I was hoping today would go by and I’d get away with not starting a piece that’s been on my mind for quite some time, actually forever. Now, I need you to do me a favor and not look away and tune out when I tell you what I am unable to run away from. I don’t know how many times I have already written about my father dying when I was a fragile, nine year old boy, terrified of the nothingness. My father was gone and I was left with an excruciatingly painful void, a choking feeling of never, ever again.
When children get frightened, it is not like the same thing for us. The possibilities for distortion are limitless when it comes to kids, because they are so fresh. Even though I was quite young, I knew I gave my father great joy. He was a traveling salesman, back in the day, driving his Plymouth sedan all around the country, selling things like caviar, etc. When he came home, I was so thrilled to make him laugh with my antics. Back then, kids were these little people you could kind of ignore when it came to important things. I was kept away from anything relating to my father’s passing and it helped to make death a little bit more of a monster for me.
All of us as little people are branded by our experiences and I don’t get any points for this revelation. I am not exactly sure what happened with me. OK, let’s keep in mind my father died around sixty-five years, so please no condolence cards, although I do love sympathy. Its impact on me grew as I did and I’m not sure I could seriously think about it until I hit into my thirties.
When I leap frogged into my teens, I got on this treadmill of expectation. You didn’t really think about yourself, you got lost in what was expected of you. Who you were was not important. It was about what you did and never about why. For my part, I got intricately caught up in endless webs of distraction.
I think life frightened me quite a bit. I felt so incredibly self-conscious my first day back in elementary school after my father had died. I became increasingly aware of myself in terms of always standing apart. At such a young age, life was framed with a beginning and an end for me. Its branding lay dormant inside until I slowly began developing my perspective, feeding on my history and trying to understand it just a little better.
I got busy in my twenties, embarking on a collision course, a boy in a man’s world. I was not nearly as smart as I thought I was. I was pretty sure I heard the muted sirens calling me to face myself, but chose to look away and make a whole bunch of other distracted decisions. The truth is i never wandered all that far from wondering about death.
As my world was coming apart in New York City, I began finding Zen books to read and located a book store around 14th street, where you could sit in on meditation sessions. More than anything else, it was the Buddha’s genius for the truth of impermanence that reached out to my little boy self. I certainly didn’t need much convincing about mortality, my heart crushed by the loss of my Pops.
When I moved from NYC to Santa Fe, NM, I got much more involved in a Zen practice, an increasingly comfortable home for my wandering mind. While it impacted dramatically on how I viewed the world around me, I still didn’t want to wake that little boy, who was so frightened by the prospect of his own death. During my time out there in the Southwest, I was blessed to lead an incredibly rich life. I was growing beyond any misguided measure of normal in terms of all sorts of choices and decisions. I began to feel kind of authentic, like the person I really wanted to be as much as possible.
I came to Kauai to complete my journey, the internal one given life all those years ago in my black as night bedroom, the night my heart was taken prisoner by a primal fear. When it actually dawned on me that I might have come here to die, I didn’t take it well. From somewhere deep, deep within, I undertook the challenge of writing my life story for my baby grandson. My numbers were getting up there and I just wanted to make sure he could get to know me without any interference, just me and him. I even completely relocated to Costa Rica, a self-imposed deportation that lasted four days. It was so clear that outrunning demons is a losing race and I needed to face them right here.
I just want to go back to Santa Fe for a second. Coming from NYC, I was not into camping at all. Moving to God’s country in the Southwest, screamed at me to get out on that land. My very first experience in a tent ended up a full on anxiety attack, feeling like I had been zipped into my coffin with no escape. It was very disconcerting and totally unexpected, but it invisibly tapped into that forever fear of mine, one i was never going to get away from.
Recently, I have been writing about age quite a bit, but have still used words like impermanence, certainly never directly referring to my own death or how I have been really dealing with the concept. Truthfully, I don’t think I have been doing a very good job. You know, it’s funny, I have always believed in the existence of the invisible world, one where spirits and past lives dance together with astrologers and palm readers and the clairvoyant. I might have to draw the line with pulling rabbits out of top hats, but I never thought I had the authority to determine the rules of the world around me. i was more comfortable thinking everything was possible.
God, I am sorry this has taken so long, but I am just about ready to embrace that little boy. My father’s disappearance was so shocking and abrupt. He was suddenly gone and never came back. Going forward, I felt like the black curtain dropped on you, mid-sentence in the middle of your performance and all of a sudden, there was nothing, nothing at all. I could and can conjure that moment every now and then. My body shutters and rockets that thought as far away as fast as possible, like a deadly poison I am about to swallow.
I have been very lucky to have been afforded this life of mine and I know it. Sometimes, I wonder why and in very quiet moments I think it has something to do with this writing thing. I know it’s crazy, but I think I’m supposed to be doing this with you. Life doesn’t end with death, blasphemy to my frightened child, it’s a salvation for my much older self. I got some work to do. It’s all an exquisite mystery and the answer is just barely out of reach, but I am now on it.