"Something lives only as long
as the last person who remembers it."
as the last person who remembers it."
(An ancient Indian saying)
I didn't want it to be that. I knew it was supposed to be that. I knew from the Facebook profiles and posts of my siblings it was that, at least for them. I've only just broken the habit of waking up every Sunday morning to thinking "I should visit... nevermind." I've no desire to make Father's Day an unhappy experience for myself the way Mother's Day took me the better part of 20 years to get over. My birthday will never quite forgive.
I just wanted it to be this. And from some of the events in the days leading up, I wasn't even sure it would be this, exactly, as odd as that might sound. I'd endured a few 'not my real dad' comments from a little girl who, as much as we love each other dearly, isn't old enough to understand the power language has, or at least can have, if we don't know when and how to steel ourselves. I know she and I have drifted a little of late, partly because we're not having as many shared activities, and partly because I think she naturally withdraws from me a little as summer and time with her biological father approaches. I think she feels a sort of strange guilt deep down about loving us both, but differently, and in a way she's too young to reconcile.
But that reconciliation of confused feelings will come to her in time, as will a clearer understanding of what is or is not 'real'.
It didn't even matter that much if it was this, so long as it wasn't that. It could be nothing, so long as it wasn't just that.
Ok, that's a lie, it needed to be this too, and I'm glad, and grateful, that it was. She did some really nice things for me, and I'm glad that she did, especially when I wasn't certain she would this time 'round. In hindsight, I suppose, that made it more special, though I'd braced myself to accept that I might be entering a short era where I would be kept at a distance while she grew and changed some more. Parenting is confusing and exhausting and comes with a well-understood empathy from anyone who is and head-scratching from anyone who isn't.
But try as I might to keep it from also being that, it was that too. And maybe I'll have to simply begrudgingly accept that it'll just have to be a bit of this and a bit of that for a while to come.
We visited the graveyard. I saw my father's headstone for the first time. It's lovely, I suppose. I'm not sure what the benchmark for "a good headstone" is, really. Graveyards have never touched me. Beneath six feet of earth is the empty husk that once housed a peculiar magnificence. I don't mourn the vehicle. I don't miss the vehicle. I mourn the great spirit it once held.
I miss the way he leaned in as if he was revealing a secret even when it was a story he'd have told anyone who'd listen, and laughed at himself every time even though I'd lost count of how many times he'd told me already. "Red Rover. Red Rover. She came through the door with the axe from the shed."
A little bit of that. The oddest of times. Now and forever. I'm ok with that.
