't be quantified. There is no time limit. What I couldn't imagine, when I put the watch in the drawer, was that over time my grief would fade and then reemerge, clutching at my itchy skin and tugging at my bones with a sharp, insistent ache. It wasn't linear, but cyclical. It bore down on me in the darkening days of winter, and lifted with the strength of the springtime sun. With each full spin of the seasons, I could begin to predict its comings and goings. It was growing sluggish, as I was becoming quicker and more nimble. Most of the time now, I could stay just out in front, the fear and grief trailing behind me with outstretched arms, trying to keep up, but falling further and further behind.

When I found Dad's watch the other night, it had been so long since I'd last pulled it out that for a brief, bewildering moment I wasn't sure where to look. But there it was in the top drawer, under an old bottle of pink nail polish. I was not surprised to find that it had stopped. Ever since that afternoon at the funeral home, I'd known this day was coming, and I'd worried I wouldn't be ready when it did. But what I felt instead was a kind of lifting, a faint relief. Dad's watch had finally caught up with him, still and silent, no longer twitching its inexplicable metallic pulse in my drawer.

What propelled me to look for it last week, I cannot say. We had dinner guests, and I had to get back to toss the salad, pour the wine, and make our friends feel at home. I did not press it to my ear or bend the band around my wrist or inspect the face for scratches, wondering which ones were mine and which were Dad's, phantom etchings of a lost life. I clasped it only briefly in in my hand, and then I put it back.

I no longer believe that Dad's dead Timex means my mourning is over or that the clock has run out on my grief. But I do believe that it has shifted, taken a sharp turn one way or the other, and that our paths continue to diverge. When we meet again, we will both be different. Maybe I will be wearing Dad's watch.

—Katie