For six days after my father’s death, I’d awoken every morning, powerless to move. My brain and body were both unable to process the reality that my dad—a tall and hefty man who commanded a room with a deep and thoughtful voice—was physically gone from planet Earth. I would lie in bed with my eyes closed, trying to fathom him in a state of “not alive,” and my body would freeze, as if possessed by a demonic force.
But on the seventh day, the thuds of the dirt clods hitting the casket still throbbing in my ears, I had no choice but to force myself out of bed, throw on some moderately respectable clothing, and limp to the bus stop to go to work. During my father’s five-year struggle with small cell lung cancer, I’d taken weeks off at a time from my job as a research analyst and writer at the University of Maryland to travel up and down the New Jersey turnpike from DC to New York to lend him support during his extended treatments at Sloan Kettering; to help with doctor visits when my stepmother needed a break; to hang out with him visiting museums, watching baseball, anything he wanted to do–making time while we still had some. My boss and co-workers had been patient with my repeated absences. But now that my father was gone, the office sympathy card sent and received, the message was clear: one week was sufficient time for me to deal with the aftermath of his death.
The bus ride was manageable; I didn’t have to talk to anyone. But once at work, I crept past my co-workers into my corner office, shut the door, and burst into tears. The unrelenting void of my father’s death felt like a brick in my gut; the realization that we would never have another conversation about the novels we were reading, the sorry state of the Mets, the encroaching climate catastrophe, his admiration for the children he tutored in math at a community center.
I pulled up my email and my heart sank further. My first office-wide task was chairing the never-ending, tangent-winding, brain-sucking monthly staff meeting, a meeting my co-workers and I hated leading so much that we rotated it among ourselves every three months.
I liked my officemates; we got along well, and they were kind and cooperative people. But as I pictured them at the meeting, chatting and laughing, I could not imagine myself being cordial, let alone having the capacity to politely keep them on task. Floored by the depth of my grief, the certainty that this sadness would never abate, my fingers hovered, paralyzed, above the keyboard as I tried to compose a reminder email.
I closed my eyes trying to center myself.
Suddenly, a voice rang loud in my head.
Instruct staff to direct all grievances to nomoremeritocracy.com.
I turned to the door, to be sure, but I was alone in the room.
The voice spoke again.
Sign off as Meeting Czar. Show them who is true boss.
At work, I was a technical writer but outside of work, I was a fiction writer, so I was not unused to having conversations in my head with made-up people, i.e., characters. But a voice I had just heard—infused with vigor and intent—was not the type that generally appeared on its own. When writing short stories, I was the one creating characters in my head, giving them names and traits and quirks. The voice I had just heard made no sense, I knew, but nothing had since my father’s death. So, I followed its sign-off instructions and hit send.
At the meeting, perhaps sensing my discomfort, none of my co-workers mentioned my new title and it seemed to work, as everyone mostly stayed on topic. Until halfway through the meeting, when a colleague meandered down a tangential path.
Again, that voice:
Bang the table. Let him know we’re not screwing around here.
I banged the table hard. Order restored.
After the meeting, I slunk back to my office, my energy spent from having to behave as if my world wasn’t completely melting down. But part of me felt a little relieved; I had made it through the worst task of the day.
And that voice? I had no idea who or what it was. It had guided me when needed, and I was grateful for its help. If it chose to show up again and direct me in moments of crisis, who was I to say no?

As a young child, I adored my father. He wore a suit and tie to his job in downtown Manhattan, and I understood that his formal clothing meant his work was important. I couldn’t wait for him to come home at night, positioning myself at the front door like a puppy. After setting down his briefcase, he would scoop me in his arms, the prickles of his five-o-clock shadow rubbing against my cheek. When he held me in his arms, while still wearing that ever-important suit, I felt protected, certain that I was equally important to him as whatever it was he did all day.
At the same time, being his daughter was not always easy. He was a man who did not shy from challenges or competition: on the tennis court, the Scrabble board, in the courtroom. As an anti-trust lawyer, he loved working through a problem with unimpeachable logic, building a case, and then—his favorite part—going to battle and winning. I was 43 years old before he grudgingly acknowledged that I had won an argument with him. Dinner conversations of my childhood were often pockmarked with exhortations to provide concrete evidence for whatever emotional state I happened to be inhabiting that day.
“Catherine said what? Why would that upset you?”
But his determination to tackle problems, especially if they involved my brothers or me, made him a ferocious advocate. It didn’t matter if our issues were mundane—he had his ballpoint pen at the ready to send threatening letters to airlines who lost our luggage—or serious—exercising his legal chops to keep one of my siblings out of serious trouble with the law. He also loved going to bat for the underdog. When the employees of his Upper East Side building garage asked to take over its management, the Russian mafia who’d held the contract for years threatened them. My father called in a security company and stood arm-in-arm next to the beefy security guys and the garage staff as they faced down the Russian mobsters.
I saw my father waver in a fight only once: when he was diagnosed with cancer at age 76 and given three months to live. But he pushed back and hung around for five more years, enduring six rounds of chemotherapy, brain surgery, and whole-brain radiation—surviving three years longer than anyone else on Earth had at that late stage with this particular strain of lung cancer.
Until he couldn’t.

My father’s death was not the first time I’d felt him taken from me. When I was eighteen, my parents—who, by all accounts, had a happy marriage—separated and then split in what felt like five minutes. A month later, my father moved in with his new girlfriend, the woman who would become my stepmother. He’d been living with her only a few months, my brothers and I still reeling from the shock of the family implosion, when one night I called the house phone to talk to him, and she answered.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “He can’t come to the phone now, we’re eating dinner.”
I loved my father, I knew that, but until that moment I had not understood the depth of my attachment to him, how he had always been there for my brothers and me. Never once had my father refused my call, his secretary at work under strict instructions to interrupt him in meetings if one of us called. Now, he’d chosen a woman who’d appointed herself gatekeeper. Perhaps in his sadness about the end of his marriage and need to make a new relationship work, he chose to let her control access to him, as he would on and off for the 35 years they were married.
Am I suggesting that this earlier trauma of the family break-up—ugly and fast and bitter, vitriol flung every which way between my mother and father and stepmother-to-be—compounded the depth of grief for my father when he did die? That part of my child-self had secretly been holding out hope that someday he would heal the wound he’d inflicted when he left the family when I was a teen? That some part of me subconsciously still needed him to center me the way he had when I was a child, and his death affirmed the eternal impossibility of that?
I don’t know. But I do know this: In his final moment, when after three days of lying unconscious in the hospital bed in his den, his eyes closed and his lungs struggling to suck in raspy breaths, when he raised his head, bolted his eyes open in shock as if he could see his last breath being sucked out of him and then lay back down into stillness, I felt the air sucked out of my lungs too. Because in that very second, I felt the loss of not only the cancer-ridden years, or the painful second-family years he built with his new wife and their two kids, but all the good childhood early years—family trips to Vermont, Sunday night word games, sledding in Central Park, weekend softball games—all that love I had for him as a child that I had not allowed myself to feel during the post-divorce years to protect myself from the hurt of losing him to another family.

But that was that, and when death stole my father, it did not afford me the luxury of time, hurling me back to a world that was spinning exactly as it was when I crossed over from having a father to not having one. Thrust into a new universe with no instruction manual, my grief felt like the loneliest place in the world. It didn’t matter if I was in a room full of friends or my husband’s arms. Every time I tried to conceptualize that my father existed only in memory, my body shut down, rather than allow the reality that I, like everyone else, was living on an island of my own body and consciousness.
Into this unnavigable, grief-ridden universe that voice appeared that first day back at work, only to reappear, two days later. During a phone call about a new product we were developing, my boss’s boss mentioned that he was interested in having me switch to contract work to save our department money on benefits.
I hung up, stunned. Was he going to transfer me off of staff?
Pick up the phone, the voice commanded. I didn’t even think. I hit return call, and in a firm, interrogatory voice I did not recognize as my own, said to my boss’s boss, “Did I hear correctly that you want me, one of two women in the office, to relinquish benefits, while all of the men have full retirement and health insurance?”
He backtracked quickly.
A week later, when I realized that the university had cheated me out of almost $2,000 on a contractual technicality, that voice practically screamed at me:
File a complaint. Go to the Ombudsman. Don’t give up.
Using work time, I did. One month later, they paid me the money they owed me.
And so, Boris—the name I gave my imaginary friend due to his unmistakable affinity for autocracy—became my go-to guy. On days when I could not face anyone at home or work, Boris was there.
Close the door and close it loud so they know not to bother you.
Boris, I soon decided, was not only Russian, but ex-KGB; he was strong and strategic, and he knew how to swiftly dispatch my enemies—perceived or real. I imagined him tall, broad-shouldered with silver hair layered across his forehead, a strict smile, and a commanding voice. No topic was too pedestrian for him. When a friend made a crack about my mixing a turquoise shirt with burgundy pants, Boris spoke up:
Ignore them. Wear whatever the fuck you want.
I did, mixing checkers and stripes and every other weird combination of clothing I could think of. I even, in those pre-covid times, before it was socially acceptable to park yourself in leisurewear for days on end, with permission from Boris, moved permanently into a pair of old gray sweatpants that helped me hide my expanding waistline from all the grief I was eating.

Because I was in my early fifties, I didn’t tell anyone about Boris, who, like me settling into the sweatpants, settled in the back of my brain. I didn’t feel the need to. The dozens of characters I had created over the years for fiction were imaginary friends in some way. If I could talk to them when developing plots and personalities, how was Boris any different? Where do characters we create come from anyway? In 1896, my paternal great-grandfather, Louis Cohen, fled Russia to avoid being conscripted into the Czar’s army, or worse, be massacred by the village peasants during a pogrom. Perhaps my psyche had constructed Boris as an agglomeration of my ancestor and his authoritative oppressor to exhibit strength. Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe Boris was one of a million souls hanging out in the Jungian collective unconscious, waiting to be plucked to guide those who needed help. Whatever the route, Boris landed in my brain to do what I couldn’t and for months, his voice would pop up when I needed help. It was a good solution.
Until it wasn’t. On a February night, about six months after my father’s death, I stood at the front door waiting for my husband and son to head out for dinner to celebrate my son’s sixteenth birthday. He’d been busy all year with high school and friends and travel soccer, and I’d been relieved for the space, assuming he’d been happy to have a semi-absent mom not hovering over him.
As he reached for his coat he gave me a long look.
“You’re wearing those sweats to my birthday dinner?”
What startled me the most was his expression. It wasn’t the withering don’t embarrass me look I’d had to manage throughout his adolescence. It was a look situated somewhere between pity and sadness.
What my son didn’t know was that these were the most comfortable sweats I’d ever had. And they weren’t just comfortable, they were comforting. My stepmother had impeccable taste in clothing and would regularly ship barely worn bright designer clothes that had belonged to my half-sister to our house for my daughter, some of which would then become hand-me-ups for me. Some small part of me, embarrassing as it was, saw that clothing as reparations, payment for what I had lost when my father left our family and started another one. By the time of my father’s death, the boxes of clothing had stopped arriving many years earlier, but those sweatpants were from one of those boxes, one of the very last things I had from his house.
My son didn’t know any of this. And Boris had given me permission to stay in them forever. It was the perfect moment for him to jump in and tell my son clothing critique was off limits.
But Boris remained silent. As did I.
Because honestly, what can you say to your 16-year-old son when he politely asks you to rejoin the land of the living?
I looked hard at the sweatpants. They were baggy. Covered in grease. And unflattering. My son was telling me that how I presented myself to the world mattered. That how I felt about myself mattered. That I mattered.
I don’t remember what I said. I don’t remember if I changed into real pants. I hope I did. I do remember sitting silently at the restaurant while my son and his father talked about the latest trades in the Premier League and his upcoming college visits. I remember being embarrassed that I had let myself retreat into such a cocoon that I couldn’t see how others might see me. What else wasn’t I noticing? Perhaps Boris wasn’t serving me as well as I thought.
A few nights later I opened a journal I’d bought not long after my father’s death. “Dear Dad,” I began writing, “I can’t believe you are truly gone.”
I made it no further, tears everywhere. The next night I started again, managing half a page before breaking down. But I stayed with the journal, writing a letter to my father every night for eight months. I imagined him listening, nodding where he would agree with me, drawing his lips in anticipation as if preparing to challenge me. As I wrote each night, I began to feel him in the room with me, and as I heard his deep voice, the reality of his loss became a little less difficult to absorb. I found a box of his things and ran my fingers over the stippled cover of his red address/datebook that he updated by hand every year. I put his watch around my wrist and held it in my other hand against my skin. I pushed myself to feel his things and be sure they were real. That he was real. The more I could feel his presence, the more I was able to allow myself to feel his absence.
Now, many years later, I understand the way that grief travels its own timeline. Boris had been helpful when I was paralyzed by grief, allowing me to harden my heart when I felt unable to protect myself. And that grief was like a stone, cold and hard and unforgiving. But at some point, grief has to give way for life to go forward. Opening space for grieving, as my letters to my father did, felt like ocean waves, a release that allowed the grief to dissolve so my body could accept a new state of being that included acceptance that my father was truly and absolutely gone. Once I allowed myself that motion, I no longer needed to steel myself against the world.
So, who was Boris? I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters. Only that my psyche managed to imagine a world in which I could propel myself through life without my father and then created that world so I could survive. And that my psyche managed to conjure a friend–same as a young child creates an imaginary one—to manage grief, to reimagine grief– to protect me, until I was strong enough to do it myself.