While Jane is off to Utah for a meeting of new students gathered for a degree in library science, I sit home here in Nevada trying to arrange my day, trying to fill in the spaces left by her leaving. Once again, I am alone for a while and wondering an old man’s thoughts, I suppose — the what ifs. You imagine them, I need not explain. At this juncture in my life having a partner is critical for me. I am feeling more dependent on the Other. I am not as strong as I thought I was. The realization is one of many I am having of late about myself and life as well. Realizing I need the Other, Jane, and the presence of my son more frequently than he can manage — or realizes, I sense the lengthening shadows coming across my lawn. Chronology destroys all of us, but it is durationally that we can live intensely or meaningfully. I am trying to create as much as I can because I know in creation time passes fleetingly and one does not sense one’s age. I am also feeling how often I deluded myself, as I reflect, of how imperfect I was as a father, sometimes highly insensitive, of how mistakes I made damaged my life, perhaps others, of how failures in my own psychological life made scaring impact of others.
Realizing that regrets do nothing for one, for they cannot release you from the errors made, what I am left with, in instances, is a deep sense of grief for what I have done to others first, and then to myself. Although my parenting was poor, I am responsible, mostly, for the choices I’ve made. And often they were not good ones. So as I wither I see more vigorously and clearly the errors of my life. And what is to be made of them? I am not sure. I know that guilt is irrelevant here. I realize that self-mortification is not a wholesome choice. Turning to a god in prayer is an unbelievable self-hoax and the ailment of the species, for I believe the responsibility is not to be given to an omniscient being, particularly the sad ones the species has promulgated for its own relief. I seek of late how best to come to terms with my human foibles, mistakes and stupid behaviors.
I think I may near something comforting for me. I just sensed here while writing that if I remember the lost ones in my life I pay them the respect and homage and care I may have not afforded them while they lived. If I have to be crucified, let me be crucified on the cross of memory. If you want eternal life, brethren, hope that your children or spouse will remember you long after you are gone. It would move me deeply if my son or Jane carried me in their minds until their days were over. I can feel this or say this freely because Caryn, my daughter, Rochelle, my wife, now more than 10 years gone, are as present in my mind and thoughts on a daily basis as ever. I don’t recall events so much as critical parts of our relationships, often some of these make me morose because of personal failure on my part. I cannot help that, it is what it is. I think sometimes that on my deathbed what Rosebud might I say, what final image would shatter my dying mind so that I had to say it and then be gone forever. I am not sure what I might say, a few come to mind for me to reflect upon. I am besotted with a crazed or mistaken notion that I need to leave something behind for those who knew me. Apparently I am of late more concerned with dying than with living, although I can make the case they are very much the same.
It turned out that I became the self-appointed recorder, the writer, of the Freese family. In a long essay I gave my son there are pages of descriptions of family members I grew up with and that he has no idea ever existed. I collected all the photographs I had and in that same essay tried to give something of who these people were. He may never read it. However, I had to record that. When I look at all these people long since gone, I wonder, like a Holocaust survivor, how much was lost, what context and human glue is now gone. And so, unlike the paranoid Pharoahs, who extended their efforts on the enslaved efforts of others to go to the other world I reach out in the autumn of my years to those who are alive and vibrant about me. I seek solace and comfort in their well-being. I continue to write in order to define who I am, for I am as fuzzy and unclear as the bottom of a Coke bottle. I am infected with knowledge. Useless. I am coated with sophistication. Eunuch. I sing smarts like a flirty castrati. But who I am is vastly unknown to me. We really are gross ignorances trying to make our way in this world. Someone, perhaps rightly, labeled me as a seeker, for he detected the search in me, the nagging quest to arrive. Imagine a needle in the middle, if there is such a thing, of this universe, a needle millions and millions of miles in length. At the tip of the needle is my squirming body.
Vanity of vanities, I write to be remembered. What a foolish self-assigned task!
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