In my choice to let go of that apartment, there’s guilt that I still carry, if I choose to examine it. It’s guilt that I didn’t cherish that San Francisco while I still could, or even appreciate my dad while he was still scribbling in his notebooks at Café Flore, which is now gone, like so many other cafés and landmarks of my youth. When my father was still alive and I was a callous teen, I used to complain to him about what I thought of as his irrelevance as a writer. No one I met had ever heard of him, and money was a constant struggle for us. I was too young to know how few writers, even the talented and influential ones, can support themselves with their writing.

But in the aftermath of his death, it felt like he was completely erased from the city. In the half hour after he died, in his room at the Maitri hospice, I gathered Dad’s personal belongings—his wallet and his glasses, a bag of his clothing—and waited for a ride from a friend. Haphazardly I opened his wallet and stared: here were all his IDs, his driver’s license, his First Interstate Bank card, his membership cards. Items once so precious—signifying a citizen, a history, a point of view—were now worthless. And so, I felt the same about the city. Its value evaporated before my eyes.