It wasnât as though checking that box changed anything. That my father was dead, that my mother left when I was a toddler, that she and I had not spoken in almost a decadeâthese were all facts that had been true for a long time. But the box, I suppose, formalized their absence, gave it a name. Knowing and accepting the inevitable are two different things.
Related Quotes
My fatherâs death demolished me. It was perhaps because I had never properly grieved my motherâs leaving that I approached mourning him with fierce intention. Grieving, I learned, was a process of story construction. I needed to construct a story so I could reconstruct my world. There were decisions to make about what to put in and what to leave out.
If I could not find belonging in my story of my father, in my grief, where could I find it? If I belonged nowhere and to no one, then what was I? Who was I?
I cannot remember a time when I wasnât aware of the fact that I had multiple selves, or a divided self, and that I needed to behave differently with the different groups of people that made up my life. All people do this to some extent, but some must be more skillful at it than others.
My room was a desert because it was barren. True, it was filled with books, photographs, clothes, lotions, hair creams, perfumes, a bed with a firm mattress, blankets knitted by my grandmother, bad paintings, candles, old letters, and new shoes. But those things had lost their meaning. It was as though they belonged to someone else whose life I had been dropped into, whose life I wouldnât have minded torching until it was nothing but ashes.
The space between the family in the photograph on my dresser and what became of it is gaping and largely unknowable. My parents rarely spoke of each other. They rarely acknowledged that the family in the photograph ever existed. My father died before I was old enough or brave enough to ask him all my questions about the end of our family. Once or twice, we stumbled onto the topic, but those conversations were terse and awkward. I worried that he would take my curiosity for ingratitude, that he would think the life he had given me was not enough. My mother, when we were still speaking, would reveal only scant details. I did not push her. Our relationship was too fragile. And, always, below us, vibrations moved through solid rock.
It is from this journal that I know how my parents believed their love and the birth of their daughters to be a part of something importantâa movement fueled by borderless love. The poems, or at least my interpretation of the poems, mourned not just a lost love but also a certain measure of lost optimism about the current condition.