One Year Later

I can’t believe it’s been a year.  Over a year, actually, at the time that I’m writing this.  A year since my father passed.  Passed into what, I have no idea.  My faith is both buoyed and strained by the complexities of caring for a baby.  Buoyed, because watching the spark that is inside of Lily positively GLOW has me certain that there is so much more to her than what I can actually see, and strained because I don’t have the time or the energy to contemplate matters of the spirit for more than a few moments at a time. 

But no matter, he has still passed on, to wherever we might go, and the fact is that I miss him.  I miss talking to him, I miss his laugh, I miss sharing bits of my life with him.  I can still conjure up his image, his voice, if I try, but it’s a poor substitute for the real thing.  Platitudes like “he lives inside you” never really make up for the lack of having him ACTUALLY here.  He can go on living inside of me, if that’s how it works, but I’d rather sit and listen to him poke fun at the republican party or share some debaucherous story from his college years. 

On the one year anniversary of my father’s death, we traveled to Muskegon, MI, to inter his ashes and have a small memorial service.  I read a piece that I had written, and seriously, it was HARD.  Probably one of the harder things I’ve ever done in my life.  I practiced it and practiced it the night before, and thought I had it down.  And then, when it came time to read it, I just…it was like it just hit me that this was actually happening, that little urn in front of me was all that was left of my father and we were putting him in the fucking ground, and he’s not going to jump out from behind a tree and yell “gotcha!” and I felt like I was falling through space.  I kept glancing at Lily, hoping it would ground me, but instead all I could do was stare at all these people surrounding me, listening to me, crying with me, as I shook and garbled through, until at last it was done and I had to stand there and throw flowers on the urn and try not to stumble on my way back to the car.  And then I was TIRED.  Bone tired.  But we still had to go to a dinner with our guests, and then we had to head back to the beach house where my family was joining us for the night.  All I wanted to do was curl up in a ball and cry and mourn and go to sleep, but hard things are demanding things, and there would be no rest that night.  We drank wine and we ate, but I will admit to taking very little pleasure in any of it.  My father was an anchor in our family, and without him, I feel like we are all adrift from one another without him, struggling to redefine how we work together without a key member.  It’s difficult and will take time, and until then it’s all rough edges and guesses and best tries.

I know that this sounds like a rather dismal and dark day, and I’m okay with that, because it was.  I think it’s okay to admit that the day you bury your father is a dark day.  Sometimes the eternal pursuit of happiness needs to be set aside as we rest in the shadows and mourn what we have lost.  It’s okay to be angry and scared and tired and not much fun to be around.  This is all a part of it, a part of doing the hard things, the things where we embrace our feelings and go down that rabbit hole and percolate in the mess of emotions that make up grieving.  Darkness and light, we need space for them both.



My Reading:

When I think of my father, the first things that come to mind are his unbridled enthusiasm for life, his smile, and his wonderful laugh.  In the year since his passing, I have poured over his memoirs, rejoicing in his voice that comes through his stories, and always I am struck by how deeply, how vividly, he lived his life.  His sense of adventure is infectious even now, as I read his detailed accounts of cross country travel in his youth – all done by hitch hiking – up through to his later adventures throughout Europe and North America.  My memories of him are so vibrantly alive, with music, with laughter and dance and wine and food, so in love with his family and his friends and his home, so passionate in all he said and did, that it was difficult for me to come up with the proper poem or verse to read here, at his memorial.  To focus on death seemed to miss the very point of the way that my father lived his life. 

And so I would like to share a reading from Jack Kerouc, a man that I think my father would have appreciated, a fellow liberal thinker, an American Catholic, and a man of many words who embraced and celebrated the dichotomies that existed in his life.  From his work On the Road, I offer this selection in memory of my father:

The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow Roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars, and in the middle, you see the blue center-light pop, and everybody goes ahh...

Dad, thank you for burning so bright.  May we all continue to carry your light forward into the world.