Addison

Last night, trying to feed and medicate Connor with one hand and message with a former staff member who is going through a hard time with the other, I somehow switched the background she had chosen to an orange one with the word "Addison" - I have no idea what this refers to in the online world, but in my world, Addison is the name of my Dad. Not my father, who never gave me anything but a tiny delicately embroidered dress when I was first born. My Dad was a friend of my mother's, 20 years older than her, who decided to help out after my father vanished like a genie before I was born. It's ironic that Dad's name would pop up now, like a message from the universe telling me to stop avoiding it and tackle the overwhelming task of packing up his apartment, where he lived for decades. I am having trouble both with the logistics of packing and moving all this stuff from his 4th fl. walk up, but also with letting go of this apartment. This is the apartment I came home to as a very premature baby when my mother's loft was still under construction. It's the apartment I spent many hours playing in with my friend Franka from the apartment upstairs, my Dad providing many hours of free childcare for both our mothers. It's the apartment where my ballet photos, each year a bigger girl in a more complicated pose, spread across the bedroom wall, evidence of a phrase my Dad often uttered, deepening his voice to imitate a long ago radio announcer, "Time Marches On." Dad made his boiled dinners here, beans baking in his inherited ceramic pot, brown bread steaming in a can. I brought my new dog to this apartment when she chewed her way out of her cardboard carrier halfway down the subway steps, preventing us from bringing her to Brooklyn in those days before dogs were ubiquitous on the trains. I cooked hundreds of meals in this apartment, using Dad's ancient bone-handled knives engraved with "Cutlerer to Queen Victoria" and kept dangerously sharp, a habit left from Dad's days cutting fish on the docks in Gloucester. This is where I brought Yuki when a client brought him to me so sick his eyes were red and his fur was rumpled like he needed an iron, too potentially contagious to bring home to my own cat crew. This is where I staggered after my overnight shifts at Sylvia's, when they didn't have money to pay me for my actual job as Director and so I had to cover the overnights to get paid. I would show up at Dad's early in the morning, his internal teacher clock having already gotten him up, and crash on his bed for an hour until he woke me and sent me on my way up to the Bronx for grad school. And this is the place where I spent hours watching over Dad in his last year, working on getting my new organization off the ground while keeping Dad from wandering out the door or drinking the dish soap "the lemony sauce" again. It is the place I raced to from the library where I was listening to clients read their poetry when a hospice nurse called, the place where I sat by Dad's bed and watched him take his last breath. Letting go of this apartment feels like letting go of Dad, of that life. I thought about moving there, so close to my office and my doctors, getting rid of property taxes and constant old house repairs, but I know it's just a matter of time before the next part of my spine succumbs to degenerative disease and the risk of not being able to get up all those stairs is too real.