I’ve just arrived in New Hampshire for a U15 soccer game when, with my forearms thrashing deep into my duffel, I panic: I’ve forgotten to pack my funeral dress. This realization, which mingles with the nauseating scent of hotel room spray, halts my inhale. I’ve failed at my own version of Coach’s uniform instructions: wear white, bring black.
I bought the dress — a dolman-sleeve, knee-length black crepe — a decade ago for the funeral of my beloved Grandpa Seymour, who died just a few breaths shy of 99. We were each other’s “only”s: He was a stepgrandfather without kids of his own; my biological grandfathers were gone before I was born.
A warm September breeze lifted the skirt as I stood at his graveside in my also new black suede eyelet heels — deeply discounted. He would have approved. A lifelong bargain hunter and shoe salesman, he frequently climbed our front steps with a tower of boxes held in place by his chin. “See what you like, Dollface.”
The dress hung lifeless in my closet until three years later when, after months of feeding my mother through a PEG tube, I retrieved it with both reluctance and relief for her January funeral. In its sheer fabric I knew I’d freeze, but that felt right. After all, with her I was burying a lifetime of private jokes and a shared sense of humor.
At the cemetery, my slingbacks sank into the snowy dirt where they lowered my mother and I longed to follow. She spent the first two-thirds of her life high off the ground in heels. But after her Parkinson’s diagnosis at age 50, she surrendered to comfort shoes. “It’s time to return to earth,” she said.
Three years later the dress emerged for my father-in-law’s funeral, and as we stood by his grave I could hear him praising my practicality — the man wore the same suit to his sons’ bar mitzvahs and weddings.
In hindsight, these were the easy deaths. I knew they were coming; I was there for them. The dress was ready and so was I. But what happens when loss is slow, the goodbye extended? Is it something to treasure or to dread?
Now 36 months hence, I don’t feel more experienced in death, but rather taunted by it. My father, 82, has Parkinson’s too. He needs a remote to sit up, a hydraulic lift to transfer, and me, his only child, to uphold his spirit. Since he can no longer stand, shoes are unnecessary. He lives in Chicago, I’m in New York, and though I visit often, it’s never enough. “Do something!” he pleads with me repeatedly, by which he means relocate him, fire everyone, reinstate his cellphone, make him well.
Since I can’t — or is it won’t? — do what he asks, I complete my own to-dos. I take stacks of his letters written to his family when he was a student traveling overseas. One by one I open the fragile airmail envelopes into their primary form factor, stationery, and read the impeccably scripted contents aloud: “Tomorrow we shall rent a Vespa for the day for $5 and ride around Rome. Gosh, this really is like in the movies.”
I try to transport my father back, as if reversing time is as simple as loosening a crease. I ask him — a phenomenal self-taught chef — to explain his technique for making choux pastry swans floating in chocolate sauce. I record his answer via Voice Memo not only because I should try to make them, but to capture his chuckle for posterity, because these days his messages are all grievances and grocery lists.
I photograph the scribbles on his bedside legal pad, the pages stained, dried, and rippled from soft drinks spilled by his ever more trembling hand, archiving his writing for reasons I can’t name, filling up my phone’s memory and crowding my own. In completing these tasks, I exist in the past and in the future, but rarely in the present with him.
Unable to stall his decline, I focus instead on preparing for what comes after. Jewish law requires burial within 48 hours, so I bring my dress with me whenever I leave home for the night, believing that if I can step effortlessly into grief’s garment I will be able to tolerate her other tasks, which are mine alone to manage — a funeral, eulogy, shiva, and the few belongings but many memories left behind in his room in memory care. I am a sentimentalist, not a planner, but here I am, armoring my future self with fabric.
Up until the frantic search for my funeral dress on a New England fall night while “Shark Tank”’s DUN-dun-DUN-dun–DUNdun-DUNdun-DUNDUN theme drums in the background, I’ve felt proud of my one-off ability to maximize organization and mitigate sorrow. I even have a Google doc for each older relation, quotes and anecdotes that are the making of touching, humorous posthumous tributes.
And yet, while I have successfully pre-commemorated my vertical relatives, I have failed my horizontal ones. Ten and seven years out my grandfather and mother lie in their graves awaiting footstones. With the markers blown away I can’t find them when I visit, so I collapse cheek down onto the spikey grass and listen. What kind of offspring cares more about what she wears to the funeral of a living relative than marking the ground where her dead ones lie? Why do I complete things so out of order, and do others engage in future-proofing too?
I ask around. One friend tells me she says “I love you” every time she leaves her son, haunted by the day she forgot to tell her grandfather before he died. But now her child says it compulsively when exiting a room. Another plays catch with his nondominant arm because he heard it reduces the chance of dementia. Now he has a stress injury in his wrist. Online a man shared that to save money for the future, he was grossly underfeeding himself. Based on my tiny sample size, sometimes our attempts at protection inflict harm.
I sit by my father, recently in hospice, forcing my senses to be my recording device. I wait for him to speak, or not, and think about how I never take the dress when I travel to see him. That would be redundant. I instinctively know that if he were to die while I’m here, I don’t need a dress to ground my grief, I have him.
Because my father, a man who modeled how to maximize life’s moments, warned against regret. This, in part, is what has made me a devoted daughter, one who guilts easily and makes decisions accordingly. And so when I am anywhere but with him at this stage in his life, I crave the reassurance that I am only one costume change away from the role of dutiful child.
I thought my funeral dress was a safeguard against forthcoming sadness. But maybe it’s for me now, something to carry around while loss unfolds, a way to signal that I am ready, even when I am not. Yet when I’m with my father, I’m reminded that grief is inevitable, and guilt, not something an outfit can subdue. But presence, that’s an invisible covering worth slipping into, as often as you can bear.
Rachel Abrams writes, dances, and works as a user experience designer in Brooklyn and Sagaponack. She recently completed a memoir about how movement can serve as a form of pre-emptive healing, shaped by her experiences as a dancer and the daughter of two parents diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease. She is online at rachelink.com.