DEBORAH COPAKEN KOGAN

I went over to my friends Adam and Martha’s to watch the inauguration on TV because I didn’t want to experience that kind of history alone. It was a moment to be shared, and as friends who share go, Adam and Martha take the cake. Actually, to be precise, they usually bake the cake, a whole tableful of them, and then my family and I arrive to freebase sugar. (more…)

So I was on my way to meet Burt, a rabbi with whom I study. He’d reached out after my father died and invited me to lunch. I was looking forward to it, but I’d had a rough morning. I recently found out I did not get the position as a professor at the New School. Several other job leads have led nowhere. Paul’s job search has been equally difficult. The music has stopped, and neither of us has a chair. With all this worrying about finances and debt, not only is it hard to write, but I’ve been unable to properly mourn my father. I’m mad about this. Furious, in fact. I want to scream, “Why?” but I have nowhere to release this anger, no time to focus on it. I was thinking about this as I left my apartment to walk the block to meet the rabbi.

There, on 96th Street, I passed by a car upon whose snowy windshield someone had spelled out the word, “Why?” On the next car, also on the snowy windshield, was the word, “Dick.” My father’s name.

I do not believe in the supernatural, but weird stuff keeps happening. My father used to tell me stories about the soapbox derby races he won as a child in Kansas City in the early 50’s. Recently, he told my kids the same stories. It struck me, when he died, that of the many times he’s recounted those stories in my presence, I never once asked him what a soapbox derby was. Or what it looked like. I was kicking myself for this. Two days ago, I was walking down 26th Street, after a meeting with my manager and a producer who wants me to write a TV show with her. The producer and I were walking together, and I was telling her about my father when we passed by a store selling 50’s and 60’s era furnishings. In the window was a yellowed, frayed poster with the words, “Soapbox Derby Races!” Behind the glass sat three actual soapbox derbies.

Why? Not even the rabbi knew.

So I’m riding in the Amtrak quiet car to DC this afternoon to do more book-toury things, and I’m texting my son, to make sure he gets out of school early and to his audition on time, and I’m sending him the address of the audition, also via text, only it’s the wrong address, because the email I received was off by a block—the audition was on 58th Street between 5th and 6th, not 59th—and my son is calling my cell phone to try to figure out what’s going on, only because I’m sitting on a train somewhere near Wilmington, I can’t actually help him, so while I’m fielding a query from another casting director, who wonders if Jacob would be free to shoot a short film in LA in the next few weeks, the kid decides to take matters into his own hands, walks into the Ritz Carlton, talks to the doorman, figures out where he has to be, finds the audition, lands the part playing Casey Affleck’s younger self in a film starring Robert De Niro, at least for the table reading tomorrow, who knows whether or not for real, which still means I have to cancel his orthodontist appointment, except I don’t hear about the role until after the orthodontist has gone home, and oh, the film people need his headshot and resume by tomorrow, too, the latter which I polish and send to my husband in an email to print out, with directions on where he can find the headshots, in the white file drawers in Jacob’s room, only he’s busy changing Leo’s diaper and waiting for the script to show up via urgent messenger, and since we don’t have a doorman, he’s stuck at home until the script arrives, but he was planning on taking the kids out for pizza, since he's all by himself with them tonight, and the baby is crying and hungry, and it’s now nearing 7 PM, and Jacob calls to tell me he has a math midterm he’ll be missing, what should he do?, so I have to send a mea culpa email to his school, explaining that I felt that getting to work with Robert De Niro trumped math, and then I suddenly feel like a bad parent, and then Paul gets on the phone and wonders how he’ll get one child to preschool, the other to the Hunter test, and the other to Tribeca when he has two job interviews and a meeting for SchoolHub, his start-up, in the morning as well, but aha!, I’ve thought about this and hired a sitter to come in at 6:30 AM to deal with getting the baby to daycare, and Jacob can take the subway himself, I say, and then I realize I’ve forgotten to tell my daughter’s school she’ll be absent for the test, and I didn't send out half the work-related emails I was supposed to have sent, and before I know it, it’s 10:50 PM, and I’ve yet to write the lecture I’m delivering tomorrow, which is the reason I came down to DC in the first place, and all the while, in the back of my head, I’m thinking, shit, I wish my dad were still here, so I could tell him about his grandson and De Niro, and I realize that this is exactly why he called me a week before he died, sobbing quietly about something Jacob had said to him, saying, “I’m going to miss so much.”

I am tiptoeing my way back to this blog since my father’s death a month ago. My thoughts are mangled, stuck, and half-formed, and I swing wildly, hour to hour, between “I’m doing fine! Really, fine!” to “Kill me now.” I know Dad would have wanted me to be working on my next project already, but starting a new book under the best of circumstances is hard, let alone under these circumstances: a freshly buried father, a husband still out of work, an unpaid rent bill, an office out of commission for reasons too boring to explain. Add to that brew a two-year-old in diapers, a puppy who still has slip-ups, a lecture this Friday morning in DC, the same day my eldest son has to skip school to do a reading downtown for a possible new film and my daughter has her Hunter entrance exam at 8 AM—and no, we did not send her to that scary cram school featured in the New York Times—and let’s just say concentrating for long stretches of uninterrupted time has become a luxury.

The other day, as my daughter and I were walking down 96th Street toward Amsterdam Avenue, we ran into a man dressed up as a giant Dunkin Donuts coffee cup, handing out fliers, and I actually thought to myself, Hmm, I wonder if he gets benefits? “That must be an awful job,” said my daughter, and I snapped at her and said, “Hey! At least he has one.”

I have a bunch of irons in the fire—I applied to the New School for that professorship; Shutterbabe the movie might actually get made this year; I have another book in my two-book contract with Hyperion; a TV news producer, who reads this blog, called to invite me out for lunch to discuss a possible future online something-or-other; I wrote a screenplay which, if I could just find a month to revise it, my manager claims she could sell; a filmmaker wants me to co-write a new TV show with her on spec; I spoke to a friend who owns a Broadway theater about mounting a one-woman show in conjunction with the publication of Hell is Other Parents; I still get hired as a photographer from time to time; I spend hours emailing and conference calling with my father's partners about his nascent business which, like all businesses these days, is having a hard time getting traction—but none of these are sure or steady gigs, and none will pay the January rent in January. March or April, maybe, but not January.

Yesterday, I took my daughter to the dentist for a check-up, and I was told she needed braces in the next few months. I had to explain to the dentist that, since my son already has braces, and we have no money in our bank account, that wouldn't be possible.

You probably want to know about my father’s final days, so I’ll give you the simple story: I went down to Johns Hopkins to see him the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, carting a single pair of underwear and one change of clothes in my overnight bag. Meaning, he wasn’t supposed to have died five days later. He was supposed to have simply had a tube inserted in his stomach, to drain off the excess liquids that tend to accumulate during the final stages of pancreatic cancer. Then he was going to live another two to three months, maybe longer. By Thursday morning, he was in severe pain, and the doctors were telling us he had more like a month, tops. I canceled my train home. By Friday, he’d lost lucidity, and we were told it was a matter of days. The liquid in his stomach was infected and unstoppable in its production, and no one, no antibiotic, no process, needle or tube could get the infection to go away. Monday morning he was dead. Wednesday we buried him. If you want to read my eulogy, it’s here, along with others.

The more complicated story is one I’m still grappling with, the one about how we, as a family, both came together—admirably and maturely—on the family cancer blog, while in real life we seemed much more like players in a dysfunctional family sitcom. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad it was a sitcom instead of a soap opera, and there were awkward moments which, in retrospect, I will cherish for their comic relief: when the funeral director asked us if we had any objects we’d like to place in my father’s coffin, and one of my grieving, bleary-eyed sisters suggested my toddler; when my mother and I were sitting in the Marriot Courtyard breakfast nook, the morning Dad’s health took a turn for the worse, and I said we had to start thinking about hospice care, and she started accusing me, quite loudly, of trying to kill off my father and put him out to pasture, before threatening, if I said one more word (i.e. “The cancer is killing him, Ma, not me!”), to send me home on the next train to New York. “I’m 42 years old!” I said. “You can’t send me to my room.” After which she abandoned me at the table, alone with my grapefruit, muffin, and shame, and I couldn’t decide whether to go ahead and eat the grapefruit, as if I hadn’t just been publicly chastised for patricide, or to join her in the lobby. Because I knew she wasn’t actually yelling at me but at the situation, because the other diners were now all staring at me and rendering a quiet, anonymous breakfast impossible, I left my grapefruit and muffin on the table, uneaten, and skulked off to find Mom.

Anyway, it’s those kinds of disconnects between the public face of a loved one’s death and the private reality I’d like to explore. Or maybe it’s just that my dad, in his final moments of lucidity the night I arrived, started asking me about my family’s finances and wondering how we’d get out of our pickle, and I told him about my plans to write a new novel for the next book in my two-book contract, and he, even in his weakened state, became agitated and annoyed, urging me to think twice. “Why would you write fiction now, at this critical moment, when it’s non-fiction that actually sells? You’re about to be homeless!”

“But I have a good idea for a novel and no ideas for non-fiction,” I said.

“What do you mean?” He started to laugh. “Write about this!” he said, pointing at the tubes coming out of his arm, my mother with her cell phone glued to her ear, people crying outside in the hallways of the cancer ward. “Monetize this! Monetize my cancer! And make it funny. I know it’s cancer, but you can make it funny. People like funny.”

Those were his last cogent words of advice to me before he was reduced to whispering mundanities such as, “Ice chip,” “Pain,” and “Too hot.” And I feel obligated, on some primal, unnamable level, to heed them. Even though I would rather write a new novel.

Last night, I dreamt I was in Saltaire on Fire Island, the last place I was with my family before we found out about Dad’s cancer, pushing one of those wooden carts down the boardwalk, the flat wheelbarrow kind they still use in developing countries to transport dead bodies. Only this particular cart had no body. It was empty, inoffensive to passersby.

I know I shouldn’t admit this, but I want to fill that cart with a body.