en deuil

My e-friend Malcolm Pollack just lost his dad. Feel free to visit Malcolm's blog to voice your condolences.

All of us, eventually, have to face the world without our parents. I heard my goddaughter, one time, talk about how she refused to imagine such a world. I had mixed feelings upon hearing this: part of me resented her casual glibness, given the death I had experienced only three years before; part of me pitied her for not understanding that death is as grindingly inevitable as the unstoppable forward motion of time; part of me was sympathetic with her unvoiced desire to see her parents live forever. That was once my desire, too.

But parents don't live forever: nothing in this world is forever. Growing up means realizing and coming to terms with this brute ontological fact.

Malcolm has been through this once before; his touching tribute to his mother can be found here. I don't want to insult him by claiming to know how he feels, but I remember how I felt when Mom died: it was as if a piece of me had been ripped away. I went home from Walter Reed Medical Center that bleak January morning, trudged downstairs, and went to sleep for the better part of a day. When I awoke, there in the silence, alone with my thoughts and my breathing, the first question to form in my mind was Why am I alive? The world had ended.

But just as death is inevitable, life is, too. My heart refused to stop beating; my brain refused to stop working. My mother had died—not me. She had been carried away by the currents of reality, but I still stood at the shore. That had to mean something.

In one of my most beloved novels, a character says, "It is the duty of the living to make meaningful the sacrifices of the dead." My heart beats; my mind works; I strive, now, to live a worthy life for Mom's sake. I wish for Malcolm the same strength: the strength that comes from healing, the strength to face the future with his parents' loving memory as his guide. Not that he needs such a wish, of course: he's a strong man, and principled—a father in his own right, and a husband with everything to live for. But continuance is hard to remember when a loved one has left us and we feel we've reached the end of our own existence.

For that reason, I offer to Malcolm my simple wish, my humble hope.

Condolences, friend.


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