I don't have the foggiest what's possessing me to come here so long after the fact, to sift through old posts and posture as if I plan to actually, truly, publish a new one. It's been three years since I've looked at the editing wall of this website, and even then I just drabbled mindlessly on a page and then left it for dead in the drafts folder.
But I guess I do know. I have to talk about Papa.
It's eating me up inside, this seamless forgetting that takes over like a virus in the absence of an ability to cope with loss. When I look back now on my mom, I find myself angry and terrified about how much I don't remember. How many details are lost; things I know I could remember about someone else. But it's more than that; looking back feels like gazing into an alternate dimension. Like watching a book character live out her life, already knowing the ending as well as the back of my hand, everything colored with those murky goggles of inevitable disaster. It's like my life was lived in two sections, two parts; 2011 B.C. (Before Christina), 2018 A.D. (After Death). Our paths don't cross, these two me's. I don't know her mind and she has no idea of the inner workings of mine. We're like ships in the night.
This is, of course, a dramatic way of looking at it. I can, of course, remember bits and pieces of what it felt to be that other, whole version of myself. And to some extent I feel like that's just part of growing up, leaving a bit of yourself behind every year until you hardly recognize the person you once were as you.
And yet, I know for a fact that there's a blockage in my mind when it comes to remembering her, and how important she once was to me. How there was a time when I really truly thought I couldn't live without her, and that her opinion of me was the only thing that truly defined me. Maybe those things were all true. It hurts that I can't find that part of me now, that I can't realign with that worldview, so safe and so simple. I search for validation in all the wrong places now a days and I know it but knowing it doesn't replace the Her in my life, doesn't make a million "she would be so proud's" into one "I love you, Locksley" from her lips.
I guess what's eating me up tonight is my helpless worry that the same will happen with Papa. I'm separating from him, from the memory of him. I didn't live with him at the end, didn't see him eveyr single day, so I'm at this point now where my brain is still cauterizing the wound slowly, telling my every so often "Hey! Haven't seen Papa in awhile have you?" As it often would. That's an over-complicated way to say I'm missing him, which didn't happen with Mom. That was like a giant hole being ripped; this is like a slow, oozing wound. But nonetheless I worry I'll loose him, all those things that I knew so well, that I ran to for comfort, that I joked and bragged about to people who didn't know him. Jack Benny and Jimmy Buffet, and the stuffed parrot he kept on his boat and the endless re-runs of "A Christmas Story" and his pet-peeve about keeping drawers closed all the way, and the Thomas the Tank Engines VHS's he used to collect for me and the Bella Sera and the time he accidentally threw out a bunch of family history with the goodwill stuff, or the stories he used to tell me when I was four. I can't possibly write it all. There's too much to tell, and it's all in my memory but I'm so afraid it'll be gone someday, replaced with the humdrum of a 9-5 and ex-boyfriend's sister's dog's names.
I'm throwing rocks at the wind now, clinging desperately to cliches but I just hope he knew how much I loved him. How much we all did. How everytime I rolled my eyes or acted like he was being harsh or unfair, I didn't mean it. That I thought the world of him and I always will. How he was my hero, perhaps the only person walking this planet who could tell me, no matter what was happening, that I would be OK and who could make me believe it.
The night my mother died he told me what was happening first. He took my outside, away from my sisters, and told me straight that things were looking bad, that he didn't know what would happen. And then he held me as my world came crashing down in a way it never had and never will again, as the two me's finally split and segregated. He held me against him as I cried and sobbed and questioned everything and even though nothing would ever be OK again I felt him there, as a bedrock beneath all my sorrow and uncertainty. I still feel him there, and I know he's still holding me somehow, but God, oh God what I wouldn't give to be pressed into his chest crying right at this moment.
There's currently no happy ending to this story, and no good answer to this question. Which is better? To constantly rehash the past, to live in a world of memory where loved one's are alive and keep their memories fresh at the price of constantly missing them every moment? Or to deal with loss like losing a limb, limping along towards what we can only hope is a bright future and pretending like we don't notice what's missing?
I can't tell you. I can only turn on another Jack Benny show and try to think about tomorrow as a new day.
