My father died on December 22^nd of last year. Last Friday, my mother was diagnosed with an advanced metastatic cancer of unknown origin.

I’m turning this space into a place where I review books. That starts middle of next month. This is just the thing before the other thing.

This is about what I was doing when I wasn’t reading.

Sometimes I couldn’t read. I’d get four pages in and find I was moving my eyes across a paragraph about a woman in a kitchen while thinking about a phone charger in a hospital drawer in Silver Spring. Reading requires holding various shapes in your head long enough that they become different shapes, shapes you can recognize and then become part of your own lived map. I haven’t been able to do that. I couldn’t hold anything but what was right in front of me. Anyone who’s lost a loved one to a prolonged illness can tell you. Sometimes all you can do is manage one thought at a time. One piece of information at a time.

But I could watch television.

So, let this be a review from a special, single edition: the rating system is my body. Laughter counts. Bawling counts. Time is its own unreliable factor.

TV SHOWS FOR KEEPING THE ROOM FROM GOING QUIET

Law and Order – from the pilot through whatever season it is when the old angry bald man leaves. The series plays 24/7 on Pluto and Roku Live. Nostalgia points: live streaming means no pausing or rewinding, and there’s recurring ads for reverse mortgages and car insurance. Feels like being sick from home on a school day. Major comfort vibes.

The genius of this series is that nothing accumulates. The death comes first. All the violence, all the shock, all the confusion of how could this happen all come first. Someone dies in the first 60 seconds and by minute forty-two the death has been converted into a procedure, and the procedure has been completed. Then it happens again. Then it happens again. You can enter at any point. You can leave at any point. No matter what, you know that questions will be asked and answered. You already know the outcome. There is nothing to be afraid of.

• Laughter: light chuckles at hard-boiled NYC Detective banter.

• Bawling: sometimes and unexpectedly.

• Hours: I stopped counting last May.

Tires, on Netflix. For when you need a hearty guffaw to break through your crippling skepticism. No disrespect to the show makers but, from the trailer I assumed this was going to be a dumb show (it’s a show that plays on your notions of what’s dumb). And yet the guffaw came out of me like an old forgotten swallowed peach pit.

• Laughter: yes, surprisingly, loud, and then repeatedly.

• Bawling: none until the second season with the dad.

• Hours: 12

Private Practice, on Netflix. For when “Grey’s Anatomy” is too much. Same hospital logic with waaaaay lower voltage. Nobody I love is in it. In fact, some of the characters are detestable.

• Laughter: yes but mostly for scenes like when they all suddenly become surgeons and remove a blood clot from a woman in labor and then perform a C-section and then perform heart surgery on the newborn. Good for mild hate-watching.

• Bawling: sometimes, not always related to plot.

• Hours: 77.

Cobra Kai, on Netflix. Men who cannot stop being seventeen, which is a subject I have opinions about.

• Laughter: intermittent.

• Bawling: none.

• Hours: 30.

Love After Lockup, on AMC? I’m not going to look it up. Part of the diagnostic value of this show is that I never once knew what channel I was on.

• Laughter: uncharitable.

• Bawling: none.

• Hours: unknown.

Real Housewives, whichever city. My best friend came and stayed for a week because my father was dead and I live alone, and we fell into the rhythm we have had since we were girls, which is two people watching garbage and narrating it. I felt better. I went to work. On the drive home I had a screaming fit in the car and wiped my face before I got to the door so she wouldn’t see the streaks.

• Laughter: real.

• Bawling: in the car, off-camera.

• Hours: one week.

Shrinking, for when you want to pretend that everyone you love and care about lives within a five-mile radius and shows up instantly for every conversation and crisis. This is the most fantastical program on television. It is science fiction. Yes, even moreso than Private Practice with its spontaneous surgery in the conference room plotlines.

• Laughter: yes.

• Bawling: yes, and I resented it.

• Hours: 17.

TV SHOWS THAT WILL SEND YOU THROUGH TIME

Your Friends and Neighbors, on Apple TV. Current season. His father dies.

The failure here is mine, not the show’s. I’d located a show as far removed from me as possible. This show is about a rich white man committing crimes in a gated community just because he wants to and he can. He has a Latina housemaid sidekick. And then his father died in it and I was back in that stale hospice room in Silver Spring with the humidifier ticking and the aide saying he’s comfortable in the voice they use, and then I was back on my couch in Hartford with a show still playing, and the whole trip took maybe two seconds.

No measurement.

TV SHOWS THAT WILL MAKE YOU LAUGH THEN CRY BECAUSE THE HARDER YOU LAUGH THE MORE PAINFUL THE REMINDER THAT YOU WILL NEVER LAUGH LIKE THIS AGAIN WITHOUT CRYING

Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen, on Netflix. For mourning your relationship to an unavailable man, who became unavailable during the worst year of your life. I have nothing witty here. I picked it for the title and the title delivered.

• Laughter: bitter. salty. dry.

• Bawling: yes, desperately.

• Hours: Six.

Six Feet Under, series finale only (Season Five, Episode 12): This is so well-done you don’t even need to watch the full final episode to get the full effect. You can just skip everything, go right to the end and you let it do the thing it does. You’ll get the cathartic release you haven’t been able to produce on your own after so much time in reaction mode. After days of paperwork, phone calls, group chats, and shitty first drafts of your dad’s obituary.

It works. That’s what I want to say about it as a critic. The final seven minutes is a strict machine that works. You put yourself in and grief comes out on schedule, in the shape our culture has agreed grief should be, set to music.

• Laughter: no.

• Bawling: on demand.

• Hours: seven, cumulative, one hour at a time, four times. The episode is 72 minutes, although you only need the final seven.

TV SHOWS TO BINGE AT 3AM WHEN YOU ARE DELIRIOUS FROM EXHAUSTION BUT CAN’T GO TO SLEEP BECAUSE IF YOU GO TO SLEEP THEN IT WILL BE TOMORROW AND TOMORROW MEANS COMING CLOSER TO THE THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW BUT DON’T WANT TO KNOW

Law and Order, again. Same show. Different show.

At three in the afternoon it is a machine for making time pass. At three in the morning it is the sound of a television in a room where a man is dying, which is a sound I know now, and which I will apparently know for the rest of my life, and which is not silence, and that is the entire point of it. You are not watching. You are being kept company by a device. Somebody is talking in the room. Somebody is always talking in the room. Nobody needs anything from you.

• Laughter: none.

• Bawling: none.

• Hours: these don’t count.

TV SHOWS THAT ARE NOT TELEVISION AT ALL BUT AN ENTIRE FILM FRANCHISE WATCHED IN ORDER WITHOUT STOPPING ON A BIG SCREEN YOU BOUGHT BECAUSE YOUR FATHER DIED AND HE LOVED BIG SCREENS

The Fast and the Furious, all of them but one, in order. Seventeen hours and twenty-seven minutes across four days.

I skipped Tokyo Drift. This is not controversial.

After my father’s funeral I flew home and I bought a big screen television in my father’s honor.

I have loved these movies my whole life. People tease me about it. They think they’ll get me to admit know better, but I always disappoint them, because I do know better and I love them anyway and those are not in conflict. I have been arguing this position for twenty years to audiences that did not want to hear it. So I have been doing criticism for a long time. Nobody was paying me and the subject was fast cars going to space. YES, I LOVE IT BECAUSE THAT IS COOL.

What these movies offer is magical thinking with the seriousness of an engineering diagram. A car leaves a cliff and lands. A body takes an impact that should end it and gets up and keeps talking. Force is survivable, and physics is just an option. The films don’t wink about this. Instead, they commit, they double down with a straight face, for hours, and that commitment to absurdity is the pleasure.

And there’s the simpler thing: it’s fun to watch fast cars. Even when you want to call your dad to talk about the fast cars but you can’t because he’s dead.

• Laughter: constant.

• Bawling: only when it was over.

• Hours: 17:27, spread over four days.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

Being Mary Jane, “Sparrow,” season three, episode three.

Next month I review a book, a real book with pages read all the way through, by a person who held the shape in her head long enough for it to become a different shape. See you then.

Well, this is me finally getting out of my head and taking the damn stairs.

I love to read books and I love to talk about the role of storytelling in visual culture. When folks ask why I got my PhD in African American literature I tell them because I wanted to read books and talk about reading books. Seriously, that was why and I’m proud of that being my why! I read The Washington Post’s Book World as a kid and pledged that one day my book would be featured and I would be a contributor.

That hasn’t happened (yet!), but I don’t need permission to make my own Book World right here. It might end up just me writing to myself although I’d love for you to stick around. Membership remains free but there is now a paid option. In the coming months, there will be book reviews, criticism, and the cultural connections between how we tell stories in order to make sense of our realities. For paid subscribers, there will be curated syllabi and reading guides for downloading. If you want to be an early supporter here’s a 50% discount (good until August 21st)!

I’m so very grateful to all the witnessing you have given me in my most recent grief journey as well as bearing witness to my experimental writing. Which isn’t ending. I’m moving my writing to a blog space since that’s really what it was turning into here. I’d love to see you there.

Either way, so much gratitude to this community and I can’t wait for y’all to see what’s next!

L

Upcoming reviews:

• Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right and the textual violence on every page that refers to Black people as “blacks.”

• Tayari Jones’s KIN is a gutting ode to Black girlhood and friendship.

• Falling into the Law and Order 24/7 vortex and realizing S. Epatha Merkerson’s Lieutenant Anita Van Buren stands the cultural test of time.

• Why reading President Obama’s book list is required reading for the pending apocalypse.

I’d asked my father why he was so quiet at the dinner table. We were staying with family in Martha’s Vineyard, having dinner with friends. I don’t remember what the conversation was but my usually loud, bold, argumentative father was quiet with his head down, focused on his lobster. He had fallen earlier that day, too.

Was it then? Did he have a brain bleed by then?

This was the last summer I would spend with him like that — mobile, aware, lucid, with plans to live and travel. He died two years later after a traumatic brain injury. They found multiple brain bleeds during his surgery. Then came the brain infection.

I’m teaching my dog to trust food again. He has gastritis and acid reflux. When he sees his food he thinks he’ll get sick so he refuses it. He has to re-learn that food is what will make him well, not sick. I coax him, on my hands and knees, scooping his wet kibble into my manicured hands, nudging some onto the side of his gums until he parts his jaws and lets a little bit in.

My father taught me that a person should always have well-groomed hands. When I was an infant he was the only one who would cut my nails — my mother too afraid of hurting me, my father an artist who trusted his hands with delicate instruments. Some forty years later I cleaned his nails in hospice with Q-tips while he slept.

By then he was fed through a tube. There was no coaxing him. No hands and knees, no scooping, no nudging food against his gums until he decided to trust it. The nurses changed the tube during their rounds while I talked to him about my day. Feeding had become something done to him, not with him.

Maybe I know exactly what I’m doing on my kitchen floor. My dog can learn again. His body is wrong about food, but it’s a wrongness that can be corrected. I could not teach my father anything. I could not even ask him what he didn’t understand at that dinner table, because I didn’t know yet that there was anything to understand.

The dog eats a little. Then a little more.

My father was quiet. I asked why. And I heard his answer as a mood instead of a symptom.

Was it then.

I didn’t come back here because I had something polished to share. I came back because I’m fairly certain I can no longer carry all the things I carry.

I need to put something down somewhere.

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Earl Stockwell, the patriarch, juts out like a hangnail, draped in his gray trench coat. His legs, looking more “au lait” than café, stick out from under a pair of tennis shorts. Tennis shoes and a polo tee complete the look. He stands slightly apart from the rest of the family, chain-smoking his beloved Camel Reds.

His distance is not with disdain, but he takes it as a courtesy he’s only recently bestowed to the youngest and newest member of the family, Ruth, making her beach debut in a head-to-toe cotton cloud of sea-foam blue and off-white tulle. At eighteen months old, little Ruth (not to be confused with her aunt and namesake, Ruth, or, as of late, “Big” Ruth) is the best dressed member of the clan, if not the entirety of passengers ready to board the ferry.

The baby watches the old man, standing in swirling rings of gray, struggling to keep her eyes open, heavily lulled by the soft reverberations of her mother’s voice, rolling, and rippling from chest to chest. The tones and beats remind her of the warm wet home she left not too long ago.

This is the baby's first trip to the beach and Diane, the newest mother – not to be confused with the mother of mothers, (as if she’d ever let that happen) Mrs. Ursa Stockwell— knows everything must be perfect for such an occasion. Thusly, she is currently in heated discussion with her older sister about the pending itineraries.

Big Ruth (the older sister) barely engages, absentmindedly nodding at her little sister’s list of all things beach and baby — First I went to People’s Drug and then I realized halfway there what kinda fool mother would get baby sunscreen from a drugstore, so then I called the pediatrician and do you know he wouldn’t take my call and — because Ruth has to be on high alert for her own child, Brandon, who at twenty-two months is in the full stage of self-actualization, refusing his mother’s pleas to stay still and stand by her side while they board. Instead, Brandon would much prefer to see just how high a dock is from the water below, and he knows the only way to do this is to race toward, then stop right at the dock’s edge. 

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