My Heart does not Love the Memory

Dad isn’t fading away from my memories, but the reality of him is. I find myself thinking of dad almost as if he were like an imaginary friend or a figment of my imagination than as a real person. It’s an odd thought considering your father to have never existed, but to have been made up the entire time.

I know it’s a ridiculous thought. I couldn’t be here if he didn’t exist. I know this. I just can’t remember him being real. Or rather, I can’t remember him being real without it hurting real bad. He was here, and now he’s gone and not coming back. It’s like missing a body part. Better to think of it never existing to begin with.

I’m starting to have dreams of him now more often than in years past. I’ll ride the bus with him, or eat with him, or do any other such mundane activities with him. In the dream he is still alive and still strong (sometimes he and my mom are still married). These aren’t the nightmares or bizarre dreams that I used to get. These are almost like memories. Future memories. I’m not sure what the dreams are. They’re desires, I suppose. Desires for something that cannot be.

With the back of my eyes I see you, but all that’s in front of me is a blank wall or a tree or the sky or just the reflection in the mirror staring back.

A few weeks ago I found a couple of books that reminded me of you. I’ll probably never read them but I bought them anyway. I put them on your bookshelf in my living room and pretended that you bought them. It was a brief respite from the reality of your death.

I miss you. Five years you’ve been gone now, and you’re no closer to coming back. It doesn’t seem fair. I had plans. Hopes and expectations now relegated to dreams that I sometimes remember. I hate that I think of you as an imaginary person. I hate that peeling back the facade of that defense mechanism leaves me feeling empty. It makes me want to call you so that you could reassure me. Bitter irony.

I’m well taken care of, and I hate to sound ungrateful, but it just isn’t enough. You left an awful hole and the whole world can’t plug it up.

Sometimes I try to hang onto the sad feeling as long as possible because I just want to remember you as a real person for a little while. It validates my existence, but it also makes me feel you, if that makes any sense. There’s a whole portion of me that lays dormant now because you’re gone. Do I let it die, or do I revive it from time to time to let it grieve?

It’s weird to think that there’s a part of me missing because you aren’t here to bring it out of me. Does this part just disappear, or does it get redistributed to different facets of my life? I do talk more about you to people (whether they want to hear about you or not…and whether I feel comfortable bringing you up in conversation or not). Perhaps the whole of me is changing to accommodate those things in you that I lost (whatever that means).

Father’s Day is a fake holiday, but I mostly say that because my dad is gone. It’s a holiday now relegated to memory and unfulfilled desires. No card to buy. No phone call to make. No gift to mail down south. Just memory and imagination.

I knew a man once. He was big and strong and funny and rather brilliant. He was obnoxious to be sure, and he could be fierce when angry, but his love was genuine and tender. My memory recalls him, but it just can’t pull all of him together. I remember him in pieces. On the rare days I do recall a sharper picture of him I immediately remember his box of ashes. I remember the whole only to remember the loss in whole.

I miss him and I want him back. And I wish I could tell him that. Bitter irony.

Words are not enough, but they are all I have. My emotions are inexpressible, my thoughts are beyond my ability to understand, and my tears only serve to obscure what I thought I understood.

Where are you?

Who are you?

I miss the sound of his voice and his laugh. I miss his pontifications. I miss knowing he was always there.

I regret I cannot introduce my friends to him. I regret being unable to call him on the phone or to visit him.

I’m saddened with the prospect of living several more decades without him. In less than three decades I’ll have lived longer than I knew my father. That seems unfathomable. The man I talked to every day silent for so long. That’s an unbearable thought.

I’m sad that this is all I can say for Father’s Day this year. I love my dad, but I cannot reach him. My heart transcends the boundary between life and death, but my mind and my body remain here on this side of the dividing line and it is an unsettling feeling.

These words are mere shadows to what I actually feel. Likewise, my memory is only a shadow of the man my heart still fully loves in a present sense. My heart does not love the memory- it loves the man.

The memory does not provide comfort, but merely confirms the object of my affections. It is a snag upon which my love trips and falls. It is the tear in my mind that both confirms my dad’s absence and yet preserves my affections. I see through it like a hole in the wall. Both my affection and his absence. It reminds me constantly of both. I do not love the memory, I love the person the memory stands in memorial to.

A Field of Impossible Trees and a Large House

I don’t remember most of my dreams, but I do have them. The majority of them that I do remember aren’t pleasant. They are mostly weird or confusing or distressing. I only really sleep in bursts lasting a few hours before I’m woken up by whatever strangeness drove me awake. Usually the memory creeps back into the shadows before I can recall just what it was that stirred me. Other times I can recall with unfortunate clarity and am left with thoughts that attempt to understand where that dream could have possibly come from. 

There is, however, a recurring dream. Or rather, a dream series that I find myself in from time to time. They are rare, but they are my comfort in darkness and where I hope to find myself when I close my eyes at night. 

This place that I sometimes visit is always sunny. The sky is brilliantly blue. There are no clouds, and though the day is bright, I cannot detect a sun to cause me to squint. The air is cool and refreshing. I am impossibly strong and fast: I run through miles of green fields like a gazelle, leaping what seems to be blocks at a time. When I stop I am not panting and my heart is at rest. 

In this place, the trees are as redwoods, but they are the size of skyscrapers. And though they are tall and strong, they come done easily enough with a simple axe and a few friends. One felled tree is ample wood for a big house and fires for a thousand years. 

In this place there is a massive house in the woods. Rooms are impossibly large and complex, leading into and out of one another. What would be weird and horrifying in the darkness is redeemed in this place of peace and sunshine. The home is filled with people, but it is not crowded, and the accommodations are more than ample. It is a house filled with love. 

I am surrounded by friends- those I see currently and those who it is seemingly impossible to ever see again. I am happy in this place of impossible trees and old friends and rekindled lost memories. 

What do I make of this? What should I make of this? This gleam of sun that penetrates my normally macabre dreamscape? I suppose it is what I hope for in times to come. To have a body that is not only whole, but brimming over with power and used perfectly. To be with friends that I can no longer be with. To rehearse old memories again, but to do it perfectly and in a perfect place. To be done with the shadow and to live in eternal light. 

Memory’s Shore

Like icy waters do you climb

Upon the shores of my mind

And touch the toes of my thoughts

I jump away at the cold touch

Retreating away I turn my back from the shore

Your fiery waters do bellow more

The sea of memory the smells still roam

Its misty vapors give me a sudden chill

And of course I face the shore again

And see you retreating back into the deep

And this is my thought as the waves go down

That perhaps I will now forget the sound

Of warm passings by at Summer’s shore

And the smells that accompanied your pleasant roar

And the waves come back for a moment more

And brush my ankles in delicate turns

The warmth of sunshine lost at memory’s shore

Its glow now a thing of time before

A Midnight’s Melancholy

Is mortality coming off its hinges?Is eternity peaking through?

Are all things bending inward with the dawning of the new?
Is perception peeling from its roots?

Is order disrupted in the passing of age?

Are the wits of time silenced by the crying of their sage?
Is the scholar proven wise?

Is the fool distracted by their folly?

Are there those who can discern a midnight’s melancholy?

Shouts from the Dungeon

“…the accuser…who accuses…day and night…” -Revelation 12:10

Depression is like having an angry prisoner in the dungeon of your mind. He shouts loudly. He accuses you of unjust treatment. He says that he should be allowed to roam free within your mind. That he should have the same rights as all of your other thoughts. Sometimes his shouts are drowned out by the busyness of day-to-day business and life or by some excitement or social activity. Other times his shouts seem to echo throughout the hallways of your mind and seemingly bounce around and reverberate back from the inside of your skull. He is a maddening presence and an unwelcome guest, but somehow you feel as though you deserve his company. 

Sometimes he breaks free. Or perhaps he convinces you to let him out. Who knows, perhaps you think he’ll quit his screaming if you let him out of his cell. But that only makes things worse: he roams around your mind a silent stalker and begins to claim things as his. He grabs memories. He grabs skills. He grabs dreams (those that have yet to be realized and the broken ones). He gathers his case against you. He hurls memories at you to prove what he says he knows about you. He attempts to put you into the prison you held him in. And in all this you have nothing to say, because you know that he is right. 

So what do you do in this? What happens when an aberrant state of mind leads an insurrection against you in your own mind? How can you fight back? More than that, how can you fight back when the will to fight cannot be mustered? When depression takes your strength and makes it his own? What do you do when he’s backing you into the dungeon shouting, “All hope is lost!” and you are nodding in silent agreement?

“…they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony…” -Revelation 12:11

A reminder. A thought that depression cannot touch. One that oddly enough meets you at the door of the dungeon as you are being flung in. The grace of God incarnate in your mind. The remembrance of the love of Christ. The very thing depression would not bring up, but ironically leads you to in his insurrection. As Christ stands there with me He takes from depression the things that he claimed from me and gives them back to me. “I give you back your memories cleansed by my hand. Your dreams, even the broken ones, too. Your skills are now yours as is the whole of your mind. The accusations I keep for myself.” And then Christ takes the aberrant voice and leads him back into the dungeon. “Just call upon Me when he shouts again. I will remind you where the guilt and shame go.”

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God.  Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” -Romans 5:1-8

It is easy to forget, but becomes less so with each failed coup inside my mind. 

Going on an Adventure

I remember growing up my dad would get an itch to take me somewhere. He’d say something to the effect of, “Zack, you want to go on an adventure?” And no matter what response I would give we would be going on that adventure.

Now mind you these weren’t epics, so to speak. We didn’t scale Everest or backpack across the USA or even go camping in the Everglades. These were “local adventures”. Kinda like sight-seeing with an expert tour guide (I, of course, would be the tourist in these little outings). If Miami were hostile territory (well, I guess it is kinda), my dad would be the guy you’d want to get you outta there…on foot.

I think he called them “adventures” because of just how much walking we’d have to do just to get to our destination. Dad was legally blind, so he was not permitted to own or drive a car. Bad as his eyesight was, however, he could see well enough to walk around, read, watch movies and throw things at me. And he refused the charity the state and Feds offered to him on his own self-proclaimed claim that he wasn’t really blind, EXCEPT for his magic bus pass that let him get on any public transit vehicle without charge (I have distinct memories of my dad strolling through the handicapped door (complete with wheelchair symbol) that led to the MetroRail platform with this ID card/pass in his mouth ready to flash it at any guard who would attempt to make him go through the coin-activated turnstiles). So our adventures would usually involve a decent walk to the bus stop from our neighborhood and after that a bus ride to the MetroRail Station and then a train ride to the destination of dad’s choosing and then more walking (times two, of course, because we had to come back home, right?). Now, I couldn’t ride the bus for free, but luckily he would cover my travel cost (actually he covered those bus fares and MetroRail costs for quite some time, even into highschool and college when I would work downtown during the summers).

I always complained about going on these little excursions. As a young adult, I never had much grace for myself as a kid, and simply thought I didn’t want to go ’cause I was a little fat kid who didn’t want to leave the couch. That might be partially true, but I think it’s kind of an unfair assessment on my part. Dad would always defend his memory of me as a child whenever I would tear that child down as a teenager and young adult. “You were a child, Zack, stop being so hard on yourself! I thought you were adorable!” I think what’s fair to say is that it seemed like a lot of effort and I didn’t know what the purpose of the adventures were for aside from getting me out of the house.  That is, until we got to where we were going.

We went everywhere cool in Miami. Museums, mansions, parks and bays. We rode on water taxis and ate at cool locations. He took me to basketball games and the circus.

I’m very grateful for the memories of these adventures. Sometimes his temper would flare when he became frustrated with my complaining over all the walking we had to do. Sometimes the bus would be overcrowded or excessively late. Sometimes the train was full of idiots or a semi-deranged individual. Sometimes the heat of Miami’s sun was unbearable in the miles we walked. But these were quality times I got to spend with him that I’ll have etched into my memory forever.

I think my dad was ashamed over his inability to drive and he wanted to prove that he could do things with me that normally-sighted fathers could do. I know he felt bad that he and my mom’s visual disabilities prevented them from doing things for me that seem rather routine to other parents, and that these disabilities limited what activities I could participate in. I wish I could tell him he has nothing to be ashamed of and that he did fine. He introduced me to culture and the arts and history and he did so in a unique way. And he spent time with me. He loved me. If only I knew better back then. But I’m grateful I know now.

Alas, the Brown Times

Alas, the brown times

Gone are the days of green

Where once fields yielded as plush carpets

Now crunch in brown misery
Where once the sky wept in predictable fits

Now stares down upon thirsty lips
The air pregnant and slow with dew

Now births a wind that gusts as a knife
Sunset flares with the dust of thirsty earth

And the night cannot cover its gasp of thirst
Gone are the days of green

Alas, the brown times

Crater Lake

I don’t even know why this day is heavy. My dad didn’t even celebrate his birthday, nor did he even like it when people acknowledged it. He hated the attention of it all, and would probably throw a fit for my being so emotional over it.

He turned 62 today. I wish I could have bothered him about that. Instead I recall movies that he liked and looked at pictures of him and quoted some of his go to lines…I forced his image into my mind. I wanted to remember that he was alive. It’s almost been three years now since his passing. Sometimes I don’t recall him at all, and other times I fall into the crater- the area of my life his living presence took up. I am forced to recall that he once was and now he is no more. I filled the crater with my tears today until it was a salty lake. It won’t do to fill the hole  but at least it let me swim out of it, even if it meant stinging eyes and gasps of air.

I miss him. I’m blessed to have days like this where I can face that, painful as these are. I can reassure myself that I still remember him  and that I miss him and that I love him. This salty lake reminds me of my humanity and I am grateful to feel the agony of lost love. That is my father’s gift to me on his 62nd birthday.

In the Shadow of the Sun

“It’s cold.”

“Cold? It’s August!”

“I’m aware of that.”

Sam presses his hand again Margaret’s cheek.

“Holy cow you’re freezing!”, she shrieks as she leaps away from Sam’s hand.

“See?”

“That’s not natural, Sam!”

“I know.”

“It’s 95 degrees out here!”

“So my weather app says…”

“We’re not in shade! We got out of the car two hours ago!”

“You trying to convince me I should be hot? I know I should be hot.”

“I’m not trying to convince you! I’m…making sense of it.”

“Externally processing are we?”

Margaret gave a little glare to Sam, “How long you been feeling cold?”

“I dunno…Last winter…but maybe before that too.”

“You don’t remember the last time you felt warm?!”

Sam shakes his head.

“Take any warm showers lately?”

“Yeah…scalding sometimes.”, Sam lifts his shirt and reveals a burn mark, “I don’t feel the heat but I sure do feel the pain so I got that going for me.”

“Sam this is serious.”

“Is it?”

“Let’s take a lap.”

“Margaret it’s 2 o’clock and I’m wearing jeans.”

“Perfect! You’ll feel hot and disgusting after our run!”

“Disgusting, yes, but hot I very much doubt.”

Margaret gets behind Sam and shoves him into a trot. They circle the small park at a jogger’s pace. Margaret even urges Sam to do a second lap just for good measure.

Margaret wipes the sweat from her forehead, “Ok let’s see that sweat!”

Sam stood there panting..but dry as a bone.

“This is impossible!”

“It’s me.”

“Are you sure you’ve been warm before? Maybe you don’t know what real warmth really is.”

“Of course I’ve been warm before! How ridiculous!”

“You sure you’re alive?” Margaret asked with a smirk.

“Well I have had the urge to eat human brains lately…”

Margaret rolled her eyes, “I’m out of ideas.”

“Well I didn’t ask you to solve anything, Doctor.”

“How does it feel, to always be cold?”

“Uhh…cold.”

“Comeon, you know what I mean.”

Sam let out a sigh, “It’s frustrating. It’s lonely. It’s joyless. It’s like being forsaken by the Sun.”

“Drama much?”

“You asked.”

“Forsaken by the Sun. That’s an interesting thought.”

“Yeah, like being in its shadow.”

“Impossible, since the Sun doesn’t cast a shadow in and of itself, but an interesting analogy.”

Sam walks over to a bench by the shade. Margaret sits down next to him.

“Well you can’t be completely forsaken- the Sun’s light allow your eyes to see afterall…well that’s an assumption on my part. Let me ask, you can see, right?”

“Yeah, I can see.”, Sam sighs, “abandoned by the Sun’s heat. At least he lets me use the light.”

“Now don’t go anthropomorphizing the Sun now. I’m sure the star isn’t purposefully withholding it’s warmth from you.”

“Yeah it’s me not him.”

Margaret rolls her eyes and they sit in silence for a while. The park was lively with children and couples. Birds sing in trees. Dogs bark.

“It’s a beautiful day.” Remarked Sam.

“It is.”, replied Margaret, “It’s a shame you can’t enjoy it with the rest of us.”

Sam looks at Margaret, “I said I was cold, not miserable! I can enjoy aspects of the summer, if not the heat.”

“I suppose there is a benefit in that. What I wouldn’t give to not feel like I’m boiling.”

They share a laugh.

“Still…you said you were lonely in your coldness.”, she turns to Sam, “I don’t like that you feel lonely.”

“I have you here with me. That’s worth more than warmth.”

Margaret grins. They had been under the shade for a while now (enough time for Margaret to dry off, but not quite cool).

Margaret touches Sam’s cheek with her hand, “Hm…still cold. I was working on a theory that perhaps you warmed up in the shade.”

Tears start rolling from Sam’s eyes.

“Sam? What’s wrong? I’m sorry.” Her eyes were full of compassion and regret for her joke.

Sam turns to her and looks her deep in the eyes and whispers, “Your hand is warm.”

Hybrid Garden

It was late as the old man delayed sleep further by shuffling around his memory yet another time. 

“What was that one…”

By his age memories often mingled with one another and he found that the ending of one memory oft times sparked the remembrance of another, though these days they all seemed not to trigger one another but rather to bleed into each other. Were his memories the genuine way that it happened or had they mutually corrupted one another?

“Corruption is such a foul word.”

He preferred to think that the flowers of his memories cross-pollinated with one another and that his memories had become hybrid memories- having characteristics of multiple memories in one. 

“Of course, I am but one person, so perhaps it’s not that the memories are becoming intermingled with one another so much as they are becoming more a part of my person. Dissolving so to speak as they are absorbed into my very personhood.”

An amusing and comforting thought. The old man smiled at that. Of course the question had to be asked,

“Or, am I becoming a part of my memory?”

An interesting thought, and possibly too philosophical a thought to delve into at such late an hour, but he was old and a wandering mind was the blessing of long years. 

“I am the one who’s body is dissolving, whereas my memories remain fresh. So I will dissolve and be but a memory. Perhaps my memories are not becoming me, but rather I am becoming my memories.”

The thought startled him: that this long life had been used as a sort of gathering period- that his body had been given only so much time to create a memory for his being to fall back into when his body had dissolved and he became nothing more than his memories. Does memory make one old, or the reaving thereof? Would I stay young without the accumulation of memories? It is true that babes grow as they gain memories…

“That’s ridiculous! Aging is inevitable!”

But to age without memory would be a folly. To refuse to create memories for fear of the ongoing procession of time- that would be the horror! To die without a memory. To have nothing for your person to slip back into when the body dissolved but the fear with which the body lived its life.

“Horror.”

But why think these thoughts? The old man clearly had memories to fall back into. 

“A fortunate thing, to not have lived for fear of memories.”

It was far too late for such thoughts and besides which he forgot what memory he was attempting to bring up.