TL;dr (no, really.)
Mid-June, it… sneaks up on me.
It's a sort of capstone on the long, elegiac reflection that Spring has become (well, May, anyway - there's a game of emotional dodgeball that occurs every time the azaleas bloom and the air becomes redolent with honeysuckle's first scent, because it also carries the incense of Death with it.
There is the slow, mournful keeners' parade of: my brother Jamie's Birthday, Mom's death--i-versary, Mother's day, the anniversary of Jamie's end at the hands of FMH, Mom's funeral, Jamie's funeral, and then, *finally*, just a long parade of the times different parts of my body met a grisly end (but: were reborn as titanium, so there's a bit of techno-Catholic symbolism mixed in there, to keep the punters engaged...Tolkien would be proud...)
And, finally, then, there's Fathers' Day...
...and with that, it's summer (a week-ish later, but it's already too humid to breathe, so, near as dammit...)
So - the point is, I think a LOT about family, and loss, and cycles, from the beginning of May through mid-June. And it's different every year; loss, certainly, gets easier, but absence doesn’t, necessarily. And both grow more (or less) personal, depending on the overall zeitgeist and what my friends - most of whom are just now going through what I went through (with their help) so many years ago - are coping with.
As it happens, a dear friend had to say goodbye to their second parent this past Friday, and so a group of very close friends who gather too infrequently, but too frequently for this purpose, of late, found ourselves in a church again - trying desperately to remember long-lapsed prayers and to furiously beam support through the ether to the back of our friend's head as she navigated the complex minuet of the Christian burial two-step. Both her sons spoke, brilliantly, and then our friend got up and delivered a really magnificent eulogy for her mother, so that we were all left feeling we knew her, even if we hadn't really known her at all (or seen her in 40 years - we've all been around a long time) Then, her husband sang with his a cappella group, and she got up again and broke our hearts with a violin solo! …and then there was cake, and a finger food, in the reception hall, and we were invited back to the family home for a more intimate gathering. (Where I wound up, as I can, in a conversation about clairvoyance, peace in the Middle East, the Higgs boson, and quantum mechanics. I love my friends. Including the two new ones from Friday).
Over the course of the day we were also encouraged to take home photos and artifacts the mother had collected/created, which I found a lovely, ritual, intention: to spread someone's legacy amongst the communal family of the remaining... lives. Because we are who remain now.
I said to Amy (our friend) at some point during the day, "You're it, now." Because I remember what that day was like for me: all my ancestors were gone. I was the adult. (I never imagined that a decade and a half later I'd be burying my younger brother - he never stopped being my baby brother, in my mind, but I stopped saying it in time, I hope - he had plenty of other things to be annoyed with me about.) But Amy and her husband John have crafted a pretty well orchestrated team out of their family, and the boys are well on their way to being men. The mantles are being smoothly passed. At the same celebration, I spoke briefly with another friend, who lost his mother this same calendar year - back in January, and who also married off his daughter and son the previous fall. It was strange to say goodbye to his mom after so long, but on Friday he let me know that he would be a grandfather soon. The circle remains unbroken.
So, we till the soil, and turn it over, and new growth comes. And that is also what spring is. Mother’s day, after all, is sort of self-explanatory - April and May are the months of fertility, Ostara and Easter, and Passover, and Purim, and St. Pat’s, etc, all dancing through the thaw of rebirth. Bealtaīne became May Day (if you don’t know the Jonathan Coulter song, I won’t scandalize you, but trust me, Lerner and Lowe - if not Guinevere - would blush). But after a little research, I learned that Father’s Day had a more circuitous and troubled history - the first Father’s Day was apparently to commemorate the death of most of the fathers in a West Va. coal mining town… and it took a long time for it to take hold as a national holiday. When I learned that, I felt a little badly, because, I suspect, it mirrored my feelings about my relationship with my own father, a bit. I was always a bit of a mama’s boy - I loved my dad, and he me, (until we didn’t) but the things he wanted me to love came too easily, and it was my mom who gave me poetry and art and Ireland (and the only grandparent I knew…). Then, we got all oedipal (the father’s side, don’t make it weird) and it took my dad and I a little while to find our way to each other.
And then, he was gone.
I’m not going to go into the way my mother and father sort of traded places in my soul, I’ve covered that before - but I have been reflecting, lately, on my dad, and the ways in which I see him emerging in me. Because, they are ways that I know made me insane as a teenager, and it is finally humorous to me, to see that teenager and his prejudices though the eyes of a no-longer-young man, appreciating what his dad went through. Far more than my mother, whom I loved, but find somewhat foreign, now, I see little glints of my father peek out in the periphery of my vision, and recognize them with a grudging comfort - “oh, that’s who you were, and why” I can hear myself think : ”how hard it must have been to have your son not understand that. I’m sorry”. I wish I could say to him:
“I get it now, Dad.”
Of course, he knows it - even if you don’t think there’s an afterlife, the piece of him that lives on in me finally gets it - and that may be all we need: a way to pass the hard-won knowledge on. So, perhaps what I wrestle with most at this time is confronting the fact that I *have* broken the chain. In a family branch that clearly didn’t read the “Growing up Catholic in America” User Manual, I have failed to carry on a couple of different bloodlines (I can hear my mother’s shrill voice in my head: “You had ONE job…”)
God bless the Lady Ann.
And so, I scribble away, like this. Making connections, and trying to tie things up in a little package that might instruct the next Catholic "failure" to come along and pick it up. Maybe that’s what I’m doing here. Or maybe, to all the fathers, mentors, teachers, and guides I’ve had (some of whom were decidedly non-fatherly) AND - to all my friends who have become exemplary fathers:
Happy Fathers’ Day. Thanks for trying.
Especially you, Dad. You’re still in here.
I’ve written things I like about my dad before: some of them are here.
