Susu turned over to get off the couch and almost pressed his forehead to it. His grandfather had died the day after we had last met, and his last words that day had been about him. He died because he insisted on getting the catheter taken out, and fell while trying to pee after the procedure. The fall induced the kidney failure which had him withering away in the hospital for the rest of his days, which led Susu’s uncle to say that he looked like an Auschwitz survivor.

Susu joked in turn that his grandfather wanted to get the catheter out so he could have sex one last time, or, he said, so he could masturbate. He recalled that he had once been shown a picture of a woman by his grandfather, his dad’s dad, who asked if he found the woman attractive. I asked him what that had been like, and he said he found the picture tame in comparison to the porn he had already begun to find. Then he recalled how his grandfather had told him, when he was about 17, that if he went on a date with a woman he should remember to compliment her shoes, since women care a lot about their shoes but few men will pay enough attention to compliment them. These were the last words of the session as far as I can recall.

He died last Wednesday, after our session, Susu said, the same day I showed my colleagues at the Jewish Culture Fellowship the film I had made, and I told them at the end that I’d never forget this day, not only because of their comments and the conversation my piece had generated, but because my grandfather had died earlier that day. It’s kinda awesome that Jews commemorate the day because they got yahrtzeit candles they gotta burn, and that we gotta figure out the date in the Hebrew calendar, which follows the moon, so every year the date falls on the same day of the moon cycle. Then he began to speak about his partner, who hadn’t asked, and so he hadn’t told him yet that his grandfather had died, and we laughed horrific laughter at this. And after our fifty minutes were over I thought to myself I’ve never seen anyone get off a couch by rolling over and supporting their weight with their forehead. It was so attractive.

He had largely complained about his partner, who had not only failed to check in with him about his grandfather’s health, but also failed to defend him against an incessant stream of anti-semitic remarks coming from a friend. I wondered about the absence of commentary on what it had been like to hear of his grandfather’s death, I felt a heaviness in the lack of discussion of it, a sense of overwhelm. He had transformed whatever he might have said into a little sweet encomium for the Jewish practices of lighting yahrtzeit candles and following the moon instead of the sun when defining the date of the death; he even said there was a “poetry” in knowing that each year the day would correspond to the same phase of the moon. He spoke glowingly of how the other members of the fellowship he was in had spoken of his work that day, as there had been a “clash of civilizations.” That his work could elicit a fight felt good to him. He complained about a comment made by a fellow whom he hates; J had complimented the group for being able to hold divergent opinions, as it testified to the strength of their communal bond. Susu wanted to say that it was the work which had elicited this, not the strength of the community. He didn’t want to be in community with J, and he wanted to insist on the primacy of the work he had made. This was as much as I heard about his feelings about the death; I sat frozen to the chair.

It was only in that small moment, when he had rolled over and almost pressed his forehead to the couch, that I saw a hint of grief actualized, and in the laughter that erupted when he revealed to me that he hadn’t told Jonathan about his grandfather’s death at all.

The gaseous presence of the dead reminded me of the fact that I probably experienced my dad as dead, even though he wasn’t. I had the option of reaching out to him but I never did, because he was dead to me. I couldn’t understand why this was so definitively the case. He hadn’t done anything to make me hate him. My learning had taught me that there was probably an unconscious hatred, an identification with my mother’s hatred, but I couldn’t access this in waking life. Once in a while I’d dream of being terribly violent or hateful to him, but these dreams were rare. I didn’t see how they related to what life was like for me generally speaking, as I was so rarely hateful towards anyone in my life, at least not with that depth of feeling.

The next night I dreamt that my dad had appeared. There wasn’t hatred or violence in the dream, but there was a feeling that something important was happening. The bible verse “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” was written or spoken in proximity with both my dad and some other figure, a man whom I was partnered with.

I tend to tell people I’m close with that the reason I don’t talk to my dad isn’t that I hate him, but that I feel sexually attracted to him. The incest prohibition is strong enough that I feel utterly repelled by the thought of making any contact, because any contact would be tinged with incest.

I don’t tell people I have dreams where I rip his face off or scream at him, for some reason. Somehow this violent response to my father feels separate from my sexual desire for him.

Susu’s mother’s hatred for his father erupts now and then. It is as if he never died; she is still the adulterous enemy in her mind, who cheated on her shortly before her death. She mentions this now and then, how he met the woman in that hospital, and had a child with her.

But he died of leukemia before a divorce could happen, when Susu was five. This was the age at which I first became conscious of my sexual desire for my father. I remember beginning to masturbate and thinking of him, and quickly displacing my desire onto the figure of Jesus Christ.

I once asked my dad to kiss me on the stomach after a shower. Then I realized Jesus was dumb and didn’t exist. I found him abhorrent. Before this, my parents had laughed when I came home from school one day and talked about God, or Jesus. In the moment I felt crushed and sad in my realization that because my parents didn’t believe in God, I couldn’t believe in God, but this sadness soon became disdain. I began to disdain my Korean babysitter for talking about Jesus, who seemed to me to be particularly embarrassing and abhorrent. I invented my own private deity based on the latin name for the snow leopard. I prayed to Uncia for certain things.

To mourn his father’s death Susu made a film in which he dragged a coffin across America. This was the film he showed the fellows on the day of his grandfather’s death. It was a film he had conceived of and worked through in analysis with me. In the film he sits with his back facing the camera, next to a coffin, in various landscapes scattered across the American west. He described to me, when he returned from the trip, how he had dragged the coffin around on top of the car, how had discovered while stopping during his drive that it had slipped a good several feet backwards. If I recall correctly, the coffin did indeed slip off the car at one point; luckily it didn’t hit anyone. He told me about how he had stopped at the Museum of American Speed. The car engines he saw there were so beautiful to him, in their odd mixture of masculine and feminine. He said he was thinking of getting a new car, a car with no passenger seats, because he didn’t need them. All he needed was a pickup truck ideally suited to carrying coffins for his yearly shiva journey across the United States. I felt myself bursting with joy when I heard him say that he wanted a car with no passenger seats, a car uniquely suited to carrying around coffins.

Susu invited me to the film’s first public screening. I was criticized resolutely by my supervisor for having gone to see the film. But as a result of my having attended the screening, Susu revealed to me that he fantasized I had a secret that once revealed would change everything. He also imagined me as being equipped with a poison dagger which might dispel the clouds of unknowing surrounding him; he didn’t know if he would be able to deal with this blinding light. He said he sometimes fantasized that his father had left behind unsent emails to him which would eventually make their way to him. Even refreshing his email each day bore this weight.

Later my supervisor would criticize me for not having asked Susu how he felt about his grandfather’s death, during the session in which he announced it. Why did I not ask? It took me three sessions to broach the subject and I stood by my delay, to her horror and frustration.

Perhaps I was granting Susu too much wisdom in this judgment of mine, perhaps I was trapping him in a little cage of my own making. He was a good songbird for such a cage, I suppose, and I liked his dependency on me. But I truly did believe that the light would badly hurt, and that he had a right to his inertia, that the waiting and the waywardness were necessary to sustain him.

My ex-boyfriend told me that when his dad died, it was like a voice in his head suddenly ended, that his dad had been his best friend at the time, they were very close, it was perhaps the only voice in his head. So it left a silence, and absence, something which maybe couldn’t be felt.

I sometimes wonder if the closest way to feel a loss is to hate what does exist, what is left over.