I sat in a chair next to his bed and watched him laboring to breathe. When I put my hand in his, he gave it a comforting squeeze. We looked at each other silently. There was too much to say, and at the same time it felt as if we’d said everything. What was left was only one truth. We were reaching the end. He would not recover. He was going to miss the whole rest of my life. I was losing his steadiness, his comfort, his everyday joy. I felt tears spilling down my cheeks.
Keeping his gaze on me, my father lifted the back of my hand to his lips and kissed it again and again and again. It was his way of saying, Hush now, don’t cry. He was expressing sorrow and urgency, but also something calmer and deeper, a message he wanted to make clear. With those kisses, he was saying that he loved me with his whole heart, that he was proud of the woman I’d become. He was saying that he knew he should have gone to the doctor a lot sooner. He was asking for forgiveness. He was saying good-bye.
I stayed with him until he fell asleep that night, leaving the hospital in icy darkness and driving back home to Euclid Avenue, where my mother had already turned off the lights. We were alone in the house now, just me and my mom and whatever future we were now meant to have. Because by the time the sun came up, he’d be gone. My father—Fraser Robinson III—had a heart attack and passed away that night, having given us absolutely everything.
11
It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful—a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.
The day after my father died, we drove to a South Side funeral parlor—me, my mother, and Craig—to pick out a casket and plan a service. To make arrangements, as they say in funeral parlors. I don’t remember much about our visit there, except for how stunned we were, each of us bricked inside our private grief. Still, as we went through the obscene ritual of shopping for the right box in which to bury our dad, Craig and I managed to have our first and only fight as adult siblings.
It boiled down to this: I wanted to buy the fanciest, most expensive casket in the place, complete with every extra handle and cushion a casket could possibly have. I had no particular rationale for wanting this. It was something to do when there was nothing else to do. The practical, pragmatic part of our upbringing wouldn’t allow me to put much stock in the gentle, well-intentioned platitudes people would heap on us a few days later at the funeral. I couldn’t be easily comforted by the suggestion that my dad had gone to a better place or was sitting with angels. As I saw it, he just deserved a nice casket.
Craig, meanwhile, insisted that Dad would want something basic—modest and practical and nothing more. It suited our father’s personality, he said. Anything else would be too showy.
We started quiet, but soon exploded, as the kindly funeral director pretended not to listen and our mother just stared at us implacably, through the fog of her own pain.
We were yelling for reasons that had nothing to do with the actual argument. Neither of us was invested in the outcome. In the end, we’d bury our dad in a compromise casket—nothing too fancy, nothing too plain—and never once discuss it again. We were having an absurd and inappropriate argument because in the wake of death every single thing on earth feels absurd and inappropriate.
Later, we drove Mom back to Euclid Avenue. The three of us sat downstairs at the kitchen table, spent and sullen now, our misery provoked all over again by the sight of the fourth empty chair. Soon, we were weeping. We sat for what felt like a long time, blubbering until we were exhausted and out of tears. My mother, who hadn’t said much all day, finally offered a comment.
“Look at us,” she said, a little ruefully.
And yet there was a touch of lightness in how she said it. She was pointing out that we Robinsons had been reduced to a true and ridiculous mess—unrecognizable with our swollen eyelids and dripping noses, our hurt and strange helplessness here in our own kitchen. Who were we? Didn’t we know? Hadn’t he shown us? She was calling us back from our loneliness with three blunt words, as only our mom could do.
Mom looked at me and I looked at Craig, and suddenly the moment seemed a little funny. The first chuckle, we knew, would normally have come from that empty chair. Slowly, we started to titter and crack up, collapsing finally into full-blown fits of laughter. I realize that might seem strange, but we were so much better at this than we were at crying. The point was he would have liked it, and so we let ourselves laugh.
* * *
Losing my dad exacerbated my sense that there was no time to sit around and ponder how my life should go. My father was just fifty-five when he died. Suzanne had been twenty-six. The lesson there was simple: Life is short and not to be wasted. If I died, I didn’t want people remembering me for the stacks of legal briefs I’d written or the corporate trademarks I’d helped defend. I felt certain that I had something more to offer the world. It was time to make a move.
Still unsure of where I hoped to land, I typed up letters of introduction and sent them to people all over the city of Chicago. I wrote to the heads of foundations, community-oriented nonprofits, and big universities in town, reaching out specifically to their legal departments—not because I wanted to do legal work, but because I figured they were more likely to respond to my résumé. Thankfully, a number of people did respond, inviting me to have lunch or come in for a meeting, even if they had no job to offer. Over the course of the spring and summer of 1991, I put myself in front of anyone I thought might be able to give me advice. The point was less to find a new job than to widen my understanding of what was possible and how others had gone about it. I was realizing that the next phase of my journey would not simply unfold on its own, that my fancy academic degrees weren’t going to automatically lead me to fulfilling work. Finding a career as opposed to a job wouldn’t just come from perusing the contact pages of an alumni directory; it required deeper thought and effort. I would need to hustle and learn. And so, again and again, I laid out my professional dilemma for the people I met, quizzing them on what they did and whom they knew. I asked earnest questions about what kind of work might be available to a lawyer who didn’t, in fact, want to practice law.
One afternoon, I visited the office of a friendly, thoughtful man named Art Sussman, who was the in-house legal counsel for the University of Chicago. It turned out that my mother had once spent about a year working for him as a secretary, taking dictation and maintaining the legal department’s files. This was back when I was a sophomore in high school, before she’d taken her job at the bank. Art was surprised to learn that I hadn’t ever visited her at work—that I’d never actually set foot on the university’s pristine Gothic campus before now, despite having grown up just a few miles away.
If I was honest, there’d been no reason for me to visit the campus. My neighborhood school didn’t run field trips there. If there were cultural events open to the community when I was a kid, my family hadn’t known about them. We had no friends—no acquaintances, even—who were students or alumni. The University of Chicago was an elite school, and to most everyone I knew growing up, elite meant not for us. Its gray stone buildings almost literally had their backs turned to the streets surrounding campus. Driving past, my dad used to roll his eyes at the flocks of students haplessly jaywalking across Ellis Avenue, wondering how it was that such smart people had never learned to properly cross a street.