As I mentioned a couple days ago, my father died almost a year ago. It was a horrible time, full of stress so profound that all of it feels like another lifetime, another person in my body, moving from day to day in a blue-grey fog of sheer terror.

It was difficult, I think, to resolve everything that was going on at that time (tension in my family, my Dad’s health, the loss of my job, my sudden resulting financial strife) with my decades-long habit of putting a face on that gives away very little of what’s truly going on with me. It’s good public policy to put on such a mask if you’re running for office, I suppose, or politicking your way through a theatre degree and every theatre company you work with for the rest of your life, but when stuff gets personal, the mask is a detriment.

It’s just that, … people don’t believe that you’re really actually freaking out, that you’re beating your fists on glass, shouting at everyone to please help, to listen harder, to be there – not with that mask. And so it was for me – I veered between being wry and unhinged, and neither was to be believed. I was finding myself in the 19 days before Christmas without a job, in an apartment I’d only just recently unpacked enough to call Home, rather than Storage.

And those 19 days were colder than I ever thought Southern California could get – I was anxious and afraid, hardly moving, hardly daring to get out in the world. Every chilly night had me shaking under blankets, had me portioning out the last of the coffee and tea. Those 19 days brought phone calls about my Dad, who was worsening, who was experiencing setbacks, who was suddenly looking twenty years older than his youthful mid-’60’s.

By Christmas, I was in Houston, completely exhausted, the mask a lame, cracked facsimile of itself. I was worn out from making spreadsheets in my head of how I was going to make my savings last, and I was not confident in California’s economy. I had only just moved there, had only just begun to settle into what I thought was a new life. Every mile driven, every meal eaten, everything was a transaction. I arrived to see my Dad for the last time completely exhausted, absolutely strung out on supporting myself with no foreseeable plan. We were two ghosts, meeting in limbo land.

So, you know, it’s coming up on a year of the last time I saw him, and while part of me wants so much to have something to hold, a filtration, distillation, sediment caught out from the muddied waters, it seems as though I don’t. All I hold in my hands is chaotic memory, a definite indecision of  writing about truth over privacy, of catharsis over propriety.

It was as though I landed in Los Angeles in late 2007, and they jammed a tin tiara on my head, cheap and bent and poking into my scalp, and they said, “Be the princess, second in command to the guy who moved here first, who left his family, who left his Midwestern past. He’s got the highest office, so you’ll just have to let him be the guy who presides over this new place where you happen to live.”

But then I was in Houston, with the assisted living facility where they moved him, and the smell of disinfectant, and the weirdness of rainy gloomy warmth in late December, and my Dad in a wheelchair, and my brother cajoling us both to smile for a photo by the gazebo outside, and my Dad and I both reacting strongly, negatively, no, no, no. With my mask, my reaction was to sheepishly grin for a second and then sarcastically ask Dad if wanted his picture taken with goofy old me, but he was already groaning and glaring with those still-striking blue eyes and with a surprising strength wheeling his chair right back towards the door to go inside. I couldn’t even pull him back, nor did I want to.

Why on Earth would we want to record this moment in mega-pixels? We were both having terrible days, and while I will never completely forget what it was like to see Dad in such a condition, I did not want it recorded. I did not want what we were that day to supplant what we were when we had agency in our lives, when we had somewhere to go with each other, as father and daughter. We were both stuck now, and there were only words to say, and only minutes to say them in. There was no more journey between us, no possibility for growth. We were done. There was no desire on either of our parts to memorialize the punctuation, the telegrammed STOP.

It was all over, then. The rest of the day I was in utter shock as I began to deal with exactly why I was there. I had no words but stupid words. I had conflicting emotions. I was sad, I was angry, I was relieved, I felt like throwing up. All of it was simply unimaginable, and it was all happening anyway. Madness.

Maybe a year is too short. Maybe these moments are just parcels for now, the stuff I remember from peeking through the eyeholes, the stuff that stays with me even after I found a little work, saved up a little money, and pried that tiara from my head. California did not need a bedraggled reluctant queen, her ascension through death and estrangement. I could never look out over the sparkling lights of the city below the hills and see anything but places I’d seen with Dad, of the teenaged memories of parental divorce and the resulting holidays and vacations.

Abdication of the throne was part of my careening course towards self-sufficiency. It was a coup, and its battlefield still shows the scars, the places where emptiness tells the story.