Learning to live with silence

Notes on grief, fatherhood, and simplicity

Blooming beargrass. Photo by Joshua Doležal.

I’m not sure how it happened, exactly, but once I left my office, I became an unreliable correspondent. Maybe it was that teaching required me to keep a dozen plates spinning at once, and losing track of emails was a sure way for something to come crashing down. If you wrote to me, you usually heard back within the hour. 

Now I have many fewer demands on my attention, but I find myself losing messages in the stack, sometimes replying a week or two later, sometimes realizing after a month has gone by that I’ve forgotten altogether. I've noticed the same phenomenon with many friends. We have the potential for instant communication but resist it, perhaps because we're overwhelmed by screens, lose track of things, or just want an interval for thought. 

It seems polite to apologize for these silences, but I wonder if we should. If Thoreau is correct that we do not ride upon the railroad, but that it rides upon us, then flouting the railroad from time to time is more cause for celebration than for guilt. I have been thinking of late that I need to learn how to live with silence. 

But there are as many different kinds of silence as there are varieties of snow. The heavy silence of dread, the aching quiet of loneliness, the serenity of voluntary solitude. Melville’s Bartleby is a man of few words whose reticence marks his withdrawal from life. Silence can mean respect, as Benjamin Franklin observed of Algonquin peoples who never responded to messages until the following day. A hasty reply would imply that the subject was trifling, whereas a lull indicated serious consideration. Yet a long delay can mean indifference, a silence which implies that you have never spoken or written at all, that you do not even exist. Beneath the comfortable silence that happy couples share is a strong foundation of trust. The very same lulls in conversation are fraught for those with doubts about their partner’s interest or care. 

Few silences are more painful than a parent’s absence. In a heartrending finish to an episode of Ear Hustle, a podcast about prison life, a boy asks the hosts why his incarcerated father rarely writes to him and how he can change that. Another incarcerated father encourages him to keep trying: “Dig deep into that little heart and soul of yours, and try to find the best words you can to let your dad know how important staying in contact with him is to you, how much you love the letters that you do get.” 

Sometimes no one can say exactly why friendship fades. One of my college friends was as close as they come. We sat together at every cafeteria meal, sang together in a music group, even staged dramatic reunions after class by running toward each other across the campus green. Yet we haven’t spoken in nearly twenty years. He is the friend who comes to mind when I listen to Greg Brown’s “Poet Game”: 

I had a friend who drank too much

And played too much guitar

Oh, and we sure got along

Reel-to-reels were rolled across

The country near and far

With letters poems and songs

But these days he won't talk to me

And he won't tell me why

I miss him every time I say his name

I don't know what he's doing

Or why our friendship died

While we played the poet game  

Soldiers once waited weeks for letters during wartime. If the letters never came, they did not know if their loved ones had simply given up on them or if the ship or truck carrying the mail had been destroyed. In Cather’s One of Ours, Evangeline Wheeler experiences the ironic opposite: a visit from the War Department to inform her that her son Claude has been killed at the front, and then a steady stream of letters from Claude for weeks afterward, followed by notes from his friends and his commanding officer with the news she already knows. 

Cather knew quite a lot about grief by the time she wrote One of Ours, how grieving fills the silence left by the departed. What a merciful choice Cather made to allow Mrs. Royce the comfort of her son’s letters for weeks after she knew he was gone. For many of us, the finality of death keeps battering our hearts when we have the impulse to call or to write a loved one who can no longer reply. 

It has been a year and a half since I lost my grandmother. I was there when the morphine took over and her words turned to the long sighs of sleep. My family kept vigil at her bedside for many days afterward. Even to the end, she responded when we’d leave for the night or in the early morning, squeezing our hands as if she would never willingly let go. I was moistening her lips with a swab when those long sighs stopped coming, when the struggle drained from her eyes and a terrible stillness fell. It was too soon. None of us were ready. And so when the shape in the blanket ceased to be her, I wanted to be anywhere but that soundless room.

Some fill this silence with hope in the afterlife. A happy reunion in heaven. As a non-believer, I believe the silence is eternal. I must learn to live with my grandmother’s absence, but I hope I never come to terms with her death. Just as the ill are besieged with demands to think positively, keep their chin up, embrace the chance to emerge stronger from suffering, so are the grieving shamed for resisting acceptance. Death is a truth that I can both acknowledge and repudiate. It will always have been too soon for my grandmother to go, and I need to feel the wrongness of it to know that I loved her. 

What a coincidence that silence was the subject of the latest Dadditude newsletter. How right they are that many fathers feel judged by the traditional roles of provider and protector — and the accompanying expectations of stoicism — even as the structure of family life continues to evolve. And who knew that the loneliness that many men experience in fatherhood could pose as much of a health risk as smoking? 

On Breaking the Silence: How Dads Can Overcome Loneliness and Thrive in 2023

Many of the essays in Brian Gresko’s When I First Held You, an anthology of fatherhood memoirs, hinge on isolation. Carl Cederström ironically finds more echoes of modern fatherhood in feminist memoirs like Rachel Cusk’s A Life’s Work than in the dad-moirs that mask uncertainty with humor and the well-worn trope of the bumbling patriarch. Dads take a beating these days for not holding up their share of domestic labor and other shortcomings, and it can be a bewildering thing to believe, earnestly, in equity and yet feel that the strategies for achieving it are so elusive. 

I wonder if these problems persist, in part, because there is such a wealth of narratives about bad fathers and such silence about what kind of fatherhood our partners and neighbors might be able to celebrate. Fatherhood, as a concept, is like a nymphal skin left clinging to a tree trunk while the actual cicada flies off through the forest, joining the pulsing chorus of its kind. Chances are if you try to explain what makes a good father, you’ll get a cardboard cutout of fatherhood that hasn’t changed since the 1950s. Motherhood has been problematized, scrutinized, written about from nearly every angle. But men don’t talk about fatherhood except in platitudes, even though the reality of fatherhood looks nothing like it did throughout my childhood. So I write, in part, to break that silence. 

To wit, the first conversation about fatherhood that I recall came secondhand from one of my basketball teammates. His girlfriend was pregnant, and they planned to keep the child, and our coach called him to the front of the bus during a long road trip home after one of our games, and they talked about the miracle of holding your own flesh and blood in your hands. My friend relayed all this when he rejoined us at the back of the bus. I remember how intently we listened, safe in the cover of darkness, hungry for this knowledge that the other men in our lives seemed so reluctant to share. 

Even now it strikes me as astounding that not one of the fathers in my family — not my father or either of my grandfathers or any of my four uncles — shared anything with me about how they felt holding their newborns or how they went about raising children. Instead of stories about fatherhood, most men I know tell stories about manhood, assuming that a man’s man doesn’t need to think any differently about himself as a spouse or as a parent. The lesson applies equally on all fronts: suffering ought to be borne in silence. In my experience, this is exactly the wrong kind of education, one I’ve been steadily unlearning.

Clockwise from top left. The trail crew at Lost Horse Mountain, Moose Creek Bridge looking toward the Selway River, Pack with crosscut and mattock, Shower at Three Links Creek. Photos by Joshua Doležal.

There is no such thing as perfect silence in the wild. I once worked as a wilderness ranger in northern Idaho, living in a tent for most of that time, sleeping on the porch of a cabin during my days off. Even in the dead of night there were mules snuffling in the corral, bats flapping through the dark, coyotes yipping back in the timber. I had to deal with knuckleheads on my trail crew and frustrations with my boss back at the office. But there were many moments when I’d stop and take stock of my happiness, the way Kurt Vonnegut said his uncle would often remind everyone during a pleasurable experience, “If this isn’t nice, what is?” Often that meant surrendering to simplicity — heat against my face as the morning warmed, or the mesmeric purl of a stream. And I think simplicity of this kind is what I want to embrace, more than silence. 

Willa Cather believed that the higher forms of art were studies in simplification, and this is one of the principles I embrace in life after academe. It’s not silence I want to celebrate, then, in the lulls between letters, it is the reduction of noise, the simplification of sound that allows me to really listen and hear and be present to those I love.