November 5, 2004

Dear Brett Favre,

I’m not the kind of guy who travels halfway around the world to find his father and then finds his father alive. I’m the guy who fucks up on the way and finds disaster at the end, except. Maybe. Oxygen.

A few days ago, Mr. Favre, I was lying on a cot in a cold Polish jail cell. I won’t explain to you how this could happen, how a Wisconsin-bred Packer fan who lived his adult life in Minneapolis found himself in jail in Poland, except to refer you to my opening paragraph. Disaster. In that jail cell, where I hadn’t slept for three days, I coughed and coughed (due to pneumonia – undiagnosed at the time) and I also hallucinated. Often, for some reason, I hallucinated you. You and me. You and me and my sister, whom I’d just met before getting thrown in jail. You and me and my sister playing catch. On a football field. People on the sidelines clapping. People cheering for us. People shouting, “See?”

See what?

Ridiculous. Except. Maybe.

I was in the middle of hallucinating you and me and my sister and our cheering fans when the cell door opened. “Hello?” I said to the ceiling, my eyes not adjusting to the bright light pouring in. No one answered, but an instance later, I thought it was a large animal that had opened the cell door. The large animal attacked me, covered me. I turned out to be wrong. It turned out that someone had thrown the black sable coat on top of me that I’d purchased at a Warsaw flea market days earlier (I had been stumbling all over town freezing and shivering). Although I continued for a moment to believe I’d been leapt on by an animal, I didn’t struggle under the weight. Rather, I accepted my fate, accepted it was time to be devoured, to disappear for good. But then my angry sister entered. In this case, she was real and not on a football field. She was literally in the jail cell, so not a hallucination. Without saying anything, she pulled me to standing and helped me pull on the sable coat. She grabbed my hand and pulled me out of the jail cell, walked me out of the jail building and into the cold Polish air. Nobody said goodbye to me in the jail. Nobody, including my sister, answered my question, which I repeated again and again. My question? “What is going on?” 

My sister, who is named Paulina, walked me to her car, this odd-looking French car with a faded orange paint job. She calls this car kaczka (Polish for duck). She stuck me in the back seat, threw a backpack on top of me (it happened to be my backpack, which was filled with my stuff, my evidentiary notebooks and my t-shirts, and my underpants, all of which I assumed had been taken from me forever). She drove to a flower shop. While she was in the flower shop, the late afternoon sun turned bright and hurt my eyes. I reached into my sable coat pocket and found my yellow-tinted Jim Morrison shades (also purchased at the flea market). I also thought the shades were gone forever, but there they were, still functional, although quite bent. I pushed them onto my face and the light became immensely lovely. So lovely, I thought of you throwing a pass against the Oakland Raiders, Mr. Favre. Light shining around you, like you were coated in astral light that turned you brighter than anyone else. Then I looked down at my chest wrapped in the sable coat. I thought of all the flashy quarterbacks. I thought, maybe I look like Joe Namath in the early 1970s? Then something crashed into the window next to my head. A football? No. A child’s fist. A gang of children had surrounded the car, in fact. They pressed their faces to the windows and shouted at me in Polish, which is a horrible language. Thankfully Paulina returned, carrying bags and bags of noxious flowers. She yelled at the kids, which made them back away. She opened the squeaky car door and threw the terrible flowers on top of me. She climbed into the driver’s seat and finally spoke. 

She said: “These childrens should be at cemetery. Not harassing infirm American.” 

Are you thinking what I was thinking, Mr. Favre? Why the hell would kids want to be at a cemetery? If I were them, I, too, would prefer to harass an infirm American.

Paulina started the car, hit the gas, and seemed intent on running over the children, who all had to leap up onto the curb to avoid death by her careening duck car.

Then we drove out of the city, but I had to go to the bathroom, which made Paulina glare. We stopped at a roadside bar with chicken wire on the walls, which apparently was hung there to keep the flaking plaster from falling in the bar goers’ drinks. The place was filled and loud. Vibrating with energy, which probably added to the walls’ propensity for flaking away and the many men in there not only shouted at each other, but shouted at me, because I looked funny in my fur coat and Joe Namath shades, Paulina told me. They stopped shouting when Paulina shouted at them. In fact, they all looked a bit afraid. Paulina is like you, Mr. Favre, a force of nature. 

Back in the car, we continued to drive. I asked where. Paulina said nothing.

The sun began to set, coloring the sky orange, darkening the orange of the car. We eventually left the main road and drove down a skinnier road lined with tall birch trees and soon into a slow-moving line of cars. We all ended up at what appeared to be the beginnings of a giant woods. We parked just outside it with hundreds of other cars. There was a line of cars stretching as far as I could see behind us. I squinted into the woods. There were headstones and statuary in lines amongst the trees. A cemetery. I asked, “Is this Dad’s funeral?” 

Paulina shut her eyes, shook her head, no.

But I knew it, Mr. Favre. I did. I absolutely knew my dad was dead, although no one had told me.

Paulina climbed out. She carried a bag of candles she’d had on the front seat, and instructed me to carry the bags of flowers. I did and followed her into the cemetery. The sky turned darker under the canopy, impeding my vision. I tucked the flowers under my right arm and took off my Joe Namath shades with my left hand and saw the trees were almost bare of leaves and that the orange in the sky decayed into streaks of blue and purple. We crunched over dead leaves, the smell of their own decay thick in the air. We waded through crowds of people above ground and below. The ones above placed flowers around headstones and lit candles, which made shivering pools of light everywhere. The ones above ground whispered; there were no loud voices. It was like a mass funeral for everybody below (and above?).

I followed Paulina through a path between them all. Eventually she came to a halt. She stared down at one stone. I read the name on it, expecting it to be Dad’s, but it wasn’t. The name was Mitsunori Watanabe. Watanabe, I knew, was Paulina’s last name now. 

I shook my head. Tried to make sense. “Who?” I asked.

“Husband,” she whispered. 

“Oh no,” I said.

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” she said. Then she bent down and gently placed candles around the stone. She lit the candles one by one. She stood and took the flowers from my arms then bent and arranged them delicately around the lit candles. She stood again, took a breath, nodded, said, “Yes.” Nodded again. Nodded faster. She started to sob. I didn’t know what to do. She fell onto the ground sobbing.

We don’t talk about death in Minnesota. But the Polish are obsessed with the dead, Mr. Favre. Instead of harassing infirm Americans, most of them spend November 1 at the cemetery, breathing in the dead. 

I watched Paulina while she sobbed, then I couldn’t take it – my chest ached, too, from the ancient waters I’d inhaled trying to drown myself in Paris a few weeks ago, and also from sadness for my sister. I began to lose my balance, began to think I’d fall down, too, but then felt a hand on my shoulder. A little hand. I looked over and saw Pani Jadwiga, Paulina’s mother, my dad’s partner for twenty-five years, a woman I’d only met moments before going to jail, standing to my right in the depleting light. She cried, too. I said, “Because Mitsunori?” I asked.

“Because of Daddy,” she said.

“Because your daddy?” I asked.

“No, your Daddy. Do you know?”

“Is he here? Is he here?” I whispered.

“Not here,” Pani said. “But gone.”

No, I am not the kind of guy who travels halfway around the world to find my dad alive. He died on August 23 of this year, about eight months after your dad died, Mr. Favre. My dad had liver cancer, so it took him a while to go. Nothing shocking like the sudden heart attack your dad had. Except, I didn’t know my dad was sick until I found out for certain that he’s dead – I’ve come here, all the way to Poland, finally, to see him. 

But Pani’s wrong in a way. Yes, he’s dead. But he’s not gone. That’s different, okay? My wife is gone. Not dead, but gone. My children are gone, too. Your dad is dead, but not gone.

Do you see?

The last night I was fully part of my own family, fully with my wife and kids, was the night after your dad died, when you played that Monday night football game against the Oakland Raiders last season. Me and Mary (my wife, who would start divorce proceedings a few weeks later) let our kids stay up late to watch. You were so amazing, Mr. Favre, throwing four touchdown passes in the first half, flinging the ball between defenders, completing every impossible pass. It did seem like your dad was down there on the field with you guiding all your rocket ball throws to perfection. It was incredible, Mr. Favre. Moving. Seeing grace alive. Believing in the connectedness of all things. At half-time, Mary and I cried and hugged, because everything we believed about ourselves was turning out false and your dad had died and you were so raw and emotional and also miraculous and perfect and so alive, your actions somehow transcended everything, but I am small. I am nothing. 

A few days after your game, Christmas day, in the afternoon, after presents and a meal I barely helped prepare, I left my family house to try to see my girlfriend, who was not my wife, who was not in her apartment, who had left her apartment because she didn’t want to see a broken man like me. I went home to fix everything, I thought. But I am so small. I am nothing. Me leaving the house had already sealed my fate, my family’s fate. 

My dad left me, too. I don’t exactly know why, but it wasn’t for Pani Jadwiga. She didn’t know him back then, she tells me.

That doesn’t matter, because my dad was alive for twenty-five years after he left.

And just a few days ago, on November 1, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the ground in this Polish cemetery, back against a birch tree, watching my new sister Paulina on the ground in front of her husband’s gravestone. I watched her mother, Pani Jadwiga, my father’s lover, bend over her to rub her back, to protect her, too. Pani Jadwiga whispered something in Paulina’s ear. I couldn’t understand what she said, but could hear the passage of air between Pani’s lips and suddenly, again, I thought of you. Your rocket balls. Yourself in action. Your propensity for disaster. For car accidents, for addictions, for interceptions. And your goddamn perfect rocket balls, too, the ones that fit between the outstretched hands of defenders like God guides them. And the world filled with light around me, like the candles on the graves were suddenly given more oxygen.

Although I didn’t know it yet while sitting in that cemetery, turns out my father loved you, Brett. He followed your career from over here in Poland. And, just like me, he was not a good communicator, except on paper. I found boxes filled with letters in Pani Jadwiga’s apartment. Letter after letter he wrote, to you, so many to me, and so many to everybody else. He never sent these letters. He somehow had to make sense of himself in relationship to these people who couldn’t answer him, because he never sent these letters, to people who were gone from him forever. Except I’m not gone anymore. I’m here and I’m writing you this letter to tell you my dad loved your terrible interceptions as much as your transcendent completions. He loved everything you are. 

And I am me.

Maybe I’ll send this letter. Maybe I’ll find you and give it to you.

Would that be too much?

With respect,

T. Rimberg

Note: a version of this letter appears in Geoff’s novel, The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg, Crown/Broadway Books

Geoff Herbach is the author of nine novels, including those in the young adult Stupid Fast trilogy. His books have received the Cybil’s Award for best YA fiction, the Minnesota Book Award, Outstanding Book by a Wisconsin author, and have been listed among the year’s best by the American Library Association, the International Literacy Association, and the American Booksellers Association. His newest novel, Cracking the Bell, came out from Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins in the Fall of 2019.