A Glimpse of the Past

I seem to be thinking about death a lot. Not really a big surprise, I suppose, since I have been trying to write a book on that very subject and a few of my previous posts have touched on things like Gerald Ford. But I surprise myself when I sometimes spend a day feelng out of sorts, stare at the sun too long, forget to lock my car, leave my ID in my desk at work, and then find myself dwelling on such topics late at night in front of my computer. It's like I woke up at 11 p.m. and wondered what I did all day.

I was having a beer with someone last night and he asked me where my parents lived and added a question, albeit brief, about whether they were alive. I didn't register it in the moment, but I thought of it again today, and though it's been 20 years since my father passed away and I can talk about his death easily, no one had ever simply asked me whether my parents were alive or not.

It's a function of getting older, I suppose, but it stayed with me today, with the inevitable outcome being that tonight, when I stumbled across a bunch of photos of me as a baby with my dad, I couldn't help but wonder what my life would be like if my father had lived to see me past the age of 13.

When I was younger, angrier, and slightly dumber, I imagined that my father would not have been able to deal with his youngest son being a queer, that I would have had spectacularly bad fights with him all through my high school and college years. I even imagined there might be a few years in there where we would not talk to one another. I am not sure what I based this on, exactly, since my memories of him were so hazy, and I never really knew what he thought of gay people anyway. No one in my family really knows either. But imagining these scenarios made his absence much easier to deal with.

Instead, I had some spectacularly bad fights with my mother throughout high school and college and wondered whether there might not be a year or two during which she and I would not speak to each other.

I know that my father was funny--sardonic, ocassionally sarcastic--not to mention tall, lanky, imposing, knew more than he let on, and could be both kind and frustratingly uncommunicative. A few of these traits I see in myself now (well, not "lanky" or "imposing"). And I like to think that while he would have likely not been 100% comfortable with my coming out at the age of 18, he was too many of the good qualities above to cut himself off from me. Sadly, realizing this is what makes a 20-year-old death feel too fresh, too wrong.

I have faded, somewhat creased, aging photos of my father, of course, but those are fleeting glimpses, not full portraits. I have a hard time accepting that I cannot know something, cannot somehow intuit or guess at an answer. In trying to imagine a relationship I can never have, however, I am finally forced to.

Yet, looking at those snapshots, the fleeting glimpses can still be filled with warmth, even decades later.