I Hear the Old Man Laughing

I sometimes surprise/disappoint myself. Today is one of those days. 

I've struggled with how to handle a solemn and personal (among the six siblings) anniversary observed today practically every day for the last forty-one years. I really thought I had it in hand this time and yet here I am looking at words I wrote a dozen years ago with the same ache in the pit of my stomach that I felt the moment the Red Cross operator gave me the news. I called it:  

And All This Time the River Flowed...

Do you know how Christmas or your anniversary can sneak up on you? It's weird of course because they shouldn't really. You know when those events are (unless you're an atheist and/or a polygamist), you remember where you were when they happened and yet suddenly there they are and you're surprised. 

I know and will always know, the moment my wife and I were married-the minute and hour of the births of both of our children, but I'm unable, actually unwilling, to nail down any better than 'over the Memorial Day weekend' as the date of my dad's passing.

I have a more elaborate, self-created, challenge. Because of 'fog of life' issues, try as I might, I can't get into focus (for me) a defining moment, the death of my father. When I say he died 'over the Memorial Day weekend,' that's the best I can do in terms of specifics. 

I've wrestled with every aspect of our relationship for almost every waking moment and it's all added up to zero. I'm very much writing today to exorcise demons rather than for any other point or purpose. 

I thought I'd opened this wound up last year and flicked the scab off, but as I sit here, I can feel my throat tighten, the rock in the pit of my stomach grow heavier and the taste of ash in my mouth become more pronounced. Again I'm seven, not seventy, and waiting as I did most days, with dread, for him to come home from the City. And so it begins, never to end.

We, the six children he struggled to feed, clothe, shelter, and provide everything under the sun and in-between, are, ourselves, parents and in some instances, grandparents. I don't pretend to know the hearts of my siblings, but I'm pretty sure I speak for at least some of them when I say we have all worked as hard as we could to not become our father. 

And if the years have taught me anything (and that proposition is still subject to debate), it's that his intentions, like those of every parent, were the absolute best. And yet one by one, as we could (and when we could) we disappeared, leaving those younger behind to be his children. Until he, himself, suddenly, left and no words could fill the void or cover the silences.

I'm never sure if it's the horrible son or the failed father who's to blame for all that was lost years ago, but I know the face I see in the mirror every morning belongs to the person responsible now for not letting go of the poisons of the past to savor today and secure tomorrow. 

It wasn't a mere coincidence that not that long ago I needed a mess of help to be talked off the edge because I'd become addicted to loathing the view when I looked down. I couldn't look but I couldn't look away.

Each of his children will, in the course of the day, try, again, to make peace with the world he gave us and that we lacked the strength to reject aloud while he was here to hear us. Silence equaled consent and thus did we become accomplices in our own victimhood. 

I want to shout at the memory of the man whose knowledge often overwhelmed the nuns who so often tormented, rather than taught, each of us. Instead, I choke on the words, as I always have and always shall.

-bill kenny