My estranged father’s death did not affect me as I had expected it would. I had been informed just two days before his passing that he was gravely ill. On the windless drive from France to Germany, somewhere in Belgium on the Sunday before the American elections, I was told he had died. My husband was driving us through a thicket of slow cars. He was the first person to hear me say it after receiving the phone call. “He just died.” We were three hours away. Our GPS predicted we would arrive at the hospital in Cologne where we expected to find him sedated by 6:43 PM. I had been looking out the window and my recollection now is of a mildly sunny pastoral view, like those from my childhood train trips through the flat corridors between Paris and the other side of the Rhine where he had lived since I was a teenager.
Mourning Negative Space
