Musings

Memories That Never Fade or Grow Dull

Tomorrow my partner and I will be in the car, en route with her family to cabins in the Northern wilderness, for four days of escape on a group vacation. Happily lost (mostly) away from civilization, I will not be near a computer.

But tomorrow is also the day that I usually need (even crave, some years) some time to write, to muse, to contemplate. It is the single most difficult day of my calendar year. Tomorrow is the fourteenth anniversary of my father's sudden death. I am a person who recalls most things well. I excell at trivia games. I can impress people with my Proustian recollection of seemingly insignificant details from my distant past. But 3 July is easily the only day of my life that I seem to remember with perfect recall. I remember each torturous hour vividly: from the phone call I received in morning from a distressed neighbor who was entrusted to tell me that my father had been taken away suddenly in an ambulance, to my horrible collapse late that night, when I passed out after drinking way too much scotch while sitting, dulled and confused, in our backyard.

While the anniversary is the day that marks the worst of my experience (it was, after all, in its swift cruelty, the day that made me understand that for all our efforts life will never be completely as good as we hope it can be), it also is the day that convinced me that people--for all of their errors, their shortcomings, their arbitrary malice in moments--are inherently good. The moment that offered this revelation is much too private to share here--even in anonymity--but it's a certainty of which I'll never let go, and it's the thing I hope to remember tomorrow when grief wells up within me.

People are inherently good.
Within everybody lies compassion and goodwill and perfect love.

And here's to my father, fourteen years gone.