ARTIFACTS

When stuff stops behaving like stuff.

When my dad was really sick, and I had fully taken over most of his communications, there was a day I needed a number from his phone. I remember holding his iPhone up to his face to unlock it, wondering—would there come a point when Apple wouldn’t recognize him anymore? When he was so gaunt, so unlike his former self, that even technology couldn’t find him?

That was the first time I noticed how ordinary things start to warp under the weight of illness. Face ID wasn’t just Face ID anymore. It was a test: had he crossed the threshold of no longer looking like himself?

After he died, that lens only sharpened. Everywhere I looked, something ordinary carried double meaning.

A few weeks ago, my mom couldn’t log into Netflix on his old iPad. When I opened it, the first thing I saw was the weather app—still set to Yountville, one of his favorite places to visit. Then Netflix prompted me for a code, one that it said it would send to my dad’s email. My chest tightened. Didn’t Netflix know there was no longer an AOL user on the other end to receive it?

Once I finally got in, curiosity pulled me deeper. What would Netflix recommend for him now? What would his “Today’s Top Picks” be? It offered me K-Pop Demon Hunters. My dad—the man who loved White Lotus, home renovation show, the Bourne trilogy. Had the algorithm already erased him? Did it just give up?

That same week, I crawled into bed with the latest issue of Vanity Fair—a subscription my dad had given me two Christmases ago. Inside, a notice announced it was the final issue, the subscription about to expire. It stung—his gift, vanishing just like him—but it also felt strangely poetic. In our family, magazines didn’t disappear; they lingered, stacked high in corners, waiting to be rediscovered.

For the Brooks, the printed page was sacred. Our coffee tables buckled beneath towers of Rizzoli books and piles of Condé Nast Traveler, GQ, Wine Enthusiast, and Town & Country. My dad loved the ritual of reading a magazine—ripping out fine jewelry ads for my mom, scratching fragrance pages for gift inspiration for his wife or daughters, dog-earing hotel reviews with the sincere intention of booking them. Even on vacations, he’d lug stacks of magazines in his bag, long after everyone else had switched to digital. I can still see him on one of our last trips together: everyone by the pool scrolling their iPhones, while he devoured the latest issue of Departures.

When he got sick and spent more time in hospitals than at home, the stack of magazines followed him there. A subtle defiance—an FU to the cancer—that, even as brutal treatments kept him inpatient, he still had a portal to the outside world. From room to room, city to city, the magazines came with us. The truth was, he was too sick to read more than a headline. The cancer hit hard—and the treatment harder—leaving him without the stamina or focus to make it past the masthead. Still, we carried them anyway, on his behalf. Maybe it was our own defiance, our way of saying FU to the cancer, too. A way of pretending that one day, he’d pick one up again.

And then, of course, there was the closet.

The first time I came home after he died, I couldn’t bring myself to go in. My dad loved clothes. Good clothes. The kind with heft—jackets that sat just right on the shoulder, scarves so fine you only noticed their luxury when you touched them. For him, they weren’t frivolous—they were ritual, identity, pleasure.

This was a guy who built entire NYC family vacation itineraries around Barneys and Bergdorf, the rest of the city slotted in as a kind of afterthought. He’d usher my sisters, mom, and me through the racks, always insisting on “just trying something on.” He delighted in the absurdity of fashion, too—sending me NYT Style articles about trends he couldn’t believe were real, half-mocking, half-marveling at the spectacle of it all. One Christmas, he even gifted me Bill Cunningham, Details from the Street — a book I’m convinced he bought as much for himself as for me.

When I was 31, he told me I was far too old for Forever 21. “You need good clothes now,” steering me toward Vince and Rag & Bone, like it was just another form of fatherly advice—right up there with sunscreen and not smoking. It wasn’t about labels or status. It was about choosing pieces that would last, that carried weight, that made you look like the person you were becoming.

So when I finally worked up the courage to step into his closet a few days after he died, I reached for a Zegna jacket he wore all the time. It still smelled like him. I pressed my face into it, knowing that scent would vanish sooner than I was ready.

And once I let myself touch one piece, I couldn’t help but see the rest. The closet wasn’t just a rack of clothes—it was a gallery of Brunello Cucinelli cashmere, Canali suits, and Loro Piana scarves. Pieces collected over decades, some broken-in with love, others still tagged, waiting for the retirement trips he and my mom used to dream about. Now they just hung there. Too fine for Goodwill. Too heavy with memory to sell. What do you do with a life unspent, suspended in fabric?

And the shoes. The goddamn shoes. Why are the shoes of the dead so excruciatingly painful to look at? Rows and rows of them, polished leather lined up with precision—at least a hundred pairs. I just stared, gutted by the thought: Whose feet will ever walk in these now?

That day, I decided to keep a handful of his ridiculously oversized jackets for myself. Every time I slip one on, my hand drifts into the pockets, searching for him. A receipt, a matchbook, even a toothpick would do—something ordinary enough to prove he was here, yet extraordinary enough to remind me he’s gone.

But holding on isn’t always about fabric and threads. Sometimes it’s about rituals, the little habits that tether us to someone. So, today, I did something small but symbolic: I renewed the Vanity Fair subscription. A tradition he started, one I can carry forward. Maybe even the thing that nudged me toward my career two decades ago.

Grief lives in the objects. The phones, the algorithms, the magazines, the clothes. They’re ordinary until they’re not. And sometimes the saddest, most beautiful part of loss is realizing how much of someone is still hiding in the things they left behind—waiting for you to notice.