My heart beats… His stopped.
Suddenly and without warning.
A sudden and catastrophic cardiac arrest, they said.
All efforts to resuscitate failed. And yet mine beats.
He lives through me. I know that, I feel that, I believe that. I know I will meet him again. I will be with my father again.
But it won’t be the way I remember him. He won’t have that body, that face, that smile which is so familiar to me. That way of saying hello, the way he held a spoon, that change of gait because of a total hip replacement or the way he got a lump in the throat when he talked of things that had deep meaning for him. I won’t meet him with this body, either or with this face. I look a lot like my mother, so my father would joke that I was a case of divine conception – he had very little to do with it.
I won’t look like this, and neither will he. So this is it. This ‘us’ is over and is never coming back. This familiarity is over and won’t be familiar ever again. It is strange. Regardless of how much I look like my mother, I recognise my father in my features. That is all that is left of him. I see him in the mirror sometimes looking back at me…
I know I have his spirit and his values, even though I sometimes forget that, I have his mannerisms, his love of reading, of history, of a good discussion, of fair play. So much.
He used to say that one does not just need to be fair but must also be seen to be fair, a hard one to live up to in this very unfair world.
You learn to live with a broken heart,” he said. “And somehow, it still beats.” – Pierce Brosnan
Yes, it beats. It does its job well. I breathe. I talk, bathe, cook, clean and do a myriad of things that everyone does every day. I even smile and chat with friends. I had lunch at a friend’s house the other day. I painted my nails. Got a haircut… But all of this does nothing to make me forget my broken heart. They say time heals, or time allows you to live with this grief. Another friend told me that I was rushing it – that almost two months is not enough time – it took her nearly 2 years. Another said ten years. I know no amount of time will ever be enough. I know, as they say, I will grow with this grief and will carry it along with me.
I KNOW all that. But that knowledge does not give me any clarity or solace or a reason to do all the things I should/ could/ would be doing.
There is a saying in Hebrew that a person dies twice. Once when they take their last breath and leave their body, and the second time is when their name is spoken or remembered for the last time.
It is true. Let that sink in.
I want to preserve my father’s name and memories associated with him forever. I did a bit of that preserving of my family history earlier. You can read about that here and here. And those efforts have been good at keeping their memories alive. But I know sometime, somewhere soon will be the last time for all of us. Them and me included. So then why are we still trying to preserve our names for the history books? Does it really matter? I want to protect and preserve their names and memories, but others may not – even others in my family.
The truth is, we will all be forgotten.
Having got to this point, one would imagine that I should enjoy each day as it comes and do what I want to do and what makes me happy. Simple. I get that. I truly do. The thing is – I don’t feel like doing anything. At all.
And then the social media Algorithm put this on my screen a little while ago –
“I think I’m beginning to understand that the quest is the point. Our sense of enchantment is not triggered only by grand things; the sublime is not hiding in distant landscapes. The awe-inspiring, the numinous, is all around us, all the time. It is transformed by our deliberate attention. It becomes valuable when we value it. It becomes meaningful when we invest in meaning. The magic is of our own conjuring. Hierophany–that revelation of the sacred–is something that we bring to everyday things, rather than something that is given to us. That quality of experience that reveals to us the workings of the world, that comforts and fascinates us, that ushers us towards a greater understanding of the business of being human: it is not in itself rare. What is rare is our will to pursue it. If we wait passively to be enchanted, we could wait a long time.”
– Katherine May, Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
Strange are the ways of the world. The inner workings of our minds and the outer paths we take. The ones we show the world.
I’ll get there. Just not sure when, as of right now.
