Joel Ivan Hamburger

I wanted to mark the recent death of my father, Joel Ivan Hamburger, who was 79 this year. But I don't know how. There are all kinds of rites and rituals that are possible, but none of them seem equal to the real and true experience of my late father and the facts of his going out of this world.

Perhaps the strangest part of it is the experience of death itself. It makes me think of being in New York during September 11th. While I was going through it, the truth and reality of the actual event kept me so grounded in the present, in every second of what was happening. And then immediately afterward, the memorialization of the event gilded the lily, transformed it from an experience to a narrative.

Lately I've been recounting the narrative of my father's death over and over, and each time I get more frustrated. "But this wasn't how it was," I want to say. The story is so puny next to the pain and sorrow of what I went through in life.

The first time I fell in love, I remember hearing a love song on the radio and thinking, "Oh, that's what they were talking about!" So too, with this, I now have a new understanding of what death means to the living who are left. It makes me hate war more than ever. It's horrific enough when someone dies of natural causes, but to plunge someone through this experience to make a political point is barbaric.

I also have a new appreciation for writers who can capture this rare, awful experience in their work. Lately I've been reading the poetry of Jeffrey Harrison, specifically his book Incomplete Knowledge, which delicately yet powerfully evokes the deaths of several friends and his brother. Perhaps poetry more than fiction is more suited to portraying the host of jumbled, jagged, and sometimes contradictory emotions called up by loss.

We'll see.