October 8, 2008

Rain. Though it’s mostly black paper, no rain has come through my roof. I thank either the workmen’s skill or my own spells laid against invasion from the air.

Sat in the evening light and wrote poetry, and was happy in the old way, the way I though had passed from me. Bless, and bless.

Michael’s funeral unlocked a range of funereal thoughts. One is that I will be wrestling with my father for a long time, wondering if the strange calm of my emotions after his death was because I am an unnatural monster or because he was not the father one mourns over with real agony of spirit. I howled in Oakwood cemetery in Syracuse for months over my mother, summer nights and winter days, when I was sure nobody would hear me. I sobbed helplessly with Conrad the cat lying under the pear tree. I cried for father, but not because of missing him. It was because he had missed himself. When the thought of him brings grief, it is for what might have been. I think of certain anecdotes I know of his youth, before he became frozen into the man we knew, and I think of the ways so many paths could have led to beauty, but not, particularly, the one he took. I dislike thinking this, except sometimes I think I am right. At the funeral in Ohio I watched the other branch of the family, fully engaged with their emotions, affectionate, complicated (irritating and embarrassing goes along with that), and I envied them so much their access to one another’s inner lives. No such thing was apparent, implied, or even available in the house I grew up in. It was so important not to be irritating or embarrassing that the rest was lost too. Mother, who was part of the lively branch and could have communicated its bounty to me, had it crushed out of her by the weight of his repression before I has a chance to see much of it. He was a small man, but he had access to us when we were smaller still, and, though I can’t speak for my sister, the ways in which my upbringing retarded my emotional life cannot be fathomed or forgiven. They are also at this point irrelevant, for I found my own ways to the healing fountains, or learned to live without. If I turn away now from blame, I must also admit that I cannot conjure up posthumously the kind of love he would have scorned, but which now seems appropriate to the death of a parent. I cannot love him in the ways he never taught me, or even allowed me–in so far as he could prevent it–to learn. I do feel bad for his suffering, for the many disappointments of his life. I feel bad that I must have been one of them. I feel bad that he is gone. I feel worse that he was never there for me, though I think he was fully present –to his salvation–at the end for the neighborhood kids and his grandsons. Bless and bless for that. I blame myself sometimes for not making it better. But it was quite late before I discovered there were other ways. I was happy in a tiny patch of garden, and only introduction to the Wide World made me sad thereafter, sad enough to seek for more. I have no memory of being hugged or cuddled or cherished or confided in by either one of my parents. I think she was too sick too long not to follow his lead. He was– I have no idea what he was. He did not love and sought to embarrass all love around him, and I was not wise enough to see it, or strong enough to overcome it. This is a small, silly thing now, but a true one, and the branch bent in that way cannot ever fully straighten.

Father, please send your ghost to me with some beautiful truth or remembrance that will change everything.

Uncharacteristically, I am already packed for Ireland. The mail is stopped, the New York Times suspended, the cat food hoarded. Emotionally I am already there.