Photo courtesy of Emily Lodish

There are few things worse than flying home for your father’s funeral, but I managed to find one: flying home for your father’s funeral while sitting next to a screaming child. On a 14-hour flight.

The poor girl must have had an ear infection or something. She was in such pain. Her mother, who was traveling as a single parent, looked miserable too. I felt bad for them both. And I wanted to kill them.

I was supposed to be culling my mind for gentle remembrances of my father bent over his desk late at night, his pocket protector so full it tugged at his shirt seams, and I couldn’t even hear myself think. Except for the hour and a half that mother and daughter sat curled up on the bathroom floor, none of us had any peace.

I arrived at home in DC with one bag over my shoulder and several under each eye. There was also the amoebic dysentery. Two words that sound really gross to people who have never been to the developing world, but are basically akin to “Hey, wuz up?” if you lived in Cambodia, like me. It had been a spell since the worst of it, but the whole experience had taken a toll on my body and left me looking pretty frail. Simply put, when I arrived at home in the middle of the night to a still and quiet house, I looked like shit.

And I was supposed to be having sex in Bangkok. I had been seeing an older man off and on with whom I had arranged a rendezvous, for lack of a better term. He lived abroad as well and we had arranged to meet in Thailand, roughly between his home and mine.

This older man had, bless his heart, suggested I get tested for STDs before we met up. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me or that I had any cause for concern, but there had been a certain romp in the sand with an Irish backpacker that I was just as keen to have stricken from the record as the next guy. We wanted our rendezvous to be carefree.

Besides, getting tested is something I try to do once a year anyway, even if I’m not having sex. Partially, it’s so I can pretend I’m having sex, and partially it’s because I just like to have someone tell me every so often that I’m fine. I kind of think about it, probably foolishly, like hitting the reset button.

The only snag was that in Cambodia, health care leaves a bit to be desired. Having someone draw blood usually means having someone shove a needle in your arm 19 times until they find the elusive vein and can begin to painstakingly drain your body of its life force. Stabbed into submission, you will let them.

By the time I got out of there my arm looked like it had been ravaged by several different heroin addicts fighting over the last vein on earth. Another somewhat plausible scenario for Cambodia.

So, fast forward to the eulogy, which I had basically written in my sleep. There I stood on the pulpit of our perfectly respectable synagogue—the same synagogue where I became a Bat Mitzvah and once ate a whole spoonful of horseradish to seem cool—way too skinny, exhausted and sporting track marks the length of my forearm. You could practically hear the murmurs: “Didn’t she go to Yale?” “Well, her father did just die.” “Is that really Jules’ daughter?”

And though traumatized and virtually unrecognizable, it was Jules’ daughter. She may have gone really far away. She may have changed. She may not look like she did when you last knew her. She may be referring to herself in the third person, but she was and is Jules’ daughter, trying to contemplate the unthinkable.

Click here for the previous entry.