Four Years
It's been four years since you didn’t make it out of post-surgery recovery. Four years have come and gone, like waves slowly washing in and pulling out again. Four years since I read the text across my screen that made my mind go blank and my emotions go numb. Since then your widow has re-married, and it feels from a distance as if she’s doing all she can to forget you. Maybe this is untrue, but that is how it feels to me from where I stand. She doesn’t talk to the rest of us anymore. Once in a while one of your children will call Dad, but even this happens less and less.
You and I did not have the best of relationships. In fact, it’s a stretch to say we had a relationship at all before you died. What I have of you are memories. Good memories, bad memories, memories that feel fuzzier with each passing year. And still, I don’t wish for you to be forgotten. A fate which comes for us all I suppose, but I’m not ready for your memory to fade completely from existence while I still live and breathe. You existed, you lived. You caused great pain to many around you, but also brought moments of uncontested joy and laughter.
When I look inside myself, I see many of your characteristics firmly lodged in my being, for better and worse. Our family would like to think that the character traits you had which led to some of the worst pain were some sort of outlier, some sort of aberration from the rest of us. I disagree. Maybe I’m delusional but I believe that each of us possess at least some of your traits that led to a considerable path of destruction in your wake. The fact that we don’t admit this or at least don’t talk openly about it with one another is harmful, or stifling at the very least. When a person is gone, why do we not consider the whole of them? Why slice them up and discuss only the good or pleasant parts of their existence? This is a disservice to both the deceased and those left behind.
My memories of you feel like small islands in the vast ocean of life. Some of these islands are pleasant places to visit, where I enjoy lingering and smiling as our shared laughter echoes through time. Some are dark miserable places I try to avoid at all costs, but somehow I end up visiting many of them each time I travel across my memories. As though I’m stuck on autopilot and am powerless to control where my travel takes me. I wonder, was the Red Suburban significant to you at all? Were I to ask you now, would you even remember those afternoons picking me up from school? I’ll never know.
My recollection of you would not be complete without acknowledging that you were dealt a miserable hand health-wise as a young child. These medical issues plagued you your whole life and were likely a large contributing factor to your death. Nobody else in our family will ever know what it was like to be dealt this hand, to have to take rows and rows of pills each day just so your body would function in a semi-normal manner. This must have weighed you down, felt so incredibly unfair, terrified you even. This of course did not make it any easier for those on the receiving end of the pain you dolled out in life, both intentionally and as a side effect of the way you so often chose to live, but you should know we were not blind to your health-related struggles.
You should know I will not forget you. I choose to remember you, not only the negative, not only the positive, but you, the whole of you. At least, the whole of you I can piece together from the memories I have. As for the rest of our family, I don’t know. Perhaps they choose to remember only the good, or perhaps only the bad. That is their right. There is no right or wrong way to remember you. I don’t believe we’ll have some sort of reunification after I’m gone. I think we simply cease to exist. Most of my family does believe they’ll see you again. Again, this is their right. I can only promise I will carry your memory with me until I, too, exhale for the last time.