Things unseen, unsaid
My father died 3 years ago; My mother died 7 months ago. The time between has been hard for reasons global and personal, and I honestly don't know what kind of progress I've made in grieving. Our lives and our emotions come unbidden, without mercy or reason, and sometimes it feels like living is simply the exhausting and ever incomplete task of trying to manage that flow1. The circumstances of my life now are helping me mourn my parents; moreso I am starting understand that what I mourn most are the aspects of them I didn't see while they were still alive and can now never be explored.
Over these 3 years I've come to see how unhappy I was in the life I had lived before. I've been seeking security in a hostile world where the goal was to find happiness within the bounds of cruelty and selfishness that was cultural, institutional, inescapable. I've hated the game of American capitalism2, selling my labour, my time, my passion in service to causes I felt were callous, callow, self-serving and vile. But as much as I hated all of that, I've feared an unsure life, one where I cannot simply stretch out my hand and make manifest the solution to my material needs. I fear the mercy of others, and being at it. And so I've kept on building wealth as fast as I could, hating and judging all along the way because it was both necessary and because I wasn't better at it3.
My spouse has done more to break me from that thought pattern than I can ever tell her, and it has lead us here. We're moving, trying something new, trying to be something new, and we don't yet know what and how. But if we never tried, we'd never know how things might have been. So now I am here, preparing the property I inherited from my parents to be a home for my own family. I am surrounded by the ghosts of them, not necessarily ghosts of the parents I knew but of the people I never got to meet.
Almost always when I've been in this place my parents were present, and they set the tone and the direction of those visits. Before arrival they would have full itineraries in mind, lists of tasks to accomplish, family to visit, things to see and do. My choices would be slimmed down to "do what they want you to" or "escape them." And throughout all of this I only ever saw my parents, being parents.
I didn't necessarily see them in their life, I saw them as they were part of my life. As I now sift through what is here I see versions of my parents I never knew or, if I did know, that I didn't explore. I see the work tools that my father put together in the tool shed, and understand that there was a lot that he did that wasn't just the bookish intellectualism and propensity for storytelling that I saw. I see the art tools of my mom and have some hazy view of the importance of art and creation to her. To me all of that was just "a thing she did," but I did not see or appreciate the real hours spent engaging with creation.
These physical things make me think more about even greater gaps in my understanding of them: how little I spoke with them about hopes and dreams, about values and ethics. About what they imagined their life to be, what it should be, what it could be. My parents held depth and complexity that I knew and respected, but at a hands distance and more as a fact about them than as a place to engage them. I didn't need to learn more about them and so I didn't try. Now that they are gone, I find there are many aspects I would have wanted to know more fully.
The reasons why I didn't engage with them more during their lives are familial: a tangle of habits, history, personalities and inertia that we all inhabit in our various relationships. Talking with my family has always felt fraught to me, an opening to judgement and condemnation, and so I've avoided it. Maybe it would have been possible to change that dynamic had I spent more time with them as an adult, to have the conversations that happen naturally because the time and space existed for it to be possible. Maybe. Playing the "might have been" game is often a fools errand. All I do know is that my grief is characterized more by sadness at not being able to learn more about their whole selves, than by the lack of the versions of them I did know.
Postscript
1: The river metaphor for how our intelligent mind should rule our emotional mind is an interesting one. The framing I've often heard imagines a river that should be controlled, brought to heel to support whatever industry we have in mind. Straight and fast, delivering power to work the mill, delivering fresh water to quench our thirst, carrying away our detritus and waste so that it cannot pollute our daily existence. This imagining feels like some 1950's hangover of a science fiction, more interested in selling us something shiny and new than in feeling our place in the world and requiring us to ignore anything that doesn't fit directly to the purpose we have assigned it. I ascribe to more modern environmental thinking a questioning of where that river is, how it fits in the world, and how can we live and sustain ourselves from it without devastation. Sometimes the best care is to let it become a delta, a swamp, a slow traveling and vast landscape. Sometimes the river is treacherous and shallow, filled with rocks and rapids but spotted with eddies and pools that breed life. Not great for moving timber around, but maybe that isn't the most important thing anymore.
2: I add these caveats not necessarily to call out and condemn the US or capitalism as a whole but because that is where I have been. Both capitalism and the US have their better points, along side their horrors, and the only good way to gain perspective is to be familiar with more than one way to do it. I hope that in my next experience I get viewpoints that help me better see the true good in these things, rather than the claimed good.
3: I do also understand that I'm part of what's happened here. I've chosen to be a willing part of the game, to be part of the back row of chess pieces and benefit from the pawns in the front. That hating and judging is directed as much at myself as at anything else. I have harmed many people in my life for the sake of my own security, when I could have been better if I had just had the courage. This is the path I have walked. It is mine and no others.