One Year After

One year later…

Curious, how time just goes on as before, as if nothing has changed. And once the thought occurs, you look around and wonder what has changed?

Not much, really. The present emerged from a slow set of inevitabilities that challenged as they happened and left us with a sense of exhaustion, melancholy, and perhaps a tinge of unfocussed regret.

Life has a shape. We can’t always see it, not all the time, and it does change in response to, well, living, but it does have a shape. We rely on it, we live within it. I’m not sure I would go so far as to say it defines us—more that we define it—but it certainly contributes to our sense of self. The components that create that shape…other people, aesthetic choices, the general gestalt of the world…

When there is a loss, that shape changes radically enough that we are unbalanced. We stagger, grope for the familiar ease with which we navigated (or the familiar dis-ease, which can form its own kind of dependence), we experience a reordering that seems impossible because that which is lost cannot be replaced.

The effect is often unexpected and we aren’t really taught how to handle it. It’s just assumed we’ll figure it out—or, as seems to be the case, we’re expected to simply keep staggering drunkenly through the rest of our lives as some kind of homage to the loss.

But healing happens for the most part. We learn how to walk again. Sometimes we replace the lost part, sometimes it simply heals over and we learn to go on with some balance. Sometimes we find something new that is not a replacement but fills out that shape we once knew.

Recovering is never indicative of forgetting, though. 

It’s been a year since my father died. He faded. It took a few years, but finally he came to crisis and he passed away after a few days of difficulty. Despite the fact that he could neither hear or see, limiting communication profoundly, he was popular at the care facility, and he received a final farewell from the staff that squeezed at our hearts.

He was a good man.

There is a large vacancy in my life’s shape now. It does not hurt. I miss him. We had no unfinished business. For my part, he was a substantial part of that shape, a presence to be relied on, not for anything specific but just to be there. I’ve been able to look back on him with a measureless affection for all that he did, for me and others. He could be gruff and occasionally short-tempered (he did not suffer fools) but at the end of the day he was a generous and kind man who went out of his way to make whatever he could better.

After retirement, my parents bought a house in a subdivision and over time he became the guy to go to for any number of things. Most surprisingly, he cut down trees for neighbors. He had spent time as a teenager in rural Pennsylvania where, I assume, he learned how to do this. Insofar as plotting the fall is an engineering problem, it would seem a natural thing for him to do well. I think he cut down 28 trees in the area before time and pain stopped him.

One of those neighbors took this photograph of him after one such project. It is quintessential dad, the best of him. He’s in his glory. He was having a great time. He expressed emotions in limited ways, but when he did, like everything else, he was all in and effusive.

 

I think that part of my life’s shape he once was has been partly filled by memory and by new stories my mother has been telling me, things I never knew or only knew partly. As for what I miss…

Occasionally I think how good it would be to have one more argument (Socratically, mind you), one more conversation. Not that I have anything I need to tell him—as I said, we left no unfinished business—but just to have the talk, the give and take. I surprised him occasionally and I relished those moments. 

I miss him, but it doesn’t hurt. It just is.

He was a great dad.