“All attempts to console ourselves, I believe, are doomed, because the world is more complicated than we are. Our explanations will fail, but it is our human work to make them.”
from “Souls on Ice” by Mark Doty
I just completed an essay, about my father. It is a draft, so incredibly far from finished, more incredibly difficult to write. If you’ve been here before, you’ve glimpsed its beginnings, the recurrent dream. The essay doesn’t attempt to interpret the dream, as one reader of the draft suggested (a suggestion I may still, sometime in revision, take, but can’t yet), and as he said, the dream as it stands is unsatisfying. So many questions left, and I stand on the dream deck watching my young beautiful dream daddy driving away. I always wake from the dream caught in some web of confusion, strands of sorrow and joy catching at my eyelashes and in my hair. I don’t know why I don’t dream of our time together back home, or relive the joy he showed at the births of my children or my first publication, or more likely, of the recurring talks we had about how he wanted us to love and respect our mother, the woman about whom he often said, “She saved my life.”
I don’t know so much.
But isn’t that how the death of someone we love leaves us? Standing, looking to the horizon as if the departed might appear, trying to figure out how we’ll go on without them, how it is that that he or she is really gone? In the years since my daddy quietly slipped away in his sleep, I can’t count the number of times I’ve lifted the phone to call him–to ask the etymology of a word, to share a funny story, to ask him to remind me again what the French verb is for to search: Pour rechercher.
I’m exhausted. And apparently, still searching.
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