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November 6, 2001
Twelve Month and a Day
After its appropriate interval, mourning comes to an end. My father's death is now a year and more removed. A cycle through the round of seasons serves to put things in the past. If grief subsides, the pain of loss does not. But we come to recognize it as the same pain that touches all of life; an undertone that ever drones beneath our descant joys. My memories of him remain a melody surmounting the basso-continuo of death.The business of his estate is also drawing to a close. It's taken a full year, and taken a psychic toll greater than the actual work involved. Legalities too, are best left in the past.
To move beyond is not to forget, but to put the memory in its appropriate place. Mourning dignifies the process; it's better than just waiting for time to drive a wedge between us and grief.
Either way, the time is past.
I've looked forward to the release, little dreaming that my loss would be outstripped five thousandfold. And now my heart rehearses the cliche, and I'm actually glad that my father isn't alive to see this war. He had enough war in his life, rendering civilian service in one; decrying another. This one falls beyond his span. No need for him to see another generation bequeathed the same old shit.
He would have worried over me.
So it's been quite a year, November to November.
Not the happiest of years. But I think of my father, and I joke about my "target" status, and I head out to the Park when I can. Lately it's hard to say whether I have a pursuit or an escape, but I've got to keep looking.
Wandering and wondering.
Last week I saw Eastern Bluebirds, a pretty good sighting for the Park. These birds declined greatly in the last century, their habitat disrupted, their nests displaced. Today they are the beneficiaries of more human intervention than most troubled species. Nest box programs are popular, and have shown success, but the Bluebird remains common only in our nostalgic past.
I'd never found one in the Park before, but it wasn't the first time I'd seen them. One year ago I was in Michigan, attending on my father's death. Amid the vigil and the stress, I took the time, while there still was time, to walk in a nearby park, and there I saw my first Bluebird. A hard pleasure, under the circumstances. I remember thinking it was not the Bluebird of Happiness.
Bluebirds generally seem to elicit positive responses, but the popular association with happiness seems to have coalesced in a 1908 play by Maeterlinck. Two children set out searching for happiness in the form of a blue bird, and travel far, only to find it back in their own home. It's a familiar lesson, and I may have suggested as much myself, from time to time.
The birds themselves suggest more.
Reappearing across time and space, bracketing a tortured year, their flight is not deterred by terror. They remain on schedule. Yet they are migrants, and must be at home wherever they are, even in a patch of park between the breeding and the winter grounds.
The dead, we like to think, have returned Home.
If home is at the source of happiness, and if, as the birds teach, it can be found in every place, then we are describing something tantamount to heaven. According to their faiths, my father, the suicide pilots, and the five thousand victims should all be there together. A scenario no less likely than that they should "be" anywhere at all. It is a Traditional belief that death renders equality, dealing the same hand to all. Judgement is a later notion, which some have attributed to god, but the only deity I know forgives us everything, hoping in turn to be forgiven.
The end of mourning is forgiveness: to hold no grudge against the burden of the Mystery. A hard end, an unasked for beginning; but in between, something worth honoring with an ascendant heart.
I love my father still.
He is a Home I carry with me always, but I will mourn no more.